Total pages in book: 116
Estimated words: 111089 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 555(@200wpm)___ 444(@250wpm)___ 370(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 111089 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 555(@200wpm)___ 444(@250wpm)___ 370(@300wpm)
“But there wasn’t anything else? Any other dream?”
“I wanted to be a firefighter and an astronaut…and also a cashier at a grocery store when I was really little.”
“Okay, we all wanted to do those things,” I said, reflecting on my childhood dreams.
“Well, what do you want to do now?” he asked, and since he’d been so open with me, I felt it was only fair to be transparent with him.
“I just want to hang with Tex through his retirement. Make my little deliveries.”
“No college?”
“Nope. Not for me. I don’t know what the hell I’m gonna do long-term. Saving up my money to get my passport and take a trip to Machu Picchu after graduation. Then…stumble around and figure out how to make it all worth it.”
“Machu Picchu is awfully specific. Any particular reason for that choice?”
“Just…on my bucket list.” I left it at that.
I waited for him to say something more, or try to convert me the way some people had done when I’d mentioned that in the past. But he just listened, waiting for me to share more.
“This is the part where you tell me all that I’ll be missing out on. Trust me, I’ve had that guidance-counselor session. And that I have to go to college, and I need all these specific goals to ever be somebody, yada, yada, yada.”
“If I didn’t have so many friends in massive amounts of student-loan debt with few career options for their given expertise in our ever-changing climate, I’d be more concerned, but I think the idea that you have to go to school to have a career is fading away as the world transforms. Hell, I would have loved to have been able to run deliveries or give Uber rides in college instead of waiting tables. Just a whole different world than the one I grew up in. And really, I admire that you can be so brazen about the future, without any set plans, without fearing uncertainty. Not that I’m saying you shouldn’t go to college, if you choose.”
He said that last bit quickly, as though he found himself caught between his real personal beliefs and what he should be saying as my teacher, which was a bit of a laugh. “Don’t worry, James. I’m not making any life-altering decisions while having coffee with my British Lit teacher.”
“Good. ’Cause I think I’m about one of the least helpful people you could be talking to about life, unless you want to discuss maybe Jane Austen’s ideas about life. Oh, you roll your eyes at Austen?”
“Yeah, I’m familiar. My mom had a boxed set of her books that she never touched, but I blew through the whole lot in a few days, and I was not impressed.”
“When did you do this?”
“I was like…twelve at the time.”
“You were twelve and you just decided, on your own, to blast through Jane Austen?”
“Yeah, a bunch of silly stuff. Everyone ends up happy, with all this money.”
“Not everyone ends up happy.”
“Pretty much. It’s hard to tell whether the happiness was because they happened to meet the right man or the right man happened to have plenty of money. I’m not big on happy endings anyway. That’s not how life works. Hamlet’s more to my tastes.”
“Yeah, you haven’t hidden the fact that you’ve already made it to the end in any of your responses.”
“I’m glad you brought up my assignments. As I mentioned before, I tricked you into this coffee date about my homework because I have a serious problem with that comment you made about—what was it—not using contemporary standards to judge Ophelia for kowtowing to Polonius’s demands.”
“That’s a fair comment. I stand by that.”
“You don’t get to take all the comments and use them however you please. First you say classics are classics because they’re relevant to things we deal with still in our lives, but then I can’t judge them based on our standards.”
“I stand by that statement, yes.”
“I don’t feel like I was just judging them based on our standards now necessarily. Romeo and Juliet were like, ‘fuck what our parents want,’ and that all happened in Shakespearean times, or whatever the hell.”
“Don’t act like you don’t know that was the Elizabethan era.”
“Yes, at the end of the Tudor period, if you want to get all specific like that. Is this a test?”
“No, but you can see why I’m not terribly concerned about whether you’re going to make it in the world.” He had this knowing expression on his face, like he could see so much more in me than I could see in myself, all from a silly argument about the last response I’d handed in about the reading.
I pressed on, “Whatever the hell time it was, it was close enough that clearly even Shakespeare thought people could tell their parents to go to hell and do what they wanted.”