Month: July 2016

A couple of my co-workers and I break up the day sometimes by playing the Top Three game. Or sometimes it’s the Name Your Favorite game. Name your all-time favorite author. Name the top three bands whose catalog you’d take with you if you were stranded on a deserted island. My response is almost always, But what mood am I in? I’m not very good at the game. I don’t like feeling boxed in. Don’t try to define me. Or make me define me. I’m complex. Or indecisive. Whichever. Depending.

Recently, though, the question was, If you could go back to any point in your life, what would it be?

This is different than what would you do differently, or happiest moments or most important days. This isn’t changing the past, but reliving it. Having just revisted my college days, it felt particularly apt to wax nostalgic.

I wouldn’t go back to high school. I hadn’t figured much out at that point. I don’t have any angst about high school, but they weren’t my best years. I made a mess of my early twenties and it took me years to recover financially and in self-confidence. No need to relive that.

And as much as I love looking back at photos of my children as babies and toddlers, I would not live those days over again. They’re miraculous years, full of wonder and discovery, but they’re incredibly hard. There’s little sleep and a lot of doubt. You’re catapulted from one lifestyle to another one that’s diametrically opposed. Babies have those big eyes and adorable wrist rolls, no doubt about it. But there’s beauty to having children to whom bath time is just a routine morning shower and who can do whatever dark magic it takes to make the tv work on Blu-ray.

My early thirties were reactionary. My youngest didn’t sleep through the night until she was 18 months old. Since she’s only 19 months younger than her sister, I basically didn’t sleep for 3 years. It takes a toll. Even to this day, I haven’t relearned how to get a full 8 hours. Specifically, 2009 was a tough year for a lot of people, and both my husband and I found ourselves laid off and struggling with how to communicate with each other in our new set of fears. We had just figured out the daily grind of parenting, how not to break these children that we’d been entrusted with. We had two children under 2 and now we had to figure out how to parent without a net, dancing on a thin financial tightrope. We coped by turning all that angst inward rather than meeting it as a team. Angry, disappointed, so awful tired. It wasn’t a good time. We made it through, grew the tightrope into a solid plank, and then rebuilt the foundation. But I’d never want to go back there.

If I could go back to any age, I might visit me at 19 or 20. I was studying abroad, traveling, learning about cheap wine and good friends. It was an extraordinary time. Maybe it was all the cheap wine, but it has that sort of soft focus vignette feel. The sort of spell you can never weave again because there are so many different and such very specific ingredients. Even looking back, I know it wasn’t all foreign capitals and sleeping til noon. I was really poor, but so was everyone around me. I didn’t have any money, but I also had next to no responsibility, other than getting myself to class often enough to be counted as a participant in the process. My heart tumbled a few times, sometimes more seriously than others. It was the time for it. And maybe that’s part of the answer to the question. Maybe the times we would go back to are simply the ones we see in the best filter, the softest light.

Those college years had a lot of merit, but meandering through my timeline I realized that if I could go back to any point in my life, I wouldn’t. I’d choose now. In contrast to 19-year-old me, there is very little soft focus in the present. It’s stark sometimes, actually. It’s constant dirty dishes and constant laundry, and neither ever get completely put away. It’s rewashing that load of clothes that never got put away, because now it’s covered in cat hair because the ungrateful cats are anti-team players. This phase is about still having a pile of end-of-school folders and papers sitting in the living room, even though school begins again in three weeks. It’s me texting my husband at 7:30 on a Friday morning after multiple temper tantrums, “I don’t think I have it in me to capably parent the little one. I feel like every morning I wake up and I fail at this.”

And then at the end of the day, picking up with, “You don’t even want to see my magic trick (/song/play/dance/explication of the history of man),” my youngest hurls at me, “You just want to read.” And God help me, she’s exactly right, and the honesty of it cuts to the bone. I. Just. Want. Quiet.

