Trips and Falls

Don't look back, my grandmother advised me the day I graduated from college and presented me with a check, You might miss a step. She had no idea.

I was, to be truthful, quite full of myself that June day. I had no clear vision of the future, no clue as to how many trips and falls and missteps there would actually be in the grownup world. I loved being in college and had never considered life afterward - I played with the idea of teaching, was enchanted with my cousin Linda's decision to be a librarian and live among books, even thought I might make a career of writing or become a veterinarian and spend my life doing good for animals. I packed up my cap and gown, framed my degree, found a place for the much loved textbooks on philosophy and ethics, and prepared to take on the world.

The world, however, was less welcoming than I imagined, less open minded, less impressed. It seemed that English majors, degreed or not, were a dime a dozen, a common commodity. My first trip and fall was learning that I wasn't as special as I thought - I took a job with the telephone company, intending it to carry me over until I discovered my destiny - and ten years later I was still there. I hadn't even noticed the second misstep, falling into a comfortable routine of work, marriage, marriage and work.

Somewhere along the line, I stopped looking for destiny to intervene with some blinding light or great crash of thunder. Perhaps, I thought, it had more discretion, more finesse - perhaps it was never there for the ordinary people at all. I tripped and fell over my own lack of faith and later my own complacency. Then there was a major misstep - leaving New England seemed like the right move at the time, opportunity and a warm climate were there for the taking as well as the nest of a loving and welcoming family. I never looked closely enough to see the danger.

Don't look back, my grandmother had said. The past is the past and can't be changed or corrected. It was her way of saying live and learn, I suppose, live and learn and keep moving -

forward when you can, sideways if you must, but never back,