Two years ago, I was standing in a flower shop in my hometown waiting for a boutonniere when my phone rang. I had figured it was my best friend: we were T-minus twenty-four hours from her wedding, and as maid-of-honor, I was on-call and ready for action. I had flown home the previous day for the wedding, joyfully ditching in my new job for a long weekend, which I had negotiated when I took the position. I had a spike of anxiety when I saw that the number on my phone was a Boston area code.
I picked up and found one very urgent real estate agent on the other end.
“I need for you to be in Brighton right now,” Ashley said to me. After a few traumatizing Craigslist apartment visits, I had followed the advice of a friend and started working with Ashley, the agent who had helped my friend find his place. I had taken an immediate liking to Ashley when we had first met: she had frowned at several listings and said that she didn’t think they were what I was looking for. She was right: they weren’t. We got on well after that.
Now, three weeks later in a flower shop halfway across the country, my head spun with trying to remember who I was in that moment—somewhere between new Boston resident and maid-of-honor in Chicago.
“Ashley, I’m in Chicago for my best friend’s wedding. I don’t get back until Sunday night.”
There was a pause on the line, and I heard her take a deep breath. “Then you’re going to need to trust me.”
Everyone—and I mean everyone—in my family thought I had lost my mind when I signed the lease and faxed it in. The funny thing about my family, though, is that they will help you accomplish the task about which they are so dubious even while they’re voicing their doubts. My grandfather cut the check, which I was to pay back immediately, and dropped if off that night at the rental office in Brookline, probably about the same time that I was strolling down the aisle at the wedding rehearsal.
I moved in two years ago Sunday. Best leap of faith ever.
One of the trappings of adulthood to which I treat myself is a subscription to the New Yorker, sent weekly to my darling little apartment. One of the things I began to do almost immediately when the magazine started arriving was to cut out my favorite cartoons. (Let’s be honest: the only thing Playboy and the New Yorker have in common is that nobody reads them strictly for the articles—the images therein are a major draw.) It started out casually enough: I would see something about cupcake frosting or Lady Gaga and cut out the cartoon to send it to the friend of whom it reminded me. The snarky corporate images—“Sir, he left a suicide deck”—appealed to my sometimes fleeting, black humor about my job at the time. Some of them were just plain funny, like the penguin who is flummoxed to find he has his tuxedo on inside-out. And still others were almost embarrassingly insightful into how I think about my life: over coffee, one cartoon woman confides blithely to her two companions, “I don’t mind emotional trauma if I can turn it into a really funny anecdote.”
Yikes.
In reality, the day on which I signed my apartment lease sight unseen and attended my best friend’s wedding rehearsal was incredibly stressful. In the end, however, it made a great story, because everything worked out—the wedding was fantastic and so is my apartment. Likewise, one of the best stories I have was born from the longest thirty-six hours of my life, during which I travelled from Praiano (where the bus was full), to Sorrento (where the bus left without me), to Naples (where I barely caught the last train) to Rome (where I found out Orbitz had lost my reservation) to Newark (where my flight to Chicago had been cancelled), and finally to Chicago, after having caught the last flight home through the grace of one very kind gate agent. I arrived more or less in one piece, but as soon as I sat down on the flight to Chicago, I burst into uncontrollable laughter and thought they might have to subdue me.
Again: horrifying at the time, but hilarious in retrospect.
Even the stories that don’t end so well can be made into excellent cocktail conversation fodder: my standard line about my disastrous year on match.com is that I was secretly conducting anthropological research for a David Sedaris-style book of short stories. After I realized how the system did and didn’t work, I would almost pray for a truly catastrophic date. It was unlikely I was going to meet my match (no matter what their commercials might say—I always have to resist the urge to chuck a shoe at my TV when they come on), but nothing about a boring date was particularly funny. And dang it, if I had paid this much money not to meet my future mate, I’d better damn well get some good stories out of it.
It’s times like that when I worry that my twenties are turning into the pursuit of the perfect anecdote.
We often think about our lives as a continuous timeline: one age gives way to another, grouped under certain sub-headings (high school, college, first job) and punctuated by memorable events. This is, I guess, more or less accurate, since all of us are bound to a certain straight, chronological line; but really, how many of us think that linearly about the lives we lead?
When I think about my life, I think about a collection of stories. When I was little, my grandmother created an oral family tree for me, and I can trace my family back several generations through the stories I know about them (the one about great-grandpa George, the Tin Lizzy, and the rhododendron bush is especially memorable). At some point, between history class timelines and Grandma’s stories, my young mind decided that the stories are infinitely more fun, so that was how I began building my own history.
At some point, of course, in my overly analytical, literarily inclined brain, I started to anthologize (pause to flinch at unbearable pretention). If I am made up of the stories I’ve lived and the stories I tell, what do they mean as—for lack of a better work—a collection, and how could they indicate what comes next? I want so much to make sense of what my history has meant, as if I might be able to uncover clues about where the heck I’m going. It’s kind of like my own form of augury; it’s an inexact science either way, deciphering the flight of birds or common experiential threads.
In the last several years of my life, there has been quite a lot of uncertainty and general flailing. I’m not a big fan of uncertainty, so when I start to think about my most recent batch of stories, I cast them in a humorous light. I make sense of my twenties by making them funny, because if these years aren’t funny, they’re scary and uncertain, and I have a hard time knowing what to do with that. Yes, my adventures in weddings, real estate, international travel, scary bosses, and internet dating have been frequently hilarious. But sometimes they weren’t—sometimes they just sucked. I am a person who always wants to be funny and always wants to have a good story, but someday I would also like to be a person who is confident enough that even if my life is scary and uncertain, most of it will make sense eventually.
I have several different editions of The Great Gatsby sitting on my shelf at home, and each of them has a fresh, insightful introduction, which tackles the meaning of the book in a new light or under new assumptions. But really? I never read the intros. I just love the book itself. So maybe I should just stop anthologizing and keep writing.
It is, after all, a little early in my life for any definitive, editorial conclusions.
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