Eighteen

The year I went to college my dad drove me the two hundred miles, my clothes and books and stuffed animals (and my bed pillow) in bins in the backseat. Jill had a piano recital that weekend, so she and my mom stayed behind. I was anxious and a little teary, and aghast at having to travel solo with my dad. In my teenage years I lived in a fog of intolerance for this man I’d previously idolized. At some point (around fourteen or fifteen) I realized I’d grown smarter than him and wasn’t shy about updating him as to this new development. I was insufferable then, and didn’t see that clearly until I came out on the other side, somewhere in my twenties. Now I could only admire him for getting through that period without throttling me.

Anyway, we didn’t have much to talk about on that trip—not his fault, he made the effort, asking me about the dorm and my classes and my new roommate, but it probably felt like riding a bike without the chain, so he let it go after a while and we rode without real conversation. If iPods had been invented back then, I surely would have been hooked up, but I managed to be tuned out just the same, immersed in the radio. We didn’t agree on music, of course, and he tolerated Jethro Tull and the Moody Blues far longer than was polite, but when Steven Tyler screamed out his lyrics my dad reached his limit.

“Sorry, Libby, I need some quiet. This is giving me a headache.”

I shot him a disdainful look and pouted out my window as he shut off the radio.

“Have you decided on your major?” he finally asked, tired, I suppose, of the icy silence.

“No.”

“Well, it’s early. You’ve got plenty of time to figure that out. I don’t know how you’re supposed to decide that when you’re eighteen. How can you possibly know now what you want to do the rest of your life?”

“I don’t,” I said.

“I know.”

What he said and his acceptance of my lack of direction surprised me. I saw no hope of figuring it out. It was the burning question, the one that labeled me as the major disappointment of the family. The major disappointment without a major. Here I was, off to college, and I didn’t even know what I wanted to be. Jill had known for years that she was going to nursing school and was already candy striping at the hospital on weekends.

“When did you know you wanted to be a lawyer?” I asked.

I could almost see his ears perk up, like a terrier, so unaccustomed was he to my asking him a personal question.

“When my mother told me to,” he said.

“You did it because your mother told you to?” I was incredulous.

“Well, not exactly. But it was her dream that one of her children would be a lawyer. I’m not sure why, but she talked about it all the while we were growing up, so I guess I just always figured that’s what I would do since I was the oldest.”

Ah, that’s where this is going, I thought. He’s going to decide my future.

“So you think I should be a lawyer, is that what you’re saying?”

Part of me wanted him to say yes, just to give me another bullet to load into his rifle of uselessness.

He crooked his head at me. “Oh god, no,” he said, and after a moment, “unless that’s what you want. Do you? Is that what you’re considering?”

I pictured myself striding back and forth in front of a jury in a conservative (but fashionably tight) navy blue suit and three-inch heels, waving a pair of horn-rimmed glasses.

“No way,” I said, with no small measure of revulsion. “I just thought that’s what you were trying to tell me.”

“Libby,” my dad said, “I want you to do what will make you happy. I want you to find something that gets you out of bed in the morning, something you can’t wait to get back to each day. I want you to find your passion.”

I had a few friends who had real passions—Kim played the viola and practiced three hours every day, Janet had been studying ballet since she was four, Patrick lived and breathed cars and was working at a body shop—but most of my friends sort of fell into their careers. Pete was majoring in business and knew he’d go to work at his dad’s construction company after college, and since Sophie’s major was English she thought she’d end up teaching, but neither was what you’d call a passion; they were more like defaults. Most of us were just splashing around in the sea of our future.

“How do I do that?” I asked.

My dad said, “College is going to expose you to a lot of things you never even thought of. Take every course that sounds interesting and you’ll find your passion, you’ll see.” This sounded hopeful, and kind of fun, but I doubted the truth of it. “I know that being a real-estate attorney must seem very sexy and glamorous”— he looked at me to see if I’d gotten his little joke —“but I didn’t start out with that goal. I thought I was going to be a litigator. But then I found out I had no talent for the courtroom.” The idea that my father wasn’t competent in everything he ever did had never occurred to me, and it pleased me. “But a law degree opens up a whole world of possibilities. Not that I’m recommending law school for you, just college in general. You have no idea the doors it will open. You’re so smart and so talented—”

I snorted. “Yeah, right,” I said.

“Don’t do that, Libby. It’s true. You might not have any idea right now what you want to do, but you’ve got plenty of time to figure it out. And you will. This is just the beginning and there are all kinds of possibilities out there. You can do anything you set your mind to.”

I was hoping to get through college having fun, making new friends, drinking a little beer and experimenting with the requisite amount of illegal substances, and if along the way I figured out how to fill the vista of blankness that was my career, well, that would be a bonus. I made a little package of the knowledge that my father hadn’t succeeded at the first thing he’d tried, and put it in a corner of my brain for safekeeping. It gave me a breather as we drove through small towns with hardware stores and mom-and-pop groceries on the way to my vast unknown.

I switched majors twice that first year. I started in journalism, and my dad bought me a tape recorder and a 35mm camera to support my choice. When I changed to theater arts toward the end of my freshman year, I expected him to yank me out of school faster than the space shuttle launch, but instead he sent me An Actor Prepares and Building a Character by Konstantin Stanislavski. He was supportive when I switched to my final major, graphic arts, and when I left the corporate world to start my dressmaking business six years ago he replaced my twenty-five-year-old Singer with a computerized machine with thirty built-in stitches, an LED display and five styles of automatic buttonholes.

Now, as I sat in the waiting room surrounded by the people who meant the most to me, I wondered if he knew the vastness of my appreciation for the father he was. I longed to be able to tell him again how much I appreciated his encouragement, and how remorseful I was for being so truculent on that first ride to college and throughout my teen years. I wanted him to know how his love was the fertilizer that made my life blossom.