Coming Back Around Again

Last week I was all prepared to get another one of those phone calls from Pants that signals that everything is going to change again. Pants was finishing up his trip out to the carrier to do his first ever landing qualifications in the big, honkin' jet, and this was the last step in a long dance that would end in us being slotted somewhere for Three Whole Years, which for us is an unimaginably long time full of forbidden, delicious stability.

"Hey Tooth," he'd say, calling me by my [inexplicable] nickname in an effort to diffuse the natural tension of the situation. "Are you ready for it?" It being the decision the Navy's made about where we're going to be stationed next, and by extension whether or not I'm going to be able to keep my job and stay in school (a one in three chance), and by extension when Pants is headed off to this stupid war. I was waiting on that call, and my body had responded to the anticipation by locking down its natural processes of elimination, a condition I'm lovingly calling "Navy butt," and revving up production from the adrenal glands so that I was doing cracked out things at three in the morning like rolling up excerpts of my printed prose into tampon-sized tubes to be dispensed from a converted tampon machine called the Vend-O-Prose machine at a conference I wasn't going to in New York. The pets were understandably nervous, and I kept talking to them in truncated non-sequiturs, like "Even if it's Japan, we'd find some way around the quarantine..."

And then a different call came, one that in my fevered calculation of all possible outcomes, I had never even considered: "I disqualified."

One thing I've always been able to count on in all the various tests and qualifications and schools and experiments is that Pants would always finish at the top, no matter what. This wasn't a pride thing, it was just reality. And every time he would come home and tell me this or that result, he'd be all surprised, like "guess what?" and I'd play along and strain my voice into the upper octaves, trying for authentic surprise. Now I know, finally, how my dad felt when I kept bouncing into his study with my grades from college, doing my little "guess what?" tap dance. Bemused, I think, is the word for it. Not that we aren't happy for you-- we are-- but really, honey, what did you think was going to happen after all that work?

But this time, it didn't come out like that. He was doing well, he was concentrating, he was getting traps, and then... not. The magic, the muse, the thing, whatever it is, just left him, and he couldn't pull out enough successful landings to move on to the next step. For Pants, the blow has been stunning. Shaming, for a big part of it, which is just hard for me to watch because what he's doing is so incredibly hard and weird and against every survival instinct that I think someone ought to show up at the squadron with balloons and cookies, every day, for anybody even brave enough to try it. But I know how he feels, I think. I know that awful feeling of having to incorporate Mistake, or Fail, into your vocabulary of yourself and how it feels like carrying around big rocks in your pockets everywhere you go.

The thing is, I think failing at something every now and then is absolutely essential. Not only does it keep you humble, it keeps you alive and interesting. Too much of anything, even success, wears you into uninteresting shapes and dull patterns.

Here are some things I've failed at:

* Softball: I was the worst left fielder ever. I dropped the game-winning ball in the only game that my whole family attended, with out-of-town guests no less. If there had been the supplies, I would have self-immolated in the dug-out, yowling "I'm SOOOOORRRRRYYYYYYYYYYY!" to everyone in attendance.

* High school trig: I made a C in high school trig, and that C was more strained over, more desperately clawed out than the whole regiment of A's I'd made in English ever since I learned to read.

* Being a model in college: ha ha ha! So silly-- I fell for this scam where a friend and I showed up almost every weekend for a semester to be photographed for free by a series of sketchy weirdos, who then gave us free prints for our "portfolios." It should have been obvious after we saw the first set that these men had no idea how to use their cameras for anything other than an awkward, peep show prop, but instead we dutifully compiled the pictures into binders and started showing up to auditions for fashion shows. I did two bridal shows for no pay and then never got another call; my friend was more successful, and ended up in a show where the make-up artist snarled sticks in her hair and shaved off her eyebrows before sending her down the runway in a giant pink sack shaped like a heart.

* Pottery: best thing I've ever sucked at. I could never spin a vessel off the wheel that was any taller than four inches or any thinner than half an inch, but I swear I got close to nirvana trying. In the end, I was one of the most prolific makers of tiny, sturdy little bowls in the class. It would take quite a pitching arm to break one of my pots against a wall (coincidentally, another fortunate thing resulting from my failure at softball!).

* 10K races: this is a failing thing I'm committed to, purely for the process because I've really got nothing results-wise to brag about. I've finished one of these things at something like an hour and ten minutes. I walked much of the time. In the end, my goals were so scaled back that I considered it a victory to beat the girl in the South Dakota shorts who actually stopped off in a restaurant and waited in line to pee. Yeah! Take that! But I've signed up for another one on the fifteenth of this month, with fucking Marines running it, no less, and I'm doing it because it's good to suck sometimes. It's good to put in an honest-to-God top effort, with no expectation of success, but still refusing to just mail it in, and still suck, but still love myself for sucking.

Why?

So I can back it up when I tell Pants, "It's OK not to be perfect. There's something to learn from this."

And the fact that we've got another month or so before this question of if and when we're moving comes up again? Well, I can't see that as anything but the first unintended benefit of an instance of sucking...