Lost Love?

I met Ned, my first major high school crush, in my freshman English class. Ned was tall and funny and athletic, and our palms fit together perfectly when we shook hands, which I thought at the time was a divine marker of our common destiny. Ned had a best friend, Jared. Jared was funny, too, but he was also many things that Ned was not: though not diminutive, he was shorter than his best friend; not into sports; musical; sensitive; incredibly smart; and kind. Whereas Ned barely made it out of high school alive after being on the losing end of substance addiction and a drug-related, near-fatal car crash, Jared moved to New York to study film and become a director. You can guess which one I still think about as the mythical One That Got Away.
Of course, I don’t know that Jared and I would’ve been any good together. In addition to his many charms, he swore like a sailor, and I could never have brought him home to my very proper, God-fearing mother. And we never dated—he never asked and I wasn’t really allowed to, anyway, so I have no purely romantic memories of him. But the idea of him—that’s what lost love really is, for me, an enticing, bittersweet idea—continues to fascinate me, even twelve years after we last saw each other. When all else fails in life, when the life you’re living is not the one you’d like to be, it is comforting to believe that somewhere out there is your destiny. And hopefully he isn’t married (to the wrong girl, of course), and he’s living his dreams and would inspire you to find yours, if you were together.
Potentially embarrassing disclosure: I tried to contact Jared, about four or five years ago, using that unreliable friend of modern love, the internet. I found an e-mail address that may or may not have been active—the e-mail I sent wasn’t returned by the e-mail gatekeepers, but it also wasn’t answered. So of course I hoped that it did not arrive safe and sound only to go ignored by the One. I was fresh out of law school and freshly disillusioned by the path I’d chosen, and wishing I’d been courageous enough to pursue my creative instincts, as Jared had. And I think that’s what I told him. In retrospect, I’m not sure how flattering that would be to hear, or how attractive. “Hi! I’m lost. Can you help find me?” Maybe for a man with dubious motives that would have been an attractive offer. But for anyone who knows where he is and where he wants to go, the idea of towing someone else’s lifeboat must not sound particularly appealing.
Despite all this--despite knowing that he might be unavailable, that he might still be completely wrong for me in some important ways, that he may have already silently rejected me, I still think about him. He is my enduring, enticing myth.

The road to hell

The latest edition of The Record, a biannual publication summarizing all of the achievements, personal and professional, of my law school’s alumni, arrived in my mailbox yesterday. In the first years following my graduation, I looked forward to its arrival and to my classmates’ news with real excitement. I wanted to stay abreast of who had married, procreated, or remained committed to doing the work for which we were all (theoretically) trained. Why? Partly it was curiosity; partly I wanted to know whose life resembled mine in its absence of spouse, offspring, or interest in pursuing our chosen profession. There is strength in numbers, after all, and knowing that I wasn’t alone in wanting to turn away from the clearest path would somehow help validate my choice—or rather, the choice I wanted to make.
It’s hard to remember now why I wanted to be a lawyer. When people—especially admissions counselors—asked me this question, I would respond with a spiel that became so hard-wired its true origins are now unknown to me. It went like this: during a mock trial exercise in my high school civics class, I became so inspired by the law while playing my assigned role of “lawyer” that I knew I had to pursue a career in the field. That story could be true. I honestly don’t remember anymore. What I do know is that what truly inspired me as I entered college and my goal of attending law school drew closer was the fat salary I could make as an associate at a large law firm. Seeking justice for the oppressed, or even seeking what I would later come to know as a “good outcome” for a corporate client, were motivations that had no place in my thought process. When my sister’s coworker, an idealistic young director of a youth center, commented upon hearing my plans that I could “do a lot of good as a lawyer-- Gandhi was a lawyer!” I responded with a smile on my face and a mental ho-hum. Doing good, I hate to admit, was not my goal.
Ironically, or maybe logically, attending law school changed all this. Many of my classmates were incredibly bright, inspired, and self-directed individuals. Everyone but me seemed to have walked in with their eyes wide open, and their anxiety over grades and inclination toward round-the-clock studying bewildered me. Wasn’t the idea just to graduate with grades good enough to secure a job at a good-enough firm? Apparently, there were hierarchies even among major firms in large cities, and those who secured jobs at the bluest of the blue-chip organizations could claim more professional success than the rest of us.
Other students strove to be lawyers of the Gandhi variety, and were committed to careers in public service. By the time I decided that a life of endless, pointless competition wasn’t for me, I was already well on my way to that path. After a summer internship at one of the good-enough firms in a large city, I walked away from my job offer. It was both frightening and completely exhilarating. Choosing a life that made sense to me and was motivated by something other than the dollar signs in my eyes was possible, and while I still didn’t know what I wanted, I did know what I didn’t want.
The latest Record tells me that one former crush (he once bought me a drink and very nearly asked me out, according to several expert girlfriend analyses) is engaged; another just returned from his honeymoon. Other friends are working at this or that firm, or have important sounding titles in government offices. What surprised me most (except for a momentary pang upon reading news of the aforementioned engagement) was how little all of it mattered to me. It all feels so foreign and distant from my present existence, almost like an alternate me was their classmate, and maybe that’s the case. We go to school to grow up as much as we go to learn from professors and textbooks. That’s the value I’m taking away from my law school experience. It was more than an expensive detour. I learned what I don’t want, which is priceless.

