Raspberry Walnut Pancakes

While at my alma mater's Commencement this past weekend, I ran into a friend who will graduate with the class of '10. He expressed frustration (he was once with the class of '09) that, having taken a year off from school, he felt, on the occasion of his original class's Commencement, no closer to knowing what his ultimate purpose in life should be. I tried to reassure him that he is not alone, but I don't know if he found the similarity between us at all reassuring; one year post-Bachelor's degree, this past month for me has also been filled with "where am I going?" questions.

As someone who must consult both subway map and iPhone to successfully find any street / building / large, well-known area in New York City, a weekend back in Western Massachusetts was comforting. There, I know the difference between Hadley and South Hadley and can find my way between almost ten towns without either directions or having to retreat to 91. Yet, on Sunday, I was driving up to Northampton from Amherst—and I couldn't get there. A policeman had set up a barricade at the intersection of Rt. 9 and East St (before the intersection of Rt. 9 and Rt. 47) and was directing traffic to turn left or right. Apparently, the best response would have been to have turned left, gone up to 47, then continued up on Bay Rd. I turned right, and a wall of people watching the "Hadley Parade" (which was comprised of old fire trucks?) thwarted my attempt to get across at the intersection of 47 and 9 and onward to lunch with Rachel, my newly-graduated cousin.

Apparently, I don't know where I'm going in Western Mass, either.

I told another friend recently that the two places where I currently feel most at home in New York are the strip of 42nd St between Grand Central and Times Square and the strip of 125th St between Lexington Ave and Frederick Douglass Blvd. She asked me if I was a tourist.

I enjoy those streets for precisely the reasons most New Yorkers hate them – I don't have to pretend as if I know the area; nor do the people who hawk goods on the streets care where I'm from. It's their business to make me feel welcome (or at least, only mildly overwhelmed) as they proffer a program to a Broadway show or point me to their discount clothing store. The amount of performing I have to do on 125 St. to pass off as a "native" is particularly low. The sights and sounds already, in a way, remind me of home: large populations of people my complexion and darker; shop windows haphazardly arrayed with neon-coloured clothing stretched over white plastic mannequins and child-body hangers (manniquers? chang-ers?); sidewalk vendors selling T-shirts! Incense! CDs!, music blaring from dark, nameless vans behind them; and—particularly as the heat begins to soar—diabetes for dessert (in this case, sold in a Dixie cup).

The other day, I bought brightly orange mango-sugar-rush-to-the-head. I walked straight down 125th, licking my artificially early death, and felt as if I knew where I was going (the train station). [The feeling was almost as good as the one I got this weekend from being in the company of so many people I love and who love me. I remain convinced that hugs = happiness.] Even so, as I continue to fail to plan for the summer (though I know, already, that I will be going home to do something, taking (any?) two classes at Columbia University, and will teaching a few books again come the fall), I hope that those architects-who-studied-to-be-geologists-and-then-went-on-to-management-consulting-followed-by-advertising (thanks, Amherst Career Center!) were – will be – ultimately right. That the '10 graduate's, my peers, and my youthful lack of direction will be rewarded; that my uncertainty as to whether I've chosen the right path won't matter in the end.

So, while I will continue to bake pancakes according to recipe (this morning's were delicious), I think I'm going to stop worrying for now about the recipe for my life. We'll see how long this lasts. ;-)

Congrats to the new alums and lots of love,
Katherine