Where I Went

March Madness. I generally never pay attention to March Madness, even though I love basketball. I blame a lot of this on just my general apathy of life when I was married, because The Ex hated sports, generally, and talked shit about everyone else who did like sports. I kind of let the sports fanatic in me die, maybe not a full death, but it was a decade long coma for sure. Since the girls started cheerleading, I've gotten back into sports, maybe spurred on by the many days and nights spent at the football field and on the bleachers of the elementary schools around the county, and maybe spurred on by me realizing it's okay for me to start embracing those things I really enjoy again. Writing, reading, yard work, and sports. But not hockey. Hockey is stupid. Guy #1 is taking me to Wrigley Field in August to see my first ever baseball game, which we'll watch from the shade behind home plate, and I am hoping that this will jump start a new interest in baseball, which I've never really been interested in. My grandfather loved baseball, and I'm hoping this trip to Chicago will help me to reach a higher level of understanding with him, even though my grandfather isn't around anymore.

But back to March Madness. Because I like to give specific details of myself out rather slowly, I've never mentioned where I went to college before, because it never seemed relevant to anything that I've written. Longwood, to be followed by VCU. Community college preceded Longwood, and I'll say that I spent exactly one year at Longwood and I hated every minute of it. When I was growing up, my mother basically gave me two choices of colleges to attend. Longwood or VCU. Longwood was the easy option after I finished community college, because I was living in Farmville at the time and it was the lazy choice. It was the choice I wasn't proud of, because even as a kid growing up in high school, I always considered Longwood to be that safe choice for everyone else that I grew up with, the college of choice when you didn't want to leave Farmville. Longwood was where you went if you didn't want to get out. And by get out, I mean that you were satisfied with life in Farmville and Prince Edward, satisfied to make that your world. I'm pleased to say I got out. It took longer for me to get out of Farmville than some of my classmates, but like everyone else who has gone to college elsewhere and "gotten out", I've never returned and I never, ever will, other than to run down to visit a friend here or there and maybe eat lunch at Macado's. And what's strange is that I've discussed this with some of my classmates from high school, and we've talked about who got out and who didn't. I'm not dissing anyone who has chosen to stay in Farmville and make that their community, because there is a sense of quaintness in living in Farmville. But to me, there's a sense of decay and Southside Virginia hopelessness that no amount of jazzing up the town with fancy lights or a Big Box Bookstore can ever begin to fix.

And so I got out. Ran an hour east to Richmond, and I haven't looked back since. Finagled myself into VCU, where I savored every bit of every other person who wasn't like me, because for real, I was tired of being around people who were just like me. VCU was where I was going to be exposed to people I had never been exposed to before, and VCU was where I was going to learn to truly think and do for myself, because the school was so large you didn't have anyone to hold your hand at registration and exam time. VCU was where a lot of the professors wore jeans and T-shirts and didn't really give a rat's ass if you went to class or not. It was your education you were working on, not theirs. VCU is the strangest and oddest assortment, a mish-mash of people from every walk of life who just seem to come together and make it work. A working mother of three who worked overnights in a Waffle House sitting next next to a Daddy's little princess who was Embassy-educated sitting next to guy from the local projects who got his GED in a juvenile correctional facility sitting next to a girl who carved a three foot tree trunk as part of her Art School portfolio sitting next to the grandson of a local supermarket magnate because he didn't care enough about family tradition to apply to the University of Richmond. This is what you got at VCU.

No football team, and I don't even know if they had a baseball team when I was there. VCU was basketball, baby, all basketball. VCU has always been all basketball, from when they played in the Franklin Street Gym, to the Richmond Coliseum to the new and fancy Siegel Center, where there's still some crazy homeless guy sitting outside on game day banging on a couple of upside down zinc tubs, calling everyone forth to the game in an unspoken inner-city kind of communication. VCU made the Sweet Sixteen this year, first time ever (I think) and has been vaulted out of the local and state spotlight into the national limelight. I'm not going to pretend to be a sport analyst, because I don't know enough to do all of that, but I know it's pretty fucking exciting to anyone who went to VCU, especially to those of us who went there when VCU wasn't shit and hadn't been gussied up with fancy brick pavers and fancy rams painted on the streets around the campus.

I didn't expect VCU to win last night against Florida State University. I expect a close loss, and it almost was. VCU squeaked by with one point in overtime, and less than ten seconds on the clock. A win is a win is a win, and it was a win, but not a domination like in the previous games of the tourney. But it was a win against an ACC team, something I never really expected. ACC teams, by and large, to someone who doesn't even know a whole lot about sports... power houses. Well-oiled machines, running around recruiting the best of the best. I am tempted to turn this into a David and Goliath moment, but I'm not because even I'm cognizant of the fact that I tend to do that. I'm trying in my head not to compare this to George Mason's road to the Final Four a few years ago, and just enjoy that my scrappy-ass alma mater is out there in the world, black and gold, with it's crazy ass funky band where the musicians wear sloppy looking jeans and VCU t-shirts, and the dance team doesn't do so much dancing. This is my VCU, and the VCU that I love. This is the VCU that I talk to my kids about, and try to convince them, at ages five and eight, that this is their only logical choice for a college.

Elite Eight tomorrow for the Rams. Can't wait.