Three Observations on Turning 30

1. I’ve developed a bad habit of examining the temples and hairlines of my 30-something friends and acquaintances for signs of gray hair or a dye job.

Like most fifteen year-olds, I was always delighted when the clerk at Putt Putt or a long-lost relative upwardly misjudged my age by a year or two. Looking older than my years was a sign that the mistaken party had picked up on the air of sophistication and maturity that I was striving for and had apparently achieved, with the aid of Wet ‘N Wild lip gloss and Bonne Bell eyeshadow. However, these same misjudgments began to hit me like a snowball to the face soon after my twenty-first birthday. It was no longer exciting for someone to ratchet up my age once all the milestones of youth—driver’s license, voter registration (good citizen that I was), legal drinking age—had all been marked. The day that strangers stop assuming that I’m a student upon our introduction will likely inflict lasting damage on my psyche.

Hair, I’ve decided, is a telltale indicator of youth. My mom started to “go gray” when she was 18, and this bit of family history hung over me like a specter until I’d gotten well beyond that tender age myself with nary a silver thread in sight. Now that I’m in the home stretch of my twenties—in my very last twenty, actually—I can’t help my eyes from darting invasively towards the parts and hairlines of friends, and wondering who among us will be the last to maintain a virgin head of hair that is true to the color of her childhood. Men have it worse, I think. A friend told me years ago that her fiancée was self-conscious about his newly receding hairlines, despite her reassurances that this was only normal at the age of twenty-seven. Twenty-seven! She said it as though he were forty-seven. And forty-seven sounds very young to me now. I am fascinated by how ephemeral youth has proved to be—or the appearance of it, rather.

2. Previously suppressed shallow tendencies have begun to surface in the form of increased time in front of the bathroom mirror.

My mother probably won’t back me up on this, but I was never a mirror dweller. I self-righteously snickered, under my breath, when I walked past women and girls in public restrooms who lingered in front of the oversized mirrors, their hands long since clean, as they endlessly examined their appearances. The particular objects of my scorn were those who carted a toolbox of cosmetics to school or work with them to ensure that at no point during the day were they without lipstick or eyeliner. While I have not yet joined the ranks of the toolbox women, and I still tend to beat it out of public restrooms, post-hand washing, I have lately found myself, in the privacy of my own bathroom, scrutinizing my visage, looking for any little change since the week before. Recently, I lamented the appearance of symmetrical creases under each eye, sure that they were a blaring announcement to the world that my twenties are over and I will hereafter appear permanently fatigued. Then I noticed the very same lines settled comfortably beneath my 10-year old eyes in my fifth grade class photo. Perhaps if I’d spent more time in front of the mirror back then, I could have spared myself my present paranoia.

