1. To high-five someone driving a car while driving my own car (slowly) in the opposite direction.
2. To own a convertible.
3. To teach part time, write part time, and host fabulous dinner parties in the evenings.
4. To one day be able to pay someone else to do my laundry.
5. To drive across the country on my own.
It is a great honor for me to share with you that I have recently made one of those dreams come true and am working on my second.
This weekend, I went back to my hometown, Fridley, Minnesota, a town that made into the top three in Minnesota for underage illegal alcohol, tobacco, and marijuana use when I graduated back in 1996. I never loved my hometown in high school. There was a nasty vein of redneck racism that ran through the school for a year. Clothing, status, and popularity were as important there as they were at any school, and while I was voted Most Friendly my senior year (that's right, the Friendliest Fridlian), I still felt isolated and excluded most of the time. On the fringe of belonging to many groups, but still feeling lonely a good deal of the time. I had to work through my own teen angst and disliking my hometown fit in nicely with this mode of existence.
Now, however, I feel a certain sense of pride for my hometown. It's so much easier in hindsight to love and understand the complicating factors causing me to feel isolated but act outgoing, Kris G to walk around like a bad-ass with a chip on his shoulder, Erik W to be on a compendium of chemicals during art class, the "rat-pack" putting on a hyper-masculine appearance at all sporting events, sitting in the front row, and mocking poor little color guard performers who drop their rifles during the half-time show of the basketball game (me). All of these things make sense in hind sight.
In a way, I feel a certain amount of love for even the businesses in the area: Dave's Sport Shop, Miller Funeral Home (with its fluorescent pink neon cross hailing as a beacon from Hwy. 65, the highway that splits a shallow man-made lake into two boggy, weedy ponds), Biff's bar, and Friendly Chevrolet.
Ironically, I went to Friendly Chevrolet this weekend to scope out a convertible. I test drove a '95 Chrysler Sebring with a missing bumper. It was not my dream car. My dream car was written on a piece of paper in my purse: 4 door, V6, under $16,000, relatively new, front wheel drive. Turns out there was a two-door on the lot.
I tried to play it cool with the salesman, but he had my number. I saw the car and immediately thought of the Renee Zellwegger line from Jerry McGuire: You had me at Hello. You had me at hello.
I did manage to hold off on buying the car immediately however, and came back a whole two days later, met with their trade-in guy, who was surprisingly a Fridley alum, one who had graduated a couple years before me, a wrestler, I think, and had married his high school sweetheart.
"Yeah, we just bought a house out in Ramsey," he said, a suburb 20 minutes north of Fridley. "It's not Fridley, but we were able to get a pretty nice house for the money. Now's the time to buy."
Turns out it was the time for me to buy, too, though a much more impractical purchase.
The last thing I pulled out of my '01 Nissan Sentra was a sticker from one of my favorite white rappers, part of a group called Atmosphere. One of his albums came out in 'o8 and I still had the sticker from the packaging. It was a lemon and his album title scrolled across the back: "When life gives you lemons, you paint that shit gold."
I took the sticker with me. In '08 I was a wounded recent divorcee. I couldn't imagine making the best of the lemonade served to me. But I liked the saying--you were not simply "making lemonade", you were Painting that Shit GOLD. Emphasis on the verb. Emphasis on the noun. Capitalize the adjective. It seemed like such an active reaction to a difficult situation. It wasn't someone making do or trying to get by, it was someone asserting themselves, claiming a new version of the original. A saying to keep for the next car. My brand-new (one-year used) convertible.
In Minnesota, there are a million reasons not to own a convertible, especially if you are a teacher. I pulled up that day to my brother's house and he immediately teased me by saying, "Wow! They must pay teachers a lot more in the Robbinsdale district."
My mom began questioning me on where I'd park this car (since I didn't have a covered garage) and I could see her mentally observing the two doors and thinking that there was no room for babies in that car.
For me, though, driving the car was like being let in on secret. And the secret is this: one life--do it up.
It occurs to me that it's not so hard to have the life of my dreams. What is hard is deciding to make it the life of my dreams.
I have made a lot of decisions that the pragmatic folk in my life cannot comprehend. I took a year off of work to go back to school. I travelled to Europe on a credit card. I bought a convertible. I'm driving across the country alone and renting a cottage for myself for a week. A lot of people, people with IRA certificates, mortgages, and savings accounts, think that I'm being frivolous. They think I'm wasting my money or recklessly throwing it away.
I think I'm doing what I need to do to make this life work.
It's a different type of risk-management, one no banker would invest in, but here's the thing: I lived my life by the rules for 30 years. I got married, bought a home, sold it, bought a bigger home, saved money to buy furniture, gave up little indulgences to finance my husband's car, worked as a coach even though the hours pulled me away from my dream of being a writer. And what happened? It all disappeared. Any equity evaporated. The furniture sold on Craig's list for a fraction of the cost. I took on debt from a house sold in a floundering market. I keep putting money towards a retirement plan, but would I want to stop working? Not if working means teaching part time, writing part time, and hosting fabulous dinner parties in the evening. I think I can make my life what I want it to be. And so, with just a trace of guilt, I bought a new car, the one of my dreams.
"Fuck that," said my friend D when I told him people were questioning my judgement on buying a convertible, "if it's not their money they can't say shit."
We were drinking Jeremiah Weed and lemonade on his roof on Sunday afternoon, surveying the skyline of Minneapolis from atop his 7 floor building of sleek and trendy condos, discussing vocabulary lessons we would use next year, the men we had been trying to date all summer, softball, my car, among other topics, and swearing in a way that is delicious for teachers on summer break.
I couldn't put it better myself. Fuck that. One life.
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