And Alexander Wept

 

The whole thing was Richard Nixon’s fault.  And it happened on August 9, 1974.

I had just turned seven, and was doing something I loved most in the world—snuggling up with my mom watching TV in bed.  You may remember the kind—a  12” black and white screen with “rabbit ears.” Of course, we usually watched kids’ shows, but there was something different about the day of August 9, 1974.  I sensed from her energy that Something Important Was Happening.  I had only had that feeling once before, and that had been when the moon landing was televised.

Of course, I was annoyed that stupid President Nixon was interrupting Wonderama, or whatever dumb kids’ TV show I wanted to watch at the time.   “What's President  Nixon doing?” I asked my mom, all irritated.

 “He's resigning,”  said my mother.

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“It means he's quitting his job,” Mom explained.

This completely confounded me. I had no idea the President of the United States could just quit his job. Nixon was the only president I had ever been cognizant of.  I guess I thought he was kind of like the Queen  of England, or some weird military dictator and would continue to rule the land until he died.

“But why?” I asked.

Now, my mother was no fool. She knew that at age 7, I wasn't about to understand the intricacies of the Watergate scandal. So, she put it in language that she knew that I, as a little girl, would understand.  “He told a lie,” she said, seriously.  “And now he's not allowed to be president anymore.”

Ah, that much I understood. I knew that telling a lie was a very, very bad thing. I had no idea that any lie could be so awful that it would prevent someone from being the president anymore, but this was obviously a very serious situation.

“ So does that mean that we're not going to have a president anymore?”

“No,” Mom explained.  “The vice-president will be our new president.  His name is Gerald Ford.”

While all this was going on, President Nixon was still rambling about his resignation. Curious, I asked. “Is he making all of this up as he goes along?”  Apparently even at that age, I was impressed at the his level of elocution in an extemporaneous speech.

“No, he has people who write his speeches for him.”

I could literally hear something crackle in my head.  All  I could grasp was that it was someone’s job to write the words the president said on television.  Apparently, the fact that I could only understand every eighth word Nixon was saying (and at that, only if the words were “and,” or “the,” or “but.”)  Right then and I knew that one day I was going to be the speech writer to the president of the United States.  I would be the one to articulate all of their great political thoughts (at seven, I had very little understanding of what the president actually did all day—just that it was Very Important).

 I started practicing right away. I wrote speeches for every president the United States had ever had.  It didn’t matter if they were alive or dead.  It didn’t matter that the speeches were filled with anachronisms (somehow, Martin Van Buren was freeing the slaves and President Kennedy had singlehandedly won the First World War).  It was like some weird, political fanfiction.

It finally got through my thick skull that the United States government doesn't employ seven year old speechwriters, so I decided that the next best thing was to become a novelist.  I jumped into my new passion with gusto. Soon, I was writing up to five or six hours a day. I'm sure that the constant clacking of my IBM Selectric drove my parents completely up the wall. The point is, I had discovered that I loved the writing process more than just about anything, so I decided I was going to become a real writer.

I actually did end up writing a lot of  speeches, just not for the president. I competed in high school forensics and all the speaking events and did very, very well, including four state championships and three bids to nationals. But it simply wasn't as prestigious as being a speechwriter for the president. But I knew. Deep in my soul. That I was meant to be a writer. It was the only thing that made my heart sing. And escaping into that fantasy world was the only thing that got me through the torment of 7th and 8th grade, when I was bullied so mercilessly that suicide became less and less of an abstract idea. I have no doubt that had I been in high school today, I would have been on some sort of watch list.

 In the words of the immortal Harlan Ellison. “So I made my own worlds.”

I loved college (majoring, of course, in English, and minoring in Creative Writing). I loved the friends that I met there. My heart was broken when it was time for graduation—I had never done “endings” well. I had also met my first boyfriend there who would eventually become my husband who would eventually become my ex-husband.  After college graduation, I got my first real “adult” job at a pharmaceutical company.  I started out as a secretary, but rapidly became a graphics designer—and a damn good one, if I say so myself.

But I loved graduate school even more.  As the expression goes, “I had found my people.”  They were all just as wonderfully quirky as I was.  We were mad as hatters, and my eccentricities, for which I had been brutalized for over a decade, were now celebrated.

(I know. This is supposed to be a blog about homelessness.  But trust me, this exposition is important).

And then, on April 29, 1994, I took the very last final exam I would ever take.  It was in Elizabethan and Jacobean tragedy.  And as strolled across the quad, feeling delightfully intellectually exhausted (a feeling I still love), it suddenly hit me like a baseball thrown at my head by Aroldis Chapman:

I was finished with school.  Forever.

I would never again have to study for an exam.  Or write a paper.  Or do research. Or give an oral presentation.  Or worry about grades.  Or have study sessions with my friends.  Or stand in line to buy books with an 800% markup.  Or eat in the cafeteria. Or take copious notes in different colored pens, loving the smell of a fresh, new notebook. I would never again need a Trapper Keeper.  Or drive around the parking lot for 40 minutes looking for a space.  Or have a conference with a professor.

It. Was. Over.

I sank onto a nearby bench.  The clocktower that sounded like Big Ben tolled out the hour of 7:00pm.  And I just sat there, shaking with terror. 

I had never been anything except a student.  It was all I had ever known for 20 years—80% of my life had been spent in some classroom or another.  And now I couldn’t be a student anymore.  I was nothing.  I was a walking sack of meat without a purpose.  A huge brain on a stick of no value to anyone anymore.

I was now no longer just shaking, I was crying with terror.  I was completely unprepared for being a real, functional adult.  I had no practical skills whatsoever.  I didn’t know a single damn thing about “real life.”  And my parents had been so proud of the fact that not only did I pay for my undergraduate education entirely by myself but also got a full academic scholarship to graduate school that they decided to not bother me with mundane things like teach me how to balance a checkbook or where the circuit breakers were or how to pump gas.  It never occurred to any of the three of us that the day would come when I simply would run out of school to go to and that one day they’d die.  And as an only child, I’d have no one to turn to.

Suddenly, I felt a gentle hand fall on my shoulder, turned, and saw Dr. Benedictson standing behind me.  I had always had a special connection with Dr. Benedictson; he was a philosophy professor, and for some reason we found each other oddly fascinating  (it didn’t hurt that he was ridiculously handsome, funny, and reminded me more than a little of a brilliant scientist with whom I used to work and was hopelessly in crush with).  We ate lunch together in his office occasionally.  He was about 35, and was now looking at me with no little concern.

“So,” he said, sitting next to me on the bench. “What’s wrong?”

“I’m done with school forever and now I don’t know what to do,” I said, not even bothering to put it in erudite language.  In fact, I sounded positively puerile.

He was silent for a moment and then said, quietly; “’And Alexander wept, for there were no  more worlds left to conquer.’”

“That’s it!”  I yelled, flailing  “How did you know that?”

“It probably has something to do with being a philosophy professor,” he said.

"I need to tell you something, Dr. Benedictson," I said, quickly gathering up all my now-useless school-related crap.

"What's that, Dr. Brennan?"

“I’m kind of in love with you right now,” I said, standing up, gazing into his intelligent, dark eyes one last time and, with renewed zeal, continued to march across the quad.

"Where are you going?" I heard him ask.

And over my shoulder, I shouted back,  "To find another world to conquer."