Response to the Five Questions

If you refrain from asking me these questions...we will have a happy and loving holiday season.

Some of us will, and some of us won't. I think the most important thing is that you are 17. That is important because it is an age that many people reach, though some of course do not. Many people remember 17, and I am just one of those people.

During Christmas break, when I was 17, we drove to Minnesota. My brother went to college there and I had been offered a scholarship at a small liberal arts college in the same state. I don't think most of my relatives knew this. No one asked me about college, except the teachers who had written letters of recommendation for me and my friends who were probably going to miss me, though I couldn't imagine why. I really didn't think I would get to go, that I would get out. We drove to Minnesota and the story should be that we were going there so I could visit the school that was giving me a scholarship and where I would eventually spend four years, though I couldn't imagine how.

We drove to Minnesota quickly because my grandmother had died and we needed to get home for the funeral. My parents hadn't lived together for years but they weren't yet divorced. My mother had known my grandmother since she was younger than you are now. We dropped off my brother's things and drove through the college campus that I would eventually call home. We drove through it--we did not even stop the car. On the way home, there was a terrible blizzard. One of our headlights went out, and we could not see the road right in front of the car. We found a motel and stayed there, all in one room, and I laughed and laughed at this absurd little lamp in the room because it was easier to laugh at that absurdity than all the rest. After the funeral, we found out that two of my mother's favorite nuns (she is an atheist, and went to a Catholic college, but not until she was in her 30s, did you know sometimes that is the way of things with people?) had died in a car accident on the road not far from where we pulled over to get to the motel with the lamp.

When I was 17, I did have boyfriends. One boy lived in an apartment and his mother smoked and he always told her he hated it. We had been friends before we dated, and in the best times we sat in the apartment and he played "Lenny" on his guitar while talking to me, as if we were not in love but just friends still, as if he didn't remember he was playing at all. When my mother turned 42, that boy bought her a cookie jar in the shape of farm animals: a pig, a cow, and a rooster. My kids eat candy from that cookie jar. My daughter's name is Lenny. Another boy was 20, so maybe not a boy really, but he had a car that was hopelessly old and he worked in a cafe and knew my favorite coffee and sandwich. He whittled a box to hold my playing cards. He whittled for me. Another boy lived far away and his grandmother didn't want him to date a white girl but he wrote me letters and I kissed him at a track meet. Then, there was a boy who was 19, who became a part of my family for years and years. When we first started dating, he crawled over all the other kids in the car to walk the girls to their doors and no one ever thanked him and he never said a word. Once we sat watching a fountain shoot an arc of water across the Chicago river, and it only did that once an hour, and we saw the arc 7 times. Twenty years later I discovered that fountain had a name, and I still haven't gotten over the disappointment.



I looked the same at 17 as I did at 15 as I did at 23 because I was a girl and girls age earlier, we start to look like ourselves and then we always look like ourselves, and at 17 you are already at the point where no one will tell you that you look older or taller unless they haven't seen you since a child, and then what they are really thinking is, you aren't a child anymore and you never will be again. And the thing is, you don't know this, you won't know this until you are 35 and learning to ride a bike for the first time and your daughter takes the video of you after your husband lets go, but she is afraid you will ride too far away and she doesn't want to lose you, so you come right back, and it's like being a kid again but not at all.

When I was 17, the only relatives who came to my high school graduation were my mom and my brother. My husband attended his graduation, but didn't walk to get his diploma, because he didn't care, and he was there by himself. Our graduation was formal and you had to wear a white dress, but I got permission from my dean to wear an offwhite wedding dress I had bought at a thrift store with $35 of the money I made at the job she had hand-picked for me in one of her many inexplicable actions of saving me when I didn't know how to save myself. She wore beautiful, bright clothes, and she wrote a note for me, allowing the dress, and one day she was exasperated at me for how I was ditching class all the time, and she who never swore slammed her fist down on the table and said "Damnit Katy! Just graduate from high school!" and I was actually speechless, I was without the ability to speak, for what seemed like forever until I said "Yes ma'am" and then eventually there I was, in a lace dress carrying a dozen roses and shaking her hand on a stage for longer than I needed to, I'm sure.



