Pocket Dispatch from the School Yard
Photo by Papaioannou Kostas on Unsplash
On the school yard, at drop-off and pick-up, I meet more like-minded adults at once than anywhere else. The last time I met so many people around my age and at my same stage of life, I was a freshman in college.
I am an extrovert, and I crave social interaction at this scale. Especially after two years of pandemic.
But this mass networking mixer is different from most. The parents at school don’t enjoy the anonymity that marks similar occasions and affords a person the opportunity of reinventing oneself. Normally, entering a new context and meeting a lot of new people at once allows us to roll all the hard lessons and heartbreak of our life, combined with our bitter compromises and character aspirations into the silhouette of a new, better self.
Instead, at the school yard, our banal daily struggle is laid bare. We benefit from instant camaraderie among other parents of children the same age, but at the price of any opportunity to reinvent ourselves. The context of school drop-off on a gray morning, where we shiver in the damp air, sober and under-caffeinated, shows us publicly struggling to cajole our children into clothing and shoes on time for school. Struggling to grasp our careers while milking every waking minute for productivity, or spending it caring for others, always weighing the costs of working and often concluding we pay a premium for the privilege.
How can we be expected to talk about the best new albums, or our own art, when someone has forgotten a backpack, a lunch, a pair of gloves? Now someone is crying. Is that one of mine? No. Wait, where are my kids? Shit. It’s time to line up.
I’m not ungrateful to have so much company who can relate to my most taxing moments of the day. We form a supportive community, we commiserate, we make friends alongside our kids.
But this is the kind of kinship I crave elsewhere, at a different hour. I want to meet people at this rate and form bonds this deep with musicians at shows, in bars and clubs, artists at galleries, writers and poets in bookstores. I want to relate to artists as artists and en masse.
Photo by Sai De Silva on Unsplash
Take, for example, a recent evening at Cafe Mustache. A friend interviews bands in front of a live audience there every month for her podcast on mental health in the music industry. I’ve wanted to go for years but only made it for the first time this week. I scanned the audience and saw young and queer creatives everywhere. I doubt I can relate to any of them over much in the realm of traditional life topics. But we all struggle to balance those lives with making things and putting them out into the world. I’m confident we could talk for a long time about wondering if we’re good enough to carry on bothering sometimes, or whether there’s still any point to making anything when we live on such a noisy internet.
There are the people I want to find. I just have to keep burning the candle at both ends, and melting it at a few spots in the middle, to meet them where they are.