Young Ones, Take Heart
cyn and red umbrella2
The year was 1976. I had a week-long assignment doing clerical work in a dingy office just outside of Syracuse, and I approached it with my usual fatalism. I guess I accepted this as my place in life back then, at least temporarily. There was a space heater at my feet and a radio on the desk playing "Diamonds and Rust", and it was winter, as it always seemed to be. On this particular day I was wearing a navy blue turtle neck sweater, and even in the sweater I felt chilly. I have no idea why I remember such a detail. Well, as Joan Baez said, we both know what memories can bring–they bring diamonds and rust.
But I happened to hear that song today, and the memories came tumbling back to me, unbidden, not beautiful memories, no blue-eyed vagabond smiling out the window of a crummy hotel over Washington Square ("our breath comes out white clouds, mingles and hangs in the air") but a lonely and confused girl with my name filing invoices and answering phones in an obscure office in upstate New York, and perfecting her most trusty survival skill: typing.
Why did I sentence myself to these bleak and tiny routines? I don't fully understand it even now, other than the obvious fact that I was confused and depressed. I liked that song, though, and when it came on the radio I probably turned up the volume a little. Its sadness resonated with me, its nostalgia for something lost and over.
Maybe I, too, was nostalgic, but for things that had never happened, and my yearning had turned to resignation. I was living my young life in a state of over-ness. And yet, here I am...and to quote a wise Buddhist saying that I seem to be repeating to people ad nauseum lately, "When you reach the top of the mountain, don't curse the trail that brought you there."
In my case, it was a circuitous trail with a lot of wrong turns and dead ends into thorny toxic brush, but I survived somehow, and at the age of 30, I claimed my life as my own and made a new beginning.
But the 25-year-old girl in the navy blue sweater listening to "Diamonds and Rust" didn't know that yet.
Yesterday I had coffee with Ming, a friend and former student of mine who is 27. The first time I set eyes on her was at a Halloween party at Vista de las Cruces School in Gaviota. I was a brand new teacher dressed like a witch, with a severe case of laryngitis. She was a tiny girl, about ten years old, dressed as a fairy princess, looking up me with wide blue eyes, never letting go of her mother's hand. I mentioned that to her yesterday.
"Oh, yes," she said, "I remember it well. You were mute and I was shy, and neither one of us was herself."
Ming is an impressive young woman today, a world traveler and aspiring human rights activist, winner of a dazzling array of fellowships and awards, a graduate student who teaches creative writing and a writer herself of course. But she's dealing with the issues and confusions that people in their 20s face, and she seemed more vulnerable than confident. She is poised at the threshold of amazing possibilities, but she's still got that bewildering forest to get through...relationships, student debt, meaningful work...that kind of stuff. Each decision point might be crucial.
Obviously my own youth was not a carefree time, but I often tend to think youth is a carefree time for everyone else. You wake up in the morning radiant and good-looking and nothing on you hurts. Your life stretches out before you as a vast potential, so much of it still ahead. You can enjoy yourself. Take some chances. Learn a lot. It'll all work out.
But talking to Ming, I remember that being young is a lot more worrisome and complicated than that, even for the fortunate ones who do not drop out of school and exile themselves to grim little offices in cold dreary towns and waste years doing psychodrama with, pardon the term, some asshole guy with issues of his own. It isn't easy being young.
Coincidentally,I spoke to another friend this morning, a woman named Rosemary, who's about ten years older than I am. I love Rosemary's spirit and the affirmative spin she puts on things. I don't even know how the subject of getting older came up in our conversation, but it might have been related to the fact that she is going to her granddaughter's dance recital this Saturday.
"I firmly believe that aging has its compensations," she said, and I am beginning to see that she's right. It's not as though there comes a moment when everything is solved and settled; that never happens. But you get used to the framework of ambiguity, and you learn to see the small good things in front of you.
"Life is so rich," continued Rosemary, "and I'm so much more attentive now. Roses, for example. I don't think I ever fully appreciated roses when I was young. Now, if someone gives me roses, I'm beside myself. I practically inhale them."
I tried to tell Ming...and I wish I could sail back into the past and tell that sad young Cynthia...but it really does get better. And yet, there's no way I would have believed it.