In a Lifetime

In the Talking Heads song, “Once in a Lifetime,” David Byrne as lead vocalist addresses everyday life. The first verse leans in to a repetition of the words, “you may find yourself,” with an emphasis on the passive act of finding oneself in a set of circumstances, not necessarily out of any active choice but rather the conglomeration of a million little choices and sets of circumstances that resulted in a life that is not necessarily undesirable, but was unforeseen.

One of my best friends quoted this song when he read his wedding vows, with an emphasis on having found himself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife. It’s a nice sentiment and a well-chosen quote for the circumstance and the overarching sense of having seen your dreams come true to culminate in that day of happiness that he and his wife had stumbled in roundabout ways to arrive at.

And there’s a sense of disorientation that goes with the song that I know well. I’ve traveled and relocated throughout my twenties and thirties--more than some, not as much as others--moving from upstate New York, to Maryland, to Oregon, to North Carolina, to Georgia with stopovers and visits in forty-two other states, four other countries. And there have been these moments when reality settles. These moments of waking.

I remember walking away from the parking lot after seeing off my parents on move-in day at college. I headed back to my freshman year dorm, kicking a little round chunk of broken-off pavement, thinking I was on the cusp of a new life.

I remember driving my first car out of a garage in Syracuse, while it herked and jerked along. Not really drivable, but the entrance to the garage was too low to the ground for the tow truck to get in. I’d just started my first full-time job and would buy my second car days later.

I remember talking to a police officer in Baltimore, outside my apartment building. He’d come to the scene after I reported my back license plate stolen from my car and gently admonished me for not at least having a club on my car, proclaiming me lucky to have only had that plate stolen.

I remember absently watching a police officer on bike patrol wheel past, before I turned back to the water, overlooking a row of surfers from a dock at Pacific Beach in San Diego, the day of my first date with Heather, when neither of us were sure if it were date until I asked her if it was all right if I held her hand.

I remember sitting on the edge of a bed with two new friends, in our fourth friend’s studio in Oregon. Days into my MFA program, past two in the morning. I was relying on a ride back to my apartment, but contemplating making the three-mile journey on foot. Because the friend who was hosting us--smart, passionate, invested--insisted we had to listen to one more experimental jazz-rock track, and each last one gave way to one more, and each one lasted in excess of ten minutes. The warning that my phone’s battery power had dropped below ten percent came and went. And I waited. When we finally got to the car, and all agreed we’d wanted to head out hours before the lone friend who’d, more than once, been vocal about wanting to go glared at each of us. “Why didn’t you say something, fuckers?” She crossed her arms and stared straight ahead through the windshield.

I remember setting foot outside a hotel in Wilmington after dinner, and stepping into a wind tunnel. That my friends and I weren’t hotel guests but the shuttle driver outside nonetheless offered up his services because no one should walk in the weather--the outer edge of a hurricane, the night before my wedding. The hurricane that sent all the best laid plans askew in the week leading up to our big day.

These are fragments--not all of them momentous occasions, but each sharing a sense of dislocation. For taken out of context, looked at in sequential order, there’s an undeniable randomness to the progression of a life. I’m prone to nostalgic thinking, and look at each of these moments with a touch romanticism, a touch of wistfulness. For the journey through college in which I didn’t know I’d wind up laying roots in the newspaper office, or at friends I hadn’t met yet would travel to my wedding fifteen years later in North Carolina. For not knowing the next car I had would be a lemon, but a lemon that I loved for the long drives I’d take to see friends, to start reviewing a cappella competitions. For moving past the general malaise of homesickness I felt in that first Baltimore apartment to feeling as at home in that city as I have anywhere. For how much better I’d get to know those friends in Oregon, and not just them, but their writing--that common purpose we shared. For those first steps into a marriage with someone I knew I loved, but know so much more, so much better over the years to follow.

I think of it as a lifetime, and in the same breath remind myself I’m not so old. I remind myself that for all of these turns, all of these moments of finding myself in a new place, in a new set of circumstances, if there’s been one consistent lesson to be learned, it’s that I never know what might be next.

And that’s a good thing.