Just An Average Girl

In Creative Writing classes, I was always taught that you should never write stories that began with: “Bob was just a typical guy,” or “It was an ordinary day.” We claim that such beginnings “bore” the reader from the very first line. If the day is “ordinary,” then why tell the tale? If Bob is “typical,” then why do we want to read about him? And, yet, my own personal story would begin no differently:

Sarah White is a typical Midwestern girl. She stands 5’6” tall with brown hair and brown eyes, right-handed, a size 10 (on most days), 8 ½ foot size, makes a middle-class wage, speaks with a Northwest Ohio “accent”—which is considered to be “no accent”—the one that broadcasters are taught to use in school. She tries not to lie, steal, cheat, kill (a hard one when driving around Chicago). She shows compassion when appropriate, leading a “laid back” life, not bothering to “fret” about most things. Life has a way of sorting things out, if a person is patient and slow to anger. A Protestant raised with a Puritan work ethic (hard work, limited spending), she possesses a last name that is as bland and ordinary as her complexion.

Sarah White is profoundly average. She is “the girl next door.” Her parents are still married. They live on the same street where she grew up, in the same house where her father carried her mother over the threshold. Her parents had two children: a boy and a girl. Growing up, Sarah owned hamsters, fish, a poodle named P.J. and then a cat named George. On Saturday nights, her parents made them watch the Lawrence Welk show. They would pop popcorn and watch The Waltons, MASH, Little House on the Prairie—she still recalls the cartoon Puff the Magic Dragon with a smile. Sarah owns Star Wars figures, grew up with a mad crush on all of the heroes—Luke, Leia, and Han. She played with Barbies, skinned her knees while roller skating on the uneven sidewalks, learned to ride her bicycle on humid summer nights after supper.

Sarah White is extraordinarily ordinary. She grew up knowing both sets of her grandparents, who all lived in her same small town. She even knew her great-grandmothers—two feisty women who did not “go gentle into that good night.” Her Grandmother White’s mother traveled the country until the very end of her life. Her Grandfather White’s mother, who had been divorced from her husband for decades and had not remarried, was a firm and fiercely independent New England woman.

With her ethnicity from England, Scotland, and Ireland, Sarah descends from a stock of people who forged the New World, fought in the Revolutionary War, and settled down to the expected lives of work and longing.

In the end, Sarah White is like anyone else. She doesn’t believe that people are like snowflakes—each unique. She cries and smiles and dreams and bleeds like every other human being on the planet, just as strong and just as fragile. She can become lost in a crowd and many people have told her that she “reminds them of someone else.” Strangers already feel like they know her. Perhaps they do.

Maybe that’s the difference between life and a story—in stories, we try to create quirky people to make them seem “real,” but truth be told, our lives are mirrors of other lives that have come before us and that will echo after us. Maybe we should celebrate the comfort inherent in that instead of trying to make ourselves and our stories into something more than they truly are. I am you and you are me and we all share these pronouns in some form or another.

Even in our stories, we seem to be thirsting for “sameness.” As the movie Shadowlands says, “We read to know we’re not alone.” Even in the exotic, we search for the familiar and that is what makes the connection electric. You are not me but like me and sometimes you are me—when trying to express your individuality in words but you cannot without me.

Sarah White is just an average girl with plenty of stories to tell but none as powerful as the "ordinary" one she is living.

At the Midterm

The other day someone said the phrase I keep hearing repeated more and more—“you’re middle-aged.”

At 34, I suppose a case could be argued. The grey hairs glint in the light. Extra weight clings tenaciously to my tummy. I see lines and wrinkles where the skin was once soft and smooth. My body shows the effects of aging—a process millions of people throughout thousands of years have tried to tame. In the end, we always come to our end: wrinkled and worn.

In academia, at the halfway point, we give grades, midterms, sometimes evaluations to see how the students are progressing. I am having my students answer questions about if they feel their writing has improved, what changes would they like to make, what do they feel they have learned that they didn’t know before.

And, this made me start to think about being middle-aged.

What have I learned so far? What changes would I make? How have I improved?

Strangely, I don’t know that I have improved. Changed, definitely. I wonder if our progression through life can be quantified in terms of reaching some “better” level. Maybe we just get older. We accumulate more experiences, knowledge, etc, but am I “better” than I was when I was younger?

As I get older, I am becoming much more fascinated by Time. Probably because half of my life has been lived. Or, should I say that I have lived half of the average lifespan of a human being? I don’t know what my lifespan will be. Maybe only a day more, maybe 70 years more.

One of my professors told us once that he believed in the existence of souls because there always seems to be a fundamental part of us that does not change. He said that in his being was an essential core that did not feel much different than he did at seventeen. He was probably in his 50s. I remember sitting in my desk mulling over this notion. I already believed in a soul, but I considered his argument.

I suppose that I am still me. I don’t know if I am Sarah per se. Sarah is a name that my parents selected. I could just as easily be Mary, or Jane, or…Jack? I recognize a certain element of myself that seems unchanging, perhaps spurned on by memory and consciousness. But, is the soul really so steadfast?

Time, aging seem to make you even more aware of the various layers involved with being human—memories from twenty years ago that feel like just yesterday, aches seem more nagging on long walks—the body weakens, the mind remembers, our “souls” retain ourselves? Perhaps.

Just last night, it occurred to me that it had been fifteen years since my brother died. I was nineteen at the time. Something about that profound passage of Time struck me. I have lived almost as much life as I had on St. Patrick’s Day 1994. I admit, these last fifteen years have gone much more quickly than those first nineteen. As you age, Time seems to be on a mad dash towards that final finish line.

So, the question remains: what have I learned at the Midterm? I have learned that I am less certain about some things in my life than I was. I am also much less flexible. I will have a confrontation with someone if I feel that I am not being heard or respected. I have learned that these might not necessarily be changes for the “better.”

I always say that “life is the journey, not the destination.” Aging has taught me, though, that while I still enjoy a good amble, the time is coming to walk with a bit more purpose.