Little Fictions

Congratulations on your graduations, everyone in the Class of 2011! Of course, this could mean that I am congratulating myself, but sometimes that's appropriate. Also, I primarily mean for this to celebrate high school graduates - particularly those brave enough to admit that they don't know what they're doing next.

I went to two parties yesterday (yay Josiah and Alex, if you ever read this), and today our whole family packed up and took off to Ohio for the afternoon to party with Emelia and the Denggs. My family. There was good food, some games (which I observed rather than joining), wine tasting (thank you, Uncle Mark, for homemade wine:), and conversation. It is the last of these which left me curious and conflicted, and about which I will write here.

Grandpa Dengg loves me very much. I suppose I have been very blessed to have known all four of my grandparents (5, if you count C and T's grandma, Aldean), and to know that they loved me. I am even more blessed to still have Grandpa Dengg, to have him send cards and try to find out what's going on in my life. The only problem is that he doesn't remember so well - today he called me over so he could tell Aunt Pat what I'm doing right now, and he said that I was shoeing horses.

Before you laugh at the ridiculosity, I suppose you should know that that was in the plan. Quite a while ago, but still... it seemed like something I could do, and something that would pay well once I was through training. It would have fit right in with my life-plan of being a large animal veterinarian. He was really excited about it when we talked about it around Grandma's kitchen table 5 years ago.

It's harmless, I know, but I still wonder what to do with this. It happened at Easter, too. I just smile and say, "That was a few years ago..." and if people ask, I say that I spent a year on a Ranch after high school. True, but there was no actual shoeing involved. How does one tell one's grandfather that he is, in fact, mistaken about one's entire life-plan? Enlighten me, please.

This is really just at the foundation of a whole bunch of questions. When you graduate high school, you're supposed to know where you're going, what you're doing. Graduating college has the same implications - each step into maturity supposedly comes with a set of clearer instructions than the last one. But what if it doesn't? My experience has been that I become more aware of the opportunities and challenges ahead, but where I will actually end up becomes more vague.

More exciting, perhaps, but much more vague.

I spent a lot of my high school years with a false sense of certainty, and God worked long and hard to break me of it so that he could point me to the humanities rather than science. I have a great deal of respect for people who, at graduation, are courageous enough to admit that they are "undeclared." There's no shame in not knowing what God has no yet revealed, and it might save you from having to deal with some of the Little Fictions that could come up otherwise.