5 Years: Lori

"Nearly all my books are made out of old experiences that have had time to season. Memory keeps what is essential and lets the rest go. I am always afraid of writing too much - of making stories that are like rooms full of things and people, with no enough air in them." - Willa Cather 

My professor in a college writing workshop course told the me that one should not write about a significant personal experience any sooner than 5 years ago. Apparently that was the necessary amount of time needed to fully process and understand an experience; the risk of writing too soon is an emotional but ultimately short-sighted piece. Therefore I want to try the exercise of writing about significant and trivial memories from approximately 5 years ago in my life to date. So here goes the first "5 Years" chapter:

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Lori was intimidating at first. She was a broad-shouldered Asian woman, 40+, with a blunt, square haircut ending a few inches underneath her ears that seemed to say, "I mean business". She wore a resting look of mild dissatisfaction along with a pair of dark-rimmed glasses that I took to be a symbol of lesbianism. When she first mentioned her "partner" in conversation I started to self-congratulate my powers of observation until she went on to describe him as a fifty-something, bald Jewish man.
But she had one of those faces that melts like sweet ice cream when she laughed, which was a lot; and of course her sense of humor was sarcastic, brusque, and very funny. I was in between client projects and helping out with in-house development and she was the team lead of the project. I didn't know what all that meant really, in the sense that I had no idea what the goals or endpoints of the work were. I just knew they were paying me good money to enter numbers in a spreadsheet. Somewhere in the back of mind I was questioning the purpose of my work, but it was a time in my life of youth and distraction and so the questions could wait. She was hard-charging and her criticisms would have been terribly frightening if she actually took herself seriously. The first time we went to lunch as a team she told me not to say the name of my clients in public since anyone could be sitting at the next table listening in, and then proceeded to give me all the appropriate nicknames for our major corporate clients: "Just call it Tiger. Then you can go on saying all the terrible things they do."

I remember her looking at me at one point during lunch and saying, "I'm old enough to have been your mother." I wasn't exactly sure how to respond to that because although it was technically true I felt agreeing with her would be calling her old. Also she was nothing like my mother at all: my mother's professional advice to me was to find people at work who knew more than I did who could help me. "Nobody wants to be friends with a woman who can do everything herself." I had never met a middle-aged Asian woman who spoke English without an accent, who didn't have children, and who worked outside the home. There was a brief pause in our lunch conversation where she likely considered how her life might have been changed with children, and I wondered how my self-concept would have differed growing up under Lori's constant tutelage.

But my time with strong, independent Lori was brief, and little did she know I spent most of my time on her project, in between the very important task of data entry, chatting online with a new friend, who was confident and certain in all that he did so unlike myself. In my naivety I believed it was possible for someone to be infallible and for this perfect person to somehow nullify my self-doubts by association. She didn't know that I couldn't wait for him to come back from his business trip to take me away from the mundane drudgery of working and to show me about belonging...to someone else. To be continued in a later chapter.