How to Be an Adult
Piet Mondrian, Broadway Boogie Woogie (1942)
Endings these days feel rare but are nevertheless everywhere. While replenishing our allergy meds, I noticed that our local Duane Reade’s seasonal aisle was dedicated to spooky socks and bone earrings, stuffed witches and ghosts, and so much candy packaged in fun sizes as if Halloween this year will be treat instead of all trick. The weather has gotten a little cooler, and the sun comes in at a lower angle, but I still haven’t gotten used to the incongruity between the markers of time and its feel since mid-March. How could Halloween be here? In my head it’s still spring, or perhaps summer, whatever those used to seem like.
Been thinking about transitions in general and how so few have clean edges. Even before quarantine, winter becomes spring in fits and starts until someday you realize that spring has bloomed into summer only when you’re in the middle of it. Most professions, too, you find yourself already in (writer, plumber, philosopher, musician, YouTuber) and wondering whether you fit. A kid might ask where the sky begins, and it’s a good question with no answer.
Human beings love to get a hold of things by carving our own handles for them. You don’t have to get too far out of the right-angled city to see land that runs off on its own, making edges with river and rock, but maps sit in records offices with made-up lines that determine one lot from another. Adulthood has a similar geography, age running off on its own with us imposing meaningful cutoffs that are more or less arbitrary. We say you can drive at 16, vote and buy cigarettes (legally) at 18, drink liquor (again, legally) at 21, and the government gives you back your Social Security at 67, but we all know that one person’s 18 or 21 or 67 isn’t another’s.
My son M, now a high school senior, recently lamented that he didn’t feel like a senior. I understand. His junior year never really ended last spring with the usual rites marking an end to it and the start of an after, including seeing the seniors ahead of him in cheap robes listening to a speaker talk about how “This Is Just the Beginning.” Instead, the end of last year stalled, then came back weird and broken until everyone (teachers, kids, parents) just decided that we had had enough. And this school year threatened to not begin at all, then to begin later and/or slowly, then actually did begin with people trying to pretend, unsuccessfully, things are more or less normal.
But as far as school and society is concerned, he’s a senior, which means next year he is supposed to be off to college or to whatever comes next — which is to say, adulthood.
How do we know when we’re adults? However many lines we draw on the map of lives, nothing clearly marks the difference between childhood and adulthood. The better question is: When was the first time you felt like an adult?
For some, that feeling might never come on its own. I remember that story a few years back about the parents who sued their 30-year-old son out of their house where he had insisted on living essentially like their child. For many, I bet the feeling of adulthood is synonymous with the mundanity of life that fills up your time once you’re on your own — buying underwear and socks for yourself, finding a dentist, feeling insufficiently fluent in the language of mutual funds, forming opinions about jarred spaghetti sauces.
The Monday after my undergraduate commencement ceremony, I moved from Kansas to Minnesota to be with the woman I loved and who I would end up spending the rest of my life with. Driving away from my college town and the state in which I was born and raised was definitely adult-ish, but I still felt young and my thinking at any given moment only took in the next few weeks. I knew I had to get a job on my own, sure, but my dad was big on work as a pedagogical and moral instrument, and I had earned money from a young age mowing laws, selling concessions at the movie theater and public swimming pool, bucking alfalfa bales, stocking and bagging at one of the two town grocery stores. I was headed to Minnesota with all my possessions and a college degree, and I could think and type fast and lift heavy stuff and show up reliably on time to do all of those.
Finding work wasn’t that hard. I signed up with a couple of temp agencies and got assignments right away. My first was two weeks out in some generic office complex photocopying thousands of files as part of Bush senior’s bailout of the savings and loan industry. It was odd and meaningless and Buddhist-level boring, perfect work for someone unwilling to identify who he was with what he did. Not long after someone decided they had enough copies, I started temping for the operations division of a large bank in downtown Minneapolis. The position was menial knowledge-economy wise but open ended and five days a week, more like a “real job.” A middle-aged woman with short highlighted hair and a pantsuit set me up with a cubicle that I could slightly decorate as I chose and a computer I could save files to. I typed memos for her and others, wore ties, and ate bagged lunches in a windowless break room. After several weeks of helping to make other’s documents better, I was hired formally by the bank to write some of my own.
Even still, it wasn’t the job that made me first feel like an adult. It was when I was looking for an apartment around that time. I called a number in a local paper (how things worked back then) about a place not too far from downtown Minneapolis and my cubicle. The apartment was serviceable but small, and the building could have been kept up better and sat on the corner of a busy intersection. After showing me around the place, the landlord mentioned that he had another, bigger opening nearby if I was interested. I was, and we went a few blocks away to a nicer building set back on a quieter street. That apartment was much better for about the same rent. I took it and lived in that building for a couple of years until we moved to New York for graduate schools and the life we’re still making.
Why did I feel like an adult then? I came to realize that I had met the landlord after a day at the bank, which meant I was wearing a tie and dress shirt and obviously coming from some sort of employment where people paid me enough to sit. I looked to him, after just a few moments, like someone whose life was underway enough to risk entering into a year-long financial contract with. (After living in the neighborhood a little while, I also realized that he almost certainly suggested his other building to me because I was white.)
I had to see someone seeing me as an adult before I could do it myself. Funny. Now that I’ve wandered pretty far out onto the open plain of adulthood, with kids unfolding into whole people and an apartment with a washer and dryer right inside it and everything, I feel less sure than ever that I’m able to read time’s map correctly. Whenever I try to find my bearings and follow the lines, I don’t recognize the landmarks. And I reach the edge too fast.
That reminds me; better call the dentist.
I’d like to try a little something new. Feel free to respond with your answer to this question:
Not so much my first job, but losing a job and really HAVING to find work with a family, mortgage, etc.
I don't currently feel like an adult and may never feel that way.