Ought To & Can (A San Francisco Fable)

Part II: Can--Chapter 10

Every single time I make a big move, it rains!

The weather was almost identical to how rainy and stormy it was four years ago when Neil first set off on his mission. It was rainy the day he left Alaska. And here it is raining in Rexburg, Idaho as he leaves town and heads back to California. Not that he minds it at all.

His final memory of Rexburg deserved to be mud.

He remembered how his mother once told him that you'll know you made the right decision because right after you make it you feel like an idiot for even thinking that doing something else was a good idea.

A California boy moving to a small town in Idaho? Toting a diploma from something called Brigham Young University-Idaho and expecting people to be impressed by it. Really?

He really held no ill will against BYU-Idaho. Most of the people he'd met there were happy, but it just wasn't for him.

After fighting the downpour through Idaho Falls going south, the rain let up in Pocatello. The clouds were starting to break when he pulled off the freeway into the tiny town of Inkom, Idaho. To his dismay, there was no large statue or monument to Blaine F. Tidwell. It's like no one even cared that their town was the birthplace of the mighty talent that graced the world with the seminal epic Preparing for Your Temple Marriage: A Guide for Teens.

From there Neil would end up in the small town of Grantsville, Utah and spend the night with Grandma and Grandpa Pressett. He declined the offer to stay with his Cannon grandparents in suburban Salt Lake City, officially because Grantsville is closer to San Francisco (only by thirty miles or so), really because he didn't like spending time with bossy Grandpa Cannon. Then a long drive to Reno and a night at Circus Circus. A strange place for a 22-year-old to spend the night, but his parents paid for it, and, for better or worse, it would mark the first time he ever had a hotel room to himself. Then back home to Glen Ellen.

From there? He'd flown back-and-forth between Idaho and California a few times and had already arranged a job. Beyond that, he wasn't sure. The rough idea was to work for about a year, save up money, then finish off his bachelor's, which would probably take two years. But if there was one thing he'd learned since he turned 18, plans have a tendency to not work.

###

"How did you like Israel?"

"I liked it but I'm glad I'm home."

"Of course, of course. Honestly, if you wanted, we could've pulled together about four or five of our internal scholarships and covered your tuition with those. I mean, your high school GPA was incredible, your Stanford GPA was exceptional, you have tons of community service. So why did you leave Stanford?"

"It was divorce by mutual consent," smiled Sabrina, as she sat in the office of Lourdes Montez, a financial aid advisor at Academy of Art University in SoMa (South of Market), the "this is just like Manhattan, right?" section of San Francisco.

"There are a lot of scholarships and grants out there for Jewish students, and you've definitely taken advantage of most of those, from what I can see. We just don't deal with those organizations very much. We have a total of...44? 44 Jewish undergraduates this semester. That always surprises me. One of the scholarship people I talked to said 'Well, you know, art as a career is considered rebellious in some Jewish circles. And there are a lot of students who think they can't rebel until they get parental approval.'"

"I got permission from my mother, so I'm good," Sabrina noted.

Sabrina spent today getting oriented to what would be her life from now on. After taking her illustration classes at AAU she'll walk a couple blocks to her new part-time job, as an assistant at the multi-story Nordstrom inside the huge San Francisco Centre, the upscale destination shopping mall located in the one city that doesn't need an upscale destination shopping mall. She'll be helping at the fragrance and cosmetic counters, an unexpected choice for the young woman who only started wearing makeup so she wouldn't always have to answer questions about why she didn't wear makeup.