Everyone has one year in their life that has a greater impact on them than any other year. Mine was 1994. Once a week, I'll recap that year, beginning today.
In January, 1994, I packed up everything I owned and went off from Milwaukee to Washington D.C.
I don't think anyone had believed that I was actually going to Washington D.C. until I went. Going to Washington, D.C. -- going anywhere -- was not something that was done in our family and circle of friends.
Sure, my cousin Joey had gone off to school in Arizona, or Washington state, or somewhere. And, yes, a few friends had gone to school out of state, too. But in our family, the accepted practice was to talk about the things we were going to do, and then not do them. So my announcing that I was going to go to Washington D.C. for a few months, and then to Morocco for a few months after that, was in keeping with our family's longstanding tradition of saying things like that. It's a tradition that continues to this day in some portions of the family, such as when Oldest constantly announces that she is, in fact, going to nursing school, and then does not actually go, or Dad constantly threatening to move to Arkansas where the property taxes are lower and it's not so cold.
And my brother Bill has made a virtual career out of virtual jobs he was virtually going to have. In between the few jobs that he has had, Bill has often and loudly announced that he was going to start a company, or had started a company, or was actually right at that very moment engaging in business without us even knowing it. These business ventures sometimes produced tangible results, like the mountain of cheesecakes that Bill's first wife had to bake when Bill discovered that she baked excellent cheesecakes, and then decided that he would go into business selling the excellent cheesecakes she baked, which required that she bake a massive amount of cheesecakes. I don't know what happened to them, but Bill is not today the Cheesecake King of Milwaukee, or even anywhere in the Cheesecake Royalty Line of Succession, so there had to have been some flaw in the business plan. My guess is that the "flaw" was that people are reluctant to buy cheesecakes, even excellent cheesecakes, if those cheesecakes are being sold out of the back of a car from which Tom Cochrane's "Life is a Highway" is blasting, and that was Bill's marketing plan.
Bill's businesses also resulted, among the outcomes I am aware of, in a closetful of unground coffeebeans (for mail order coffee) and a few lawsuits. I don't believe he's started any businesses in a while, but everytime I hear about someone selling something weird on eBay, I hold my breath.
Bill did at least try to do some of the things he said he was going to, which was more than could generally be said for our family. Very few people in my family managed to break away from the tradition of saying we were going to do something and then not doing it. I was always a little different, and I like to think I was a groundbreaker as one of the first people in my immediate family to have that follow-through, to say that I was going to do something and then actually do it, the kind of groundbreaker who could set the stage, eventually, for my sister to up and move to California on the spur of the moment to become a teacher.
I am, by the way, very impressed by that move, but it's a move that my Mom will never forgive. My sister is still living in California, years later, but Mom has never given up on her dream of forcing my sister to move home. She is constantly hatching plans to get my sister to move back home, and interpreting the news in ways that will support her schemes. When I mentioned to her that Sweetie's dad, who is a teacher in California, said that it's very difficult to get a job as a teacher there, Mom replied "Maybe Katie will have to move back home and work as a teacher here." I am, I like to think, a little responsible for Katie having the gumption to pack her things in a U-Haul and drive that U-Haul through the Rocky Mountains, and that inspiration all began when I decided to go to Washington, D.C.
I decided to go to D.C. and then to Morocco the way I make most of my major decisions: On the spur of the moment, and because I was lost. I was lost, and about to make those decisions, in the fall of 1993, when I was walking through the building in which I believed my advisor's office was located at my college. It was not located in the building that I was in, but I hadn't realized that right away and I wandered through the hallways looking for her office so that she could do the three things that she did for me throughout my undergraduate years. Those three things were (1) help me choose my classes, (2) tell me to take Astronomy 101 as my science credit, and (3) discourage me about my future goals.
She was very good at part 1, tried hard at number 3, and was not so good at task number 2. From the first time I met with her until the last semester, when I finally gave in, we'd meet each semester for her to help me pick my classes and for her to tell me that I wouldn't achieve my goals, and she always suggested that I take Astronomy as my science credit that semester. Each time she suggested it, I rejected it. I don't even know why; it just didn't sound that good to me, and it did sound hard. So instead, I took things like "Environmental Dynamics," and "Anthropology 101" and some sort of geography class that I only vaguely recall, all classes which fulfilled my science credits while not actually teaching me science at all.
The single thing I remember from all the science classes that I took as an undergraduate, the sole fact that I can recall, is this: My anthropology professor insisted on saying "Neander-Tall," instead of pronouncing it "Neander-Thall."
I don't even care if she was correct. She probably was. But it annoyed me each and every time she said it because I assumed that she did it to sound pretentious. Who ever heard of a silent "h?" So to this day, I remember only that she pronounced it that way. I don't know the correct way to pronounce the word, I don't know anything else about Neanderthals, I just know that's how she pronounced it and because of that, I make a point of saying "Neanderthal" with a "th" sound. Out of spite. Or class envy. Or boredom. I don't even know why I do it anymore, and it's not like I get that many chances to pronounce the word, anyway. But if given a chance, I will say Neanderthal. Try me.
