Turbulent Twenties

There’s a reason that decade of our lives is called the “Turbulent Twenties.” When I hear people say they wish they were young again, I shudder a little inside, because I would not live my teens and twenties over for anything. (They happened longer ago than I would have you believe, but let’s not quibble over numbers.) The twenties have many wonderful and marvelous moments, but mostly they are just TOO HARD. They are hopefully when we work out most of our stupid shit, because if not, we’re trapped in years of looking back all the way to our Terrible Twos and whining about a bunch of events and relationships we can’t do anything about. Fortunately, I managed to make (and learn from) just about every horrible mistake a woman can make during my twenties, paving the way for more mature mistakes later.

One thing that has been good about every decade of my life is that I’ve had friends who endured me and usually even loved me. When I was in graduate school, one such friend was Lynn Domina. A poet, Lynn was in the MFA program and I believe she even ended up the editor of the Black Warrior Review, which is the University of Alabama’s literary journal that’s put out twice a year. Through Lynn, I was able to sit in on a few writers’ workshop classes and discover that some of the professors, as well as many of the gifted graduate students, in the writing program were not the ego-crushing beasts I feared. At that time in my life, I would not have shared one page of my creative writing with anyone (I was in the Masters program, so the writing I shared was confined to essays and literary criticism). But Lynn did share her creative writing, and I greatly admired her poetry and her short stories. Through her, I also discovered how writers lift moments from conversations when she took something I said one day and used it as a line in a short story. “Steal with pride!” we writers are wont to say. I still remember what I said, and no, I’m not telling. I might eventually steal it back from Lynn.

One of Lynn’s friends, with whom I had a passing acquaintance, was another Lynn, Lynn Pruett. Lynn was also in the MFA program. While we were in school, she married one of the English professors, David. (Irrelevant side note: When Tom transferred to Tuscaloosa from the University of Alabama in Huntsville, he was short an English credit and ended up in a freshman comp class taught by David.) One of my sweeter memories comes from a party at David and Lynn’s home. They’d just had a little boy, prompting the purchase of a video camera (a rare possession in those days, particularly among impoverished graduate students). While being shown features of the camera, we saw footage of David holding the baby and singing to him these lines from the Rosanne Cash song “Seven Year Ache”: The boys say “when is he gonna give us some room”/the girls say “god I hope he comes back soon.” It was a moment that could have been written by any of those talented people in the room, but it was real. To this day, every time I hear that song, my mind makes us all young and full of promise again.

Though we moved from our Turbulent Twenties onto paths that took us far from one another, I’m so glad for the friends I’ve known along the way. And I’m fortunate to have more than just good memories of some of them. A few years ago, I bought Lynn Domina’s book of beautiful poetry, . And I just finished reading Lynn Pruett’s funny, touching, and achingly Southern novel, Ruby River.