3. My formerly bulletproof protection against the world’s expectations has turned up several chinks.

Most of my friends have already turned 30, and I watched as they experienced career/marriage/baby panic with a very unsportsmanlike lack of sympathy. “Thirty,” I assured them smugly, “is an arbitrary number to use as a benchmark for any of one’s life plans.” However, as the weight of a new decade bears down upon me, I find myself alternately overtaken by my own various panics, and at peace about it all. Turns out, it is much harder than I expected it would be to ignore the social and cultural expectations, perceived or otherwise, of what one’s life should look like at 30. I’m trying to resist the temptation to see this age as more significant than any of the others that I’ve seen come and go. The lesson for me, so far, is in the resisting, and in arriving at this latest milestone without fear.

Life Lessons at the Holiday Inn

In recent years, much has been made in the media of studies purporting to show that marriage is on the decline: the average age at which we get married is older than ever (24 for women! 27 for men!), and depending on one’s tax bracket, some of us might never get married at all. Based on my own astute, though admittedly unscientific observations, however, it still seems to be the case that in most circles, regardless of one’s cultural background or socioeconomic status, getting married is pretty much a given, eventually, for those who are able. But as has been demonstrated by various romantic comedies starring Katherine Heigl—or the current girl-next-door starlet of your choice, early adulthood and marriage don’t necessarily go hand-in-hand these days. My single girlfriends and I have examined the whys of this issue ad nauseum, and the one idea that always soothes our world-weary spirits is that those early marriage types are too eager to cast off their high expectations, whereas we have refused to settle. I admit that I’ve wavered over the years, and wondered whether my self-appointment as a romantic stalwart is a virtue, or a stubborn rejection of reality.

As a college freshman, I joined a mammoth club of Christian youth, seeking kids who shared my views on drug-free partying and the banalities of the Greek system. My commitment to this club lasted all of one scholastic year, but I was an enthusiastic participant for the whole nine months, attending every meeting, prayer party (yes, prayer party), and retreat. The Winter retreat was the second of three that the club sponsored that year, and it was held at the local Holiday Inn, a few miles from campus. On the first night of the retreat, the club’s male staff headed up a Q&A in one of the hotel’s conference rooms with us girls, so we could ask all of those PG-13 questions that had been burning a hole in our brains.

As I sat cross-legged on the drab industrial-carpeted floor of the conference room, I thought of all the kind but bland young men I’d met the past semester, my brethren in the club. They were the kind of boys that every mother hopes will be her daughter’s first crush, but somehow I couldn’t picture a life with any of them fifteen years down the road. I posed the following question to the club’s senior advisor, a tiny father of seven who wore his pants approximately three sizes too large: “When do you know whether you’re settling, or just being reasonable?” A chorus of “ahs” reverberated off the beige-curtained walls.

The tiny prolific father nodded sagely, and said something to the effect of, “Nobody is perfect” and “You’ll know when you know,” before moving on to the next girl. Surprisingly, his advice has not proved particularly useful in the ensuing years.

I decided that when I met a man who would encourage me to cry on his shoulder over my parents’ divorce and the death of my father, I would know he was The One. Man enough to lean on, tender enough to care. I went out with a guy once who asked me about my parents, and I told him that my father had passed away when I was nine. I waited for the usual empathetically furrowed brow and compassionate murmur. Instead, he said, “Oh, that’s cool. Did you handle it pretty well? I feel like most people handle death pretty well.” I think he was stoned, which probably should’ve tipped me off that he wasn’t One-material.

A few years ago, I read an article in a woman’s magazine by a writer who encouraged her readers to forget about waiting for Mr. Right and to embrace Mr. Good Enough. She apparently agreed with the Tiny Father that, as a result of original sin, waiting for The One was a waste of time. Find someone who is just okay, the writer urged, and you’ll be glad you did! Ridiculous!, I thought. Or was it? After all, her philosophy wasn’t so different in application from arranged marriage, and I’d heard of successful arranged marriages (although friends from cultures where arranged marriage is practiced have pointed out that successful matches are often the exception to the rule, and when they’re bad, they are very bad). I think I allowed myself to be ruled by this philosophy for a few years, focusing on men whose marriageability was indicated not so much by their dazzling personalities or uproarious senses of humor as by their FEP (future earning potential) and perceived readiness to settle down. When this method produced disastrous results, I put the whole institution and my doubts and questions about it on my mental back burner.

