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At Thanksgiving, I got to see an uncle with whom my family had a schism years ago and whom I don’t know so well. He’s the youngest of my dad’s brothers, the father of five children, and owns his own landscaping business. Recently, he and his wife filed for divorce, and the proceedings are in a holding pattern as far as I can tell. From my early memories of he and his wife, I can make out more animosity towards her from my parents than him, and I am subconsciously aligned with him without really knowing why.
After a few games of ping pong as a digestive stratagem, I rode back with him to the house where we were both staying. This was the first time I could remember ever being alone with him, I noted as I stepped up into his giant SUV. He’s got a funny kind of wit, one that works best playing off somebody else, and therefore I started the talking. I asked him about his two eldest daughters, the two of his children I’m closest to, and he told me about one’s first semester of college and the other’s semester abroad in Italy. That out of the way, I asked him about his college experience, about which I knew next to nothing.
He told me that he studied finance and got his master’s degree in tax. He could have been an accountant, really wanted to be one, in fact, but had two kids by the time he finished school, and they needed to be fed. So he went into landscaping, and made a nice life out of it. He told me he makes more money through that business than he would have being a CPA, but he still has the desire to make use of his education.
Here I chimed in, putting two and two together, and pointed out the possibility that now might be a perfect time to make a life change, what with the divorce and two kids already in college. I didn’t mean to ignore the risks and moxie necessary for that kind of change, but it seemed like his life had reached as neat a turning point as lives do. I said as much, and he agreed without the slightest hesitation or quaver, with the resolve of a man with decades of hard years behind him and vibrant, novel ones ahead. He did not look like a man decelerating through his fifties in that moment, but rather like a man reborn, his eyes wet again with purpose and drive.
Though I’m still thirty years behind him in life like everybody else around me, I saw something of myself in him. Think of graduation like a divorce, full of financial difficulty, life choices that will determine our course for the next batch of years, and general sadness with the world and its cruel ways. Come May, I will be tapping my reserves of fortitude to find my way in the world, just as my uncle does ahead of me.
This could easily be my excuse for not writing last time, namely that I was anguishing under the building weight of my impending graduation and release into the real world and thus had little time to think of, let alone write about, the beauty of daily life at Swarthmore.
There you have it. Blame it on a faltering in the face of the blank page, on the increasing pressure of Swarthmore’s difficulty, or the looming guillotine that will cut off my time here at the neck. I did not write last week, and do not write most days, but now I feel much better and give thanks for the opportunity to write.
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