When you are engulfed in flames - By David Sedaris Page 0,25
strong back then, the best in the country, but it wasn’t the sort of thing your father could get too worked up about. Or at least, most fathers wouldn’t. Mine was over the moon. “Killed by a Princeton graduate!” he said. “And my own son, no less.”
My mom was actually jealous. “So what’s wrong with matricide?” she asked. “What, I’m not good enough to murder? You too high and mighty to take out your only mother?”
They started bickering, so in order to make peace, I promised to consider a double major.
“And how much more is that going to cost us?” they said.
Those last few months at home were pretty tough, but then I started my freshman year and got caught up in the life of the mind. My idol-worship class was the best, but my dad didn’t get it at all. “What the hell does that have to do with patricide?” he asked.
And I said, “Umm. Everything.”
He didn’t understand that it’s all connected, that one subject leads to another and forms a kind of chain that raises its head and nods like a cobra when you’re sucking on a bong after three days of no sleep. On acid, it’s even wilder and appears to eat things. But not having gone to college, my dad had no concept of a well-rounded liberal arts education. He thought that all my classes should be murder-related, with no lunch breaks or anything. Fortunately, though, it doesn’t work that way.
I’d told my parents I’d major in killing them, but that was just to get them off my back. In truth, I had no idea what I wanted to study, so for the first few years I took everything that came my way. History was interesting, but I have no head for dates and tend to get my eras confused. I enjoyed pillaging and astrology, but the thing that ultimately stuck was comparative literature. There wasn’t much of it to compare back then, no more than a handful of epic poems and one novel about a lady detective, but that’s part of what I liked about it. The field was new and full of possibilities. A well-versed graduate might go anywhere, but try telling that to my parents.
“You mean you won’t be killing us?” my mother said. “But I told everyone you were going for that double major.”
Dad followed his “I’m-so-disappointed” speech with a lecture on career opportunities. “You’re going to study literature and get a job doing what?” he said. “Literaturizing?”
We spent my entire vacation arguing; then, just before I went back to school, my father approached me in my bedroom. “Promise me you’ll keep an open mind,” he said. And as he left, he slipped an engraved dagger into my book bag.
I had many fine teachers during my years at Princeton, but the one I think of most often was my fortune-telling professor, a complete hag with wild gray hair, warts the size of new potatoes, the whole nine yards. She taught us to forecast the weather up to two weeks in advance, but ask for anything weightier, and you were likely to be disappointed.
The alchemy majors all wanted to know how much money they’d be making after graduation. “Just give us an approximate figure,” they’d say, and the professor would shake her head and cover her crystal ball with a little cozy given to her by one of her previous classes. When it came to our futures, she drew the line, no matter how hard we begged — and, I mean, we really tried. I was as let down as the next guy, but, in retrospect, I can see that she acted in our best interest. Look at yourself on the day that you graduated from college, then look at yourself today. I did that recently, and it was like, “Yikes! What the hell happened?”
The answer, of course, is life. What the hag chose not to foretell — and what we, in our certainty, could not have fathomed — is that stuff comes up. Weird doors open. People fall into things. Maybe the engineering whiz will wind up brewing cider, not because he has to, but because he finds it challenging. Who knows? Maybe the athlete will bring peace to all nations, or the class moron will go on to become the president of the United States — though that’s more likely to happen at Harvard or Yale, schools that will pretty much let in anybody.