Hello! I'm Emily.
Welcome to my blog. I pontificate on my observations of family, friends, and occasional fun travel.
Welcome to my blog. I pontificate on my observations of family, friends, and occasional fun travel.
All in life
Thirty years ago I sat on my high school football field, draped in a light blue graduation gown, a mortar board bobby-pinned to my 17 year old head, listening to our commencement speaker (a minister,) drone on about the statistical diagnosis of the class of 1985. He cast an uninspiring message of death, divorce, failure, and bankruptcy. He talked about the world from the perspective of numbers, the Russian roulette message of motivational speakers, he predicted the odds against us, against our success, against our happiness.
Throughout the past thirty years, I have thought of that speech, of the sadness he threw upon the future, of the cruelty and (sometimes accuracy) of his forecast.
School should be out, but it's not. We are paying a 90 degree summer rate for stolen snow days. Teachers, bookbags, and sneakers, fresh and new in August are tired and frayed, ready for a respite.
I cried every single day of first grade, even the last day of school. I was moved from classroom to classroom, my teachers passing me along like a white elephant Christmas gift, where the wrapping looks cute but the contents are not as expected. My brothers alternated the duty of escorting me from school bus to class as silent tears poured down my cheeks. After I was delivered, they bolted for refuge in the junior high building. I. Hated. School.
It got better along the years. I finally realized school played to my nerdiness. That along with the abundant library where you could read as many books as you wanted was almost a fair trade for the caged confinement of desks and chalkboards.
I met a man today. His name is Larry. He was in line beside me at the coffee shop, waiting for a refill of decaf. He is old in the way that stoops the body and makes eyes cloudy, watering for no real obvious reason other than they have been in the sockets for so very long and have probably seen many things. Larry was dressed in that casual, sporty, old man way with dress pants, button-up shirt, shiny shoes, and a little cap like the jockeys wear in the Kentucky derby. I felt an urge to sink down beside him on a couch and watch an old Clark Gable movie, listening to his stories about the war and the Great Depression.
Larry stepped right up to me, too close really for someone you have just met, but I didn't mind. Perhaps when you are old and you can hear the clock ticking, you are less bound by the rules of personal space. Larry saw my sweaty clothes and asked what I had been doing. When I answered, "Exercising." He asked if I had been running through the forest. He once had a friend who when she was at Princeton would run through the forest to clear her head and think. I often trail run. I moved closer to Larry. I understood. It is so hard to clear the head and think.
