The reading at Perch went very well. I read some Smartmom and some
poems. The audience seemed to like it. This piece was written last summer when I was thinking about attending my 25th college reunion (not to be confused with my 30th high school reunion in less than a month).

The 25th anniversary of Smartmom’s college graduation is coming up this
June. It’s hard to believe it’s been 25 years since the day the great
I.F. Stone, that iconoclastic journalist and critic of the Cold War,
McCarthyism, and the Vietnam War, spoke to her class of 1980 at SUNY
Binghamton.

She can’t remember a word he said but she does
remember that his commencement speech was quite long and
characteristically controversial, as it elicited boos from some parents
in the audience. Their reaction disgusted and embarassed her.

While Smartmom is not sure if she
will be attending her 25th reunion in October, she took a look at the questionaire, which said something like: "So, what have you been doing since graduation?"

To
Smartmom, it seemed like a horrendous exercise in personal
reductiveness. A friend said she
took one look at that questionaire and knew that she was incapable of
filling it out. "I’m having a mid-life crisis, I wasn’t going to sit
there and do it," she said.

Those kind of reunion
questionaries invite boasting, whether it’s about your spouse,
children, career, or creature comforts. You feel like you’ve really
gotta impress all those people you went to college with: Look how great my life is. Look at my kids. Look where I live. Look at my degrees. Look at my job. Look how much money I make!

But still, it got Smartmom thinking: WHAT
have I been doing since the day I.F. Stone spoke to my class in the
Broome County Arena? What fabulous resume can I whip out to impress my
peers, what personal biographical detail will just wow them all….

Hmmmm.

Well…

Ahhhh….

Seriously,
how does one honestly characterize a quarter century of one’s life? Is
it all really just a list of degrees, courses, jobs, projects,
addresses, and names. Are we nothing more than our resumes?

What
about the interstitial life – the life that goes on between the lines
of all the other stuff. The little discoveries we make about ourselves;
the conversations we have with friends on the phone; the surprising
moments we have with our children on the way to the store; an inside
joke told over and over; the words of a wise therapist; getting
proposed to at Two Boots Restaurant on Avenue A; an ephiphanic walk
across the Brooklyn Bridge; stopping at the National Poultry Museum
while driving through Kansas; hearing Caetano Veloso and Ornette
Coleman in concert and Patti Smith at CBGB’s ; a memorable meal in a
small Tuscan town; Teen Spirit and OSFO’s first words…

What of
the life we live concurrent to the resume life. The life of our hearts,
our minds, our sensations? Our attempts to just be.