28 Years Later
8 minute read
I am out in Montauk where I am working on what are hopefully final edits of my new novel – it’s become automatic when I reach the end of a draft to count out six weeks and book myself in for a weekend here. This happens twice a year and luckily for me – for my pocket and my ability to focus – these trips coincide with the off season.
There’s something about a seaside town in the off season that I love, have always loved. One of the (many!) differences between me and my wife – who was brought up in Florida – is that for me the beach has never been synonymous with sunbathing. If you waited for that kind of sun in Ireland, you might get to the beach a handful of times a year, and besides there’s got to be something resilience-building about swimming when it’s hail stoning. If I’d grown up somewhere like Florida, I wonder if I’d still love the colours of the sky when a storm is rolling in; the wind blowing the foam from the top of the breakers before they crash? But I’ll never know the answer to that, I only know that I do.
I realise that you might not know where Montauk is, so I’m going to take you back to when I first heard about it, sitting around a table in Hilper’s coffee shop in UCD, nursing a cup of coffee that was probably empty. Many hours of my three years in UCD were spent around tables of empty cups and overflowing ashtrays and back then – the early 90s – everything was all right with the world as long as I had scraped enough money together for a cup of coffee and 10 Marlboro Lights.
At first, I didn’t realise the strange-sounding name was Native American – in fact, it might not have been until I saw the names of the other towns on our journey east on the Long Island Rail Road that the penny dropped. Montauk was the last stop – ‘The End’ was the slogan printed boldly on coffee cups and T-shirts. It still is. But back on that day, in Hilper's, listening to a guy we knew who had been there the summer before, I don’t think I asked too many questions. He spoke authoritatively about the jobs on offer, the money to be made, the bars to spend the aforementioned money in. Feeling my way back into my 18-year-old body sitting at that table, I can feel that I had a nervousness about this upcoming summer – this J1 rite of passage – that we were planning.
Like many things at that age, I don’t think I stopped and asked myself if this was really something I wanted to do – somewhere I wanted to go – or if it was assumed that I would go there, because, well, everyone else was.
I wanted to go to America – that’s for sure – and maybe it didn’t really matter to me where it was we ended up.
As it would turn out, that summer would be the first of four summers I would spend in Montauk, more than anyone else in our group. One of my most vivid memories of June 1993 is the first day that my two best friends and I spent walking along the main street, CVs in hand. The sun was beating down and we had devised a fair and equitable system for job seeking where we each went into every third establishment – a system that started to break down when I landed on the town’s only ‘Bait and Tackle’ shop. My friends – naturally – thought it was hilarious, but I was still stewing over it when my next prospective employer turned out to be a dubious-looking Chinese restaurant above a sports shop. In a town of bright sunshine and brighter awnings, this place – Wok n’ Roll – looked dark and, dare I say it, dingy? As I reluctantly climbed the stairs, feeling the sting of blisters from my new River Island runners on my heels, it was hard not to feel victimised by the whole stupid process.
It’s interesting sometimes to reflect on a moment in time – a moment in your life – and think how things would have been different if you hadn’t walked through a certain door. If I hadn’t walked through that particular door, I wouldn’t have made a great friend – a lifelong friend. I would likely never have even met her. We wouldn’t have travelled around Australia together two years later and she wouldn’t have visited me in London several years after that, where she would fall in love with someone I’d invited over for dinner, thinking that maybe they would get on. They never would have gotten married, their two kids wouldn’t be here, if I hadn’t walked up those steps. And without her friendship, I might not have stayed in that job or gone back to work at the dingy Chinese restaurant the summer after that and after that and after that. If I’d only spent one summer in Montauk – as most of our group did – I might not have fallen in love with the place off season, I might not have established a foundation here, a knowledge that no matter how far I went, I would always come back.
Yesterday, bringing home my dinner from the pizza restaurant that is still going strong, I took a shortcut through a car park at the back of where the Chinese restaurant used to be. It’s been through a lot of iterations since then and today it’s some kind of lobster place, reflective of a more Hampton-esque vibe in Montauk these days. But the back of the building is really the same – a rusting metal balcony where I used to smoke on my work breaks, sitting in either a sagging director’s chair or – if that was already taken – on a plastic crate left there for the same purpose.
Walking by, feeling the heat of my dinner in my hand, I can see myself up there. I can picture what I was wearing – the baggy polo shirt, shorts longer than I’d wear now, my Reeboks that I obsessively tried to keep white. And I imagine myself – my 19-year-old self – looking back at me, at 47, and I wonder what she would think of me and how we’d spent the intervening 28 years.
One thing I know my 19-year-old self would be excited about – maybe even ecstatic about – would be that we are living in New York, somewhere she’d loved for a decade before she even set foot there. Nineteen-year-old me would also love being an author. She’d be very proud of that accomplishment, but she’d be disappointed that four published books hadn’t paved the way for riches and stardom in the way she would have imagined. She might not fully buy it when I told her that those things matter a lot less than she thinks right now, and she’d definitely roll her eyes if I said that it’s something we do for the joy of it, because it’s part of who we are. She wouldn’t be into that kind of talk at all.
The part she’d have the hardest time getting her head around would be being married to a woman. She’d be shocked, but more than that, I think she’d be ashamed. Looking at her up there smoking, I’m glad she doesn’t know, because if she did, she’d worry about what was going to happen to her when this awful secret that she only has an inkling of right now would be found out.
The thing I’ve found about midlife – about this ability to look back – is that what comes next, inevitably, is looking forward.
I start to do mental gymnastics of maths calculations in my head. It’s 28 years since I sat on that balcony smoking (could it really be 28 years?) and if I look forward another 28, I’ll be 75 – if I make it that long. That’s roughly my mother’s age and I see it in her when she looks back and talks about her 40s or her 30s; I see the same incredulity that she can’t believe it’s all gone by so fast.
As I write this, I can feel the fear creeping in – fear of what you’ll be thinking of me right now; fear that I should have written the piece I intended to write this month, instead of this. Life is short, life moves fast – so what? There’s nothing here we don’t already know. And you’re right, there isn’t. It’s something I’ve “known” all along, except it’s taken me until where I am now – my 40s – to really feel it.
When I think about the difference between me on the balcony and me today, there are many, of course. I don’t smoke anymore for starters, I drink much less, eat healthier, I run and practice yoga. (The fact that despite these positive changes I am a stone heavier may be fodder for a future article!) The way I make my decisions, my choices, is different today, of course, than it was when I was 19. But then again, a lot has stayed the same – my love of writing, of empty beaches, my sense of humour, my obsession with always having my runners whiter than white. A lot of my friends today were among that same group from all those years ago. Sure, my principles and my values have evolved as I’ve learned more about life, about the world, but mostly the seeds were there, 28 years ago.
Twenty-eight years is a long time to look ahead and one of the things I’ve learned, am still learning, is that like many clichés formed in truth, I can only live it one day, one hour, one minute at a time. Whereas 19-year-old me was invested in outcomes and accomplishments, over the intervening years I’ve learned to enjoy the process of getting there and to understand that this is only possible when I begin to let go of my attachment to the end result.
The choices I make in my life today, this morning, in this very hour, are building blocks that will make up those weeks, those months, those years, and there’s something comforting in that, in the thought that I don’t have to worry unnecessarily about the whole journey, only about making the next turn. Because I know that if I do that – if I take responsibility for doing that – and if I get another 28 years, when my 19-year-old self looks down from her director’s chair and sees an old lady walking by, carrying a pizza, she might like what she sees. She might even be proud of her, like I am proud of us both.
Yvonne Cassidy, April 2022
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