I thought I should title this post "Milestones" because I've been thinking a bunch about milestones over this little four-day holiday. Two of my inner circle lifelong friends -- one I've known since age six and one since age 14 -- got engaged this weekend. My Best Friend's wedding is planned for July 4th, and she and her sweetie just left Manhattan for Montana, arriving on the 26th in their new home, where they will paint the walls and sand the floors and plan their wedding and, soon enough, raise their children. Another friend is ripe with a baby, due in February.
But I don't, as it turns out, have that much to say about milestones. Or I haven't been able to think of anything. I'm looking forward to all these weddings a great deal. I don't want to get married myself. Although I feel sort of like I'm supposed to, I don't feel like these engagements have made me take stock or anything like that.
Last night at my book group's holiday party I saw my oldest friend, Gudrun, a woman who is beside me in a Kodachrome snapshot of two toddlers, naked and covered in soap, washing a long-forgotten dog. Our moms are friends, and we're both only children, and we ebb and flow in closeness but she feels like a relative I trust and admire and will always know. She's living in California now studing funky independent animation. She's always been really cool. We sat in the kitchen of the party catching up. When you see an old friend with whom there's a longtime connection you sort of cut to the chase. We talked about the places we were both in, our thoughts about them, our professional pursuits, our relationships. It is getting hard to talk about our work to each other -- our vocabulary is starting to be too specialized and too remote from one another's world. I told her I still sometimes feel like an undercover spy in the world of lawyers. I told her I felt embarrassed to be living in my hometown when she's off doing such exotic and interesting things, even though I feel like my life here is rich and full of love and fun. She's not sure whether she'll ever want to have children. She was impressed with the fact that I have a house and a boat -- thinks it makes me a grown up in some way that she's not.
I notice at gatherings like the book group party and at a big family gathering of relatives people make lawyer jokes -- not the "two lawyers walk into a bar" kind but the "watch out, A.J., you don't want to say that around her, she's a lawyer" kind of comments and I don't really know what to make of them. Do people do this with other professions? It's part of what I meant when I said I feel like an undercover spy sometimes -- like people don't see beyond the badge of lawyer, they've labelled me with a whole bunch of assumptions that don't really feel that comfortable. When I was talking to Gudrun I was trying to learn more about what she's studying and didn't really have the language to ask. So I asked, "If I am doing something and I say, I really need to hire Gudrun to help with this, what am I doing?" It was not that useful a question, but it led us to more interesting questions and I learned some things about what she's studying. But as I asked it I felt self-conscious, thinking, geez, I sound like someone who thinks everything can be reduced into what kind of job you do with what you learn, and I wonder if she'll think that's because I'm a lawyer, and I wonder if I AM that kind of person, and I wonder if it IS because I'm a lawyer.
This post doesn't have anything to do with milestones after all. I think it would, if I could sort out my thoughts better. But not tonight, I think.
Your job does turn you into a certain kind of person. The much-maligned James Gould Cozzens wrote several novels in the '30s and '40s built on this idea.
Posted by: John P. | December 29, 2003 at 11:01 AM