Doesn’t really sound like the best of times, does it? But it is. I wouldn’t take back high school’s neutrality, or even the aching feet of 19-year-old me trekking up one more winding cupola in Rome. I might get a little misty at the thought of once tiny hands growing far too quickly to capture again in plaster and handprint art. But I am raising two daughters who are fierce and opinionated and not just head strong, but strong. I have a partner to whom I can text my worst weekday morning fears, and know I’m not dancing on that tightrope alone. “I know,” he replied. “It’s hard.”

“I know. It’s hard.”

Those four words are everything, aren’t they? Those words get it. We’re building something, and it’s messy and it’s sometimes stark and sometimes has jagged edges. We’re figuring out families and careers and mortgages and 401ks and 529s and IRAs and acronyms we haven’t even discovered yet. We’ve had our plans fall apart, and we’ve rebuilt.

This isn’t the age I’d relive because it’s easy. I’d choose it because we’re sometimes a mess, but I’m proud of this family. I’d choose it because at bedtime, after a day of fearsome valleys and intimidating peaks, my youngest sneaks downstairs one last time, wraps her arms tight around my waist and says, “My life would never be better without you in it.” It’s an apology and a promise and a confusing double negative. But back at you, chica. To the moon and back.

For so much of our lives, we’re living in four, maybe five, year increments. Elementary school, middle school, high school, college. You get used to the idea that life stages are short-lived. You make amazing friends, have wonderful experiences, or terrible experiences, but there’s a sense that this too shall pass. Four, three, two, one…

I’ve lived with my husband for 13 years now. That’s longer than anyone else in the world except my mother, father and brothers and in a handful of years, it will be longer than each of them, too. Just like with parenting, we’ve had peaks and valleys. We’ve haven’t always liked each other every moment of every day. Our house is messier than we’d like. Our tempers sometimes shorter. But we’ve created a little island of experience. Our island. We can share our worst days and our worst fears. Spoken out loud, they aren’t quite so scary. Every day, there are little things. The way when I hold them close, my daughters’ hair smells like the fruity pomegranate shampoo they love and how it changes color in the summer sun. Red for the older, blonde for the younger. And how they fall over each other, trying to tell the most details about their day. They won’t always, I know. Watching thunderstorms roll in, and the complicated dance of coordinating packed lunches and pool day bags and water bottles… stand on the front steps, arms out, sunscreen on. Such little things, but it’s our island.

For me, instead of counting down to the next, this stage is about counting up. Counting up anniversaries and birthdays and new backpacks and stories told and books read.  And even as I’m counting up, my children are counting down. Two more years in her current school for my oldest, she reminded us at dinner. And she got up to put her plate away, and her legs were childhood tan from summer days at the pool and evening bike rides, but already nearly as long as mine. Counting up inches, counting up years.

I can’t bottle them up, these days flying by. But when it’s hard and messy and has jagged edges, as it is and does and will from time to time, I can remind myself that I wouldn’t go back. I’d choose now.

They say to trust in the magic of new beginnings. In the summer of 1997, I had already decided to go to school out-of-state. Many of my high school classmates were going to Ohio State, and Bowling Green, Miami of Ohio and Ohio University. Others scattered across the country, but no one else from my high school headed to the Pennsylvania state school that I had chosen.

At Freshmen Orientation, I met another girl who, in the sea of strangers, seemed like a familiar. Since otherwise the roommate assignment process was a random jumble lottery, we decided that we would trust in fate, and each other’s apparent normalcy, and room together (for the next four years, as it turned out).

For those next four years, that little town in Pennsylvania, too far away to be suburban Pittsburgh, and confusingly dual-state named – Indiana, Pennsylvania, hometown of Jimmy Stewart (you literally have to say it altogether) – was home. Somehow, even in those first days as we loaded suitcases and plastic egg crates into the service elevator and set up our first home away from home, our college family was already drawing inward toward a cohesive core. Through the magic of new beginnings, instead of being strangers in a strange land, we found new orbits, and we were kept steady by the gravitational pull of us, on us.

