my pen

I accidentally checked out a young adult coming-of-age book. Well, that’s not exactly true. The checking out was deliberate, the coming-of-age part was the accident. Also… I checked out two, not one.

I knew Lin-Manuel Miranda had written a couple of books and being a big fan, I wanted to read them. I logged into the library’s audio book catalog and typed “Lin-Manuel Miranda” into the search bar. Two books came up. I clicked on both and checked them out. When OverDrive asked me if I wanted to “download MP3”, I said yes. I tapped the play button on my phone and as I walked outside, the book began to play.

Wait. What?! I was confused. I stopped and replayed that last 15 seconds. My ears weren’t wrong. I did hear the nice woman say “Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe by Benjamin Alire Sáenz. Narrated by Lin-Manuel Miranda”. I looked at my phone. Yup. There it was — Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe by Benjamin Alire Sáenz, narrated by Lin-Manuel Miranda. Well, hell. Now I was wondering what kind of book an almost EGOT would narrate. I left it playing. I listened. I was hooked. It caught me, spoke to me and I couldn’t turn it off.

I listened to the entire book and I wondered why. Wondered why I listened so intently to the whole thing. I even bookmarked certain passages so I could go back and relisten. And relisten and relisten. Why did a coming-of-age book about two 15yr old Hispanic boys in El Paso, Texas speak to a middle-age white woman in Washington? Sáenz’s engaging and expressive writing was definitely part of it.

As someone who longs to be a writer—let me stop you. Yes, I am writer in that I wrote this thing you are reading. But that’s being a writer. I want to be a WRITER. A writer writes “I called his name.” A WRITER writes “I heard his name in my mouth.” That’s what Sáenz is. He is a WRITER. He says things like “hail is like pissed off snow” and “… he got that incredible look on his face. It was if he had become a sentence ending with an exclamation point.” And then this “Senior year. And then life. Maybe that’s the way it worked. High school was just a prologue to the real novel. Everybody got to write you but when you graduated you got to write yourself. At graduation you got to collect your teacher’s pens and your parent’s pens and you got your own pen. And you could do all the writing.” That last one grabbed me and wouldn’t let go. It stayed in my brain and lived in my soul.

The other reason this book just wouldn’t let me go is the story Sáenz’s words craft and the depth to which those words spoke to me. It’s the story of two boys, Aristotle (“Ari”) and Dante, two Hispanic boys growing up in middle class Texas families. No, that’s not the part of the story that speaks to me – stay with me a minute. Ari is the youngest of four. His siblings, 11 and 12 years older, refer to him as being “born too late.” He didn’t play sports, didn’t like scouts and kept to himself at school. And he was always careful never to mention the family secret. Never. Feeling awkward and like he never quite fit in, Ari tried hard to go unnoticed. It was just easier that way.

Jamie, Ari’s father, is a strong private man of few words. He’s a good husband and father and has a deep love for his family. But his life hasn’t been easy. Few people other than his wife have found their way behind the walls he’s built. Those same walls, carefully constructed and designed to hold nearly everyone at a safe distance also kept his youngest son from getting too close. Ari learned from his father about building walls and keeping people at a distance. Being careful to not get too close, Ari and his dad are tentative with each other and coexist cautiously.

As the book progresses, Ari and Dante become close friends, seeing each other through difficult times. His relationship with Dante teaches Ari what it means to have friends and to be a friend. And slowly, very slowly, Ari and his father begin to deepen their relationship.

I’m not those boys. I am not 15. I don’t live in Texas and I’m not Hispanic. Yeah, and I’m not a boy. But still, I see myself in Ari. Myself at 15 and myself now. Sáenz refers to high school as a prologue to the real novel. To life. A prologue, the story before the story. The portion of the story that lays the foundation for all that is to follow.

I too, am the youngest of four children with the first three coming boom, boom, boom. Then many years later I showed up. I don’t know if I was “born to late” but I was born an “oops”. Our reasons are different, but like Ari I never felt like I fit in and keeping to myself was just easier. My family wasn’t hiding any secrets (at least not that I know of) but because of my dad’s work, we moved a lot. I was always the new kid at school and not very good at figuring out how to fit in. And I really wasn’t very good at making friends or knowing how to be one. But I was very good at building walls. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not placing blame on the moves or my dad. I have three sisters who all grew up in the same family and we’re all very different people.

My relationship with my dad wasn’t much different than the one between Ari and his dad. Dad’s walls weren’t constructed from a difficult early life. His were from a job that took him away from home far more than he wanted. And they were reinforced by being the only male in a house full of women and never quite fitting in or feeling quite at home. Just as Jaime and Ari moved past superficial small talk to meaningful conversations, so did my dad and I. But those early conversations were awkward, sometimes stilted and tentative. It took time and work and courage for both of us to write a new page for our relationship.

Sáenz tells the story of two boys coming of age. Maybe we can have multiple coming-of-age stories in our lives. Maybe coming-of-age can also be the journey from other people’s pens writing your story to your pen writing your story. It’s still a journey of angst and indecision. Of fear and confusion and uncertainty. A journey where we turn inward and look at ourselves at the same time as we turn outward and look at the world and our place in it. With pen in hand, we wonder what to write. Wonder where we fit. How we’ll fit. If we’ll fit.

