March 2003

1993: Misdirected Repentance
or, Poor, poor, pitiful Grandpa

My life changed the first time I read "Something About Repentance" by Mark Twain. It's a very short essay, barely a page long, written in 1908. In it he explains how a very few good deeds torment his mind more than all the sins he ever committed. He wrote, "Often when we repent of a sin, we can forgive ourselves and drop the matter out of mind; but when we repent of a good deed, we seldom get peace - we go on repenting to the end." That little piece has messed with my head for years.

The late night haunting of days gone by are never filled with visions of the terrible things I've done to myself and others. (At times I am arrogantly confident that most people, myself included, had it coming to them anyway.) I've been this way since I was about seventeen, and I never contemplate the past in any other terms.

When I decided to dedicate at least one column a month this year to my memories of 1993, I almost immediately began repenting. I have been stewing over events of the spring and summer of 1993 for ten years. Having read the Twain by then, I was filing memories in a folder neatly marked 'Regrets.' With all the time I had on my hands, it's no wonder that year's file is not only neat, but bulging.

Don't get me wrong, because I do not spend all my time pining for my lost youth or unrequited loves. I have plenty of decent memories of 1993. I have been trying to understand why I have such fond memories of that particular year, and I think my regrets are just another reason I can't let it go. The whole point of me writing all these columns about 1993 is to flush it out on paper. (Nobody reads my columns, anyway, so it's not like I'm sharing with anyone.)

1993 may be the most unique year of my life because I left home to attend college. I, along with my friends, spread out across the country to get an education, shaking off the dust collected in the suburbs in hopes of collecting some new dust. The time in our lives afforded us an opportunity to sever our ties with nearly every person we knew without burning a single bridge. We could disappear without anyone holding it against us. I didn't think about life that way then, but I might as well have since I carried on like I did.

A person does not have that kind of chance to escape more than once or twice. For most, by the time they've graduated from high school, they've spent up to eighteen years in the same town with the same people. They went to kindergarten and elementary school and high school with the same people. The only people lucky enough to attend college with all their friends from high school when to either Beverly Hills or Bayside High School.

Had my life been more traumatic, I could go on to write a book about how going to college freed me from the torture of my home town, and my chaotic relationship with alcohol, or something. Since I lived a quiet and normal life, I get no such chance. All I have is the lingering feeling that as I tossed off the shackles of suburban life, I might have tossed more than I wanted.

In the last ten years, I've burned my share of bridges. I do not for one minute regret burning one splinter on any of them - even the accidents. The opportunity I had to watch them burn before my eyes helped me to accept their destruction. I don't miss them and I don't care to rebuild any bridges any time soon.

Of course, way back in 1993 I simply abandoned dozens of bridges. Not only have I never had the chance to reconnect with most of those people, I don't know what I'd do if we were to meet. It's foolish for me to think I could just pick up where we left off, but that isn't the point, anyway. They left the same bridge for the same reasons. It's our fault collectively that we haven't been in touch.

The people (and things) I left behind are not the regret itself, and this comes back to the Twain, because it's the leaving I regret. The normal course of events for a young man require him to leave home to get an education, and you cannot judge him for doing so. The act cannot be judged because it is natural and necessary. By doing so, you are doing the right thing. Therein lies the deepest part of my regret.

I believe that leaving behind my cozy life is the regret itself. It encompasses the lost opportunities (real or imagined) as well as the abandoned bridges. It's utter foolishness on my part, but I cannot imagine that it being so will effect the way I think about it.

So what am I do about this? When I think back on what may have been the most important year of my life, I still repent. I can only pay penance to myself, and there is no cannon law to guide me. Without the ability to forgive myself sincerely, I'm left alone with my thoughts.

Does this make sense? I had hoped that I could unlock the secrets to my character, peculiarities and frailties by searching myself for answers to my 1993 obsession, but all I have found, yet again, is that the grass is always greener in another time. New month, same old answers.

So what does this, ultimately, have to do with regret? It tells me that regret, and the inevitable repentance, are often misguided over time. While I do not doubt that I could have lived my life differently, the individual regrets of my youth will always have been tempered over time by the larger regret connected to the loss of my youth. Knowing that, I don't know how I will ever be able to come to terms with myself.