Princess Diana died the first week of college. I can remember watching the news on the TV/VCR combo in our dorm room. My 18^th birthday fell a week or two after college started, and my new circle delivered a pizza, with candles. I can still picture the matching bedspreads (but reversible so we had options) that my roommate and I picked out. We put up a wallpaper border, because why not; this was home now, after all (though it frequently fell, almost as if putty wasn’t the glue we assumed it would be). We were perhaps the last college generation of calling cards and land lines, of DOS login screens and 24mm film developing. All of that seems so long ago, a little fuzzy around the edges… and yet the friendships, the people, are current and vibrant and real, still in my orbit, still gravitationally imperative to my sense of balance.

To say that college friends are family is, I think, in no way hyperbolic. For years, you are living together, eating together, studying together, procrastinating together. I can very literally say that those friendships were a testament to blood, sweat and tears. Not a lot of blood, thankfully, but some (I tend to go woozy at the sight of blood, so it’s just as well it was infrequent). But they did include an Even Stephen policy on exercise, and there were definitely some tears, a lot of laughter. In the same way that our immediate family experiences are a mix of the day-to-day and the peaks and valleys, so are our college days. I was incomparably lucky.

In the last 15 years, I’ve seen some of those friends quite a bit. Some a handful of times, and some just once or twice. Some, I had not seen since graduation, even though we’d kept in touch, celebrated new jobs and new children, mourned losses and disappointments. After years of talking about a reunion in broad terms, two of those friends set a date and said, This is it. This is the day and we will see you all there.

RSVP’ing should have been easy. It should have been an automatic, come hell or high water enthusiastic YES. Yes to the people, absolutely. These are the sisters of my heart. But years that are so highly charged with every possible emotion come with baggage as well. Not every moment is a glowing golden memory. They shouldn’t be. What sort of shallow person would such a one-dimensional life create. But knowingly walking back into those less golden memories in some ways felt like risking a confrontation with ghosts not entirely laid to rest. What shades and of who would I see, faded by years, and yet in sharp relief against that thick wall built and then intentionally wiped clean?

But my friends know better than me, and thank goodness. Don’t be ridiculous, they said, in varying ways. Of course you’re going. Which found me on a plane headed to Pittsburgh. Well, not right away. My flight was first delayed by 5 hours in the airport, and then by another 2 on the tarmac, and then, finally in flight, we lost power to an engine and had to do an emergency landing in Kansas City. “Just when we thought this flight couldn’t get worse, folks,” said the pilot. “We’re going to be landing soon and safely, but not in Pittsburgh.” It was late. I was already supposed to be in the heart of my circle. The only food option was a bagel shop, and I don’t eat wheat. After another couple of hours and some false hope, the flight was canceled and somewhat questionable lodging provided near the airport. I called my college roommate.

“I don’t know,” I said, tired and discouraged, with a headache I’d had since the tarmac delay now in full force, and still hours away from Pittsburgh. “Don’t be ridiculous,” she said. “Of course, you’re still coming.” I took a taxi to the hotel, unwilling to wait for the tiny shuttle bus to clear an airplane full of frazzled travelers from the curb at Kansas City International. I’m fanatical about hotel rooms. I check for bed bugs and toilet ring and smell the towels for bleach. It’s a problem, I know, but not something I can control. Except that night, I just didn’t care. I kicked off my shoes and walked right across the hotel carpet. I pulled back the covers and slipped into bed. It felt like I wasn’t 18 anymore.

The next afternoon, finally making it to Pittsburgh, my roommate’s husband picked me up from the airport to take me the next 2 hours to campus where everyone else had already gathered. We know each other mostly through photos. We’re Facebook friends and I have his number in my phone, but I flipped through those photos quickly to make sure I remembered exactly who I was looking for. It could have been awkward, I suppose, that two hour drive. Except that he’s basically family, even if we’ve only met once before. At one point he said of his wife, “Well, you’ve known her longer than I have.” And the truth of that is somehow the realest, most important part of this spontaneous reunion. I have known these friends more than half my life, and that percentage will only continue to grow as we get older. These are the people who were there at the new beginnings; collectively, we are our secret keepers and broken heart tenders. A mirror to our laughter.

