Travel into the future and you’ll see the hero is a mother. Ghosts tug her clothes and hands, and trail behind her, scuffing their shoes; they run so far ahead, they grow smaller and smaller until she can cover them with her thumb. She knows all their tricks. She pulls a tray from the oven and extinguishes the flames in the sink, her antique ring, cut red glass with a gilded back, weathering those changes. Each morning, she picks one good thing—a fur blanket, a warm cup of coffee with cream, a gray cat curled and sleeping in its basket—and holds it in her mind, like a jewel, all day. Sometimes she has to breathe and lead her mind back to it. Can she bear the heavy clouds hovering near the horizon, impersonating stillness, for yet another day? For years, she paints and paints, always a small blurry figure walking away. 

​It started with a dining room table and chairs, enough for a small dinner party where we would converse about the composition of novels or maybe music or film (not movies, but film or cinema). I even bought furniture for the front room of the house I was renting, a closed-in porch that pretended to be a sunroom, but was too hot when the sun was out, too cold when the winters of Indiana settled in. Nobody ever sat on the couch, and I never occupied the chair, save for in my imagination when we moved from the table to have dessert and discussions about politics or art or other Important Issues.
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Or maybe it began when I looked through catalogs: one from public radio with shirts emblazoned with Not now, Carmen, I’m Bizet or Books: The Original Hand-Held Device and ties modeled from Frank Lloyd Wright designs or one from Levenger filled with barrister bookcases with a B chiseled into the glass and fountain pens that cost more than the engagement ring I bought for my first wife, the one who would leave before I could ever afford one shelf, even without the engraving.

I fell in love with skyscrapers and public transportation, so I traded in the mountains for a metropolis, of sorts. And now when I go home, or a place that looks like it—difficult to tell the difference—the one-fingered wave on the steering wheel that once welcomed me home has transformed into a finger flipped at a foreign entity with bumper stickers for the other side. Or maybe I’m the one who’s changed.

In “Thinking as a Hobby,” William Golding writes, “It is easy to buy small plaster models of what you think life is like.” To a boy from Carter County, Tennessee, who ended up in graduate school in the Humanities, it was impossible to know what a different life could look like, so I missed a world I never had, a world where books matter more than football scores, where philosophers filled my mind more than the family I left behind. I never knew what I had lost. I never knew what I had gained. I never knew which was which.

​I didn’t believe Jamie would beat you up, find you with his fists after school even though I told him to, every day for a few weeks. I treated life like the Atari video games that were just becoming popular, something like Chopper Command, where we would hit reset every time we made a mistake all so we could make another and another and another. He told me about it on the bus ride home; we were proud of ourselves. If I saw the students I teach behaving that way, I would want to shake them until their self-satisfaction fell off their faces and rolled down the hallway, never to be seen again. I’ve passed middle age by now, so I wear self-righteousness on a too regular basis, as if I never made such mistakes myself. But what can I say for the self I was then?

I was young and I was dumb and I wanted not to be on the bottom of the popularity pyramid for at least one moment, I wanted to know what it felt like to be aligned with Jamie and Alan and Joey who beat me up like it was their hobby, beat me up on a rotation like the universe had employed them to keep me in my place, and I thought that I could show that you were beneath us all—though that was already obvious to everyone, even me—and I was mean, though I didn’t know it then, and I wanted somebody else to suffer like I did, that feeling of wonder that came over me when I looked at other boys talking and playing with ease, without wondering what everybody was thinking about them all the time and when my parents sent me to your house to explain—as I had said over and over that I didn’t do it; I didn’t do it; I didn’t do it—your mother didn’t believe me because she knew me better than I knew myself, but you forgave me and I was almost in tears and I said I was sorry; I was sorry; I was so so sorry, and I never did anything like it again. But I know enough now to know I didn’t change—I’m still mean and I’m still dumb—but at least I rearranged what I worry about: popularity isn’t a priority; people’s opinions are as fickle as a boy who turned on his next door neighbor just to prove he could. And my ego has never recovered from the beating I gave it that night.