TCNJ

35 WINTER 2025 If half of literature is about finding home, the other half is about escaping. Sigrid had a loving family. To Siggy, it was sometimes an aggravating love. "You don't know how to set your own pace," her father often said. "Slow down." In Sigrid's diary, she confessed that she felt tugged in two directions. One was toward financial security and parental expectations. The other direction? The life she really wanted. The road less traveled. The unknown. Sigrid moved 3,000 miles from California. She rejected her parents' plane tickets, preferring cross-country bus rides instead. She stood at a crossroads. If she didn't break free and become her own person, she feared that one day she'd wake up in her mother's body, living a life that wasn't hers. She was too young to know one day it gets better. "Try laughing at it, Siggy," her landlady advised. "That's not how I operate," she said. At choir rehearsals, Reverend Aldridge took her aside for singing too loud. "All he wanted was to help me figure out why I seem to want to outdo the others all the time … I see him every Monday at 3 now; he thought it was funny that I would refer to it as 'free head-shrinking.' And I told him a number of things: how much easier it is to get along with older people; how I prefer older men to ones my age or younger; all the mother trouble in the family; and how the victim always seems to be a girl." It was July 1977. She was eager to hit the road. Thumb- ing through New England, she crossed into Canada, wearing her "big-eye little-girl smile for security guards, professors, and every patrolman." She made great time, obsessively recording road hours between destinations in her diary. She wrote urgently, as though she was running late. Her travels were upbeat, though on the road she worried more often about finding a place to sleep. In those vagabond days, she slept in vestibules, went days without showers, but seemed happy. In restaurants, she'd drink three water refills before glancing at a menu. Thirsty days on the highway, she slipped wild berries under her tongue, feet aching as the wind whistled past her thumb. She didn't mind walking, so long as it was sunny. She sketched the countryside, gifting her sketches to strangers who helped her along the way. In her diary, she seemed overjoyed, in motion, purposeful. A thick-accented trucker told her, "You got more nerve than Dick Tracy," buying her Cokes and sandwiches as she "The time to leave is when practicing is done and I've done what I want with the piece. " We asked a few people who knew Sigrid well to share their memories of her. No surprise, music was the common theme. A few words from Sigrid Stevenson's friends "We all took piano lessons and while we were playing Row, Row, Row Your Boat, Sigrid was playing Beethoven. She truly had a unique gift." — Carol Edson, childhood friend "Sigrid lived three blocks from me and we were in class together all our lives. She mostly kept to herself. Music seemed to be her life. She practiced every day." — Terry Givens, childhood classmate "She was not your typical 1970s girl. She was not into her physical appearance, and instead, she was focused on her music. If she was playing a piece of music, she would study it diligently." — Neil Boumpani '80, fellow music major at Trenton State College

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