Read Online With Patience and Fortitude: A Memoir by Christine Quinn - Free Book Online

expressing my political views and doing activism on campus. And because I was an activist working on all kinds of issues and outspoken in general—and probably because of my very loud laugh—I got a reputation for being brash. No doubt I cemented that reputation when I became the Bantam, Trinity’s mascot. Here’s the story of that.
    A bantam is a big fighting rooster, but of course we couldn’t have the real thing at Trinity football games. Instead, we had a human inside a bantam costume. It had a big, poufy orange-yellow chest and a head with a beak. The person inside the costume wore orange-gold tights, little yellow feathery shorts, and a blue T-shirt that had a “T” on it. My freshman year I would complain about how awful the Bantam was at the football games. He didn’t do much more than walk back and forth and flap his arms. And my friends said, “Stop complaining. You should be the Bantam next year.” So I said, “Okay, I’m gonna be the Bantam next year.” And I was! I don’t think there was much competition for this exalted job, but it was fun. My role as the Bantam was to excite the crowd, torture the cheerleaders by hitting them with their pom-poms, and get the crowd to do chants. And besides, most people didn’t know who was underneath the costume, so I had a lot of freedom to be as silly as I wanted.
    Then there was the time I got beaten up. Wesleyan was our rival, and I went over to their side and started running up and down, taunting them. Some guys came down from the stands and started pouring beer all over me, pulling on my beak, and tugging on me. My friend Jon, who was calling the game on the air, sent out an SOS: “This is not a joke! Someone is beating up the Bantam. The Bantam is on the Wesleyan side, and she’s getting attacked. Please, people, help.” I couldn’t get them to stop, so I had to haul around and clock one of the guys. And when I screamed at him, he said, “Oh, I didn’t know you were a girl. Sorry.” I was all wet and droopy-beaked and had to limp back over to Trinity’s side. I went up to the dean of students and said, “Can you believe this? They poured beer on me and were really mean to me.” He said, “I hope you had your mouth open,” and walked away.
    I liked Trinity. There was plenty of social life, and there were lots of different kinds of groups of people. I didn’t mind being one of the few liberals on campus—that was totally fine. I hung out with football players, and the jock crowd, and then I hung out with the hippie crowd in the fraternity I joined. I liked bopping around between groups. It was all fun and good, but I was also adrift personally, and because I was never completely rooted in one group it added to that.
    I just didn’t really care about the classes. They all seemed sort of irrelevant, and they were difficult for me. Until then, school had been a breeze. But college was another thing entirely. I didn’t have particularly great study skills, because I’d never had to study that hard before. I am also an unbelievably slow reader, who has to read things a couple of times to digest them. There’s a lot of reading in college, and I just couldn’t get through it. I had a hard time keeping up. Truth is, I may not have tried that hard, but I bet if you’d asked people, they would’ve thought I was doing very well in classes. In reality, I was basically just getting by. And then the loss of my mother in the years before college had left me sad and overwhelmed, which made focusing on classes even harder.
    I couldn’t shrug off the grief and the guilt. They were an enormous distraction, especially when I was supposed to be studying. Even though I knew intellectually, at sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, that I wasn’t, I nonetheless felt completely and exclusively responsible for the fact that my mother had gotten sick again and had died. There was little doubt in my mind that it was my fault. I thought that if I had been more attentive to