Some of those who knew me at 22 wouldn’t be surprised at where I’ve ended up — a grateful, proud, happy parent; a published writer whose voice others find worth hearing; a woman who kept going forward even when she bloodied her knees on boulders. They knew I always had it in me.
I didn’t.
Natural intelligence can be a poor counterweight to being young and dumb. And angry, cynical and impulsive. In truth, knowing you’re smart makes you resistant to understanding how dumb your choices can be. Arrogance of youth and all that.
It’s not only our most deprived youngsters who need a wise outsider’s steadying hand and sensible outlook. You know what Tolstoy said. It’s still true: The failures of what should be human life’s basic nurturing unit are multifarious.
When I was 22, a first-semester college dropout, former teenage bride and soon-to-be single woman dabbling briefly in the high life, I found myself, by the purest act of fate, as the new, thoroughly unqualified secretary in a private school office in Manhattan. My colleague, occasionally mistaken on public transportation for Bette Davis attempting to travel incognito (this is a true story), was a woman of little tolerance for nonsense but, as life would later bear out, a gift for seeing hidden nuggets of worth in lumps of raw clay.
Peggy had once, as a diplomat’s wife, shared the back of a car with Thomas Mann’s brother as they escaped Occupied France for the safety of neutral Spain. To say she was an interesting woman is a champion understatement of the meaning of the word “interesting.”
She took me under her crisp yet congenial wing. She sent me to summer typing school and shared with me the elements of punctuation style she’d learned from a former boss at a Yale science journal.
She encouraged me to go back to school, and though I never did earn a degree, I encountered a few worthwhile professors and learned a bit more than I’d known before. She gave me Fowler’s Modern English Usage and, miraculously, through all the moves and losses I’ve gone through since then, I still have it.
And, more than anything else, she looked past my idiocies, foolishness and immaturity, and thought I still made good company and a desired guest at her country home (a country home! It was modest, as such places go, but it was the location, and not the square footage, that dazzled me.).
She showed me there was a better way of living than how I was presently conducting myself, that difficulties should never be seen as permanent, that women who take their lives in their own hands tend to be happier than those who don’t, and that someone who really cares about you, regardless of your flaws, will have a positive effect on you that will endure for a lifetime.
We worked together for only one year before she retired, but we continued to stay in touch throughout the various adventures I managed to get myself into. She never did get to dance at my second wedding, as she always expressed the hope of doing.
But she set me on the road that led to every subsequent good fortune that ever fell my way. I still stumbled now and then. I needed to do a lot of growing up.
I doubt I’d have done any of it without having been rescued from myself at a crucial moment by someone with the wisdom to see me for all I might become.
Be someone’s Peggy. Someday, their children will bless your name.
Sarah Crysl Akhtar lives in Lebanon.