I did, my senior year, after 1994, cave in and take astronomy, and it turned out that I loved it, loved it so much that I briefly considered switching majors from "political" science to "actual science" and becoming an astronomer. I didn't, though, because doing that would have extended my college career even longer, and I'd already been going a long time, and also because I didn't want to give my advisor the satisfaction. We had a love-hate relationship that was best exemplified by this exchange, when I told her I was applying to law school:
Her: What law school do you want to go to?
Me: The University of Wisconsin.
Her: You won't get in. Don't even try.
When I asked her for advice on how I could get in, she advised me to apply to other schools, instead, and suggested one down south that I'm pretty sure wasn't even accredited.
But in the fall of 1993 our relationship had not yet devolved to that level and I was looking for her office. I could not remember which building it was in from the last time I'd seen her nearly eight months before. I wandered around the hall of the building I wrongly believed her office to be in, passing a bulletin board crowded with posters and fliers and photocopies, the kind of billboard that ordinarily I would not even try to read because it was so full of papers that my eyes would just kind of glance off of it, unable to get a foothold on anything on the bulletin board and so I'd ignore it and move on, but there was a larger poster in the corner that said something about foreign study programs which managed to catch my eye. I stopped and read it, in part to kill time because I wasn't all that excited about going to see my advisor, anyway. The poster had a listing of various foreign study programs and what they cost and how long they lasted. As I read it, I suddenly and out of the blue developed a desire, a longing, to go to a foreign country.At that point in my life, my travels had been limited to a few vacations with my family: Tennessee, Maine, Florida, Virginia, and South Dakota. While those vacations had left me with a breadth of experience in American culture-- culture ranging from
"knowing what Wall Drug is" to "knowing the correct way to pronounce Mackinac Island*", I was lacking in experience with foreign countries, and suddenly my life in my tiny L-shaped efficiency apartment with my jobs at the movie theater and sub shop seemed boring and commonplace.The poster had exotic cities and countries listed: London, Paris, I think Moscow, maybe Tokyo, each of which sounded exciting and promising. And each had prices listed after them, and each of those prices was high.
But down at the bottom of the list was "Rabat, Morocco," with a note that the program was only two months, and a price of only $2,000. So I took the application and sat down and filled it out because I suddenly wanted to go to a foreign country and Rabat, Morocco, was the only foreign country I could afford to go to.
I wasn't exactly sure, then, where Morocco even was, despite being in my second year as a college student majoring in political science, a field of study which, while I wasn't entirely sure what it was about -- whenever people asked me what "political science" was I would shrug and say "it's about politics" -- I was pretty sure that a "political science" major meant I should know where the countries of the world were. But maybe not. Maybe that's for cartographers to know. I'm still not, to be honest, entirely sure what it is that political science majors are supposed to know. But I knew then, as I read that poster, that I wanted to go to a foreign country, and I knew I could afford to go only to Morocco.
So Morocco is was. I was confident that once I got into the program, I'd learn where the country was. I took the application out of the little box there, filled it out, and went to the office down the hall where I was supposed to hand it in. While waiting to do that, I noticed that there was also a program to spend a semester in Washington, D.C., attending classes and working for some government office or other group in our nation's capital. So I took an application for that and filled it out, too, and handed them both in.
Then I wandered back outside and eventually found my advisor's actual office and forgot, more or less, about both of the applications, until I got letters telling me that I'd been approved or selected or whatever the process was, for both, which is when I began telling my family "I'm going to Washington, D.C. And Morocco."
To which they would inevitably reply: "Great." Or "Nice." Or "That's good."
At Thanksgiving, I told my relatives "I'm going to D.C. next semester, and then Morocco."
"How nice for you," they would say, and go back to talking about whatever it was they talked about.
At Christmas, my brothers were trying to make plans for January. "I won't be here," I told them. "I'm going to Washington, D.C. And then Morocco."
"Okay," they'd say.
Shortly after Christmas, I asked Matt if I could store a few things at his house beginning in January. "Why?" he asked.
"Because I'm going to D.C., and then Morocco," I said.
He okayed it, but I know he didn't believe me, because when the day came for him to go drop me off at the train station in Milwaukee, he met me outside my apartment. As we loaded a couple of things into his car -- my suitcases and a large cardboard box that would be shipped to Washington, D.C., and also the hamster cage that had my hamster, "Machiavelli," in it for him to take back home with him ("Machiavelli the Hamster" would not keep his name long; he would be renamed "Hammy The Hamster" by my nephew Nick)-- Matt said to me, amidst the loading, "I can't believe you're actually going."
But I was, and I did. He drove me to the train station, where I picked up my suitcase, waved goodbye to him and to Machiavelli, and got onto the train that would take me to Washington D.C.
Oh, and: *It's pronounced "Mack-In-Naw."
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