It’s hard to explain what it felt like when we were all finally together again. Because what it felt was… normal. It felt like we might all get together every weekend, except there was probably more hugging. It felt like we’d always felt together. An unbroken orbit. There were children and there were spouses, but they were already woven into the whole because that’s the way family works.

People change less than places. We went back to campus and they are in the midst of renovating, which is a bit tragic. It was this great old red brick and ivy architecture centered by an old and lovely Oak Grove with wagon wheel paths. It was the sort of place that was calming and peaceful because it felt like it had been just that way for generations, and would be the same for generations more. You were walking the same paths as women who had worn long skirts and puffed sleeves at the turn of the century and men in newsboy and Gatsby hats a couple of decades later.

And now they’re knocking it down and replacing it with that stereotypical brick and tan clapboard townhouse look that doesn’t have nearly the same sense of tradition. As we walked, one of my friends, our group’s patient conscience and subtle jester, said, “They did it wrong.” And he’s right. It hurts to see in some ways. If we go back again and our old dorm room isn’t there for us to marvel over its tiny dimensions, or to smell the familiar, even after 15 years, smell of stairway tread rubber and still air… will it still feel like going home again? If Frida Kahlo isn’t looking over our shoulder in the picture bathroom, or Klimt paintings hanging in the lobby, will just the geographical coordinates have the same significance? I lost my childhood home to a front end loader in a heartbreaking end to an era, and I have to say that now my childhood town is a place I once lived, but it has lost its pull. There are people I love there, but the place is gone. Hiraeth is the nostalgia, the grief for lost places of our past. In some ways, in going back, in seeing what has already begun, the hiraeth for our college haunts seems inevitable, even as I celebrate the friendships that will never crumble like the concrete steps that have seen so many student footsteps come and go. It felt like a celebration of the people, but a letting go of the place. A continuity juxtaposed by a conclusion.

I won’t say that we aren’t older. Because we are, though in my eyes, we looked the same. But I think we are also more comfortable in our own skin now, which makes us perhaps just more substantive versions of who were then. We’re not the same, but we’re not so different.

We’ve known each other longer than we’ve known our children and our partners and we’re still steady in our original orbit, our gravitational pull on each other the most important and unchanging magic of our long ago new beginning. 

 

You know who I wish was running for President? Mother Theresa, may she rest in peace.

Or maybe Gandhi. Also dead, but you get the idea. Pretty high approval ratings (except maybe with the British at one point). And I’d be okay with Neil DeGrasse Tyson, actually.

Except there have been questions about the financials of Mother Theresa’s charity, and criticisms that she admitted feeling disconnected from God in later years. Was Mother Theresa, perhaps, a hypocrite with questionable financials and/or morals?

And Gandhi. Don’t get me started on Gandhi. That radical pacifist advocated such extreme non-violence in response to the Axis nations of World War II, he went so far as to say sacrifice of self and country was preferable to freedom obtained through violence. And really, how impressed would Hitler have been with principled non-violence? I get that it was your thing, Gandhi, but how different our world would be.

Neil DeGrasse Tyson, now, seems pretty solidly logical. And intellectually amusing. Except… logic is nothing compared to society’s rampant truthiness. Take your science and stuff it, Neil. And he’s a self-described agnostic. We really shouldn’t bring a lack of religion into politics. Imagine the chaos! So, he’s out.

