In Praise of White After Labor Day

There were many times in my life when I thought I'd never get married. There were many factors contributing to this, including, but not limited to, my own parents and their marital buffet of dysfunctions, the boys in my high school class being more interested in basketballs and guitars than hanging out, and the fact that I read Virginia Woolf's "A Room of One's Own," and vowed to always have my own room. I just assumed that as long as I was single, I would have that room all to myself and no one would ever be the boss of me. I would be able to write and dream and be as silly as I was in my secret journal, which my friends and sister kept finding and reading. Very annoying for a slightly self-conscious high school cheerleader. So I began keeping a decoy journal and kept my real journal very, very secretly hidden in the back of my underwear drawer.

So there I was, all cozy in "A Room of One's Own," only I was sort of lonely. I didn't know that I'd be lonely, but I was. There were friends and later, in college, roommates and some random flings, and there was all the books and essays and academic work my little old brain would ever want, as well as cool art and cheap wine, but none of that really made up for the fact that I would always go back to my own room, and though my own, it was just me.

In my times of lonely living, I came back to stories. All my family, no matter what our other faults, are excellent storytellers. I always loved being part of a crew that would linger until 1:00 in the morning, sitting around with high school yearbooks, letting the stories roll about classmates, some of whom I still knew. My imagination roamed as I heard about the jock who died in the water at Starved Rock and the cute black girl named Lamb who my dad secretly dated in junior high. She had one of those plastic pink bow barrettes stuck in her huge afro -- I have yet to use her as a character in my own writing, but somewhere, sooner or later, I'm sure she'll emerge, pink barrette and all.

One story that stuck with me later in my own room came from my Aunt Sue. She was always content in her singleness, and as I got older, I understood why. She'd been engaged to married when suddenly, her fiancee stopped talking to her for the last three months leading up to their wedding. Bad. But even worse, in a sense, was that as a twenty-something, she found herself going to a lot of weddings and sitting around tables at the receptions, making bets with her fellow receptionees about how long the marriages would last. There was usually much green put down on the year-or-less category. So many of her friends, she told me, were just getting married because they were afraid of being alone, not because they loved and even particularly liked the other person. I would vow, fervently in my idealist teenage way, that no matter what, I would never get married just to have another body in my room.

And she smiled, maybe a little idealistically herself: "I'd rather be single forever than realize that I married the wrong person for the wrong reasons."

You know, I thought she might be single forever. I thought I might, too, at one point. But here it is, 2006, and as of two weeks ago, she's engaged to be married for the first time to a really wonderful man. She's getting married in February and moving into a new house after she sells her home.This is radical upheaval, the kind that only love inspires, and here, after fifty years, she's found it. She's currently throwing her life into mix-up-mix-down of future homesharing, trying to figure out what this new way of living is going to look like, because, let's be honest, these transitions rarely happen like they do in good writing. Smoothly, connectedly, without total randomness. As much as I admire good writing, I admire the willingness to mix it up-down even more. Especially years after you're supposed to be done doing that kind of stuff.

So, this is in praise of all the things that are supposed to be over at certain points of your life: high school, loneliness, conversations about "the way it is," secret journals to throw off your friends (or maybe blogs), artistic careers, starting over, new houses, engagements, and walking down the aisle for the first time as a mature woman in a fancy white dress in the middle of winter. These things are never off the table, something I remember in a room of my own, in a chair of my own, in a home shared with someone who respects my room and chair. Virginia would be delighted, I think.