Chapter VI:
On The Rooftop

Continued From
Chapter V: Of Kansas & Sunrises

I don’t know why I was expecting anything else, but the process of saying goodbye was entirely underwhelming.  I had gone through the whole process when I left Boston eight years earlier and I recalled that even back then the process felt no different.

Of course, it was different.  When I left Boston after eighth grade, I had no promise of ever moving back.  For all I knew, I would never again in my life see most of my Boston friends.  But moving to Leawood was different.  When I began thinking about leaving Seattle for Leawood, I had made a promise to myself that I would, someday, move back.  In that sense, I suppose, I didn’t think the goodbyes were at all permanent this time.

I had found it helpful to not even say goodbye to some of my closest friends.  The best I could do was a heavy-hearted see you later. If I had to think about the idea of a for-real-as-in-maybe-never-see-you-again goodbye, I wouldn’t have survived the process.  I had to view the move to Leawood as completely temporary just to cope with the reality of my situation.

Sometimes, I’ve noticed, it is necessary to change the facts of a situation to make it easier to deal with.  My sense is that there’s probably something very significant about this idea.  It seems like it is probably quite similar to the lovers’ myth.

The whole process of graduating from college had been a similarly underwhelming experience.  I woke up on the day of my commencement expecting that the experience would hold some significant change in perspective.  I woke up on the day after my commencement with the realization that I felt no different.

My roommate Zachary compared it to certain rites of passage.

“Think about your twenty-first birthday,” he suggested. “You wake up in the morning expecting to feel completely different–like a real adult.  In reality, it’s just another day.  Maybe the only difference you wake up feeling is a little bit of a hangover.  But that goes away quick.”

I remember laughing to myself.  Zachary’s words were completely true.  Certain rites of passage did mark significant points of development, but the day or the ritual or the ceremony itself had always been a little bit underwhelming in my own experience.  Commencement was a lot like that.

Zachary and I, in addition to our massive bedroom window, had two other windows that opened onto the roof of our house.  We had developed a habit of retreating to our rooftop in moments of crisis.  Somehow the air seemed fresher three stories above the street.  In the back of my mind I suspected that it was always easier to think clearly while sitting on a rooftop.  Maybe it was the stars that helped this clear thinking.  Maybe it was something else.

One week after commencement I invited Haylie to come sit on the roof.  It had become a sacred place for me and it was something I was excited to share with her.

The conversations that Haylie and I had were never particularly concise.  When we talked, we never simply went until we had reached a clear conclusion.  It seemed instead that every time we met we would just begin where we had left off.  And we would always leave a conversation open for later continuation.  When Haylie joined me on the roof we continued the conversation that had begun under the Aurora Bridge–the conversation that began with Haylie’s difficulty confronting the end of her experience at University.

As I think about our evening on the rooftop, I realize that Haylie and I had been asking the exact same question in the week since commencement.  We had both spent the last week asking the very simple question, “now what?”

Because neither of us had any clear answer to the question, we sat in silence.  We watched traffic on the expressway in the distance.  We watched the nighttime activity of boats on Lake Washington.  We smiled at each other.  We did everything except approach the question that had defined our recent days.

Now what?

Haylie was the first one to break the silence.

“I don’t think that any of the adults in our lives have been faithful to us,” she said.  I must have looked at her with the kind of look that suggests that I had no idea what she was talking about.  She took this as a cue to continue.

“I’m serious,” she said, almost seeming to laugh at the oddity of her grand claim.  “Think about it.  I can’t think of a single adult in my life who has been honest about the fact that after college, it is completely up to us to decide what we want to do for the rest of our lives.  None of them even suggest that there’s any difficulty here.  They all seem to suggest that it’s no problem to find a job, find a partner, start a life, start a family.  None of them seem to even acknowledge the fact that it’s a time of confusion–a time of asking ourselves what, in God’s name, we are to do with life.”

Haylie explained how up until now, the course of our lives had been more or less prescribed for us.  We go to college because that’s what we’re supposed to do after high school.  “But what about after college?  Now what?” she asked.

Hell if I know, I was tempted to say.

“Just think of how every adult in your life has asked you what you’re up to now that you’re done with school,” she went on.  “Their asking that question presupposes the idea that we should to have things figured out–that we should have some sensible course of action.  And think about how disappointed some of them look when you tell them you’re not sure what the next steps look like.”

Haylie’s words seemed true, but I wasn’t sure what to say.

“Tell me more,” I asked.  I had learned many years prior that one of the best ways to deepen understanding is to “mine for details” by asking the simple question, tell me more. Tell me more, of course, is no question at all.  It’s more of an instruction, but it works.

Haylie explained how overwhelming it was to consider the fact that the decisions she was making right then would lay the foundation for the rest of her life.  “Life is now happening for real,” she said.

I didn’t really know what to say.  I waited for Haylie to continue.

“But what if I make a mistake?” she eventually asked.  “What if I choose wrong?”

Haylie and I had once engaged the age-old question of whether or not something like fate could possibly exist.  She was convinced that there was no possibility of anything like fate actually existing.  I had at first disagreed, convinced that there must be something like fate at work in the world.

I very clearly remember our talking about this question because I had made a drastic error in my argument.

