It's a few days before Christmas, the one time of year where my father and I can have serious conversations without fighting. Every year we go out Christmas shopping for my mom together. It's one of my favorite holiday traditions, partly because my father loves Christmas. Something about the season makes it so that this trip, this one time out of the year, we can actually talk to one another. We've been shopping for his Christmas presents for Mom together ever since I was a little girl, and I've never told him, but it's the best Christmas gift I get.
This year we're talking about relationships and marriage. I tell him one of the best things about growing up with them as parents has been that my brothers and I have felt very little pressure to grow up in the conventional settle-down-have-kids-and-buy-a-house kind of way. Their attitude made it possible for me to go to school out of state, live in China, settle down here in Minnesota, get a graduate degree, move around often, and live a life of my own choosing.
He;s thoughtful "I met your mother at 24." He pauses and says to himself "I think she saved my life."
My father, particularly in his early years, is an enigma. I've heard bits and pieces of his early life, a little about how he met Mom, and snippets of stories about aunts and uncles here and there. I know that he was laid off from his job in his early twenties and lived on a beach in Belize for a few months. He would go down to the Kentucky Derby as a road trip with his friends every a year for many years. He was wild and young and making what appear to him retrospectively to be bad decisions and somehow my mother fell into his life.
She was no angel herself. A disco queen with an affinity for shoes, nail polish, and big hair she made her own youthful, rash decisions. But somehow the pair of them clicked and settled down and built a life together. I would have thought that after over thirty years of marriage, they would know all there is to know about one another. I've wondered a few times whether or not they've ever grown tired of one another's jokes and stories over the course of their marriage, if they've ever longed for the thrill that comes when you meet someone new. A few years ago Mom said something to me I've never forgotten.
"Your father," she said, looking up from her knitting, "is a very different person than the man I fell in love with."
I'm a little nervous about where this conversation is going. My mother is known for weird, slightly embarrassing non sequiturs, for instance, leaning over in the middle of Mass to ask when you last moved your bowels.
She continues, "It's like getting to fall in love with him all over again."
***
I'm driving back from Minneapolis, feeling more than a little wistful. I've spent the past three days in the company of the people I love tremendously, the people I refer to as my Minnesota family. It's always hard to leave them behind, but today on my friend Nick's birthday, a few days after he and Victoria announced their engagement, it's really difficult. I'm a weird mix of happy and sad, and I can't quite identify why I'm feeling the way I am. It's a good distance from Minneapolis to the North Country, and during the winter, night comes on quickly. By the time I start getting into town, the winter light is fading rapidly.
And it happens.
There have, for me, always been songs that are right for whatever period of my life. In high school, it was any song by the band Thursday. In college "Nobody Knows Me," by the Weepies. Graduate school was, hands down, the song "Wagon Wheel" by Old Crow Medicine Show. Whenever those songs came on the radio, I had to listen to them all the way to the end. For whatever reason, whether teenage angst or good memories associated with them, the songs were (and still are) just right for that time in my life.
Anyway, I'm coming down the hill into my adoptive city when the song for this part of my life comes on the radio. And I realize why I have this funny wistful feeling. Regardless of what happens in the next few years, I think that this is going to be the part of my life that I always look back on with a certain fondness. Realistically, the last couple years have been challenging. God knows I've blogged enough about those challenges. But this is also the first time I can remember by life being wholly and completely my own. While I have obvious responsibilities (bills, family, work) those responsibilities are relatively minimal. I've spent the past year and a half without having to do homework or look after children or worry about whether or not my boyfriend is going to be pissed about the dishes in the sink.
I say this with utter sincerity (all the while feeling a bit hokey.) I feel like right now anything is possible. I could write a best-selling memoir and become a famous writer. Go back to school and become a noted astrophysicist. Close a million dollar gift. Make a difference in the lives of women and children. And those aspirations are good ones, they're ones I feel like I can be proud of, but even they don't encompass the whole of what I've trying to talk about.
I feel like I finally understand the gift of youth. That the dance parties we have in Victoria and Nick's basement, the long nights spent debating politics and religion over many glasses of wine, the cigars smoked while talking about art and love and life, these are all things that are possible in this way only right now, only because we're young. Of course they'll happen later in life too. One cannot surround oneself with interesting, intelligent, engaged people and expect them to become less so just because they get married, buy houses, have children. But whether it's the new year or number of engagements that have happened recently or confronting the mortality of someone I love, these recent months feel blessed in a way I neither anticipated nor recognized until now. It's as though something clicked in the past year or so and I've finally given myself permission to commit all of those youthful indiscretions I feel like I've missed.
***
Since their children have moved out of the house, Mom and Daddy have taken some amazing trips. Somewhere around their 25th wedding anniversary, my father bought a Harley-Davidson motorcycle and my parents have taken to taking cross-country motorcycle trips to listen to blues, eat BBQ, and generally act like young adults. They called me once at 2 am after a Springsteen concert, waking me up with the screaming and noise of motorcycles in the background. They are as lovey-dovey as a pair teenagers, which is simultaneously sweet and gross.
I wonder what my parents would have thought of one another if Daddy hadn't lived like a drifter for a few months, if Mom had gone out a little less. It would be reductionist to say that they wouldn't have fallen in love and I wouldn't have been born and wocca wocca wocca. But I can't help but wonder if my mother would have asserted so firmly that she has continued falling in love with my father throughout the years if he hadn't started out a much different person than the man he's become.
The gift my parents have started giving me as I've gotten older is more profound than they'll ever realize. The stories of their youthful indiscretions, of the mistakes they made, of the chances they took are a revelation. These stories are, whether they realize it or not, reinforcing that while my own story, my own youthful indiscretions may not lead to finding my one true love or settling anywhere close to their home, they're worth experiencing regardless.
And they're teaching me that even when you get older, even when you've been in a committed relationship for 30+ years, have raised children, struggled through adulthood, and do all of the things that I dread, perhaps you still don't have to give up those memories of when you were wild and young.
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