A few months before that, I was at a friend of a friend's house and we were going to go drive somewhere, anywhere really, because we had nothing and everything to do, and as we sat there giggling and plotting, the girl's dad came outside and glared and I thought, in that way that I used to fantasize about how corny and normal fathers behaved, that he would say have fun girls! but instead he threw his daughter the car keys, said "don't get pregnant" and slammed the house door.

Some people's parents drank too much. Some people never talked to their parents. Some didn't have parents, or lived with other people's parents. Some wanted to flee their parents.

We didn't have family parties.

And somehow, I knew the stories. I knew that my best friend's parents had met when he was a dance instructor and she was learning to dance. Years later, at her wedding, I would dance with her father and understand what the phrase "my feet didn't touch the ground" actually meant. I knew that adoption was different in the old days, because I had asked, and thought it was so curious that you could tell the kind of baby you wanted (A German baby, please), and babies were free, and no one would ever know if the teen mother had wanted to give the baby away or not, and back then, no one cared.

I knew that my grandmother loved trains and had a lot of boyfriends as a girl. I knew how much whiskey at Chicago hotel bars cost at various points in history because my grandfather was a young man during the Depression and he knew how much everything cost, everything, forever, and he used to tell me. I knew which of my uncles had been wild, I knew about people's jobs and experiences in war and everyone's favorite sports teams. My mother's brother had once had a job at a farm and he cut the heads of chickens and then they ran after him and he never ate chicken again for the rest of his life, not even today, and I knew that then, when I was 17, and I was known to ask questions.

It's hard to picture, isn't it? Someday, you will be almost 40, and there will be this idea that your life will be boring, but that is the last thing it will ever be. People say you stop talking, that life becomes mundane. It's hard to know that you will go to a bowling alley with your husband, and it is the same bowling alley you went to at 17. The people are the same but different. You are still not very good at bowling. Your husband still likes to watch you from behind. You had gone out to dinner first, and you had seen a couple so cute and obvious, he so much older and trying again, she enamored with the attention he paid her and his stories of his children who she didn't even know. After bowling, you would talk to your husband about how strange it was to see couples like that, so deeply in love as if the other loves weren't real, except that's the thing, isn't it? You told your husband that at the moment of your biggest breakup, which sounds like nothing but is so much something, you told your lover that the hardest part was not that you would never fall in love again, never feel like that again, but that you would. And your husband just said "oh." And you told him you meant it, that if you died, he should and would find someone else, and he said no, not someone like you, there isn't anyone like you. And you said, there isn't anyone like anyone. Because the things that are hardest never start out sad.



It might take more than 20 years, but you will come home from the gym one night, even though you usually go in the morning, and you will still be in your bike shorts and hoodie and headwrap, still sweaty, and you will barge into the kitchen as your husband makes pasta. You won't even sit down before you begin to tell your children about this article about the Five Questions, and how you hope they will always talk to the people who try to talk to them and show an interest in their lives, and your daughter will say "of course they will ask. Because they don't know. How can they know if they don't ask?" And you will say, ask them a question. Listen to their stories. And your husband is the quiet one, but he chimes in when you remind them that someday they might be inclined to think your casual love for them is misplaced. He will say, yeah, what do I do every day when I come home from work? I always ask "so everyone, what was your favorite part of the day?" and for now, you tell me. But you already roll your eyes when I say the same thing: "My favorite part of the day was walking in the door and seeing your smiling faces!" And your daughter will say, but DAD! You say the same thing EVERY SINGLE DAY.



And that's the story. The story you will tell someone else decades from now, in another house, maybe in another country, maybe after half the people in the story are dead, is a story about your mother in her bizarre workout clothes and inability to keep the words in, and your brother constantly getting up from the table, and your dad laughing at himself, and maybe you will remember what they were trying to teach you about being respectful and empathetic, but really, probably not. You will remember, perhaps, your mother's face burning with endorphins and intellectual agitation, when just a year before she had been like a ghost of herself, all paleness and thin hair and dizziness and lists of other people's names, and you will remember your father telling a story about himself telling the same story. Someday, you will tell someone. Every day when your father came home from work, he asked the same thing. Every day your father had the same answer. Every day, your father came home.