Student Life on Walkup Street

I was curious to know if it was just coincidence that there were a few photos featuring Mom eating an apple from her early days in Illinois. Dad explained that apples were hard to come by in Taiwan (where mangos and papaya grow in abundance, but most kinds of apples less so), so when Mom moved here and discovered that they were plentiful and available at a good price, she enjoyed them whenever she got the chance.

His description of certain details of her daily life as a student reminded me of some of my own errand routines in college. To feed myself every week, I’d walk just over a mile, sometimes through snow or drizzle, to the Roche Bros. supermarket. Going there was the easy part, since I knew I’d be weighted down with bags the way back. Inside, I would pick up one of the compact baskets, the better to rein in my purchasing, and begin the painstaking work of filling it up within the portable threshold. Making my way through all the well-stocked aisles of colorful, delicious foods was an exercise in restraint — the obligation hanging over me to schlep whatever I had bought back to my dorm on campus.

Mom moved into the house on Walkup Street with some of the flatmates already there to save money. She got a research assistantship some time in her second semester by switching from nutrition to chemistry. She did not have a car and did not ask boys to give her rides, although many offered her a lift quite willingly. She would often walk to the supermarket and call a taxi to bring her groceries home. We would buy a very big watermelon for $0.69/$0.99 and call a cab for a few dollars when I visited her. Mom loves watermelons.