Belated Thanks

Earlier today, making my way back to my office after a particularly awful meeting, I overheard a student saying this: "I had a really crappy day yesterday, so last night I started making a list of all the things I had to thankful for. I wound up writing down all these things from the past that I wasn't thankful for at the time, but I am now." We parted ways at that point, but I've been thinking about this all day.

So, in no particular order: my list of Things I'm Now Thankful For, Even Though I Wasn't At The Time.

1. Working at McDonald's. Possibly the worst year and a half of my life, and I'll do just about anything to make sure my own kids never have to work fast food, but dealing with the lunch rush at McDonald's pretty much convinced me that I could handle anything. Plus, I saw first-hand what kind of job I'd have if I didn't finish college. There can be no better motivation.

2. Personal Finance class in high school. I wound up taking this class when a schedule change left me with very few options for a particular time slot in my last semester. I would never have taken it of my own volition, but I learned a lot that I still remember. And speaking of that last semester of high school. . .

3. Parents who made me take a full load of classes even when it wasn't required. My parents were an odd mishmash of practical and illogical. On the one hand, they actively encouraged me to forget about college and go to secretarial school instead; on the other hand, they insisted that I take a full load of high school classes rather than only the required four or five and working more hours at McDonald's. But Personal Finance was one of those classes I wound up taking just to fill up my schedule, as was Typing 3. And excellent typing skills turn out to be very handy when you're a professional writer.

4. Fishing and camping. My family rarely took actual vacations, but we went camping almost every weekend in the summer. My dad taught me to bait my own hook, cast my own line, reel in my own catch; he taught me the value of sitting still, not saying a word, appreciating what was all around us. The first time I saw the Milky Way was when I was fishing late at night with my dad. But usually, in the evening, my parents and brother and I would crowd around the little table in the camper and play Go Fish or Yahtzee. I can't remember my dad ever playing a game with us at home, but on a camping trip, anything was possible. And what I remember now isn't all the times he said no when we asked him to play with us; I remember the games we played together when we were camping.

5. Growing up in Idaho. The whole time I lived in Idaho, I couldn't wait to get out. I made big plans for going to college somewhere else--ultimately impossible, given the cost of private school or out-of-state tuition--because I was so thoroughly convinced that Life was happening elsewhere. In those days (pre-Internet, pre-Southwest Airlines, pre-Demi and Ashton in Sun Valley), Boise was a very isolated place and Idaho never showed up on the evening news. But living in a small town makes you use your imagination--also helpful to a novelist--and growing up in Idaho makes you unique in most venues. I always have something to talk about when I'm first getting to know people.

6. Non-traditional students in my undergrad creative writing classes. At the University of Idaho, most of my upper-division creative writing classes were scheduled during the evening. As a result, many of the people in my classes were older, non-traditional students who worked during the day. It didn't take long for me to learn that if I was going to be lazy and turn in cliche-ridden crap, they were going to highlight those moments of laziness and ask me to justify myself. At the time, I thought they were taking themselves way too seriously; in retrospect, I can see that they wanted me to take myself more seriously. And along those same lines . . .

7. The horrible Dr. D. He was one of my professors during my first semester of grad school, and he was nothing short of draconian. He told me I was vacuous. I locked myself in the women's room and cried after one of his in-class interrogations more than once. And then, after I'd produced what he considered a halfway decent paper, he helped me revise it and encouraged me to submit it to a literature conference. It was accepted, and I gave my first professional presentation with him sitting in the audience. I would never, ever treat a student the way he treated me--and now, having a Ph.D. myself, I look back and wonder why I thought that gave him the right to treat me so badly--but he did help me to convince myself that I could be successful in academia. And he did help me to understand that, while being tough on a student can be helpful in the long run, being unkind does nothing good for anyone.

It's interesting to think about how time changes these things--or, rather, how we change the way we think about them, given enough time to see how they fit into a big picture of our lives.

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.

Out of the Blue

An old college friend found me on Facebook this morning, a person I've thought about more than once in the years since our paths diverged in Idaho. She wanted to apologize for some wrong she thought she'd done me all those years ago, so I quickly wrote back to assure her that the past was the past and long since forgotten. Truth be told, I can't for the life of me remember why I was so angry with her back then. (Though, since we're telling the truth, I do remember being really, really angry.)

I'm glad to know that she went on from college to live a happy life. As I recall, neither of us were particularly happy people at that point--probably for different reasons, but in my case I know the problem began and ended with the feeling that I wasn't a person of any merit. I did a lot of stupid, dangerous things as a result of that feeling, and it's nothing short of a miracle that I'm still here to tell the tale. But I've always believed that things happen for a reason, which means there's a reason why I'm still here and why I took the path that brought me to this moment.

When I was younger, I hated the story of the Prodigal Son--the story of the kid who screws up and comes home to find that he's already been forgiven. I was the good kid in my family, sandwiched in between a rebellious older sister and a younger brother who, as my dad would put it, was "a typical boy." That means he got into some trouble along the way, but no more than expected. (When my kids were little and my son was acting up, my dad would say "Leave him alone--he's just being a boy." If my daughter was doing the same thing, he'd give me the hairy eyeball until I intervened. And now you know why I wound up teaching Women's Studies.)

So I always hated the Prodigal Son, because it seemed to me to be one more example of the good kid being overlooked and the bad kid getting all the attention. We all know that isn't fair.

What I didn't know, as a young person, is how often I would need to be forgiven myself, and how grateful I would be that people have the capacity to forgive each other. And ourselves. After I left home for college, I quickly gave up on being the good kid--so I'm still working on that last item. I have many current shortcomings, but many more memories of times I knowingly made the wrong choice. Giving myself a break is sometimes not an easy job.

But it's easy to forgive the people who hurt me a long time ago, especially if time has proven those hurts to be so inconsequential that they don't even live on in memory.

So welcome back, my old friend. It's wonderful to hear from you.

Serendipity

My son had an appointment with the orthodontist this morning. It doesn't normally take very long to have the hardware adjusted, but today it took a bit longer than usual and I found myself getting antsy as I flipped through the random selection of available magazines. If I'd been thinking ahead, I would have brought along a book of my own. But I hadn't expected a long wait, and so I was heavy bored.

And then: I remembered that when my husband brought our kids to the dentist (who is also our orthodontist) a month ago, he'd come across a copy of National Geographic that featured an excellent article about fighting forest fires. Since wildland firefighting is central to the novel I'm just beginning, he'd come home excited to tell me about the article so I could run out and buy a copy of the magazine. (Later, my daughter told me she'd suggested absconding with the dentist's copy, but her father had pointed out that this would be wrong.)

As it turned out, that issue of the magazine was already off the newsstand; it was a month old and nowhere to be found. Except, as it happens, at the orthodontist's office. This morning, after I remembered that earlier conversation, I rummaged through the magazine basket and found National Geographic all the way at the bottom. Then I spent the second half of my son's appointment trying to internalize as much information as I could, since I didn't have any supplies for note-taking.

When it was time to check out, I asked the receptionist if it would be okay for me take the magazine and photocopy the article, then bring it back. The whole office staff knows I'm a writer--they have the photo and interview that appeared in our local newspaper last spring posted on the wall of their break room--so I explained that I was doing research for a new book.

"Oh, just take it," she said. "We have lots of others. I had no idea our famous author was doing research right there in the waiting room!"

Fame is relative, of course, but being famous at the dentist's office clearly has its perks.

I know I could have tracked down a back issue of the magazine online, but I wouldn't have even remembered to do that if it hadn't taken awhile to remove my son's bite blocks. Now he can chew with abandon, and I can get ready to write.