One of my girlfriends recently became engaged to Mr. Good Enough. I want to be happy for her—and I would be, if only I was sure that she was happy for herself. She’s wanted to be married for years, and I’m sure she thought she would throw herself into wedding planning and other premarriage preparations. Instead, she seems a bit bored by it all. The woman’s magazine writer failed to consider the effect of her practical, if unromantic, marriage philosophy on Mr. Good Enough, who can’t take any pride in his title. If I still harbored any doubts about the wisdom of choosing a partner based on a misplaced desire for security or my fears about my perceived future, I don’t anymore. I still don’t know the difference between settling and being reasonable, but I guess the advice of the Tiny Father is as good as any: nobody’s perfect, and I’ll know when I know.

Kid Wilma

I didn’t get a chance to know my father. He died when I was nine, and in my first memory, of him or of anything else, my mother is holding my tiny crying self as she and my dad argued in the family room (now my mother’s office) on the day my dad moved out of our house. I saw him fairly regularly after their divorce, on weekends, and he died of a brain tumor four years later.
In the years following his death, I became weirdly attached to objects—gifts he had given me: a purple-and-white candle from Hawaii, its twisted form a cross between an erupting volcano and an iris unfurling in slow, suspended waxen motion; a necklace, also from Hawaii, made of tiny coral birds carved from seashells, linked together by irregular pearly bits. The non-Hawaiian portion of my collection featured a glass tumbler with a picture of Kid Wilma Flintstone on it. Kid Wilma looked pretty much the same as grown-up Wilma—same white dress and dino-pearls, same outsized orange updo; just a smaller body and slightly softened features. Although the glass may have been available in Hawaii, mine was purchased from Ann Arbor’s Burger King during a special promotion, the glass of your choice with any regular meal. Originally, our kitchen cupboard housed two Wilma glasses—one for me and one for my sister. At some point, however, one of the Wilmas disappeared.
My memories of my dad faded steadily over time, and I often thought about him only when a new acquaintance asked about my “parents,” or if I met a stranger who looked like him, or smelled something that reminded me of him. Oysters still do it; on his weekends with us, my dad often took my sister and me to The Spaghetti Factory, a tiny, deserted, dimly-lit restaurant in another restaurant’s basement. The place always smelled like oysters, and I think it eventually closed because our biweekly business was its only regular source of income.
In college, I took Abnormal Psychology and diagnosed my attachment to objects as a mild symptom of a nonspecified personality disorder. Identifying the problem was as good as a cure, and I banished the exploding lily candle to the back of the linen closet, and tucked the necklace away in a drawer filled with tacky costume jewelry in my nightstand. The Wilma glass survived, and maintained its place in the regular rotation of glasses in everyday use.
The January of my junior year, my mom was scheduled to play a concert in Detroit and my grandmother was visiting from Ohio for the occasion. Grandma displaced mom from her bedroom, so she was forced to get ready for her concert in the den. Mom packed her music into her briefcase and swung the long black leather strap onto her shoulder. It connected with the Wilma glass, which sat on the edge of a bookcase, and it shattered on the hardwood floor. Out of habit, my sister and I ran down the hall to see which glass had broken, and when I saw the telltale orange paint of Kid Wilma’s bun, I collapsed into tears. My sister, the more stoic of the sisters, pursed her lips and turned back down the hall. It was just a glass—I knew that. It didn’t make me feel closer to him, or make his memory more real. But it—that two dollar glass from Burger King—was all I had left of him, and it was gone.
I volunteered to clean up the mess, but before I tossed the broken pieces into the trash can I fished out the largest fragment. I keep it in a jewelry box, nestled in velvet next to a pin I never wear. You can just make out Kid Wilma’s smiling face, and a bit of orange bun.

