I was eating my lunch outside of security at the San Francisco airport the other day, on my way home to Seattle, when an older man with a bushy beard and a boho hat came and sat near me in the only other available chair in the area. An airline employee helped install him: he had couple of big suitcases, a carry-on, and some kind of pet carrier. There had been some kind of problem with his itinerary, and ultimately it turned out that the airline would have to refund him his ticket and he’d have to pay a different airline if he really wanted to get to Savannah, GA, that day. He really, really did: this wasn’t a vacation for him — he was moving there from Calif to live with his sister.
We started talking and I found out we were only a year apart in age and were both from Long Island. He had been (or maybe still was) a musician — “anything with strings” — and had lived in a number of places in the USA. He mentioned having some health problems, so my guess is that was one reason for the move. After a few minutes conversing, he said something to me that I have heard many, many times over the years — “you’ve had such an interesting life.” — And this from a guy who’d been a pro musician, among other things, and was traveling with (as it turned out) a 50-year-old parrot. Hmm.
Well, OK, these days I can acknowledge that I have had an interesting life (hence the “extraordinary ordinary” autobio project underway). But the thought has only lately occurred to me that just because someone observes or asserts that I have had an interesting life does not mean that they think their own life is less interesting or more pedestrian or ordinary than mine. This is not some kind of zero-sum game! Many people have lives that appear from the outside to be humdrum and routine: certainly the task of keeping food on the table and the wolf from the door often requires (in the USA, at least) working one or more jobs, day-in, day-out, with minimal time off (compared to other first-world countries). Still, even the most routine-looking lives are punctuated by events.
That said, I acknowledge that I have had a life that is likely more interesting (or certainly more varied) than most people experience: I’ve gotten to sing in world-class venues with high-level choirs; I’ve spoken at symposia; I have traveled extensively; I’ve had some interesting jobs; I have an interesting husband and interesting kids; I have an unusual religious history that includes a couple of brushes with notoriety; I’ve had fun collecting rocks and fossils and shells; I’ve met many other interesting people; I’ve drawn and painted and created assemblage art —and all this just touches on the events and circumstances that have punctuated the routines and “humdrumitude” of my day-to-day life.
Day-to-day life at this moment feels rather fraught in this time of the Second Trump Debacle. I am making some noise and protesting (not enough yet, but at least some). However, I am also working against an internal sense that my memory is not getting any better with age. (Even in elementary school, while still in single digits, it greatly bothered me that there were gaps in what I could remember in the medium-term, and this has remained true pretty much the case my entire life.) So I will try to write down what I can about my putative interesting life, hopefully in an interesting way.