For some of us, we also wonder if it maybe it isn’t just too damn late. Maybe the part of the journey that creates and forms, builds and breaks us has already been written and read. What about the rest of the book? Have those pages already been written? Maybe they have. But if not, who gets to write them?

I’m of an age and my life has changed a lot in the last few years. Not just because of a pandemic and riots and hoarding and murders recorded on cell phones and shown on the evening news. It’s also because I’ve been looking at the person I have become and comparing her to the person I was during those traditional coming-of-age years. The prologue years. Then I compare both of us to who I want and wanted to be. It’s like shopping online and trying to decide which of the 3 or 5 items that all do what you need them to do you should buy. You can click on a little check box next to the picture of each one. Up pops the different features in a side-by-side list so you can compare and contrast and decide which one is the closest to what you want. I clicked on the picture of me at 15 and at 23 and at 30 and at 40 and at now. I clicked compare and looked at all the features. Features like “works at a meaningful job” “loves work” “kind” “authentic” “strong” “in a loving relationship” “has a circle of close friends”. You get the idea. I made note of where the check marks were and where they weren’t. Of what was there at 15 and not at 40. What wasn’t there at 15 and was at 40. And I thought about it.

I thought about Aristotle and Dante. They were learning to understand how to define themselves in the world. Self-definition comes at a cost and it takes courage. There is the kind of courage where you stand up to bullies when you know you know how to fight and when you don’t. There is the kind of courage when you speak up so your friend isn’t standing alone. And when you speak truth to power. There is the kind of courage where you let people see you when what you want to be is invisible. When you are terrified and still you take a deep breath and you say “this is me”. Sometimes it’s not saying it, sometimes it simply being it. When you’re not afraid to be the answer to “which of these is not like the others?”

Aristotle and Dante’s story is the story of two boys trying to find their own way and make their own decisions. They are fighting the expectations of their world and their society. They are trying to discover not only who they are, but what makes them into who they are. And if who they are is who they want to be. They are young and all that is written is their prologue, the rest can be up to them.

I think of my prologue, written so many years, so many pages ago. Of the times someone’s pen wrote the words “you should be/ you should say/ you shouldn’t do/ you shouldn’t think…” and my pen drew a line through what I had written on the page and I let their words stand. I think of those who held the pens—teachers, society, family, classmates and friends. I think of the times when someone’s pen wrote “it’s best not to speak up” and “good girls stay quiet”. Of the pens that never wrote of the merits of giving thought to words before putting them out into the world. Or never wrote how to have the courage to be vulnerable or to stand strong in your beliefs. Someone else may have held those pens, but I allowed those words to stay there. To write my story. I thought of the times fear held the pen and gave me the desire to be invisible. When I was a child, I couldn’t control who held the pens.

But I’m no longer a child. As an adult perhaps I give people the pens. Or maybe it is the paper. Maybe I give them the paper and they have the pens they’ve always had. It’s too late to collect all the pens that have written on my life, but it’s not too late to get out a new sheet of paper. It’s never too late to control who writes on that new sheet. Now, not maybe, it’s time for a different coming-of-age story. The coming-of-age story where I control who writes on the paper.

The already completed pages will still be in the book of my life. I don’t think we can ever throw those old pages away nor should we. They are the prologue to who and what and where we are now. But we can start a new page. We can take a pen — our pen — and start writing on the new page. We can write the story.

It can be hard you know. To know where to start and what to edit. Maybe the thing is to just start and remember to keep reading and rereading the pages. When I see someone else’s writing appear on my page it’s up to me to decide if I leave it in or cross it out. Leave it be or edit it out. I can tell my writing on the page. It’s childlike—tentative, unpracticed, scrawling, wandering and hard to read. I work at it. The deciding what to keep, what to edit and what to simply cross out is hard and sometimes painful work. I spend a lot of time rereading the old pages and thinking. Making notes in the margin with edits and suggested changes.

“I don’t know how to be a friend.” I told her. The pens of parents and sisters and classmates and friends had all left marks on my paper. But I knew some things were missing. I knew because I’ve seen friendships and I didn’t know how people get there. It’s up to me now but I don’t know what to write.

“What?” She asked.

“I never learned. Seriously. I want you to tell me when I’m not being a friend.” I’m lucky. I made a wise choice. I can trust her. I can let her pen make notes on my new pages. I know I won’t be sorry. But it was hard and it was scary to say “I don’t know” and ask for help.

It’s never too late to write new pages. Even for me. I can’t rewrite what’s been written. I can’t even edit it. It’s done. The prologue is there in indelible ink and it’s what got me to here. What I can do is keep trying to be careful about whose pen I allow to write on my new pages. When I stumble across marks from a pen, marks that I don’t want there, I need to be brave enough to scratch them out and use my own pen to write the revision. My pen. From now on it must always be my pen.