COLUMN: Unraveling a rite of passage

From Karen Pasternack's, "Effective Immediately," Fall '97 From Karen Pasternack's, "Effective Immediately," Fall '97 A Penn student of an uncertain age sits on the sand by the edge of the water clad in sweatshirt and faded jeans, her knees tucked into her chest. But her mind is now swept towards the future, to the following week that will mark the halfway point in her last fall semester of college. She is pondering her approach to this year can't quite grasp how to experience this phase of her life. One finger, one sandy finger fumbles with the brown strands of hair that fall around her head. Twisting, knotting, the grains of sand becoming mingled with the freshly washed curls. She is trying desperately to brainstorm a concept of how she will live out her year. What if she doesn't discover her true calling? She looks for an answer out where the faint purple and pink creep across the sky and connect with the water, far away from where she is sitting all alone on this deserted beach. She wishes she could be out there, or at least know what's out there at the distant place. But the thoughts in her head continue, she cannot push them away. She reminds herself she must make an appointment at CPPS, and don't forget to bring that special resume paper, her mother had said. She must make a clip book, and compile the letters that recount her painstaking work over summers past. And somewhere she heard she must own a special suit for interviews, with buttons in specific places. What if her interviews are in other states? And what about her friends? Will they scatter across the continent only to come back for random holidays and weddings? She has learned there are Penn alumni available for discussions about making the right career move. They can teach her how she should target herself for the best possible position. Find the job that would become the ladder for the something else she really wanted out there. But how much can she actually prepare herself without feeling fake, like a perfectly wrapped package waiting to be shipped into the world. A large splash of water hits her toes, crawls up onto her shins, wetting the end of the jeans she wears, specked with paint from the play she worked on freshman year. She loved the winters at Penn when they'd ice-skated downtown and had snowball fights on the green. Before everything became serious, or was it really? Wasn't it fun then, she thinks. This child, or is she an adult now? Even she doesn't know the answer to that. She thinks she remembers someone calling her an adult recently, yes her grandmother. But maybe she's not sure she is ready to accept that title yet. Not just yet. As if becoming an adult somehow symbolized giving up creative visions for a grounded nine-to-five reality. And yet she'd rather not contemplate that, just focus on the horizons, or what's out there that she can't see, can't know. Funny, she doesn't remember ever thinking, planning ahead for her sophomore year. And even her junior year spent partially abroad. Never determined it really, until it was there, until it was happening. But now she has found herself walking a tightrope between past and future, wondering how to unravel the present. And there is the water again splashing, splashing, an urgent message, but she doesn't look down, doesn't want to be aware of where she is, who she is at this moment in time. She'd rather look at the seagull that has just landed a few feet from her. So now she's not really alone on the beach because this seagull is standing there, tiny feet in the cold, cold water. She watches him, observes him, notices he doesn't seem fixated on anything but his immediate moment, his feathers wet from the sloshes below. The beautiful melding of colors is in the distance, yet the distance means nothing to this bird, she thinks. She sees. She understands. And slowly her gaze, the eyes of this young creature, whose not exactly sure of how old she wants to be, are moving from the seagull to the lines in the distance to the bubbling water at her feet. And this is the image she conjures every time she is walking down the Walk and becomes aware of the imbalance within her. She is learning to imagine the horizon, ponder the multicolored dreams that weave themselves through her mind, without focusing out there, far away, in a somewhere she does not know. Still touched by that feeling of her feet, and the icy water and the grainy sand in her fingernails. She has accepted the horizon is out there, but for now it can wait.