Cincinnati

Today I’m officially on leave from work and we are going over to Sarah’s school for the Field Day named in Sarah’s honor. I’m trying not to stress and get antsy about going there. The last few days I’ve been sort of torturing myself in my mind with the notion that I will no longer know how to get to the school, how to drive there from our house. But I believe I do know how to get there and it shouldn’t be an issue once we get in the car. Or I can just ask Max to use his iPhone to guide us.

Max doesn’t drive. I’m not sure if I mentioned that before. He never got a driver’s license when he was a teenager or later on either. There was his drinking problem when he was a teenager, and also, he says he was scared off by his father’s and older brothers’ driving habits when he was a kid. If Max’s father thought he heard a strange noise the car might be making, he would pop Little Max into the trunk and close the lid and tell him to listen for where the noise was coming from in the car while he drove around at various speeds. I know! Can you imagine? So Max had an almost phobic feeling about cars. Plus his older brothers are very intense drivers (everyone is really in Philadelphia), lambasting everyone around them and calling out other drivers for the slightest perceived traffic infraction. It can be kind of fun to ride with them but it’s nerve-wracking too. “Hey! New Jersey! Whaddya want? Any closer to my bumper I’m gonna need a reacharound!“

I was too nervous and uptight to pursue my license or learner’s permit in high school. I finally got my license when I was 21, during my senior year of college, when my best friend Laura and I decided we would share an apartment together in Cincinnati (where she was from) and look for entry level jobs. I really didn’t want to go back to New York City and live with my family and try to find work there. (I know my family has lived in a lot of places, DC, Boston, Austin, and New York City.) So I really needed a driver’s license to be able to live in Cincinnati, and I finally got one.

I was thinking about Laura (we are still in touch once in a while) and our Cincinnati years the other day at my niece’s college graduation. I remember at my own graduation lunch, my Uncle Michael asked me what my plans were for the future and I told him that my friend Laura and I were renting an apartment and job-hunting together in Cincinnati. He turned to my father and expressed bafflement and trepidation that my father would allow me to move to a strange city and into an apartment and community without personally approving and vetting the entire situation beforehand, stating he would never permit me to do any such thing. My father just said that he trusted me and that he thought it would be okay. My uncle was still nonplussed.

I think I was relieved that I was raised by my own parents rather than my uncle. The graduation speaker at my niece’s graduation quoted Michelle Obama’s book Becoming, in which she says “Don’t make decisions out of fear. Make decisions based on hope and possibility.” I definitely think that’s true.