My mother liked to think my fondness for encyclopedias a sign of precocity. It was not. Rather, like many fat and awkward children, I became ‘bookish’— though not by the ordinary route—because I secretly hoped that by acquiring the vocabulary of a grown-up, I might in fact pass as one. Having quit little league and the scouts, given to hot tea, shopping, and easy tears, I had utterly failed at boyhood. Adulthood conferred a kind of impunity: a teacher who could not run the mile in under twelve minutes was no sissy; a doctor who gardened instead of golfed was still a viable part of his community.
So I dug into a long line of World Books that dominated the solitary bookcase in our living room, imposing its will on a painted glass duck and flanked by the Bible and old yearbooks. By age ten, my vocabulary reflected an uncanny familiarity with ocean life, American presidents, and human anatomy. Context, of course, is lost to the young encyclopod. I could spit out names that sounded impressive (to me) but couldn’t go much further than that. Uncles would quiz me and kids my own age would puzzle over me the way a cat puzzles over a fly. I could pass as a ‘nerd,’ read ‘smart,’ by mentioning Somerset Maugham’s Cakes and Ale without being entirely certain that I was not referring to a cookbook.
Eventually, I think, I outgrew that stage. But then, as a potential Comp Lit major, I sometimes wonder. The other day a girl named Shauna showed up at the Middle School library where I and some other Princeton students tutor kids after school. Shauna was in sixth grade, wore glasses, a tightly-bound ponytail and responded to questions in short, slightly neurotic blurts. She was carrying a big, stuffed panda.
“So you like pandas?” I tried to be friendly as we dug into a worksheet on igneous rock.
She peered at me crossly through her glasses as though I had just asked her if she was fond of eating panda. “Well, I had to bring this one to class for a project, but if you’re asking if I like stuffed animals, the answer is NO.” she said. “I’m just not that kind of person.”
I recoiled at her sarcasm, wondered about the home life of a child who found the notion of liking panda bears so reprehensible. Though I know that her self-conception and career plans—she intends to be an “Egyptologist” when she grows up—are childish and subject to future uncertainties, I envied the certainty with which she could say “I am just not that kind of person.”
So what kind of person am I? Less certain than Shauna, it occurs to me to offer a pointillist portrait: My favorite flavor of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream is Cherry Garcia. My favorite color is periwinkle. Most acronyms and the people who use them make me queasy. I drink too much coffee and not enough milk. I sleep with a nightlight and grind my teeth. I was recently diagnosed as Obsessive Compulsive…which explains why I brush my teeth for twenty minutes every morning. I have a golden Labrador named Misty and I think the daffodil is a perfect flower. I love airports and trail mix and rainy days. I love poetry and wish I could write it; I have friends who do. I’m told I am an exceptional whistler and a mediocre pianist (at best). I can't draw a straight line but I can’t stand a crooked tie. As a child, my favorite TV shows in order of importance were: 20/20, MacGyver, and Matlock. I hated cartoons. Except for Ducktales which hardly qualified as such; I think I saw Scrooge McDuck at an alumni dinner here last summer. From fourth to ninth grade, I played football. On a team. With pads and cleats and a mouth guard….I can hardly believe it either. I broke my pinky during a rainy game. Tragically, this is the most gruesome sports-related injury I can claim. I drank two bottles of Starbucks Frappuccino everyday for two and a half years ending last summer…which, it occurs to me now, also makes more sense with the OCD. My favorite drink is a White Russian, which is also my mother’s favorite drink and the wimpiest way of consuming alcohol this side of a Fuzzy Navel. I have smoked various sorts of things once. Okay, twice, but I coughed both times. And frankly, the smell of anything worth smoking makes my stomach turn (unless, of course, we’re talking salmon). I do not have favorites outside of food and color, but my poem of the moment is Hardy’s “Darkling Thrush;” my book of the moment is one I read this summer: Max Perkins, which was written, like this sentence, by a Princetonian, A. Scott Berg. NPR (National Public Radio) is also dear to me, especially a program called “The Splendid Table,” hosted by Lynne Rossetto Kasper who talks about food the way most folks talk about sex and whose name sounds like something you’d order at one of those hairy, hempy, hydroponic, places in the Village. I paid $7.00—seven dollars!—for a cinnamon tea latte at a place in the Village a month ago. It was like drinking potpourri, which I loved. My mother too is fond of lattes of most sorts, though my father worries over anything that can sound like Sunday with an –e. My thought of the moment: I suppose someday when I’m old and my thoughts are beginning to get mixed up, I will remember happy moments from books and movies and other people’s lives as my own. I already do this sometimes. So I figure, wouldn’t it be great if everyone swapped all their happy memories so that one day, when we are all old and the caffeine, the smog, the hydrogenated oils have made us crazy, our minds will be, in larger proportion, full of happy thoughts to get mixed up with? And since we’d have spent a lifetime swapping with friends and loved ones, chances are pretty good that, at any given moment, we would be mixed up on the same happy thought at the same time as someone else. Which means we could all be, in a way, what we become less of everyday: together.