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

