Twenty Nine

April 2019

Becca has made it. By all conventional measures. She lives in a big beautiful home in an affluent suburb.  Her husband is industrious and, I guess, does well enough so that between their two salaries they can afford an attractive neighborhood.  They have healthy kids and judging by social media sleuthing they all appear to be well adjusted.    

Becca’s changed careers a number of times.  She’d been a pediatric psychotherapist in a hospital when last we were romantically involved.  Then she went back to school to earn an MSW and became a social worker and, from what I can gather, a successful one.  But after a spell she changed gears again and went into radio.  She had her own program on a local station where she counseled women who were between relationships and struggling. That too was a successful enterprise. But she gave that up and is now a Human Relations VP in a very large organization.  I have a buddy who works for the same company and he told me that Rebecca—as he called her- did wonders for what had been an HR unit that had been in disarray. 

It is interesting that Becca has jumped around and I have stayed at one job my entire career.  Of the two of us, she is absolutely the straighter arrow. Once she and I were painting a room and I started on one wall and she worked on another.  This was back in graduate school when a landlord would typically tell you that you could paint, and might even spring for the paint, but you were responsible for the painting. Well, there we were one night painting my bedroom.  At one point she turned around, saw my work, and started to laugh.  

“Look at us. Look at the way we paint. It is just like our personalities.”  

I saw what she meant. Her wall was all vertical lines. She had started at one corner of the wall, worked her way down, and then went to a new row to work her way down from that.  Not me. I started in one place and also went down, but then might have gone sideways for a while before starting up.  The result would be the same, but I was not structured in how I went about it. She was.

Yet career wise, she bounced all over taking risks while I stayed put. Could be that I just had found something I liked to do earlier than she did.  Could be that she just had a better grasp on the reality that we had this one life and might as well reinvent ourselves periodically.

When I was an undergraduate, I played a lot of rummy five hundred. I was very good at the game, frustrating opponents by how often I would take risks putting my hand in jeopardy yet somehow managing to be victorious. My plan was simple. Always, always, always, pick up cards when you could make a meld. An opponent might have two cards in her hand and I might have had eight. There could be ten cards on the table.  If I could make a meld, even with a low point card, I’d pick up all ten and take my chances that eventually I would be able to go out with a whole bunch of points.  Rarely did I get burned, and over the course of a game to 500, regularly the strategy would result in a win.

The thing is that in my life I have not done that at all.  I have had the same job as a college professor since I was in my mid 20s. A number of times people suggested I go into business and make some dough.  But I never wanted to risk a job that I liked with tenure.  Completely the opposite of my rummy five hundred philosophy.  

Security is a comfortable thing.  But do you get the same juice out of your life if you stay doing one thing and stay in one place.  Or do you, like Becca did—despite her personality—take risks.  In my head I am an iconoclast—and in action--I have taken steps to identify and work toward ending insidious conventions.  Yet, this thing has lingered and not been addressed. And it did not even nag at me before Las Vegas. I had buried it. And I have this one life. It will run out at some point.  It could run out tomorrow. Several of my contemporaries are dropping-suddenly.  I browse through my college alumni magazine and linger on the News and Notes section to see who is now gone from my era. I read about this one or that one who has died and now cannot address items on their to-do list even if they weren’t aware of what was on their to do list. 

I know this Nevada person is dead.  And I knew who did it. As Becca pointed out in the library, there may not be certainty about who did it, but I knew who did it.   Maybe if I did nothing now some sleuth would eventually find the doer and relay the sad news to the parents.  But maybe not.  And nobody but nobody would ever accuse me of being delinquent for not involving myself now forty years later, except for me. And now, Becca.