My Word's Worth: an occasional column by Marylaine Block

vol. 5, #48, December 3, 2000

LIFE WITHOUT A PLOT LINE

I've just finished reviewing a book called The Long Journey Home, by Don Coldsmith, which, according to the blurb, was about an American Indian athlete of the early 20th century, John Buffalo, who, like Jim Thorpe, was given a chance for a brilliant athletic career at Carlisle Indian School and the hope of competing in the Olympics.

It was an engrossing book, with a likable hero, but about halfway through, I started getting this eerie feeling that something was missing. Things kept happening to John -- one event would send him in one direction, and another would come along and send him someplace else altogether. The opportunity to train for the Olympics was taken away as abruptly as it was offered. He didn't mind that much, because he hoped to become a coach, but the offer of a coaching job was rescinded when a white man wanted it. When a chance came to work with a wild west show, John took it; when the chance to coach Jim Thorpe came along, he did that, and accompanied him to the Olympics. When no coaching offers followed, he went back to the Wild West show.

John had the power to say yes or no to the different opportunities that come along, but he had no more control over his life than a billiard ball that keeps being hit and sent whizzing off in different directions.

This is not what we expect of a novel. We expect plot. We expect the hero to choose a course and pursue it. If he wants to be a coach, and obstacles are placed in his path, we expect him to jump over the obstacles or go around them, or even to create his own opportunities. We expect single-minded determination in our heroes.

This book, though, is uncomfortably like real life. John Buffalo never expected to control his life, because as a young Indian man born at the turn of the century he knew it was no longer possible to follow the ways of his ancestors. He saw no choice but to try to fit into white society, which he found incomprehensible. He learned to play by their rules, but when he found out that the cards were stacked, he stopped trying to control his life. That's not to say he wasn't excellent at the work he drifted into -- taming wild horses, and organizing the hundreds of people and animals of the traveling show. But he drifted out of that and into something else just as accidentally.

The thing is, I can understand that, because I am part of probably the last generation of American women who thought their plot line was "and they lived happily ever after." We expected to marry and follow our men wherever THEIR long-range plans would take them. We expected to work, but only until the children were born, and maybe after they were through school. Not surprisingly, we filled the professions that didn't have much of a career path -- there are many teachers but fewer principals, many librarians but fewer library directors. The first time I was ever asked the basic job interview question, "Where do you see yourself in five years?", I was puzzled. After all, my life was conditional.

The down side to conditional lives was dependence, frequent uprooting, and the danger of being ditched and left to fend for yourself without any job skills. A lot of young women looked at their mothers' and grandmothers' lives and said, "No way, not me." They became as career-oriented as men, planning where they wanted to be in five years, scouting out promotions and stock options and pension plans. They expected to write their own plot lines.

But there's a down side to that too, as men have known all along, which is that stuff happens even to people who make careful, well thought out plans. The union job in the company your grandfather and your father worked for could be sent to Mexico without notice. The pension plan you counted on could vanish in a corporate merger. The promotion you counted on might not come through, and your company could start demanding that you put in 60 hour weeks.

If you have spent your life thinking you were in control, the bad stuff may seem like a personal failure, not an accident.

That was the real tragedy of the depression -- that so many men who'd worked hard and played by the rules were thrown out of work because of impersonal economic forces they couldn't possibly expect to control. Except, of course, they did. A whole generation of men were second-guessing themselves, wondering whether if they had only tried harder, or been a little smarter, or taken a different job, they would still have their jobs. For many of them, their sense of their own manliness depended on the job, the ability to support their families. It's not surprising a lot of men broke under the strain; suicides and desertions rose steeply during those years.

But another problem with constructing your life as a series of ten year plans is that it may make it harder to see that some of the things that happen to you are opportunities. If your eyes are firmly fixed on the retirement date and the pension, your painting may seem like a hobby you don't have time for, even though people are eager to buy your work. You might not notice that people would be happy to pay you to do the gardening and landscaping you enjoy and have a knack for. It might not occur to you that, if you pared down your budget, you could quit before your pension kicks in.

The happy accidents that happened to me over the past few years caused me to re-think what I want to be when I grow up. I discovered I could write, and that people would pay me for it, when I had nobody to support but me and two cats, and when all the stocks I bought quadrupled in value. I still might not have gotten the hint, were it not for the fact that several of my friends and relatives were telling me how much they were enjoying early retirement. They made me realize that though I was fond of my job and a steady paycheck, I didn't have to have to keep on doing it until I was 65. I thought a little about the risk, and a lot more about the wild, open landscape I saw through the doors that were opening in my life. It wasn't a hard choice.

Of course, doors close, too. Fox News has revised its Views page and no longer feels the need of columnists, so I've written my last column for them. I'm back to living a conditional life, waiting for editors to say yes, waiting for other accidents to happen, but I don't mind. I've learned to trust that other doors will open, and that's what they're doing. Perhaps my life does have a plot, and I won't understand it until I get to the end of the book, but meanwhile, I'm enjoying the action, the conversations, the cast of characters, and the entirely improbable events.