Practice for Life

How treacherous is memory, or how true? This weekend, at an alumni event, I stared at a woman, remembering her 21 year old face, now ruined by sun and time and even life, I suppose.

She had been and was still tall and blonde. She had two friends, twins, who were also tall and blonde, and the three of them would sit in on a sofa in the middle of the student center looking like royalty. Stiff necks on unbending stalks. They didn’t talk to anyone, not even each other, and once a guy asked if they were deaf mutes.

I was amused.

At this university at this time there were the INS and the outs. The INS came from a good neighborhoods and good high schools and had money and the right clothes, the right cars, the right stuff, you might say and the outs did not. I had had an in/out relationship with life already by virtue of living in a small town without having been born there (out), and various other accidents of birth and circumstance which contrive to place one IN or OUT. Of course it was sometimes possible to be so far out that one was IN.

My scout troop was poor, and instead of going to camp, we rented a cabin in the mountains and the leaders came up and a woman cooked for us and we did scout stuff and froze our asses off in the cold night high altitude air. One day, on a 15 mile hike, all sweaty and tired, we were overtaken by a group of girls on horseback, from a Chele camp, girls who did not even deign to look at us, footsore, horseless, and consigned forever to be Out Out Out on the Far Side of the Universe.

I felt tears welling up in my eyes after all these years at the awfulness of having been quickly judged and found wanting. Rejection. Very much like trying to get someone, anyone, to look at your writing. Quickly judged and found wanting and excluded. Out.

So one gets practice for life early in life and one might think that familiarity would breed contempt and that the process might get easier, but it does not. In her 80’s, my mother joined a fraternal club and was roundly snubbed, which cut her to the quick.

One thing life provides in abundance is the ability to practice sucking it up.