Sappy, Yes

Two years ago this week I took the bar exam. I stayed in a very seedy hotel in St.Paul the evenings before the exam with the intention of having somewhere quiet to study, decompress, possibly swim. The hotel was a complete dive and a drunk guy woke me up the night before the first day of the exam by pounding on my door and yelling that he loved me.

The morning of the first day of the exam I woke up too early, as always, got ready too early, and headed to the exam too early. On my drive to downtown St.Paul I realized I did not have a watch. No way to keep track of my time in the exam. No way to gauge how anxious I needed to be at any given moment. I stopped at the CVS on Snelling, pictured above, and bought a huge and hideous men's watch as it had the clearest watch face and every hour was numbered (I knew that if I relied on fancy slashes or dots circling the watch face I would end up losing valuable milliseconds figuring out the time). The store clerk argued with me for several seconds that I surely did not want to buy a man's watch and he tried to point me in the direction of a tiny, hours-told-by-little-sparkly-things watch. I may have cussed.

I drove by that CVS tonight, coming home from a baseball game. It hadn't struck me until then that it has been two years since that awful, lonely, anxious summer. In those months, and many of the months that followed, I could not imagine what possessed me to move here. To be so far from friends and my carefully constructed life was insurmountably depressing, despite the enjoyment of living near my family again. I thought the people at my church were cold and unfriendly, I hated my job, the friends I made here seemed to be shadows of "real" relationships I'd had elsewhere. These Norwegian/Swedish/German folk are not easy people to get to know.

And now I'm home after a warm, brief trip to the ball park, peanut shell caught in my hair. My summer is full. Full of running and races, dinners, visits, coffees, games, concerts, dates, new restaurants, and lakes. And friends. Good ones.

I was anxious and terrified for so long, even after passing the bar, that Life would now be Ordinary. That the exciting decisions had already been made and now, only Mundane, Necessary, Unbeautiful decisions were left. Not long after passing the bar I started thinking of where I should take it next, where I should move, and not because I was violently unhappy, but because I could not figure out how to live in one place without the expectation of another on the horizon. I do not think I have ever in my life enjoyed or accepted where I am. I fret and fidget in a place, love it, leave it, and then ache for what is left behind.

It's just nice to have no preparation for departure. To plan for next summer. For the winter. To plan for races and new pizza joints. To grow cozy and comfortable. To pass places with memories attached to them, good and bad. To remember who I was, buying that watch two years ago, and how unhappy and unsatisfied I felt with my seemingly happenstance arrival in Minnesota. And to drive by that corner now, which probably still sells hideous watches, with peanut stuck in my teeth, sun setting over the skyline as I make my way home, and feel content.