Magic and Regret

In books and movies, regrets tend to center around a single decision, an instant, something that can be summed up in a sentence or frame that comes back to haunt the characters in flashback. That makes for good storytelling, but I’m not sure it reflects life all that well. When I look back at the choices I regret, most of them are little daily choices that built up like plaque, that I only realize are mistakes years later. But maybe I’m being melodramatic about all this, given that I’ve lived a safe, protected, and therefore am mostly regret-free life. Case in point, three of my top regrets from high school seem pretty petty when I write them out: not socializing enough, not reading enough on my own, and spending way too much time and money on Magic: The Gathering. 

If you haven’t spent enough time around nerdy high schoolers, Magic is the first and most popular collectable trading card game. It has a massive community; even a town as small as Grinnell has its own game story that survives mostly on Magic products and weekly Magic tournaments. The rules are so arcane that it took me a full year of regular play to figure out the most obscure of them, and the cards are so expensive that they drive otherwise worthless cardboard up to obscene prices. 

The complex rules and high prices scared me off at first, as did the general vibe of obsession that the game seemed to breed. But a few people I wanted to be friends with in middle school played, so I bought a deck and learned a passing familiarity with the rules. Middle school turned to high school and one by one my closest friends became hardcore collectors who would spend two hundred dollars on booster packs in one night. I never spent that much, but I had to spend something to maintain my collection and keep up a deck that could be competitive. I’ve never added up how much I spent, but if I did I think I’d probably be more than a little shocked at how much I’d lost.

The problem, I think, was that I was never all-in with Magic. I liked it well enough to learn the rules and play if someone had their decks out, but not enough to ever get really invested in it. Which, being surrounded by true obsessives, meant that I was always just a little bit behind, hoping that we’d find something more interesting to do or talk about. For me, Magic was just a way to make and maintain friends, but when most of what those friends did was talk about Magic, I felt a little bit lost.

An odd thing has happened to me over the last month or so: I’ve gotten back into Magic. The lore, which once seemed so dense and meaningless, now fascinates me in how overcrowded and bizarre it all was. The convoluted rules have a sort of legal elegance to them that I didn’t take the time to appreciate when I was first learning them. I have a special appreciation for how each of the colors has its own personality and philosophy, and how those interact when mixed. I’ve even considered getting back into the Magic community, even though that’s basically impossible now that social distancing has shut down all competitions. Really, I want to go back in time and choose a side. If I’d been really indifferent, then I should’ve found different friends, different interests, and built something that would’ve served me well through the rest of my life. Or I could’ve gone all-in, memorized the terms and watched the matches and learned to love it. I could’ve gotten a lot out of it. But I didn’t choose either, and now I feel like I paid the price and got nothing for it.

But, when we remember things, especially things we regret, we tend to simplify what should be complicated. The friends I made playing Magic are real friends, even if there was a consistent disconnect between us. The thrill I felt constructing my own halfway decent deck for the first time was real too. I got a lot out of it, if never quite what I wanted. And the memories that I have left over from it all aren’t just regret; there’s happiness there, real happiness that I should value.

Major World Events

One summer in middle school I volunteered as a Vacation Bible School camp councilor, but all that I remember from it is the fascinating way those kids talked about the past. They assumed that all events before they were born happened roughly simultaneously, that Jesus died on the cross at around the same time as their parents went to college, and God created the heavens and the earth back when George Washington fought off the British. In their minds, the world used to be a frightening and exciting place, where angels visited prophets and nations went to war about once every fifteen minutes. Then they were born, world events settled down and the history stopped. When I talked to them about it, they seemed relieved that they had been born into a simpler, safer world than their parents, but a little disappointed too. Scary as the past was, it would’ve been nice to hang out in that world at least long enough to see a dinosaur (which, according to them, died out sometime in the 1980’s).

