High Tide in Tucson_ Essays From Now or Never - Barbara Kingsolver [54]
My rationale, which came to me long after the fact, has to do with a desire to jump fences and graze a lot of pastures, both greener and thornier than the one where I supposedly belong. It looked as if we could raise a huge amount of money to promote literacy, and also I did need a break from an unhappy, hardscrabble time in my life. But those aren’t reasons enough. I did it because I want to be exactly what I am—a writer who does other things. Not just a soup-of-the-day double-tasker, Breadwinner Mom; that’s the default option. If I can also be, for one brief moment, Literary Rock Goddess, why not go for broke?
I’ve spent my life hiding a closetful of other lives. When I entered graduate school in biology in my early twenties, my committee looked long and hard down their noses at my interest in creative writing. And now that I make my way mostly as a writer, it’s considered comical or suspect that I have degrees in science. When I speak in public, I’m frequently introduced by someone who will make a point of revealing my checkered past: archaeologist, typesetter, medical technician, translator, biological field researcher, artist’s model. The audience generally laughs, and I do too. It seems ridiculous to add music to the list, but it’s on there. In 1973, I went to college on a music scholarship. I studied classical piano performance, music theory, and composition at DePauw University for two years, until it occurred to me that all the classical pianists in the U.S. were going to have a shot at, maybe, eleven good jobs, and the rest of us would wind up tinkling through “The Shadow of Your Smile” in a hotel lobby. So I switched to zoology. It seemed practical. I could just as happily have gone over to literature or anthropology or botany. I’m in awe of those people who seem bent from early childhood upon a passionate vocational path. My father, the M.D., tells me that as a first grader he blew up his toy soldiers for the sole purpose of patching them back together. When I was a child, if anyone asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, I would reply first of all that I didn’t think I would grow up, but on the off chance it happened, I planned to be a farmer and a ballerina and a writer and a doctor and a musician and a zookeeper.
This is not the right answer. I know that now. “Philosopher-king,” you might as well say. “Sword swallower—stockbroker. Wrestler-art historian.” A business card that lists more than one profession does not go down well in the grown-up set. We’re supposed to have one main thing we do well, and it’s okay to have hobbies if they are victimless and don’t get out of hand, but to confess to disparate passions is generally taken in our society as a sign of attention deficit disorder.
For all the years I studied and worked as a scientist, I wrote poems in the margins of my chemistry texts and field notebooks. But I never identified myself as a poet, not even to myself. It would have seemed self-indulgent. Thoreau was unabashedly both scientific and literary; so was Darwin. But something has happened since then. Life is faster and more streamlined, and there is too much we have to know, just to get the job done right. To get one job done right, let alone seven or eight. And certainly we are supposed to get it right.
For all the years I’ve worked as a writer, I’ve also played at keyboards and the odd wind instrument, and lately even conga drums. I have sung in the shower. (I sound great in the shower.) I have howled backup to Annie Lennox and Randy Travis and Rory Block in my car. I’ve played in garage bands and jammed informally with musician friends, and with them have even written and recorded a few original songs. But I’ve never called myself a musician. It’s not the one thing I do best.
As I get comfortable with the middle stretch of my life, though, it’s occurred to me that this is the only one I’m going to get. I’d better open the closet door and invite my other selves to the table, even if it looks undignified or flaky. Possibly this is what’s regarded as midlife crisis,