Our Other Lives E. O 0 As you get older, you begin to realize,. longer be an thin%u A new, unsettling thought was creep- ing into my 10-year-old head: I'm too old to do that. If I wanted to get where she was, I realized, I needed to t was 1976. I was sprawled on the have started a long time ago, and red shag carpet in our TV with more than just endless cart- room, spellbound, watching Thea wheels around the lawn. It wasn't Nadia Comenici win the Sullivan so much that I wanted to be a Olympic gold medal for gymnas- gymnast. It was the fact that, for tics, when, suddenly, a knot formed in the first time, the door to a possible my stomach. future was closing before my eyes with a Thea Sullivan is a San Francisco thud. THEA SULLIVAN Special to The Jewish News l writer. Growing up, my parents gave me a clear message: you can be anything you want to be. Like most people of their generation, they'd had few choices, and took pride in offering their children the freedom they were denied. But given their lack of experience with unlimited options, they didn't think to warn me that I couldn't be everything, that there would be inevitable limits, choices to be made. This alarming discovery, beginning with Nadia, continued with increasing frequency as the years went on: without my even noticing it, whole possible lives started slipping right by. Professional dancer. Concert musician. Doogie Howser, M.D. Now, in my thirties, I'm more philo- sophical about it. If I were meant to be a violin prodigy, I would have felt an over- riding passion for the instrument, instead of abandoning it for baseball • when I was twelve. . If being a dancer was my path, I would have been really, really good at it. I was fair to middling. Even as I watched these futures zoom away-the high-speed bullet trains- and wondered if I should have tried harder to catch them, I harbored a secret relief: one more thing I didn't have to be. These days, I see the process of find- ing a path as an inevitable, necessary narrowing. We are drawn in particular directions, choices lead to more choices, and before we know it, our lives take on a certain shape. For me, that shape is defined by two activities I love, writing and teaching. They were the trains sitting patiently at the station long after the dust settled, waiting for me to notice them. It's not as . glamorous as some of the lives I'd imag- ined, but in my gut, there is no gnawing anxiety, no lurking wish to be doing something else. Most of the time, I feel a solid, persistent "yes." Still, it's poignant to think of the pos- sibilities that got left behind. Now and then, I ask people what they'd be doing in another life. My friend Dina, who raises money for museums, could see herself as a Supreme Court Justice. My husband would be a tug boat captain or a fire- fighter; in this life, he's a high school teacher. My mom, who owned a travel agency, has long dreamed of being a psychologist. Not all our alternate realities need remain in a parallel universe. Most of us, with a little luck, will live long enough di to reinvent ourselves a few times. At almost 60, my mother has just started a graduate program in counseling. And everybody knows about Grandma Moses' belated painting career. But some doors do inevitably close. At 37, it's probably too late for my hus- band to become a firefighter. Although he swears he's not regretful, when he seed the men jump out of the truck with their axes and billowing coats, he gazes after them with something like longing. This, it seems, is one of the lessons of age: there will be lives we don't have a chance to live, whether because of tim- ing, or circumstance, the process of elimination, or simply because we didn't want it badly enough. I have made some peace with limits:% the fact that I can't do everything. But what of those alter egos, the experiences we miss out on? Isn't there a way to make room, somehow, for all our poten- tial selves in the lives we have now? After all, we are more than our careers. In the midst of my adolescent agoniz- ing, a perceptive high school teacher asked me, "Can't you just dance becauscs you love it? Does it matter if you become a dancer?" At 16, with an imaginary clock tick- ing loudly in my ear, I had no patience for him. At 32, I see the wisdom in his question. My chance to become Nadia is decades gone, if it ever existed. But I can still turn a mean cartwheel in the grass, and breathe in the joy of being upside down. ❑ HAPPENINGS Saturday, Oct. 17 The New Orleans Klezmer All-Stars per- form for YAD. 8:30 p.m. At the Seventh House in Pontiac. Cost: $18, includes dancing, kosher appetizers, cash bar. Call Marc Berke, (248) 203-1458. Monday, Oct. 19 Hillel of Metro Detroit Coffee House Night. 9 p.m. Lonestar Coffee Co., 207 S. Woodward, Birmingham. (313) 577- 3459. Bring a can of kosher food to donate to Yad Ezra. Wednesday, Oct. 21 Young adult panel discussion about the November elections and current political events. 7:30 p.m. At the Max M. Fisher Federation Building, Bloomfield Hills. Sign 17p Now! Havdalah program, sponsored by the Rekindling Shabbat Young Adult Task Force. Saturday, Nov. 7, 7:15 p.m. Havdalah service and volunteer experience at the Pontiac Rescue_Mission, 35 E. Huron, Pontiac. Participants will host a party for the children at the mission. Admission: three cans of non-perishable food to donate. Reservation deadline is Nov. 3. (248) 203-1486. The Second Annual Midwest Conference on Women, Halacha, and Modernity, Sunday, Nov. 22. (847) 675-2200. IKOMMUNAI 10/16 1998 114 Detroit Jewish News