The Color of My Parachute

 

At twenty-something, I walked into a NYC office and applied for a job in public relations. It wasn't a fancy-shmancy office. It was a not-for-profit that organized a running event to raise money for cancer.  It was hugely successful. It was for a wonderful cause. I wanted that job. She read my PR thesis and pushed it across the table. She scribbled something on a piece of paper, folded it, and handed it to me - Ordering me not to read until I left. And then she went on to tell me all of the super-fun reasons why I wasn't qualified and blah blah blah for this job. She was gentle. She stung nonetheless. She was right.

I was sad.

So I opened the sticky note on the way to Penn Station. It read - " 'What Color Is Your Parachute?'  Read it. But in case you don't - you are a writer."

I was mad.

I did land a job doing PR for a huge magazine publishing conglomerate. I thought that was my in. They wouldn't let me write. One day after work, sitting on a dirty  floor in Penn Station while waiting for the next train, I took a mental head-count of all the seemingly unhappy heads. I got up to 1,345,678 before I lost track. I got the point. I quit counting. I quit my job.

I was a quitter.


I took a meaningless office job for a while. And that was fine for me, until I found meaning in running. I walked out, didn't bother collecting my things, and drove away. I wondered what I did that I loved at that time. I wanted to drive toward that. I needed to do that -- even if it meant being  the smallest, seemingly insignificant, ugliest piece of that puzzle. If Stephen King books were what I loved, I would gladly be his photo-copy-machine-guy for $5 an hour. I loved running. I lived to watch Milena Glusac fly.

So, I decided to work full-time at a running specialty store. I was the wanna-be track geek who put shoes away and hung Milena Glusac posters in the back room. I dreamt that if all the planets aligned, and all the elite runners' alarm clocks failed to go off on one single, given moment in time, and I had all the hard work in the bank - I could win the NYC Marathon too. I am a dreamer. My dreams haunt me. They chase me down and GET me. But not in a bad way. It's like a mom running after her daughter on her way out of the house to school in the morning,  shouting don't forget your lunch! So I sniffed shoe boxes all day. Love the smell of  track flats. I fondled people's feet. I figured out how to get by on $7 an hr. And I ran until my vocation called me.

I was a runner.

And I  ran and I waited for the universe to lead me. On these runs I would listen. Sometimes I would listen to the voices in my head. Not Elvis, I swear. It was the universe or my conscience. Sometimes it was my fear. But I let it speak. I promised to listen. I would listen to my running partners. I would listen to the rhythm of our bodies and our breath. And I waited for the universe to move me. This was my way of meditating. I was a Buddhist of sorts. I didn't dare name it, wasn't into religion. I used it to connect me to something higher. I let it lead. Running was my altar. Running was my religion.

I was a Buddhist.


I always thought I would be a good teacher. But to people who needed me. I don't like it when people feel entitled. I am all about the underdogs. Side-note: Underdogs can feel entitled too. If I know someone is hungry, I will give them my pantry, long before they even get up the courage to ask. But if they walk into my kitchen and just take my last cheese doodle, I get mad. But the underdog-- I love the underdog. Maybe it was from seeing, as a kid, my gambling father always place his last dollar on the underdog.

Maybe it's because I always felt like I was the underdog. Maybe this was why Milena Glusac was always the one I wanted to win. Regardless of when or why, I thought people with disabilities....that was the underdog. A co-worker at the running store saw a book I was reading about teaching special ed. She had no idea I wanted to do this. She had a brother with Down's Syndrome who needed a one-on-one aide. 13k a year. Sweet!

I was a teacher's assistant.


So I would crunch numbers in my head while escorting my friend to his classes. If I started taking classes now I could be a teacher at...ummm...wait, maybe I'm calculating wrong... 43. Dag. Ok. Alright. If I can handle 13k a year, surely I can handle 43. Then, one day in the teacher's lounge I was telling somebody the numbers and how I'd figure it out. 43. Sigh. A teacher overheard. He told me about a grant for career changers. Teaching kids in urban settings. Kids with disabilities. The underdogs. I could get my teaching certification and my master's in one year. For free. And 300 smackers a month. I applied.

I was a teacher.

And then I got Multiple Sclerosis. And I was floored. I wasn't a mother or a teacher or a runner or a retired running store shoe sniffer. A former foot fondler. I was sick. It consumed me, and all the other angles of my life slipped away. They were too pale in comparison to this. Until one day, when I was laid out on my back, floored by the pain, unable to move anything but my fingers. I started typing. I balanced the netbook on my belly and tapped. Lightly. Gently. And it stung.

I was writing, but about things that really really stung. Things I couldn't tell my husband because he was already bogged down with working and our kids and picking up my slack. He couldn't hear another symptom of my sickness. And I couldn't either, I was too focused on SICK. That print, the font of that pain and the ailments were too bold. They were making the beautiful angles impossible to see. Too pale.

I didn't want that to be the story of my life or where my destiny led me. So I began to type to get the sick out while simultaneously and super-ironically attempting to create something other than this picture of sick. I didn't want sick to be the big bold print of what my life had to say. So I wrote. I was...finally...a writer.

I am an author.