Free When You Are Engulfed in Flames by David Sedaris Page B

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.
    There were those who left Princeton and soared like arrows into the bosoms of power and finance, but I was not one of them. My path was a winding one, with plenty of obstacles along the way. When school was finished, I went back home, an Ivy League graduate with four years’ worth of dirty laundry and his whole life ahead of him. “What are you going to do now?” my parents asked.
    And I said, “Well, I was thinking of washing some of these underpants.”
    That took six months. Then I moved on to the shirts.
    “Now what?” my parents asked.
    And when I told them I didn’t know, they lost what little patience they had left. “What kind of a community-college answer is that?” my mother said. “You went to the best school there is. How can you
not
know something?”
    And I said, “I don’t know.”
    In time my father stopped wearing his Princeton gear. My mother stopped talking about my “potential,” and she and my dad got themselves a brown and white puppy. In terms of intelligence, it was just average, but they couldn’t see that at all. “Aren’t you just the smartest dog in the world?” they’d ask, and the puppy would lick their fingers in a way that was disturbingly familiar.
    My first alumni weekend cheered me up a bit. It was nice to know that I wasn’t the only unemployed graduate in the world, but the warm feeling evaporated when I got back home and saw that my parents had given the dog my bedroom. Above the dresser, in place of the Princeton pennant they’d bought me for my first birthday, was a banner reading “Westminster or Bust.”
    I could see which way the wind was blowing, and so I left and moved to the city, where a former classmate, a philosophy major, got me a job on his ragpicking crew. When the industry moved overseas — the doing of
another
former classmate