By Ben Mullin —
When I walked through the doors of Burns Valley Elementary, I felt like I was in third grade again.
I walked across the blacktop and parted a sea of students, feeling their eyes settle on my six-foot-tall, bespeckled frame. Hushed whispers preceded me through the parking lot and into my mom”s classroom, where several of them pointed and told me, out loud, that I was very tall.
This must be what the new kid feels like.
The purpose of my visit to Burns Valley was to tell the students of room nine how important college is. To tell them that my job as a reporter depends every day on skills I learned in the classroom ? reading, writing and telling time.
It”s true that if I hadn”t passed the third grade, life would have been a lot less exciting. Within the last eight months, I flew across the country to Orlando for a journalism convention and accepted a national award for The Orion, Chico State”s newspaper. I collected my first ever paycheck as a reporter, failed an introductory chemistry class and gave up on my ambition of becoming a medical doctor.
And, most importantly, I met my future wife in college. Over the summer, I hired Quinn Western, an incoming Chico State freshman and journalism major, to The Orion. After reading the name “Quinn” at the top of her high school stories, and upon learning that she was a college golfer, I assumed that she was a male. When she friended me on Facebook a few weeks later, I realized that she was definitely not a male, and that I was going to have a very hard time editing next to a very pretty woman for a semester.
Seven months later, I took Western, a Fresno native, back to Lake County and showed her Upper Lake High School. I took her to the field I walked across for graduation, peered through the doors of the gym into the dimly-lit court, and ushered her into the woodshop, where we met my old cross country coach.
She was astounded by what she saw, and marveled at how small ? and beautiful ? the campus was. On the drive back to Chico, we discussed how we grew up in different worlds: she in the fast-paced, busy metropolis, me in, well, Upper Lake.
When I think about what I”m supposed to tell these children about college, it occurs to me that the real importance of what I”ve done in the last year has nothing to do with books or papers or academics.
Facing all of them, nervous as the new kid in school, made me realize that the real importance of college is being able to put that anxiety into words, to be able to tell them with this column where I”m from, where I”m going, and who I”m going with.
Ben Mullin is a Lake County native and a sophomore student of English and journalism at California State University, Chico.
