Twenty Five

In your twenty fifth year you are cold. The two you moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan and promptly began to freeze to death. It snowed seventy two inches that winter. And, in every picture taken your shoulders are slightly hunched as you cringe in that damnable wind.

You try and get a real job for two months before settling back into child care. You begin work as a preschool teacher. As it turns out, you don't really care for toddlers en massse. Individually little ones can be quite cute, as a group it's sort of like trying to corral a group of coyotes while riding sidesaddle on a chicken. Which is to say, not easy.

You do things like call this kid named Teddy Eddie. You say it really fast but after a while he starts to catch on and occasionally shouts, (the little hellion had no voice control) "My name not Eddie. It's Teddy." I didn't correct his grammar, rather I quickly told him that I'd been saying Teddy all along. Try it. Say Edddddyyyyy quite loudly and you'll notice that by the end you might as well have said Teddy. So yeah, rough year, I apparently spent it driving four year olds crazy.

I don't really know what else to say. They didn't like me, and I didn't like them.

Pros-Peak of physical attractiveness. (Not for me though). Oh to be twenty-three...

Cons-Pre-school kids. All of them.

Cons-The snow.

Cons-Though it's still true that at twenty-five you're young enough to be working on that career people start to wonder what exactly you're doing teaching preschool or working the late shift in the Chuck E. Cheese outfit. It's a dangerous age. People start to expect things.

Pros-You are still young and living in a culture that values youth and beauty a whole heck of a lot.

Con-Most of your co-workers are angry women in their early thirties.

I hit a rough patch in my mid-twenties. I started to wonder what exactly I was doing with my life. I hadn't pictured myself arguing with screaming naked three year old's for a living, and it began to cause a bit of consternation. I think turning twenty five was probably the most stressful birthday I've ever had.

You remember living below ground level, spinning out in your car on the first big day of snow. You remember falling four times in your parking lot one morning as you attempted to get into your car.

You remember this crazy kid who used to throw cars at the others, who sent one of the teachers to the hospital. You remember thinking even then that he'd probably end up in prison some day. You can't remember being five yourself.

At best you remember playing cards with great friends and sledding down hills in the warmth of a rare sunny day. Mostly what you remember though is the oppressiveness of that year. You remembered walking down the street years before in San Francisco with your mother and having her tell you you could do anything and hearing the same thing from your mentor. At twenty-five you begin to wonder if you can do just one thing. Forget everything. It would be nice to find that one thing.

You listen to this and think that if you ever wrote music the lyrics would be something like this.
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At night you lie awake and think about all the places that your life is not going to. You think and you think, mostly about yourself. Twenty-five is apparently still too young to have learned to look outward in times of trial rather than obsessing over the self. You suppose that's a lesson you'll have to learn at any age.

Elegy for a silk tree

The tree trunk is four hand-widths wide at its base. The bark is smooth, but it has been scored by the beak of a woodpecker that you’ve heard, but never seen. You are not sure if this is even true. Perhaps you have seen him and just forgot. It is easier to remember him in the ghostly marks he leaves, the little holes he drills searching for grubs. The tree bears these scars in silence. Your littlest finger fits perfectly into most of the holes, and you hold it there, imagining in this way, that you can hear the beating heart of the tree. In the early morning, long before you have risen from sleep, you can hear the woodpecker beating out his silent rhythm on the limbs of the tree. And you dream of men hammering on cement, and your father, putting up a picture in the living room, all alone. You imagine that the woodpecker looks something like the woodpecker on television though you know this is not true. He is small, and black and sad. Sometimes, with your fingers still inside the tree you say a small prayer, something you picked up in church. You do not know the term sacrilegious. Last week, you asked your teacher, an old, white haired woman, if trees and woodpecker’s had souls and some of the kids from higher grades laughed. You were very earnest. Your heart was beating its own insane rhythm like the woodpecker, you had to know. “Oh honey,” the teacher said, Don’t ask silly things just to impress these boys,” nodding to the laughing kids who are not your friends. You sat down on the orange rug and watched dust motes fall in the rectangle of light. A spider in the corner spun a web in solitude.