This way of thinking intrigued me in part because it was so familiar. I followed a less extreme version of it even then, and would for years to come. Sure, on a conceptual level I knew that things happened as slowly in the past as they did in the present, but I definitely got the sense that the world had decided to halt major events when I came around. The obvious exception to that was 9/11, but by time I was old enough to understand it, I’d forgotten what it was like in the moment. Then there was the Obama election, but I grew up in such a conservative town with such liberal parents that I couldn’t decide how I was supposed to feel about it and ended up registering it as a mostly neutral event. The U.S. was at war through most of my childhood, but the information was so muddled and the event so distant that I didn’t know how I was supposed to feel.

Because of this, for most of my life I had the distinct feeling that I was missing out on history. You could attribute this to my general disinterest in present reality, always imagining that there’s something better in the past or future or some fantasy world that never existed. (I’m still a little like that: I have trouble getting into modern space exploration, but I marvel at archiac scientists with crude telescopes who thought that there were jungles under Venus’s thick atmosphere or that Mars’s stones were red with blood from alien wars). But there is some truth to this too, I think: aside from a blip in the housing crisis, we had a fairly stable nation from 2001 to 2016. And, though it was never really on the front of my mind, I did have an idle wish that I could live in an era someone could study or write historical fiction about.

Ever since November of 2016, that wish has seemed like some kind of monkey’s paw-style curse. I forgot that, with precious few exceptions, people don’t remember major world events because everyone had a good time. Usually, it’s an event because a whole lot of people die. 

It’s impossible to deny that we’re in some sort of major world event right now. Even home in sheltered, suburban Edina, there are no cars on the highway and basic amenities are disappearing from the grocery store. My parents and brother and sister and her girlfriend and my girlfriend are all under one roof, none of us entirely sure what the next step in each of our lives will be. In a way, it feels like a gritty reboot of what I thought the past was like as a six-year-old: disaster and excitement in a chaotic mess, nothing stable for more than a couple minutes.

But in the midst of it all, there is a sense of peace that I don’t think any six-year-old could have predicted. For the first time ever, Mica is meeting my entire family and staying at my house for more than a few days. Even pandemonium isn’t what I predicted, I guess. And there’s that to be thankful for.

My Short Senior Spring

I know you’d probably love to read about something other than the COVID-19. Most likely it’s all that’s on your newsfeed. I’d love to write about something else too. But these days I can’t really think about anything else. Sorry about that.

After a few weeks of rumors, Grinnell sent out an email confirming the worst: after spring break campus will close, classes will be online, anyone who can go home will have to go home. The administration left most other details blank, leaving most students in panic for what to do next. I don’t want to moan unnecessarily, especially when I’m privileged enough to have a home to go back to, in a state with only a few confirmed cases, and a body with good odds of fighting it off. But I can’t help but feel overwhelmed. As a senior, I was putting a lot of stake in this last half of the semester: saying goodbye to friends I’ve made over these four years, running my last 10k and hoping for a personal best, finishing up my time at Grinnell with a sense of accomplishment and closure. Now, suddenly, it’s over. There might not even be a graduation ceremony. My girlfriend and I have been spending most hours of the day together for the past few months, but once we say goodbye, we won’t see each other for more than a month. Mourning sounds like an extreme word, but I can’t think of much of another way to put it.

But it needs to be done. Not everyone at the school agrees with that. There are plenty of reasons to be angry, of course: the news was abrupt, the email was vague, the decision-making process was a little opaque. Worst of all, there are more and more reports of people who absolutely need to stay on campus having their petitions denied, which is unquestionably awful. It doesn’t help that this decision is all wrapped up in corporate bureaucracy, which is an institution that specializes in dismissing something personal and valuable in favor of the broad and incoherent. 

But this decision is based on something personal and valuable, though. It’s easy to forget that, when most news stories about COVID-19 show up with photos of CGI virus cells or maps covered in numbers and deaths are discussed in incomprehensibly high statistics. But there are entire lives at stake here. Not the lives of most people displaced by this decision, COVID-19 doesn’t hit people our age that hard, but people older and younger than us will die if it hits. Grinnell isn’t ready for it to hit: they only have three respirator masks in the entire town, and only three isolation units. Sending everyone home changes a slice of our lives, a significant slice, but only a slice. Letting COVID-19 into our community could end someone’s life entirely. It’s a sacrifice, and one we need to mourn. But, overall, it’s worth it.