I had argued that there must be such a thing as fate because there appears to be too much order in the world for life to be a matter of simple chance.  I had to believe life could not just be a series of contingent occurrences.  It was just like I had agreed several years earlier with Emily–there could not possibly be such a thing as an accident–everything had to be a part of some plan.

I explained this to Haylie, managing to argue my entire case without once thinking about her sister-in-law Annie.  I was accordingly mortified when, halfway through a sentence, I realized how offensive my words must have been to Haylie.

If I was going to put my money where my mouth was, I would have had to defend the idea that Annie’s kidnapping was part of some master plan.  And there was no chance that I could argue that the kidnapping and likely murder of somebody’s family member was part of any plan.  It was easy for a person like me to talk about some grand master plan because I had never experienced firsthand the reality of plans going wrong.  It wasn’t so easy for Haylie to believe that everything happens for a reason.

In other conversations, Haylie had spoken passionately about the fact that chance wins out over order every day.  Bad things happen.  Plans go wrong.  Dreams get lost.  And in a single moment a sister-in-law vanishes and lives are changed forever.

The only reason I mention the idea of fate to is to explain Haylie’s understanding of the world.  Haylie understood that if she didn’t proactively work against chance and chaos, nature would run its course without her.  The world would go on and events would transpire with or without any consideration of her own desires, dreams, wishes, plans, aspirations, whatever.

This meant Haylie’s life was one that engaged disorder head on.  If there was no such thing as fate, it would mean that she would need to be single-handedly responsible for guiding her own steps through life.

“What if I chose wrong?”

Haylie’s question hung heavy on that rooftop.

After a moment of silence and the realization that I had no way to directly address her question, I responded to her question with a question.

“What do you want out of life,” I asked.  I wasn’t sure exactly where I was going with this question, but I was confident that a question as broad as this one would eventually lead to some truth that might be applicable to the situation.

“What do you mean?” she asked back.

“I mean, you’re ninety-five years old.  You look back on a long life.  What are you looking back on?”

I was glad that I was the one asking this question.  If Haylie had asked me a question this broad and vague, I’d have probably resulted to my default response.  Hell if I know.

She paused for a moment, appearing to consider several different responses.

Haylie eventually answered that she wanted to look back on life at ninety-five years of age and see that she was faithful to God’s will for her life.

While sincere and beautiful, I couldn’t help but think that Haylie’s response was a little bit of a cop-out.

“You can do better than that,” I said, pressing her on.  She said that she couldn’t do any better without thinking a lot more about the question.

Before I could press further she had done what I was terrified she would do–she turned the question on me.

I told Haylie that her asking me the same question violated a law of conversation.  There’s a law somewhere that says something about it being unacceptable to ask a person to answer their own vague and possibly unanswerable question.  My sense is that everybody can probably understand this phenomenon.  It’s the phenomenon that is generally responded to with the words, that’s not fair–you can’t ask me that back. Maybe I’m the only one who experiences this.

I took a moment to consider what a thoughtful response might be.  My feeling like Haylie’s answer was a cop-out meant that any answer I offered had to be substantial.

“Well, I know that I want to have children,” I began. “So at ninety-five years old, I’m probably sitting by a fireplace, talking to my grandchildren.  Probably my great-grandchildren too.  And I’m probably telling them stories about adventures and travels, so that probably means that I want to spend some time seeing different parts of the country and the world.  And I probably want to be sharing with them something meaningful about these adventures, so that probably means that it’s important for me to be able to look back on a meaningful vocation.”

Haylie looked intrigued.  I was surprised at the fact that once I began imagining this hypothetical situation in my head, the details began to come quite naturally.

This hypothetical rabbit trail had begun with with Haylie’s question, what if I choose wrong?

While I was telling Haylie about the fireplace and the great-grandchildren I began to get a sense of how my vague question had anything to do with her own question.

“Right there,” I went on, “I have at least three clear priorities.  It’s important for me to have a family.  It’s important for me to continue exploring the vastness of our world.  And it’s important that my vocation be meaningful.”

Haylie nodded as if to suggest she was interested in where I was headed with this idea.

“Beyond those three things, there are probably many more.  Some more important than others.  The fact that I could come up with those three things so quickly probably means that they are some of the biggest things I want out of life.  And I bet if I spent some time thinking about those three things, I would be able to determine some order of importance among the three.”

Both Haylie and I were well aware that I had not yet done anything to address her question, what if I choose wrong?

“Once I decide the level of importance I place on those three things,” I said, looking to return to Haylie’s original question, “I have some idea of where to go.  If I decide that the great-grandchildren are the most important of the three, then maybe my main effort right now is going to be focused on working toward a family.  If I decide that the vocation is the most important of those three, then maybe my first concern is going to be to focus on establishing a solid career path early on.  If I decide that having adventurous stories is most important, maybe my focus needs to be on seeking out adventure and traveling the country and the world.”

I was becoming aware that this was one of those situations where you don’t really discover what you’re trying to say until you say it.  External processing, a friend had once called it.

I continued to explain my newly formed understanding that maybe our next steps in life are dictated by the question of what we want out of it–what we want to be able to look back on when we celebrate our ninety-fifth birthday.

Haylie seemed to be tracking with me.  My thoughts on the issue were new enough that I had not yet had the opportunity to consider whether my words were true, or whether they were simply magical thinking.

I knew fully that I had still not done anything to address Haylie’s question, what if I choose wrong?