The Upside of Getting Older

Lake Ontario's waves are glittering in the sun like dancing stars, and the warm breeze is gently teasing my face. I contemplate the steaming plate of poutine in front of me — my new favorite comfort food -- while an impatient gull eyes me from the next picnic table. This is not the life I anticipated.  

It's been thirty years since I graduated from law school. Thirty years! Now I'm in college again, working on a second bachelor's in creative writing. I don’t expect to finish it — I just want the discipline that comes with due dates. 

Backing my Subaru out of the gravel parking lot, I coast back to the library, passing dozens of students walking to their next classes. Someday they'll be accountants, drug dealers, grocery store clerks, hedge fund investors, homemakers, white collar criminals, lawyers, construction workers. 

But today, right now, they’re just kids. Kids with furry slippers, plaid pajama bottoms, and cat ears. Kids with green hair and bow ties. Kids carrying beat-up backpacks and kids pulling their books behind them on designer wheels. Kids of every body type, every color, every opinion, every gender. Just kids, in all their glorious diversity.

As I stop to let a couple of them cross the road, it occurs to me that they have no idea what lies ahead. They don’t know if they’ll live until they’re 93 or die at 25.  Whether they’ll ever be homeless. Whether they’ll be loved or reviled. They don't know how much joy or pain they can endure. They don't even know if they'll graduate.

And then it hits me: I don't have to figure out my life, because it has been laid out for me. I already know how it most of it will turn out:

There will be marriage, and a beautiful, wonderful daughter.

I'll get drunk a lot and end up clean and sober, at least for a while. I'll break a few bones, but recover easily. I’ll graduate squarely and honorably in the middle of my class at Harvard Law. 

I'll lose jobs unjustly, and I’ll get jobs I don't deserve. I'll be a lawyer and a librarian and a lobbyist and a professor. I'll screw that up and be a barista for a while, and that is where I'll find redemption. 

I will write over a thousand resumes.

I’ll live on the Navajo Nation, and in Santa Fe, and in Georgia, of all places.

I will have amazing friends and wonder what they see in me. I'll write a little play and get to see it produced, and I'll sing on stage. I will help Tibetan monks release a mandala into the Great Lakes.

Some of it is going to be really rough. There will be a divorce, followed by a lot of terrible decisions. I'll live without electricity or hot water. The sensation of fleas on my scalp will become almost routine, and I’ll sleep on a chewed-up mattress marinated in urine. Worst of all, my devastatingly poor judgment will weigh heavily on my daughter, and I will know that this shit show was completely of my own making. I’ll spend the rest of my life seeking forgiveness, mostly from myself.

Still, in the middle of this wreckage I'll haul two newborn foals from Kentucky to Georgia in the back of a rented cargo van, and that part will be miraculous and incredible and absurd.

I will survive every single one of these things, and I will live for at least 62 years. So I already know it’s going to be okay, and I am filled with relief and gratitude. 

Someday these kids will have their answers, too.