There’s Still Time For You…

There’s Still Time For You…

When I was fifteen, twenty-five seemed so far away I wrote out a to-do list I hoped to accomplish within the span of a decade. I tried to be easy on myself, since I hate having goals that I fail to reach. In my straggled, teenage handwriting I wrote on a piece of torn notebook paper that I wanted to darn a sock, bake an apple pie from scratch, stand beneath a proscenium arch and kiss the love of my life in the rain.

I wanted to run in a marathon, get straight A’s throughout college, master the mandolin, and publish a book. The rest of the goals I cannot remember; there were over a hundred of them and the list was lost somewhere between college and home, but these few remain with me, and I believe they always will.

Tomorrow I turn twenty-five — a quarter of a century if you’re trying to make my impending age sound really old — and I haven’t darned a sock. In my defense, that was really a stupid goal to write. Nobody wears socks anymore that you can even darn, and long ago I bucked against my Old Order Mennonite heritage by refusing to sew the apron my mother thought would make a great summer project. Instead, I swam in cow ponds until my patriotic one piece turned red, brown and blue. I “rescued” baby snappers from along the banks of the creek with my brother and let them scramble across our claw-foot bathtub. I went spelunking with my best friend, envisioning the watery caves filled with treasure belonging to lost Old World explorers. No wonder I never really learned how to sew on anything except buttons.

That apple pie I was going to bake from scratch never happened. It’s not that I don’t like to bake, but that I am terrified of butter–and how can you bake an apple pie without that? For a while there I tried to replace all oils with prune puree and plain yogurt. My husband, who will usually eat something only fit for the dog and with a smile on his face, would tentatively taste some of my tweaked recipes and wrinkle his nose. After a year of this, I finally gave in and used applesauce as a butter replacement instead.

I’ve never actually stood under a proscenium arch, and I don’t think I would remember what it looked like even if I did. I think it resembles the Arc de Triomphe, and the closest I have ever come to this was a sweetheart display at Dollywood my husband and I posed under last year.

Kissing the love of my life in the rain? That might’ve happened once or twice, but I’m pretty sure they were only goodbye pecks, not the From Here to Eternity rolling around in the sand scene my adolescent heart had envisioned.

The marathon…well, that’s another goal I never reached unless you’re counting when I decided to run in a 5K I had not trained for, and my lungs felt like they were splintered by the time I crossed the finish line and stumbled back to the Jeep. Now whenever I hear the techno music I was listening to on my iPod that sleeting winter day, I am conditioned like Pavlov’s dogs to sit down with my head between my knees or else I will barf.

For a while there the straight A’s through college looked good until the liberal arts university forced me — an English and Communication Arts double major! — to take a math class. By the time I remembered how to divide and multiply fractions, we were on to algebra. By the time we were on to geometry, I was sitting at my desk in tears. I was one of the last to turn in my final, but all my mental drudgery was to no avail: I received my only college level C while taking basic math.

Somewhere between my mother’s desire to turn me into the next Barbara Mandrell and Nickel Creek disbanding, I lost the desire to master the mandolin. Those thirteen years (yes, thirteen; I wince just typing that) I clipped my nails so I could press down on the instrument’s strings and sat in a folding chair, plucking out grating notes, while my teacher tried to withhold his/her frustration, were not all for naught. Whenever I hear a song like “Ode to a Butterfly,” my dream to play like Nickel Creek will unravel itself from the cocoon of my childhood dreams. I’ll take that $100 baby out and pluck a few chords, then — discouraged by the skill I have forgotten — I’ll put the mandolin back in its ancient case where it will wait until I remember it’s there and come at it with my feather duster once again.

Out of all these goals I have failed, the one that haunts me the most is the one I thought would be easier to reach than darning a sock: I haven’t published a book. To those of you reading, I know the ease in which I hoped to accomplish this was somewhat naive. Okay, a whole lot naive. But by fifteen I had already written a book that filled up my two-hundred page journal. I had notebook after notebook filled with my thoughts, stories, and general pubescent musings. Example: Does 8797 like me? Oh, I hope so! (I never put real names in my journals. With two brothers and a mother who believes journals can be subpoenaed by suspicious parents, naming my crushes felt as dangerous as naming Watergate informants.)

Now what felt like an infinity of years has passed in the colorful streak of a decade, and I have no book credits to my name. I am daily working toward that goal, yet it is still one I have not reached. At times I tell myself it does not matter as much as not having darned a sock or baked an apple pie from scratch does not matter, but deep down it does.

Then I remember what a bearded wise man once said (or maybe it was a fortune cookie): Sometimes the goals you seek the most, once accomplished, are those that let you down. So that’s why I must remain true to the craft and not to the goal: I must write because writing helps me make sense of the world, not because it will give me a place in the world; because writing is my tether and also my wings; because the ability to write may take years and years to fully hone, but when it’s all said and done, it’s impossible for me to just let my keyboard or journals set around like my mandolin and collect years of leftover dreams and dust.

Not when there are such characters to meet and stories to tell.

This song’s for all of you with goals that haven’t been reached. Regardless if you’re fifteen or fifty, there’s still time to reach them. What do we have to really lose? We’ve only got a hundred years to live.