Everything Happened | vol. 225

Fledgling Season

It’s fledgling season, the most dangerous time of year for undercooked birdies too big for the nest but frankly too gnarly to be gazed upon by the human eye. They are splatting onto sidewalks and scaring the shit out of us, all while trying to learn how to fly, eat, survive, build nests of their own. The little fledgies don’t even know their species’ song yet! Pathetic. I saw one in my yard today looking like a stunned, beaked toad. The overwhelming desire to scoop it up and “protect” it! I will save you, toadbird. Come to mama.

They don’t need to be protected, and in fact, it’s not kind to intervene. One-third of fledglings won’t survive this period, and it’s too late in the season for the mother bird to lay a replacement egg. Enough will survive to continue the species. This is what it is to be wild. People aren’t wild, no matter what the evo-psych podcaster creeps say. People are rubbery yet fragile and we can give ourselves as many chances as we want.

During the spring of my senior year, the ambitious members of the class of 2004 submitted ourselves to a lightning round of what they called local scholarships interviews. So many local organizations and entities offered minor scholarships — $75 here, $250 there— that rather than have us apply for dozens of them individually, we did one generic application to everything and then sat in on a huge panel interview.

I remembered what I was wearing, which was a gray skirt suit from Kohl’s with the back vent still stitched shut, over a sky blue modal camisole with built-in padded shelf bra. My mom had not approved of the lace-trimmed satin camisole that I wanted instead, but this was a reasonable compromise for me. On my face were the brown plastic-framed glasses that I only qualified for because I threw the eye exam slightly in pursuit of them. (At this time Tina Fey was co-hosting Weekend Update which I mention for no particular reason.)

Even at the time, I knew that teenagers in suits was the funniest thing in the world. As we all waited in the cafeteria for our time slot, we looked like a teen undertaker convention or a speech and debate tournament, not that there’s much daylight between the two.

You got assigned your ten-minute time slot and then you entered the Thunderdome; it was like speed dating in the round. Representatives from Knights of Columbus, the Rotary Club, the local chapter of MADD, the Parks department, League of Women Voters, all sitting before you in suits, probably also purchased at Kohl’s. They each had a packet with your scholarship application and your “résumé” and referred to its claims in their questions.

And instead of putting on the razzle dazzle, I answered their questions like they were assistant district attorneys and my ass could fry if I ran my mouth. “So you are a member of the National Honors Society?” “Yes, that’s right.” The saliva left my body and I could hear my cheeks click as I smiled. It was the sound of me absolutely bombing.

Even 20 years ago, these scholarships were inconsequential. If you really killed it in the interview, you could scoop up a raft of scholarships totaling $3k, enough for maybe one semester of room and board at a state school. My peers and I would need close to $50,000 to make it through a public four-year degree at minimum.

Now, my parents had professional class jobs and my older siblings were already attending college. An underwhelmed Rotarian was probably not standing in the way of me getting to go to university. I didn’t care about the scholarships as much as I cared about being good at everything all the time, even things I didn’t like and didn’t care about. I had done so badly that I wasn’t sure if my self-concept as a basically competent person was accurate anymore. And I had pitted out my damn suit because I was only wearing a tank top under it, for which I somehow blame Ally McBeal??

I waited around outside the room after my interview to listen in on the next one because what the fuck had just happened. The interviewee was someone I had known all through school, and I will call her Patty, because she was a Patty Simcox type. A Jessie Spano type, a Hermione Granger type…a member of the strong tradition of earnest, nerdy teenage girls who are blameless and lovely but who still activate a strong irritation response within anyone in their immediate vicinity. And man. Did Patty have these sweaty civic leaders eating out of the palm of her hand. She regaled them with tales of her volunteer work, her studies, her extra-curriculars. The plot centered the efforts of many yet still underscored how lovely and pleasant and capable she was.

Recently, an instagram account called @ifyouhigh showed me a close-up of a spider weaving its lacy, baroque web and it elicited a similar reaction in me. How do they know how to do this? Did they learn or are they incapable of being any other way?

I’ve had several dozen interview situations since then, and there is still a dark Kermit over my shoulder each time reminding me that I am biologically incapable of providing these people with a Patty experience. Once I bombed an interview so badly that as the interviewer was walking me out to reception, a colleague approached to introduce himself, and the interviewer solemnly shook his head ‘no.’

My kneejerk disdain for this quality, whether the quality is inborn or developed, is no doubt sourced from envy. But I still wonder what it would be like to have the savvy to climb, soar, play the game like you have all the pieces. How things glide for some people, an air hockey puck, a Z-orb.

So much is different now for me. Having weaned Polly this spring, I’m post-reproduction for the first time since 2014 when I became pregnant with Desi. My father-in-law died, and so the years of this round of remotely managed elder care are over, and we have only our grief and our memories and a metric ton of admin. In a few weeks, I will start my first new job in five years. We’re fledging for the first time, or maybe the hundredth, and I’m glad for the ability to fledge over and over again. I’m bombing hungrily, I always do. I’ll be okay. I’m not wild.

yr mate,
Evie
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