Year 23

In your twenty third year of life you get married. People will always tell you that you got married young, but you don't know what you're supposed to do when you meet the person you want to marry when you're young. Kick em to the curb and tell them to wait until you've had some fun? Assume that you'll meet someone equally as great when you're ready for it? Develop an elaborate maze, trap them in it, and then force them to escape in order to prove their love, obviously using a design that allows them to escape at the exact right moment. Actually that's kind of a great idea. Obviously this guy would guard the exit to the maze.

You remember everything about your wedding day. Okay, you don't. But, you do have a wonderful video that you watch on every anniversary....this may not be true. It's a little slow at the beginning. I'd suggest to anyone getting married soon that fire eaters and a magician are probably a good idea. Not so much for that day, but for the later one when your wife is trying to get you to watch the video. You're going to love it more if someone is sawed in half or married or whatever. ">

What's that glow you ask? That's youth baby. No substitute for it. We also lived in CA where the sun actually shows up fairly consistently.


And oh yeah that's love as well.
For my Bachelor peeps. "Why would you ever write this song and then share it with world."
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By the time you're twenty three you should have started working on your career. Instead you spend mornings helping ESL kids with reading and afternoons with little girls who put flowers in your hair. You've always thought of yourself as a good person but some days the kids wear you out. You find yourself just wanting the reading session to end, not giving a damn if they've learned a thing, just wanting them to read quietly. They never do. These kids constantly poke fun at each other, and it is so hard for you to remember back to your own fourth grade classroom. And when you do, you remember being quiet unless called upon. You remember winning at times test. You remember very little.

You remember Katie, the little six-year old girl you befriended that first year at the daycare. Her parents had abandoned her and she lived with her grandmother. On warm days you'd toss the basketball back and forth with her and listen to her talk about her hopes and dreams and how she was doing in school. It's amazing how resilent a child can be, against all odds, you hardly remember being six, it seemed like forever ago.

Years later when you are moving to Ann Arbor she says, "You won't forget me will you?" And you know that it is you who will be forgotten.

Twenty three is not a year for being sad.

Pro-You're old enough to know your limits and still young/stupid enough to enjoy them.

Pro-When you say something like, "I'm in love!" Their is a remarkable lack of jadedness that characterizes a word like "love" years later. You don't feel the need to dissect the difference between "in love" and "love." This is how I'll always feel you think.

Con-Unless you're a marine biologist or world explorer (not a real job) then you're probably working at a job that you don't love. You're starting to wonder if you should go back to school if this is all the "real world" has to offer. You hate terms like the "real world," primarily because the difference is so stark between college and work. You see a long line of blank years ahead of you. The time for waves and change seems gone. You are wrong of course, things will always change.

Pro-You are the best looking you will ever be. (This may not hold true across the board). Your mother once told you that the traditional peak was 25, but you think that 23 probably did it for you. It is a long and slow decline from here but you've conned someone into marrying you, so it doesn't really matter.

A long aside greatly abbreviated. I was going to whine about beauty and our complex relationship to it, primarily as consumers, but I decided not to. Instead I participated in the doppleganger thing that I'd avoided on facebook. Ergo; I proudly loaded in a picture of me from my younger days and was only too happy to discover the person who I most resembled was Dakota Fanning. I concluded that the face recognition software had made an obvious error and decided to try again with a more manly picture, shirt off, booze in my hand. And the computer came back with this:





Granted I've always thought of myself as a bit more masculine than myheritage.com, but what I mainly learned is that I'd have made a good looking women. Unfortunately, according to my h, I don't make the best looking man. I believe the low point was seeing Steve Buscemi gazing back at me with a 64 percent match. Really? So, as a dude I'm Stevie B. but as a woman I'm Veronica? Clearly, my life could have been easier with a little chromosome change.

Con-A couple of days before you are married you get your hair cut. This is like Samson and Delilah. Your power is gone. Soon you'll be up to your elbows in the sink and making pancakes on Saturdays.

Pro-You've still got seven years to write the great American novel even though you don't know you want to write yet.

Con-Time gets faster each year that you're on the earth. You imagine that at ninety you'll blink and suddenly you'll be ninety one.

Pro-You're not turning off the fan and trying to listen to the squirrels in your attic perhaps giving birth. "Is that the wind? I don't think that's the wind. I think that squirrel is giving birth."
"Then they'll have to cut a hole in our roof, which is going to get real expensive."
"Maybe they're fighting?"
"Maybe I should turn the fan back on."

At twenty three you are young and smart, a pretty decent driver, you still have flexible viewpoints about things and can actually be influenced by things like facts and science. The world is not yet a snow globe.

You remember having a horrible fight about the cost of a car repair. You remember walking two blocks to the ocean and sitting on a bluff above the dark sea, listening to the waves crash. These walks down to the ocean soothed you. It was good to be alone in the dark in front of infinity. It reminds you of your place in the world.

This is the actual first dance song. (Sorry wings of love).
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Elegy for a Silk Tree (Fiction)

Sometime, while you are away at college, three states away, your mother takes a lover. “She’s screwing some guy at her work,” your father says, directing it not so much to you, as to the clock on the microwave keeping silent time. You still haven’t adjusted to this new adult version of your father. You keep silent, study the soft insides of your palms. The tablecloth between you is white, and patterned repetitiously. Every other square is adorned with a yellow basket, bearing overripe apples. A girl bends in the distance, far away, small in comparison to many of the apples, to pick a tiny speck of an apple up. You trace the outline of her pig tails while your father cries to himself at the kitchen table, his beer, half-full, sitting between you, the amber liquid collecting light, looking like apple cider. You turn away from the beer, from your father. You look out the window at a small oak tree in the front of your parent’s yard. The tree’s leaves are turning bright red and pale yellow, falling when the wind changes speeds. This is not the sort of thing that men share. Your father taught you that.