Friday, November 14, 2008

Postcard from a parallel universe

Perhaps it's because I'm on sabbatical this semester, and therefore paying more attention to the world around me than the stack of papers in front of me, but I'm really missing autumn. Perhaps it's because I was in Boise a few weeks ago (and at Ragdale a few weeks before that) and had a taste of real fall weather for the first time in a long time. In this part of Texas, we know fall has arrived when we need to put on a jacket for the first few hours of the early morning. Sometimes I wonder how in the world I wound up here, of all places

A friend of mine recently moved from Kansas City to an apartment in downtown Portland. She's loving her new life, including the change of climate, and I have to admit that I'm a little jealous. Portland is a great city, and I love the ethos of the Northwest in general--living in an apartment in the Pearl District sounds like a great life to me. There was a time when my husband and I were planning an urban life for ourelves, either in Portland or Seattle, but our plans never came to fruition. We wound up staying in Boise instead, and that turned out to be a great choice for us: we taught at BSU for several years, made some good friends, had a baby, reconnected with my family. I've never regretted that decision, but I've often wondered how our lives might have changed if we'd followed our original plan.

A few weeks ago, I watched a really interesting episode of Nova on PBS called "Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives." The premise behind it is pretty complex, but it hinges on the theory of parallel universes--the idea that every time we find ourselves at a point where a decision has to be made, there's a version of ourselves that lives out every possibility. We're only aware of one decision, of course, because we're only one version of ourselves.

So, in theory, there's a version of me that made that move to Portland (and probably a version of me in Seattle, too.) I wonder if the Portland/Seattle versions of me wound up going back to graduate school and earning their Ph.D's. My husband was happy with his full-time teaching position at BSU, but I'd hit the ceiling of my options and knew I couldn't spend the rest of my life as a part-time teacher of freshman composition. That just wasn't going to make me happy. The only way I could open up other options for myself was by getting a book published--a process over which I had only partial control--or by getting a Ph.D. So the Boise me chose to go back to graduate school.

But the Seattle/Portland versions of me might have made career shifts when they arrived in their new cities; those choices might have moved graduate school off the radar completely. Perhaps those versions of me found their way into careers that supported the lives they wanted to live, something I knew part-time college teaching in Boise would never do.

The interesting thing about the trajectory of your life is how it builds itself, how one decision leads to others you wouldn't have had to make in other circumstances. If we hadn't moved to Boise, I might never have thought about going back for my Ph.D.. If I hadn't asked Deborah Eisenberg for a letter of recommendation when I applied to graduate school, I might never have considered the program at Missouri--that was her suggestion. (Of course, there's a version of me that didn't make this decision, too. Who knows where she is now, or what she's doing.)

The long chain of choices that brought me to this particular moment in this particular version of my life probably couldn't be traced back very far, since it involves the smallest decisions along with the big ones--whether to drink a cup of coffee or make a trip to the grocery store, for example. And it's probably best not to think about the millions of versions of me that have met with untimely deaths because of the choices they made, however innocuous those choices might have seemed.

Instead, I'll focus on the small miracle of being where I am right now. It's not a perfect place, true, but it's a human place. The fact that I'm still here seems like reason enough to be happy.

Monday, November 10, 2008

True West

I’ve been doing some reading in the last few weeks, both in preparation for a class I’m teaching in the spring and in support of some writing projects I’m working on. My class is going to focus on literature that examines our evolving relationship with the American west, from frontier to New West. But the reading has started me thinking about why I identify myself as a westerner, and what exactly constitutes “The West” in contemporary culture.

I’m planning to ask my students that question next semester, to give them each a map of U.S. and ask them to mark off The West, then discuss how they came to a decision. How would I mark that map myself? To be honest, I’m not sure. Certainly the Midwest is part of the western U.S., part of the frontier that people were exploring as our country expanded westward—but is it a subsection of The West now, or is it something else, something of its own? I spent twelve years in various parts of the Midwest—Kansas, then Iowa, then Missouri—and I have to say that none of those places felt like Idaho, my geographical home. But does that mean they didn’t feel like The West?

I didn’t expect that Texas would feel like home either—it was just below Oklahoma, certainly part of the Midwest. By the time we moved here from Missouri, after I’d finished my Ph.D., my husband and I had moved enough times that we knew what to expect: we’d hate our new location for awhile, identifying all the ways in which it failed to measure up to our old stomping grounds. Eventually we’d forget to hate it, though, and start to focus on the things we liked. We weren’t even planning to live in Texas long enough to get used to it; we’d live here only as long as it took for one of us to find another job in a more desirable location. Texas was never a place we’d imagined ourselves living for the long haul.

Imagine our surprise, then, when we found ourselves immediately delighted by just about everything we discovered in San Antonio. Excellent Mexican food on every block! (We’d never been able to find even passable Mexican food in Missouri.) Fresh tortillas made daily at the grocery store! A festival for every imaginable thing—books, strawberries, accordions! Add to this the fact that winter lasts for about two weeks in January, and it didn’t take long before we started telling people that we were never, ever leaving Texas.

My husband and I have often wondered why we felt at home here so quickly. The only explanation we’ve come up with is that Texas felt familiar to us in ways we didn’t expect, ways we still can’t articulate clearly—ways that would seem to include the Midwest, too, though we didn’t have the same affection for that region. (The fact that my husband grew up in Kansas, that it’s his geographical home, just complicates matters further. Can it be that Texas feels both like The West and the Midwest? But if that’s the appeal, why does my husband prefer Texas to Missouri—which also must have felt like the Midwest? Shouldn’t Missouri, Kansas’s next door neighbor, have felt more like home than Texas?)

I guess there’s no accounting for what the geographer Yi-Fu Tuan calls topophilia, the emotional connection between people and the spaces they occupy. Perhaps it's just as irrational as most emotional bonds.

All I know is this: I love The West. I know it when I feel it, and I miss it when I don’t. And here in Texas, for whatever reason, I find myself at home.