I've been thinking a lot lately about the future. My future in particular. No matter how much the people around me say "You don't need to know what you're doing with your life right now", I can't help but think I do. It seems that people are reaching the thresholds of success at younger and younger ages now than ever before. Maybe its only because I'm young now and haven't hit any defining moments that I feel this way. But maybe it's not. Maybe the concept of "enjoy your youth" has gone out the window with our generation. I try to think it hasn't, but I wonder sometimes what I need to be accomplishing to one up the person who does think fun while young is an idea left to our predecessors. While I am sitting around with friends laughing, there is a person preparing their resume with job after job of quality experience builders.
Luckily I've come to terms with the fact that I am in the wrong major early enough. And luckily I did so while working at a job that is a "quality experience builder". Since October I've been working with a 93 year old woman here in DC, editing a book about her life that she is writing for her grandchildren. We take a half hour break each day for tea and discussion, and within that half hour I've learned more from her than I have from any of my professors at college so far. In one of our daily teas a few months ago she planted the idea in my head of editing as a profession. I took it as a polite word to an employee and never really addressed the idea again until recently. Each day at tea she reminds me of her idea for my future, and each day it seems to be more appealing. AP Language introduced me to memoirs, made me realize everyone has a story. Now I know what it is like to be part of that story, part of the process of writing it down for everyone else to hear. I imagine myself sitting next to Jeanette Walls as she details her childhood. I see Frank McCourt lying in the bed that my boss lays in searching for a magnifying glass to read the words he wrote in the paper's margins. And Betty Morris, the beautiful 93 year old, tells me about her aspirations when she was younger and how her first husband held her back, and about her love when she was older with a second husband who left her far too young.
I can't see myself anywhere else these days. I want to hear every story first hand and have a role in how it is shaped onto the paper for the rest of the world to read. Being an editor or publisher was never a thought on my horizon until Betty Morris. I was an international studies/ communications double major with a minor in Russian. Now I'm a Lit major with a minor in Foreign communication studies focusing on spanish. I'm not sure where my life will go, but I'm a little bit surer since I've worked for her.
I'll leave off with a poem she wrote, in a book of her poems that she gave me:
"Growing Old, Indoors"
This is the last year, quite. I know the years
and this will be the last of them, I know
when still I will remember with my tears
the earth so brown with sand and white with snow.
I will forget the pastures and the stir
the corn-stalks make against the wind at night.
I will forget, though none is lovelier
the locust blossom's turn from green to white.
Like luster of the rain that drops from trees
in sun-lit glitter when the wind has passed,
scattered and loose are all my memories.
Even the hill of stars will go at last.
Or will earth keep me, six-foot down, aware
of what I am forgetting, being there?
