Praise the lord.

When I was ready to go to college, I was a very naive person who knew NOTHING, really, about college. My parents had each gone for a little over a year, but neither had graduated at that point and were so out of touch that my mom still thought--in 1988--that I would have an enforced curfew and a "dorm mother." Imagine her surprise when she found that the adult who was responsible for me was a 19-year-old sophomore who lived down the hall.

Anyway, I went to school for a year in Kirksville, Missouri, at Northeast Missouri State University (now known as Truman State University; previously known as Kirksville State Teachers' College.) They offered me a full-ride scholarship, and as my parents hadn't saved a dime toward my education, that was certainly an issue of some concern. In addition, as I reasoned, this town was slightly larger than my hometown, plus it had some 6,000 college students in it, so it would be just fine, right?

Wrong.

It was a hideous place, I didn't have a job that year and so in some sort of reverse bit of logic, my grades were horrible because I had TOO MUCH free time. I did enjoy my time with some of the people I met there, though in retrospect we had little in common except our shared misery (four of the five people in my closest social circle transferred after freshman year), and I haven't kept in touch with any of them past the first couple of years after we left there. Near the end of my year, I called my friend B. (a good friend from high school who lived in the same dorm, way at the other end of the fifth floor) and asked her where she was living next year. "Columbia," she replied. Well, that's 100 miles away, it's going to be a hell of a commute, isn't it? "No, dummy, I'm transferring to Mizzou. I'm leaving this hellhole, and I advise you to do the same. Hold on, I'll get you the number to the admissions office." WTF? I swear to you, I didn't even know you could transfer. I thought I was stuck in that armpit forever.

And so, that was it. I did transfer to Mizzou, where I had pretty decent grades, found a job that ended up being my career, made a lot of friends, a few of whom I am close with today, and will likely be forever. And I met Lisa.

I swore I'd never go back to Kirksville, but life is funny. I was sent up there for work this past week, to help the new-ish manager who is now running the University bookstore there. So I had to take a few photos of my favorite places. Burt Bacharach once wrote that "there's always something there to remind me," but I somehow don't think he had in mind either the Kum-N-Go or the House of Jesus.

P.S. I don't know if the Kum-N-Go is part of a chain, but I do know that it was commonly referred to by its alternate names: Shoot-N-Scoot, or Ejaculate-N-Evacuate. Nice, huh?