This I Believe

New York

This week marked my last creative writing class at Sarah Lawrence. For the second semester, I have made the weekly commute from New York's west side beginning with the M86 crosstown bus to Lex, then the #6 train to 125th Street, and finally the MetroNorth Harlem line to Bronxville. Once in this quintessential college town with its brick streets and cozy main street, I would either walk the mile to campus or, sometimes, one of my classmates would gratiously give me a lift. All tolled, it is about a two hour proposition from my door on the UWS to the Wrexham Road classroom.
There have been times this semester when the sun has set before I got on the first bus, times that I have questioned what I was doing making this trek since there are at least three major universities within 15 minutes of my apartment.
But last night I knew once again why I make this pilgrimage. It's the calibre of the writers. I have been in writing workshops off and on for the past decade or two, and I have never worked with such good writers--or such good faculty. This semester, Steve Lewis, our intrepid leader ( whose work is featured in publications such as the New York Times), prodded, quipped, and cheered as I wrote and wrote about Iowa in the 1950s and 60s. It became a running joke that my mostly Eastern-born and bred colleagues were learning more about threshing and Herefords than they had ever expected. I knew I had them when, in one class not so long ago, after I read a segment of The Red Bicycle, they were guessing where I had landed by plane to begin the trek along Interstate 80 toward Waterloo, Iowa, my childhood home to visit my frail mother.
" Well, she landed in Chicago, of course," declared Mel. "No, I think Des Moines is closest," said Lauren. Finally, Steve ( a Long Island boy who went to the University of Wisconsin at the height of the 60s student movement ) announced: "Iowa City, she landed in Iowa City." Close enough.
As our last assignment, Steve asked us to write an essay on the model of the "This I Believe" contest on public radio--and send it to him a couple of days before class.
We met at Lisa's house in Dobbs Ferry for a party and a little literature on Tuesday night. Steve had made a chapbook entitled Writings from the Edge of all of our essays about our belief systems. I was the first to read.

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Hopscotch

A couple of years ago, I was sitting on the beach with my best friend and her daughter Elizabeth. My friend and I were talking about what we were looking forward to in the next six months. Somehow, the conversation drifted toward our goals for the next decade—our dreams, really. Elizabeth was lying on her back, her lanky, bronzed, 25 year old body shiny with Coppertone deep tanning oil. She turned onto her side to face us, opened her eyes, and declared earnestly: “ I didn’t think people your age still had all of those expectations of the future.”

When I was 25, I probably believed that, too. But I think the amazing thing about growing older is that I don’t feel that old. Surely it must be true that I’m not the same in my sixth decade as my mother was in hers. It’s true that I look in the mirror more fleetingly now than I did at 25—or even 40. But I see the foundation of the same woman I saw in the mirror then. And aside from the paraphernalia of age—reading glasses, a must-take pill or two a day, and the fact that I lean in to hear some conversations---I am 25 in the land of my dreams.

My life and my career have been a working draft. Divorced at 35, (something I never ever dreamt would happen to me) with two pre-adolescent boys, I constructed a life for us from scratch. We moved to a new part of the country, and I set about getting my career back on track by accepting a position on a Ivy League faculty as an instructor (even less rank than a TA). I rented a little white cape near a good school, put a regulation basketball hoop at the top of the driveway, and stocked the refrigerator. It was a second chance.

Ten years later, I was an empty nester-- a term I hate (it always evokes a forlorn and feather-bare blue jay cawing in an oversized, untidy nest in the crook of a lifeless tree). By that time, I had left academia for business, found out what it is like to be fired (my gut said don’t-do-it the minute I walked into that ad agency to interview for the job), and started over once again. Because of career choices that I made during those decades, I have a resume today that is a mix of science and humanities. It looks unfocused to the unwashed who aren’t right brained, I suppose. And has cost me an easy fit into either the world of academia or business.

But recently, I realized that the hopscotch of my career is, in some ways, true to my ambivalence about what I really want to do.

So what do I want to do? My working answer is I want to do something in this coming decade that makes a difference. Maybe it is in healthcare reform. Maybe it is helping promote the little psychiatric center on 34^th Street and 9^th Avenue that counsels homeless clients, shepherding them through their recovery keeping them out of the hospital, out of the cold, and on their medication. Maybe it’s writing one truthful story that resonates with a yet to be found editor who publishes it.

I don’t know if any of those things will happen. But I believe in the timelessness of possibilities. I am just not done yet.