After college, I lived in a tiny studio apartment in Baltimore. My apartment was furnished mostly with college furniture. I mean that literally, as my friends and I had actually stolen some of the furniture from our dorm rooms at the end of our senior year. While I managed to accumulate a lot of stuff, I had very few “nice” things at that time in my life.
At the end of my second year of teaching, one of my student’s mothers gave me a beautiful glass pitcher with two margarita glasses. It was that heavy glass with a cobalt blue pattern woven throughout. It reminded me of summer and entertaining and sitting on a deck grilling and enjoying good conversation. Nevermind that I had no deck, grill or actual space to entertain. For me, it represented the hope of having these things.
When I got home, I carefully unwrapped the entire set from its mounds of packaging material and cleared a space for it. But when I tried to put it in my kitchen cabinet, I realized that the pitcher was too tall to fit. I can still remember the disappointment of that moment: all I wanted was to have one beautiful item among my hand-my-down IKEA dishes. Instead, back into the packaging material it went to be stored away for another time. I made a promise to myself, though, as I sat in that dorm room chair that I would start to make an effort to transition away from college into adulthood. And that I would do this by getting some nice things; just a few special items to make me feel like more of an adult.
A few years later when I was living in a tiny one-bedroom apartment in Evanston (upgrade from the studio), my margarita set finally found a comfortable home in the cabinet above the kitchen sink. I still had no deck, or grill, or actual space to entertain, nor do I recall actually ever using the set. But whenever I opened that cabinet, I would remember the quiet promise I made to my 23 year old self. The cobalt margarita set served as a reminder that growing up did have a place in my life and that I needed to make a small space for it.
Then, one day, as these things tend to happen, my boyfriend was getting something out of the cabinet when one of the margarita glasses fell and shattered all over the floor. Now, please let me preface this by saying that I am not someone who freaks out about breaking glasses. Which is why my boyfriend looked so shocked when I began yelling about “destroying my dreams” before running into my bedroom and slamming the door.
I know. It’s just a thing. And it was a thing, I’ll remind you, that had never actually been used. But for me, this was a symbol of my first cognizant desire to be an adult; this item had bridged the gap between youth and growing up and now it lay shattered on the floor. It was kind of heartbreaking to me.
Here’s the tricky thing about becoming an adult, though. As you grow up, you begin to realize that tiny losses are a part of life: things break and fall apart and get shattered. You can choose to dwell on what you’ve lost, or you can look at your life, shift things around a bit and then continue on. You can mourn the loss of not being able to entertain two people with your nice things, or you can serve one person a very large pitcher of margaritas.
Since that day, I have used the pitcher countless times. Most recently making strong drinks for a group of women gathered at my house for an intellectual discussion that ended in a drunken bullfight and lots of pictures involving an eye patch. So, maybe I haven’t quite made the full transition into adulthood yet, but I like to think that for the moment, I have arrived at a nice balance.