What we need is someone more trustworthy than Mother Theresa, more principled than Gandhi and more affable than DeGrasse Tyson. Also, we’d like to feel like we could have a beer with this person while simultaneously trusting them with our nuclear codes and to know every nuance of every foreign government, those in power and any possible coup. We will feel entitled to every detail of this person’s personal life from here on out, and also from birth til now. And their children’s. We will watch amateur video of things said at barbeques in 1992 and judge accordingly. It would also be helpful if this person could see the future, but just when there is more than one possible course of action and/or resulting reaction. So, every time, I guess. Times a million or so. 20/20 hindsight is one thing. But we will settle for no less than 20/20 foresight, thank you. Why is it that we never have qualified candidates?

Or, on second thought, forget all that. We’ll settle for anyone but these two, but only now that we’ve settled on these two. #nevertrump #neverhillary

And I get it. I do. You hate Hillary Clinton. She’s a liar. She fiddled while Benghazi burned. She’s practically a moderate Republican in a pantsuit who stole the election from Bernie with her insider connections. And Donald Trump. He’s a racist, misogynist, nativist whose isolationist policies are the only ones we’ve heard spelled out with any clarity, while the rest of his platform is built on the hate and anger and fears he’s stoked to a bonfire, and the bombastic phrase, “Believe me.” And like with the Pied Piper, so many do.

Fantastic. We all know where we all stand. Entrenched. Partisan. Angry. Mystified. Righteous. How could this have happened?

31 million Americans voted in the Republican primaries. 29 million Americans voted in the Democratic primaries. There are about 225 million adult Americans. So… by my English major math, using some rounding, approximately 75% of Americans didn’t vote. If you did, good on you. Colorado holds a caucus. I went. So, I figure if I want to complain about the excruciatingly polarized state of the race now, I’m allowed.

What might have happened if another 60 million Americans voted in the primaries? What might have happened if another 120 million Americans had voted? I’ve seen a meme several times lately that reads, “If Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are stranded on a desert island, who survives?  America. America survives.”

I get it. It’s not your fault. You hate both of them. You can’t be blamed when it all goes to hell.

Here’s the thing, though. Trump and Clinton didn’t become their parties nominees in some sort of Hunger Games style throw down. They were nominated by a majority of their party’s approximately 30 million primary voters. In other words, about 7% of the population, on both sides. Everyone else, on both sides, received even less than 7% of the country’s vote.

So, throwing around a bunch of curse words and bumper stickers now is kind of pointless. If you voted, great. If you voted, but you know someone who didn’t and didn’t move mountains to convince them to also vote, then that’s only half credit. I’ll stop patting myself on the back for just going to the caucus, I suppose. If Americans were actually terrified of the two choices we have, they shouldn’t have let 25% of the country make the decision for them. If they truly don’t think that these two people represent us as a country, different choices were on the table. All we had to do was vote. Single digit percentages of adult Americans on either side would have changed the outcome. Three out of four Americans didn’t bother. Primaries are tricky. I get that. There are registration rules and deadlines and polling places and sometimes you need a stamp.

I think what our election cycle says about us as a country may well be, We prefer being angry to being engaged.

Anger is easy, after all. Engaged requires a little more. Anger is reposting a meme, writing “bitch” or “orange toad” in a comment thread. Haha. Good one, Bob. Point definitely made. Engaged means having a discussion, questioning our own values. God forbid, listening to the other guy. Our neighbor, our classmate, our nominees. Their nominees.

We don’t have perfect politicians. In fact, we have far from perfect politicians. I’ll concede that point. Some days it’s hard to justify leaving Britain at all. We’re sorry. We obviously weren’t ready. But as a government by and for the people, it’s on us to hold our representatives accountable by holding ourselves accountable. It’s the only way the system works. We’re imperfect and hypocritical, occasionally passionate, but also intellectually lazy and partisan. We want our politicians to be better than we are. And they aren’t. We want them to fight for the things we want. But we don’t vote.

French philosopher Joseph de Maistre said about democracy, Every nation gets the government it deserves.

How potentially terrifying.

Let’s work on it. Maybe even without hashtags and angry comment threads. We might even be able to serve as an example to our politicians. Or, here’s a thought, vote for new ones. We’re only stuck if we choose to be.