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I am all the ages I've ever been.
[anne lamott]
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I decided I wanted to be in the Peace Corps in the eighth grade, when I found an old newspaper clipping from one of my dad's columns packed away in a box.
Dad had been totally overwhelmed with the task of sorting through a few decades' worth of articles, so he offered to pay my sister and me to organize the haphazard clippings chronologically in folders. It was fast, easy work for a bored kid on summer vacation. I might have made a killing if I hadn't kept stopping to read them.
I was about to file this particular article away when I noticed that, strangely, it was written to me. It was a letter my father had published the day I started kindergarten.
Dear Katie, he began, You can't read this yet, but today is your first day of school. I sat down in a patch of sunlight on the dusty hardwood floor and pulled my bony, bug bite-laced legs to my chest.
He wrote about how much I was going to love learning, how much I was going to love new ideas and new books and my strange, wonderful teachers. He wrote about classes and new friends and the potential others would find in me, the potential I would find in myself.
He said one of the most magical things about school was the people I would cross paths with, writers and musicians and miscreants, future rocket scientists and oil tycoons and rabble-rousers, people whose lives would bend and twist in ways none of us were able to imagine now. For this brief period of time, he told me, we would all be thrown together into this pre-adolescent free-for-all, before time and calling and social convention separated us out.
Treasure this time, he wrote, because some of them will go off to become rocket scientists or start rock bands or join the Peace Corps while the rest of us go off to regular jobs. Over the years I've forgotten the exact phrasing of most of the article, but this sentence circulates in my chest still, after more than a decade. The hallway was so quiet, dust motes circling in the afternoon light. My heart pounded away sturdily in the taught muscles of my thighs.
As I read those words, raw desire surged in me so acutely I could smell it- it had the exact same metallic bite as fresh, cold morning air- and I thought, I want that to be me. I don't want to go off to a regular job. I want the different thing, the other thing I felt pulsing through my father's words. I want to go on adventures. I didn't want to be a rocket scientist or a musician, so from that day on, for me, that meant the Peace Corps.
I spent a college semester in France eating voraciously and wandering the rain-streaked, sunlit streets. (They'll love that I've lived abroad!) After graduation, I backpacked my way through every national park in Arizona with a conservation corps, building and breaking down trails, felling trees, staring into campfires. (Environmental conservation is one of their biggest sectors!)
In California, I picked strawberries and planned barn dances on an organic farm and guided backpacking trips in Yosemite. (Organic farming! Wilderness skills! Leadership! Adaptability!) Now in Colorado, my job is fund development for a nonprofit organization serving veterans. (Building sustainability for a grassroots NGO? Check!)
I've volunteered as an English tutor, a Head Start gardener for impoverished families, a medical coordinator for the Colorado 9Health Fair. I taught prenatal classes at an emergency pregnancy clinic, became a Texas Master Gardener (yup, that's a thing), then a Wildnerness EMT.
In November, I laboriously completed my application and had a perfect interview with a Peace Corps recruiter. She nominated me right off the bat for a program working with maternal and children's health, with a side project in agriculture- exactly what I wanted to do. You're going to be a fabulous volunteer, she said, shaking my hand. Welcome to the Peace Corps.
On Friday, a week before my twenty-fifth birthday, I found out that I didn't make the final cut. I won't be in South America this next year after all, planting gardens for high school students or helping new mothers weigh their babies. I won't be wrapping my heart around a new people or my tongue around a new language. Someone else received the invitation in the mail I thought was meant for me, the invitation I have wanted and worked for with building fervor since I was thirteen. That invitation will never be part of my story.
When I found out, I went into the bathroom adjoining my office at work and sat on the porcelain toilet seat cover, my head between my hands. Everything was so quiet. I felt the pulse in my forehead ticking against my palm. The Peace Corps was supposed to be a sort of capstone for me, the culmination of everything I've done in my early twenties. Getting word that it wasn't going to happen felt almost exactly like falling out of a hammock.
After a while, in that quiet, I heard an interesting question somewhere inside my head. It threw me off guard, because it was one of those questions that is so basic you kind of forget to ask it of yourself after a certain point.
What do you want to do?
I actually opened my mouth, still almost answered the Peace Corps, out of habit, because that has been my answer for so long, at first silently to myself, then out loud to everyone else. But on the lid of the toilet seat, it didn't ring quite true. Everything was very still and cold. Something about the air itself felt almost new.
It felt so sacred that I stopped being sad for a second. It suddenly felt like a place where it was okay to say a different dream out loud, one that was newer, more true to the woman I am than to the girl I was. So I did, completely surprising myself.
You're not a failure, the voice said. I felt the young girl inside me relax.
And after another beat- That sounds like an adventure.
I have wanted to be in the Peace Corps before I even knew what it was, and I've always used it as a sort of compass, my guiding light. I wonder how my life would look now if I hadn't had that dream threaded all through my veins, from a letter that was written to me before I was able to read it. It has ordered my steps like a mantra, or a mentor, to this job or that volunteer opportunity. This added such richness to my life.
And today, in the midst of my confusion and disappointment and rising hope, it feels like I'm pausing, turning to look back over all the ground I covered. The mountains and valleys, cut with snow-fed streams and crisscrossed with false trails, the titan trees and desert brush, the sky so deep black it's almost blue again.
It feels like this phantom light led me out of the desert, through the woods and to the shore, then disappeared right as we reached the edge of the world. It took me down a path I never would have taken had I not had a reason to go. It left my side just in time for me to turn and see the paths still ahead, winding out of sight, and beyond them the sun just beginning to rise.
