A Gift

Practicing the conditional with the only student who came to my upper-intermediate class one recent evening, I asked what he would change about his life if he could change anything. He is a 19-year-old computer technology student, living at home with his mother. Half an hour away, in another city, live his father and stepmother with their six-year-old daughter. “Half-sister” and “half-brother” are not terms in Spanish, so when my student had told me about the girl, he said simply sister. He tries to visit that family every weekend. It occurred to me that one obvious change he might wish for would be parents who had never divorced, and a sister who lived in the same house—though that might count as two changes, and might require a few others, as well.

My student gave a shrug and a shake of his head, and then almost immediately said, “Nothing.”

“Nothing?” I was surprised.

He paused for a second, as if checking a parcel, and then, as though finding it as he expected, said no, nothing. “I mean, we only have one life.”

“Right,” I agreed, and waited.

He made a face to show the difficulty of explaining. “Sure, everyone wants to be rich,” he said—“me, too.” But he wouldn’t wish it into his present life at the snap of his fingers. I got the feeling he was saying something about authenticity. Wealth was not real in his life, did not fit the shape of the other pieces, or was the wrong material. In other words, it wouldn’t be him, and it wouldn’t be his life.

Then he said again, “I can’t explain.”

“Oh, try,” I urged him, because I wanted to feel what he did. I wanted to imagine that my life had some intrinsic structure that couldn’t be changed. That it was all part of what should be, and was unwinding as it must. That I didn’t live in Spain by accident, but because the series of choices that had led me to be an English teacher in a language academy in Gijón were not random but all belonged together as my life: a herd of cattle in a pen, all belonging whether they bellow or not, none cut out.

My student shook his head, his brow furrowing as if still considering. “But I would make one change,” he said.

“What’s that?”

He explained that his best friend had epilepsy, and he would cure him of that condition—not rewrite history so the friend had never had it, but stop all future seizures, freeing him from both the seizures and the fear of their occurring. My student told me that he and his friend had just returned from a weekend concert in Madrid; the lights and noise had triggered a seizure that began as they were arriving back in Gijón, and he drove his friend straight to the hospital. It could have been much worse—the attack might have occurred at the concert. But with a cure, they would not have to worry about such things. It would also bring practical changes: The friend could get a driver’s license and have the freedom and opportunities that driving gives.

After my student left, I thought about what changes I would make among my circle, if I could. Besides magically making the worriers worry less or the impatient people more patient, I could think of none. I would not ask for the dead to come back to life or for the living to live on indefinitely, though I might be tempted to. Among friends and family, my mother is the oldest person I know. I hope she lives forever, but I certainly couldn’t force that on her. To paraphrase Henry David Thoreau, there is nothing to do with a day but live it. And by the same logic, all you can do with a life is live it—not enshrine it or gild it or hallow it, or bottle, pickle, or endlessly preserve it. You can’t make it mean anything. I believe my student was talking about something similar. So what good is a life? To watch it unfold naturally. And see if it is, as Helen Keller said and my mother loves to repeat, “either a daring adventure or nothing at all.” Whatever it is, like any life unfolded, it will crumble along its folds and disintegrate, impossible to save or preserve.

So run my thoughts. Today, March 18, is my mother’s birthday. Each year I want to have some fantastically surprising, daring, just-right birthday present for my mother. I never can think of what it would be. Besides, the real present is from her to me: another year in my life.

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