This last is like the first line of a haiku. The poet who wrote that piece of advice lives on top of a mountain with his ink stone and brushes. Winds blow warmly, and there is all the time in the world for him to transcend. He exists without regrets and leaves nothing unsaid.
Down below, for the rest of us, it is too late to live without regret. People are gone, the past has hurried on. But it is still possible to say what was left unsaid, once you decide who should hear. I know someone I would say it to. While I was busily growing up and away, my mother was busily paving my life with generosities I never noticed.
Here was one. In the soprano section of the a capella high school choir, I met a student who was the opposite of my sheltered self. Her voice soared, and she taught me to smoke cigarettes behind the risers. As an emancipated minor, she lived alone in a downtown apartment with beer and no vegetables in the refrigerator crisper drawer. I felt liberated in her presence and idolized her. Between the contents of the crisper drawer and the cigarettes, my mother felt differently.
My friend yearned to become an opera singer and decided to audition for a prestigious vocal competition. It meant mastering complicated scores, and she threw herself into the process. I would sit in her apartment, smoking her cigarettes while she rehearsed. The combination of smoke and classical music created a feeling of wild, unreasonable independence.
But the competition had a logistical barrier, nothing to do with music: Entrants were required to audition in suits or formal gowns. My friend could not afford a gown. She could barely afford beer.
You should ask my mother for a loan, I told her. The solution seemed simple, since my mother had always helped me. The instant I suggested it, though, I knew it was all wrong. No mother can feel charitable toward the person who taught her daughter to smoke behind the choir riser. It's a set-up.
Even so, a conversation between the two of them was held in our kitchen. I waited in the next room, unable to eavesdrop, frantic to know. Eventually they emerged, as if from Yalta, with an unexpected agreement. A few days later, my mother drove the two of them to Lord & Taylor and purchased a formal gown -- paid outright, no loan involved, eggshell blue.
Someone else won the competition, and my soprano friend and I fell out of contact when I went to college. Probably the eggshell gown was not worn again.
But no matter. This is what I did not understand then: That gown was not for my friend. That gown was for me.