Childhood Horrors

In fourth grade a friend told me that he was immortal. Claiming to be a demigod or wizard or alien in a highly realistic human suit had been a day-to-day occurrence with kids I’d known since Kindergarten, so by then I was more or less over it. At the time I hardly even listened to his rationale, though some part of it stuck with me, because I still remember it today: “My Dad hurts me so bad sometimes. Anyone else would have died over and over, but I didn’t, so there must be something special about me.”

Just before I moved to Minnesota I went to a fantasy play-acting camp with a paramilitary bent, where we learned to march in formation and fight with foam swords, while our councilors did acrobatic stunt shows fighting pretend monsters with real weapons. There was one kid I got to know pretty well who seemed to get special treatment: he got to hold a real mace once, even though he was barely strong enough to hold it, and the head-councilor let him talk to an ent in a vital scene for the plot of the summer, while the rest of us just sat around and watched. Once I asked him why he got to do all this cool stuff, and he just kicked at the dirt and said he didn’t know. I assumed he was just ashamed that his billionaire parents had bribed him into special privileges. And maybe that is really what happened. But he was bone-thin and entirely bald, so there’s another option too.

Maybe the first time I got a glimpse of this childhood horror, the kind that doesn’t really hit until you look back on it years later, was when my Dad took me to volunteer at our church’s evacuee shelter when Hurricane Ike hit Texas. But there wasn’t much a little kid like me could do to help, so instead I spent the morning playing with this boy. I don’t remember what we did, but we must have had a lot of fun, because when he went missing, I spent the entire afternoon running around looking for him. Eventually I found him in the quarters where the evacuees slept: a dim room full of snoring men and slowly leaking airbeds. The boy spoke to a man, probably his father, in hushed and worried Spanish. I knew I shouldn’t be there, so I left before they could see me. 

That was the only one of these examples in which I noticed the real despair of the situation in the moment. I didn’t put the pieces together just then, didn’t realize that their home might have been destroyed or they might have lost a family member in the storm. But I knew that something sad had happened, more sad than I could really comprehend, so I ran away scared.

For the most part, though, I was an oblivious kid. I thought child abuse meant spanking, couldn’t imagine someone my own age could get cancer, and assumed that all the families staying at our church would have somewhere else to live once the storm blew past. Probably that’s a good thing: the vast majority of my childhood life I was so far from tragedy that when I did see it, I didn’t recognize it. But I still can’t help but feel guilty. What really gets me is my friend who thought he was immortal: if I’d really listened to him and asked a few questions, I could’ve told an adult, and maybe they could’ve helped somehow. I’m not so sure I could’ve helped the other two, cancer and hurricanes are beyond my power to stop, and their problems are a little bit more ambiguous. Maybe the kid at camp just happened to be bald, skinny, and rich. Maybe the kid at the shelter’s Dad was talking to him about something different, and really they were safe and fine and well-insured. But at least I could’ve been a little bit more observant, and offered whatever sympathy and comfort a kid can.

But maybe I picked up on more than I’m giving myself credit for. From what I’ve seen, kids notice a lot more than most adults believe; they just can’t explain what they see, or choose not to. I could see myself seeing the darkness in all three of these stories, but ignoring it, then intentionally forgetting, because I wasn’t ready for it. After all, there was never a revelation moment when I exclaimed to myself, “Oh wow, that kid must have been going through so much!” It feels like I’ve always known, which means either I came to terms with it subconsciously, or I really did always know.

For the most part, I don’t beat myself up for not doing more. However I feel about it, though, they’re all in the past now, there’s nothing to be done. But even though I was never a kid to notice pain in my peers and heal it, that’s not impossible, and it’s beautiful when it happens. At my job working with second graders last summer, I saw kids hugging and comforting each other the day after some tragedy hit. I’m not saying that we should leave it up to kids to be each others’ therapists, or expect them to always know how to help one another. But it does happen sometimes, and it’s beautiful.