Dear Kate,
What a beautiful letter you wrote last week. Your grandfather sounds like quite the fella. I wish Iâd gotten to meet him.
I just spent a weekend with my own grandparents. Their backyard has the largest oak trees youâve ever seen. Deer munch on the grass. My grandmother dashes cinnamon into the coffee grinds before she turns on the pot. It is very nice there. Iâm lucky to be near them in Texas, only a few hours drive away.
At the dinner table, I asked what they plan to do once theyâre vaccinated. Big adventures? Vacations? Parties? Top of their list: Ordering a blooming onion at Outback Steakhouse. Just a blooming onion. Thatâs it. Something that must be eaten inside, at a table top, with all of the dipping sauces spread out. Something that canât be scooped from a takeout container, canât be zapped in the microwave. Something celebratory, a little frivolous. This, they say, would be heaven.
What a stark contrast to my own chorus of thoughtsâon fire with all the things I want to do, all the things I pray for, all the things I mutter into my pillow, âplease, câmon, please, please let me have them.â
Just a blooming onion. Imagine being so content with yourself, so content with what youâve seen and done, so content to have loved deeply and been loved deeply, that a fried appetizer platter is all you need. Just a dinner out, and that would be enough.
Are you that content? Iâm not. I worry that the tenuous grip I had on my sense of self, the loose threads I pulled together to form me, a person, an idea of a person, have unraveled.
I walk around my house and realize I am wholly unfamiliar with the woman who lives here. She doesnât have any groceries in the fridge today. She must have forgotten. She leaves dishes in the sink, sleeps in until 10:00 am on weekends. Strange. She is a Texan, a real one. She listens to country music with the windows rolled down, drives too fast and stops for gas at Buc-cees stations and Buc-cees stations alone, kolache in hand. Sometimes, she eats french fries off the floorboards. Sheâs also shy, and awkward, and painfully self-aware. Sheâs been alone a long time.
This is not me, the me that I know. Dishes in the sink? A lunatic. Kolaches? Iâm a vegetarian!
I can collect evidence of who I once was: The high heels stacked along the top of my closet. (Did I really wear those?) The black cigarette jeans that no longer button and can barely be pulled past the knees. (Someone must have put them in the dryer.) An errant subway card. (May as well be space dust from Mars.) The pictures of parties, the easy cheer with which I once introduced myself, met strangers and embraced them. Was it really me?
We were supposed to spend this time at home with ourselves, reconsidering our priorities, doing jigsaw puzzles and pondering the profound. Coming to terms with a bare, stripped-down understanding of what it means to be happy. A year of reckoning; that was the silver lining. The suffering of millions would put our own petty problems into sharp relief, give us new perspective.
It did. And I did. I pondered. I reckoned. I grieved. A year on, I only feel more lost. Lost to myself, lost to others. Who will I be when we emerge from this strange, endless winter? I donât know.
Of course Joan Didion has something smart to say on the matter: âAlthough to be driven back upon oneself is an uneasy affair at best, rather like trying to cross a border with borrowed credentials, it seems to me now the one condition necessary to the beginnings of real self-respect.âÂ
I agree, Joan. Some real reckoning is required to earn self-respect. Itâs also a pre-requisite for sustained empathy and kindness to others, for the discernment to see what may have otherwise gone unnoticed.
But hereâs my question: what about diminishing marginal utility? One ice cream cone is good, two is better, but three makes you feel sick, and four makes you hurl. How much looking inward, chiseling down the artifice of the self, stripping away the ego, examining every indiscretion, is a good thing?
Does it make us more content? Or only more consumed by an interior world, riddled with questions and no answers?
I suspect my grandparentsâ contentment has little to do with reckoning, and much to do with their 60+Â year tradition to go out for banana splits on their anniversary. Watch the birds. Feed the deer. Call the grandkids.
When I get too consumed by the self, too caught up trying to make meaning from the meaningless, too bogged down by my own thinking, I consider this quote from Cormac McCarthy: âYou never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.â
It is bad luck for a pandemic to strike when youâre 25, when you live alone, when youâre resigned to pace the halls by yourself, convinced cellulite and wrinkles are blooming in the night, spreading across your body like moss climbing trees?
Yes.
But what worse luck could I have had? Well, instead of a quiet weekend with my grandparents, watching football and sneaking bites of dessert off the counter before dinner, I could have missed it.
In a parallel world, I could have spent my Saturday night at a stupid bar in the Lower East Side, drinking stupid drinks, and eating a stupid slice of dollar pizza, feeling guilty later and booking a stupid Y7 class to sweat out the beer and the parmesan cheese. Now thatâs worse luck.
I donât know what this year of reckoning may have saved me from: A life unexamined, questions never asked. Maybe it saved me years of heartache. Iâll never know. Maybe I donât need to know. Maybe I can just trust: It meant something.
Even in the times of greatest crisis, there are some things I do know. I have to remind myself. I look around and find artifacts of the self I was before I ever thought to question it: pinecones tucked in a drawer, notebooks from elementary school, geodes plucked from the dirt by my motherâs quick hands, birthday cards pasted together by my aunt. My class ring sits on my finger, the same place itâs been for years. Not because I have an ounce of collegiate pride, but because my grandparents bought it for me. It reminds me of them. The skin underneath is pale, softer than the rest, missed by the sunâs rays.
That patch of raw, tender skin, thatâs me. Thatâs who I am. Of some things, you must be certain.
XOXO,
Ali
#TexasForever
My Book Rec: The Things They Carried
Oh boy. This book gets it. The boredom. The drudgery. The feeling of listlessness, lit up by moments of life and death. To me, reading is a way to connect to others. To practice what it feels like to feel. This book does that. Itâs rare, and perfect, and beautiful.
The book: The Things They Carried
My rating: đ„đ„đ„đ„đ„
Read more: Tim OâBrien reflects on âThe Things They Carriedâ 20 years later