Preppin' For Fall

Today was one of those strange and lovely days in life that seemed marked with a theme, a sense of literary continuity that runs throughout the day, recognized and unrecognized, playing itself throughout. I may have read too many books, but I have those days - infrequent but often enough, when everything is an allusion. Today it was fall.

It started easily - I woke up, and through a violent nose-blowing in the morning, realized that the rain yesterday had broken my hayfeverish dreams. My eyes weren't itchy, my throat was clear, and, best of all, the air outside was crisp. The Chicago dog days of summer, humidity and goldenrod were taking their first step of retreat. Fall! It felt like fall!

When I think of fall I have an idealized version of myself I like to picture: it is something like "carefree, fun, young woman on a bike with cool hair and a nice outift." This is sincerely stupid, but imagine something like this in the late sixties - with a nice bag, maybe she's going to write some poetry somewhere, or take a history class, or just be in a cafe and be doing something productive and cool. In New England, maybe. (This is a cool vision unless I got it from the movie Love Story, in which case I am so screwed.) This young woman, I am not. I get on my bike with a helmet and huge backpack, sweating and grimacing as I slop around to rehearsals. Nothing charming in the bag: just-in-case allergy medicine, pens, gum, a book in case I get bored, a stick of deodorant because of the biking, lots of unorganized sketch scripts, carmex. I am not crisp clean unburdened back-to-school girl, pretty and having a great soundtrack. I am regular mess me.

That reality does not prevent me, though, from on the first day of fall, trying to seize my chance at the dream. Why this dream, though?

I remembered while perusing my friend Dorothy's blog and she mentioned reading the book Prep. This vision of girl on bike is singularly preppy. Am I a total preppy person? Maybe? In the midwest you can only sort of do preppy things. People here do not play squash unless they moved here. People here rarely go to real sleep away boarding school. Until J.Crew became a store not a catalogue, no one had whales on their clothes. Sure, I went to a college with plenty of preppies, but true prep has the lingering scent of a lifetime at vacations on the east coast and a disregard for things that are important to me, like Big Ten football and eating a lot.

I blame the books.

I biked to Border's after lunch, looking for something to take with me this weekend, and they had the new Curtis Sittenfeld (author of Prep) novel on a table with lots of other books like Catcher in the Rye and A Separate Peace and something about a headmaster and such and such. It was, without even being labeled as such, a table of ultimate prep: boarding schools.

Disclaimer: I did go to a private day school.
Other disclaimer: it ain't nothing like a boarding school - I realized this when I visited Choate a few years ago on tour.

This body of literature has singularly fascinated me - and many of us, I assume, seeing that the people familiar with these books and things like Harry Potter which get a lot of material from the boarding school mapping - did not go to a boarding school. We must all be wondering what the hell goes on there.

And those books tell you: phonies and snogging and sweaters and mandatory fall sports and betrayal and sex. Maybe it's the sex that gets us. I skimmed a few pages in the books and realized: I don't want to read about these people right now. These tumultuous teenage days in the crux of privilege - no thank you. I do not care who loves who. I do not care about curfew. I do not care about coming to terms with your identity because you have some overbearing father who doesn't want you to be an actor.

Okay, I also blame The Dead Poets Society.

So I bought Barbarians at the Gate and, unwittingly, consigned myself to reading a book about where the preppies go: Wall Street.

Those preppies! Those ridiculous problems! Those social mores! Brendan Fraiser in School Ties and leafy changing color trees around an athletic field!

I went to rehearsal.

Biking home, I stopped by a soccer game that a friend was coaching and lost all claim to my scorn. Sitting on the sideline on a nice fall day promptly gave me every sensory input I needed to be struck with how life has changed - the kind of nostalgia where you know you don't want to BE a seventh grade soccer player again, but maybe nostalgia for the kind of person you were, or the innocence you had. The kind of nostalgia that makes you want to write terrible poetry. The kind of nostalgia that reminds you what it felt like to go back to school: the slimmest chance for a new start, a new year, a moment to be the bicycle riding girl.

Maybe, that longing for childhood or innocence or tradition represents more broadly the kind of voyeuristic nostalgia we get from prep lit: a quaint bildungsroman wrapped in rich people. Rich people who do crazy shit.

Or maybe the prep lit is all romance: the romance of the WASP culture of the American 1950s. Which is a strange thing to idolize and return to, because that culture was repressive (and much of the prep lit reminds us of that) - or, really, maybe, because it gave us something to rebel against and take the full measure of ourselves.

Possibly, it is both. Possibly (and this is a NY Times editorial David Brooks type stretch so hate me for it as I dislike him) - these books are back because they are simpler and the world now seems more complicated. Now punch me in the face.

I went home, feeling sweet and sweaty. And then I drank a Miller Lite.