Thoughts on the Cardigan

I just finished reading “Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith,” by Anne Lamott. I believe that I am about five to ten years late in adding my hearty endorsement to the chorus of praise for that book, but add it I must. For the uninitiated (like myself, until recently), “Traveling Mercies” is a collection of vignettes from the author’s life, focusing on her journey from agnostic childhood to drug-hazed early adulthood to single parenthood to discovering Jesus crouching in a corner of her bedroom. A sort of partial memoir, I guess. Or maybe that’s redundant. Anyway, many of the stories of Lamott’s life struck a chord with me, but the one that has stuck with me described, in hilarious and poignant fashion, a trip to the beach with her mother, younger brother, and son. Lamott writes about how she couldn’t stop herself from dwelling throughout the day on the little things about her mother that annoyed her, even while she appreciated the blessing of spending the day with three generations of Lamotts. In particular, it was the elder Lamott’s insistence on wearing a cardigan, on a warm day, to the beach, that her daughter found personally offensive.
As a born curmudgeon, whose crotchety ways have only gotten more aggravated with age, I fully embraced the attitude that allows one to object to one’s mother’s clothing choices. I, too, nag my mother about the small things: buying too many (yes, in my opinion) long, denim, linen, corduroy, fill-in-the-blank skirts; asking me how to upload an attachment to an e-mail for the two hundredth time, calling me at work to ask about something she’s perfectly capable of figuring out herself—and she would, if I weren’t readily available. My mother is an incredibly strong, smart, savvy person. She raised two children by herself and has successfully run her own business for over 30 years. Does she really need my help to determine the proper length of time to warm up her leftovers in the microwave? But it struck me, as Lamott explained, without explaining, that the cardigan/microwave-related frustration was code for all of the big stuff that is wrapped up in the mother-daughter relationship: the fear of losing her, the outrage over her intervention in our lives, the desperate desire for her involvement in our lives, the harsh perceptions and projections that we volley back and forth as soon as we are old enough to form them.
We don’t want our mothers to need to wear cardigans on warm days, to be reminded that they, too, are vulnerable, finite. It’s terrible to think of our mothers growing old and cold and fragile, so terrible that it makes us angry at the world, and who embodies the world moreso than our mothers?

Raegan of Green Gables

Every year or so, I re-read a book from the Anne of Green Gables series. I was introduced to “Anne” by Mrs. Yahr, my fourth grade teacher, when she read the titular novel, the first in the series, aloud to my class, and I fell in love, truly and deeply, always and forever. Anne was everything I aspired to be and everything I thought myself to be. She was the 19th century, white Canadian parallel of my 20th century, black American self. I cried over the rejection and mistreatment Anne faced as an orphan; as the child of a single parent in a community that was virtually untouched by the dire national divorce statistics, I knew something of her pain. Anne was red-headed, my hair was reddish—you know, for a black girl. She was smart, spirited, and sassy, and no matter the mishap she found herself in, she always triumphed in the end. I liked to think that I had a similar capacity for avoiding consequences.

By the end of the first novel, it is clear to the reader that our heroine would have it all, someday. She proved that a girl could be smart and bookish and still get the guy. Gilbert Blythe, Anne’s romantic foil, started out as a friend and academic rival. I liked to think of Andrew Ashley as my Gilbert. He was smart, and lived nearby, and fit various other Gilbert-esque characteristics. One recent Saturday morning, as I scanned the wedding announcements over tea and toast, Andrew’s name caught my eye. He and his wife are musicians and live in Boston.
The last Anne book I re-read was Anne of the Island, which takes place during Anne’s years at Redmond University, when she is a young woman in her twenties, before we witness her settling into a life of domesticity, marriage and children. In addition to winning various academic awards for her prowess in English literature, Anne must decide between two romantic suitors, Gilbert, our hometown hero, and an interloper, Royal Gardner, who threatens to derail Anne and Gil’s perfect love story with his promises of wealth and urban sophistication. Although I’ve never found myself in a similar situation while also studying English during my college years, this reading of Anne of the Island was particularly poignant for me. The first time I read it, as a girl of 12 or 13, college was still several years ahead of me, and the idea that I might someday have to choose between the boy next door and a wealthy stranger seemed like an exciting future possibility. This time around, my twenties were mostly behind me, and the world I’d created to parallel Anne’s as a fourth grader was lost in prosaic reality. My Gilbert was lost to marriage and the Lone Star state, and Royal Gardner had not yet appeared to replace him. The last books in the series treat Anne mostly as an afterthought, focusing instead on her friends and children. Her disappearance into a supporting role had never bothered me, until now.