Sunglasses in the rain

I've never been what you would call a great skier.
In fact, I've never been what anyone would call a great skier. Getting into
skiing always seemed to me like getting into illegal drugs: an expensive,
dangerous habit in which I would be surrounded by people who would call me
"dude." I have never attempted to be anything other than a mediocre skier.

Except once.

When I was a sophomore in high school, my friend Matt Wrenn convinced me
to join him for a ski trip to New Hampshire. Matt succeeded based on his
arguments that a). it would be really exciting and b). a girl I really liked
by the name of Michele would be at the same place at the same time. For
some reason, I thought I'd find it less awkward to approach someone while
wearing ski pants, moon boots, and a face full of frozen snot. I knew next
to nothing about skiing, but I didn't want Matt to know how little I knew
(although it was probably fairly obvious when I began looking for a way to
attach my rented skis to my sneakers) so I didn't ask him any questions.

The only fact I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt was that it was very
important to wear sunglasses when you were skiing. You could go blind
without sunglasses. I put my sunglasses on before my skis, my coat, or
anything else, so that I did a lot of stumbling around before we left the
lodge. I did even more stumbling once we made it outside, since it was
raining.

My glasses fogged up almost immediately, so that I could only see a few
feet in front of me. I stuck close to Matt, doing whatever it was that he
did -- turning when he turned, ducking my head when he ducked, shouting out
"Dude!" whenever he said anything. After a few hours on the slopes, I
couldn't imagine why I had ever thought skiing would be so difficult. Matt
began guiding us down more and more difficult trails, paths marked by
double and triple black diamonds, skulls and crossbones, rolls of police
tape. Nothing fazed me. From time to time, Matt would offer a few words
of praise, telling me how much he'd thought I'd learned in a short time.

"Dude!" I agreed.

And then my glasses fell off. For the first time that afternoon, I
could see where we were and what we were doing.

"Holy crap!" I said. "This is a mountain! We...are...on...a...
mountain!"

"Dude?" Matt asked.

"That's it," I said, sitting down. "You go ahead. I'm riding down this
one on my butt." And that's just what I did, making for a less-than-
impressive entrance when I slumped to the end of the mountain, right in
front of Michele.

I haven't seen Matt, Michele, or the business end of a ski pole in years.
But I remember the way I felt that afternoon, because I've had that feeling
all over again in recent weeks. The last few months have been the busiest
of my entire life. When I wasn't going to class or teaching class or
tutoring students or writing short stories or writing newspaper stories or
paying bills or grading papers or dealing with whatever minor life crisis
had come up that week, I was lying in bed at three o'clock in the morning
thinking about it. I don't miss those days at all, and I've been looking
forward to a time when I could sit back, relax a little, and take a long,
hard look at my life.

And the thing is, I'm doing pretty well.

And that's really scary.

For the first time in my life, I'm doing exactly what I want to be doing.
I'm writing every day. I'm reading and learning, meeting interesting people,
traveling all over the place and discovering new things about myself and
the world. I have family, friends, and a relationship that makes me really
happy. I feel like I'm growing as a writer and a person. I've even learned
how to match my belt to my shoes (it isn't as easy as it looks).

And all of that is great, as long as I don't think about it too much.
As long as I'm perpetually busy, moving at top speed, worrying about the
distinction between fiction and autobiography in Isabel Allende or the
budget crisis in the Pembroke schools or my own use of narrative voice in a
short story -- I'm fine. An overcaffeinated, paranoid, frenetic version of
fine, but fine nonetheless. It's when I stop to realize the good fortune
I've more or less stumbled into, when I realize how easy it would be for me
to lose everything I've come to care about, that I begin to panic. I want
to hunker down, clutch all the people and things I love in a death grip,
close my eyes, and scream until the fear goes away. I think a lot of people
feel this way when they reach a certain point in life. Maybe it's why so
many people become conservatives as they get older. I know it's not the way
I want to live.

I've always loved the film O Brother, Where Art Thou because of
its vision of the Depression. Rather than treating that period as one of
the darkest in American history, the film presents it as a time of
possibility -- when, because of the breakdown of law and the social order,
anything seemed possible. I feel like the same thing might be true today.
Yes, we're faced with a terrible economy, terrible wars, a terrible
President, and the prospect of a truly terrible movie about the Incredible
Hulk. And it would be so much easier for me to try to hide from all of it
in my own private world of short stories, Seinfeld reruns and
Superman, to make holding on to what I have my only goal.

But if there's one thing I've learned from watching VH-1's I Love the
80s, it's that everything that refuses to change must die. Everyone who
refuses to take risks becomes old, stagnant, and boring. Burying my head
in the sand might help me to avoid seeing any reference to From Justin to
Kelly, but it would also prevent me from becoming the kind of person I'd
like to be, in a world where anything is suddenly possible. (Have you
seen the previews for The Mullets? Anything is possible).

Besides, skiing is more fun without sunglasses. Or so I'm told. I
intend to find out for sure next winter.

Dude.