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    But the days turned to weeks, and when summer finally wore down, the best Dad had found was a position as a weekend security guard. With the family car tied up on Saturdays, I had no way to get to Dr. Norris’ clinic when school started back up. Unable to stop it, I watched the first piece of my life plan slip away.
    The second piece followed fast.
    “I have to get a job.” The look of panic and disbelief betrayed the unnatural calm in my brother’s voice. “It’s the middle of the semester. Where am I supposed to find work now?”
    A senior in college, majoring in anthropology, my brother was home for a weekend visit he clearly hadn’t wanted to come back for.
    “I thought you had a job.”
    “I teach four labs a week. That’s barely enough for groceries.”
    “What about your scholarship?”
    “It pays for school, but not my apartment or anything else.”
    “There isn’t anything left in the college fund?”
    Dan shook his head. “Mom and Dad raided it to pay their own bills. It’s gone.”
    Gone. Anger welled in me. Even if Dad landed a job tomorrow, my parents wouldn’t be able to build up any kind of savings before the next school year. If they had to cut off subsidy to my brother now, where would that put me in the fall? I would have to rely on what little I had made over the past summer and what little more I would make this next one. So much for the car I wanted to buy. Every penny would now have to be squirreled away for other expenses.
    It wasn’t fair.
    And what I was thinking deep down wasn’t fair either. That Dan had gotten at least some support for three years, but I would get nothing. That the male in the family had gotten the help he needed to put him in a position to get a job that might one day support a family of his own. Even in the mid-1970s, traditional values from a dying age had managed to win out again.
    “What about me?” I asked quietly.
    “So you don’t go to college. You’re a girl anyway. What difference would it make?” Shoulder-length hair did not automatically make my brother a fan of women’s lib. Not when his own future was on the line.
    “Do you think you have some sort of entitlement, just because you happened to be born first and be born male?”
    He shrugged. “That’s how things are.” Then, with a pointed stare he hit home. “And you know Mom and Dad believe that too.”  
    I hung my head. It was no use arguing or staying angry with him. He wasn’t to blame. The generations that had come before were. It was the misguided dogma and brutal catechism learned at a paternal ancestor’s knee that kept the myth alive. It was 40 years and more ingrained in my parents’ very being. In my mom who quit her secretarial job the day she married and who held proudly to the fact that she had never learned to pump her own gas. In my dad who worked finger to the bone to provide for his family. In the way they responded to my oft-voiced complaints that Dan had been allowed to do something at whatever age I happened to be with a simple phrase that held for them all the wisdom of the world encapsulated in five small words: “That’s because he’s a boy.”
    But this … I couldn’t let college and my dream of being a veterinarian fall through simply because of my gender. Or for the lack of a few dollars. If there was a way to get into college I would.
    ~~~
     
    For me, schoolwork always came easy. I absorbed without having to study, not understanding why the classes had to be paced so slow. Resentful that my classmates were holding me back.
    I breezed through accelerated courses – science, math, English. I crammed four years of advanced high school work into three and, with visions of scholarships dancing through my head, tested high on college entrance exams. All the schools I didn’t want to attend courted me handsomely. But I had my eye on Texas A&M , with its College of Veterinary Medicine just an easy transition away. The scholarship offer seemed