by
Helen DeWitt
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I want to be a banker, I said. Isn’t there some way I could be a banker?
He sighed and settled back in his chair. All right, he said. I think I understand why you don’t want to be a professional musician. But I think you’re under a slight misapprehension about banking.
I said Oh really? Why is that?
He said: You’re not the first by a long shot. We see this sort of thing all the time in young people, they think banking is about making a lot of money.
I said Oh really?
He said The thing is, Ephraim, we’re really not looking for people who just want to earn a lot of money. We’re looking for people with a genuine interest in banking.
In the morning, with both boys still sleeping, I got my coat and headed out. In the past, I would have made breakfast for my husband and son, done the dishes, the laundry - a good wife, until I couldn't anymore, because it felt like a pillow was pressed on my face, cutting off my oxygen. The sun was out, turning the world brilliant, and I didn't want to miss any of it. I stopped at Java Cafe and talked to one of the regulars who was reading a book about a woman who loved the characters in a book so much that reality began to fade for her. I wrote down the title. [...]
Throughout the day, the thought of Ben's mother tugged at me. It wasn't abandonment. After all, Ben was in high school, soon off to college. But it was something. Part of me envied her - how she could empty herself of her son, give herself over exclusively to herself again, like a young girl without a care in the world. Her attention, energy, time, mental space, she reclaimed it - it was all hers. She'd trusted the universe to provide, which, in fact, it did.
I'd had a long day at work, teaching three classes, with finger-wringing students filing in my office, worrying about their stories. I loved their stories, loved puzzling over them with my students, but I was tired. Sun from the spring day hung low in the sky, as if it wanted one long look at the world before it disappeared. Thomas had basketball practice and wouldn't be home for another two hours. Solitude luxuriously stretched out in front of me, like an empty sugar-sand beach. I'd soak in a hot bath, let my mind become my own again. I'd write something. I'd been working on it in my mind, though it was inchoate.
aaah i really like this (reminds me of lorrie moore for some reason?)
He didn't say anything. Then: "Dad. You weren't nice to him in the end."
His voice quivered, as if he'd suffered an irreparable loss, and in that moment, I glimpsed Thomas's former self, the boy who wept when his hamster died. Together we held a proper funeral in the backyard. All at once, I felt I'd made a terrible mistake, not just how I'd handled the divorce, but everything, the way I'd chosen to live, make a living, raise Thomas, as if at every time, I'd opted to take the wrong direction, though I couldn't say what was the right direction.
Thomas shook his head. "Forget it."
He left. Music blared from his room, creating a sonic wall.
this story hits me in unexpected ways
[...] The snow would be piling up outside, we could see through the screened-in porch out back. His sister glued to her TV upstairs. [...] I pressed the record button. Our voices, tinny, seeped out into the room through his headphones and I breathed very shallow so as not to make extraneous noise. I sat there and listened to BJ play the solo, brassy and languid, and he nailed it in the first take. He picked the last harmonic, let it sing out and decay, then nodded at me. I stopped the tape.
Where is it now?
nothing's really going on or anything, i just find this so beautiful
[...] As mirrors of each other, we were a success, and for a boy hung up on what shared Converse might reveal, this felt like dying. [...]
And I saw my future stretch before me like a flat, snowy expanse. I would not get to reinvent myself in college. I would not get the new life I'd been dreaming of. I would be in High School Part II, BJ's continued twin. [...] I can't imagine not being your friend. I try it, and it's like imagining not having arms, or a foot. A worrisome question at the heart of every relationship: where do they end and I begin? For so long, you always ended over there. Like: right over there in a very clear place I could point at and walk someone over to. But over thirty years, I feel that things have shifted, and there's a worrisome question left for me now: what is it that still lies between us?
[...] Music had been his major in college. Why wasn't he trying to make it his job?
"A job is a job," he said. "It's what I do to pay my bills. Music is my life. If I made my life my job, if I relied on it for money, I think I'd come to hate my life."
It was pitch black out, the dashboard's glow lit our faces orange. I was struck by the force of his voice, the volume of it in our little car. I'd rarely heard him talk that way. And then I was struck with a feeling, a new one. Behold us two boys sitting together, as different as head and tails.
i wonder about this tbh (with writing)
Let's be Beage. Age forty. White. Brown hair. Six feet tall, maybe two-hundred pounds. Married twelve years to the girl we got set up with after college, who teaches history to middle school kids. Let's live in a townhome in a suburb of Washington, population 71,000, with our two sons, Oscar, nine, and Jack, four, and our dog, Melvin, and drive thirty minutes to work at an engineering firm, where we and the team we lead help rezone properties for developers to build what they're dreaming of. Let's drink beers at our work lunches, wear sideburns that border on muttonchops, and buy a leather iPhone case that looks like an old prayer book. Let's believe in God, but skip church. After the kids are in bed, let's record songs on our iPad in our basement, where our kids keep all their toys and we do the same, our guitars and amps and accordion and pedal organs and our bottles of Scotch tucked away in closets and cabinets. Let's mow our own lawn. Let's have a car payment. Let's have a mortgage and a habit of railing against home ownership, which we call a crock. Let's have, overall, a softness that makes us attractive in a spatial sense, makes it easy for people to want to get close to us. Let our talents glean to music, and let's develop those talents to where we can pick up any instrument handed to us and play "I"m a Believer" or "In My Life" well enough for everyone in the room to sing along. But mostly, let's play those songs alone, in our basement, our friend since fourth grade living 2,800 miles away, where his guitar case sits behind his bedroom floor, coated in dust.
:(
and yet - is the alternative better?
Once, I and a friend of ours blindfolded BJ and drove him somewhere deep in Fairfax County, the end of some generic cul-de-sac inside a nest of twisting cul-de-sacs. We set him in a car, madde him wait a few minutes for us to drive off, and then let him find his way back to a bar in Hendon. If he made it back in one hour, we'd buy his beers that night; if not, he was buying. The friend and I drove back in my car, excited about the contest, feling pretty good about the confusing place we dropped him. I parked in a lot across from the bar, and as we walked toward the entrance, guess who was standing there waiting for us.
His whole thing is zoning, land use. A master's in urban planning. [...]
[...] My ability to take a little jog to my polling place and cast my ballot required so many before me to fight without fear - or to fight with the fear that neglecting to do so would lead to things staying the same. How easy human beings can forget the people who came before us, and the debts we owe.
on suffragists
The 2016 election casts a terrible heap of shadows, one of them being that too many people have been tricked into believing they witnessed the beginning of a catastrophe, rather than a subsequent chapter of a catastrophe already underway. Because we teach such tidy history in our schools, all steady arcs and epiphanies and heroes and villains, this kind of thinking is an easy trap. But November 8, 2016, took a magnifying glass to what was already there and enlarged those injustices to Godzilla-size.