Who Are You and Why!

Back in 1977, I was an enumerator.

This means that I spent half a summer working for R. L. Polk & Co., going door to door in the Syracuse area with a list of names and addresses. My job was to verify who was living at each address so that the next edition of Polk's City Directory would be as accurate as possible.

It was an excruciating job in some ways.  I'm pretty shy, so ringing doorbells and attempting to take names was hard for me, especially when the person at the door refused to give a name. They didn't mind that their basic personal information was routinely published in the phone book, but being asked to tell the 20-year-old college student at the door the same data (plus the names and ages of other household members) seemed an invasion of privacy. I was also told by one person that he wouldn't give his name because he was hiding from the law.  Gulp! Okay, sir, I'll leave quietly now.

There were also productivity issues, partly because I didn't hustle quickly enough from door to door, but also because whoever set the quotas didn't have accurate data on the housing density of the different parts of town, and therefore set some quotas too high. Mr. Wigglesworth looked out for me, and I didn't get in much  trouble over this. Then the building we were in burned, and we had to go out again to the same houses as before.  Some of the people who gave the info the first time refused to do it again. 

I didn't have to put up with that for long, though, because right after that I left for the Clarion SF Writer's Workshop at Michigan State University for the rest of the summer. Clarion kind of scuttled my fiction writing for more than a decade, but I met John there so I've no complaints overall. Eventually, when I was ready to finish the stalled novel, the 1977 advice of Damon Knight and Robin Scott Wilson and Algis J Budrys and the rest were still in my head, waiting to help me.

There was one day on the enumeration job that I still remember after all these years. I was in Liverpool that day, a Syracuse suburb near polluted Onondaga Lake.  Years before, I'd taken karate lessons there. This day, I got lost briefly en route to my assigned district, but that was no trauma. I've never been a great map-reader, and I always learned an area best by exploring it while technically lost. 

I soon found the neighborhood, parked my dad's Duster, and resumed the door-to-door work.  One house had a decoration by the door that featured a wooden owl, and the words, "Who are you and why!" I couldn't figure that out.  Who am I and why what?  Why am I at the door?  Why am I who I am?  Who wants to know, anyway, and why?  And why did the question end with an exclamation point instead of a question mark?  Did that mean that the people in the house didn't want me to tell them the answer? Maybe the ! meant that I was supposed to think about the answer for myself.

The last house of the day was inhabited by an elderly lady whose son worked for my dad at University College.  She was lonely and wanted to talk. Since it was after 5 o'clock and I wasn't going to get any more work done anyway, I accomodated her.  That fifteen minute conversation was the most pleasant moment that came out of that summer job.

Oh, and during that job I lost 35 pounds with Atkins (mostly Steak-Umms and cottage cheese) and all that walking.

Why do I mention this, after all these years? That weird little sign, "Who are you and why!" has come to mind as I've thought about the school reunion topic that John Scalzi and R Yanagi and others have been talking about. High school reunions are all about who you are compared to who you were, as judged by the people who knew you way back when. Who am I? I'm theoretically a novelist, but I don't have printed books yet to prove it.  I'm theoretically about to be an accountant, but despite my high GPA I don't really feel anywhere near ready to sit the CPA exam, or to choose a specific area of the accounting field--maybe auditing, maybe not.  Is it too late to become a paralegal instead?  Maybe forensic accounting?

So who am I? I'm, umm, Karen.  Who do I have to be?

I registered on the Fayetteville-Manlius alumni site, but I have no plans to go to Manlius for my 30th high school reunion next year. Maybe if I was a CPA by then and had a printed copy of Heirs of Mâvarin in hand (from a major publisher, of course), I'd go. Maybe.  Without those things, I can't prove that my graduating class was wrong to deny me the Most Likely to Succeed award at the F-Emmys, and to give me the Gladys Ormphby Award instead. Even with the book and the CPA designation, I'm not at all certain sure my old classmates would be impressed. On the other hand, none of my classmates are U.S. Senators or Nobel laureates or Grammy winners or CEOs in the Fortune 500.  Probably. So why should I feel defensive or intimidated?

The thing is, I shouldn't feel the need to prove myself to all those strangers, who weren't particularly friends of mine when we were 17 and 18 years old together. My friends were a year behind me, or at other schools.  My boyfriend, Dan Cheney, had moved to Texas by then.  He's been dead for over a quarter of a century, but my other friends from 1975, from my old Star Trek club, are probably all still alive. My mentor and co-maid of honor, d l hobert, runs the Fulton library. Chris Dohery is in Skaneatales, the last I heard, and I think Gordon Hunter is a professor.  Now that would be a reunion worth going to. I wonder what Carl Norman, our token pro-military Trekker, thinks about the war in Iraq, and whether Karyne S. ever changed her name legally, or went back to Karen. Did Tim Reed become a cartoonist? How is Mark S. doing, and Will G., and Dick C., and Had C.? Who are all those people now, and why?

In my novels, I wrestle compulsively with the concept of who someone is, and what changes a person into someone else. All of my major characters are buffeted by profound changes in circumstance, in perception, in memory. They change their names, sometimes their bodies, and their roles in life. They become different people, and yet never so different that there's no trace remaining of the people they were. In the real world, people don't usually get amnesia, share consciousness with someone else in the same body, or turn into monsters, or suddenly learn they're displaced royalty.  Even so, there are echoes of such things in our mundane lives, and they change us. What victim of Alzheimer's or dementia is quite the same person as before? How does it change you when you find out you're adopted, fall in love, take on your spouse's name, get divorced, become a drug addict, get a prestigious new job in a new city, lose the job you have, or undergo chemo to fight the ravages of cancer?

I'm not adopted, addicted, demented, divorced or cancerous, but I know I've changed over the years. I kind of remember 17-year-old Karen in the halls of F-M High School, 20-year-old Karen going door-to-door, and 33-year-old Karen at her first Doctor Who pledge break at KUAT. I'm not quite any of those people any more. I've accreted years of experiences and ideas, accomplishments and failures.  I've learned things, but that hasn't taken me to success by anyone's standard.  I'm barren and in debt, fat and terribly sleep-deprived, and yet most of the time I'm reasonably happy.  Weird. All that stuff has changed me, and helped to make me who I am.

Whoever that is.

Karen

So.  Who are you?  And why! Take that anyway you like. It's kind of a verbal Rorschach test.