The Longest Years

Why Four Years Is a Lifetime, Depending on When You Live Them

I’m spending a few days in Portland, Oregon, where I lived for four years right after college. Has anyone ever analyzed the significance of those first post-college years? It’s so enormous. I remember once reading how the music you hear when you’re in your early teens has an outsized impact on your sense of what is good, musically: It brands you deeply, imprinting the way no subsequent music ever will, and you measure all music thereafter by how much it does or doesn’t deviate from that music of your tweens.

The first years after college seem to have that same disproportionate impact—they loom larger than any years that follow, they form you more, they linger in your soul more permanently. I only lived in Portland for four years, but I lived a lifetime in them. It was the first time I had a real job; the first time I set up a home (my college apartments were furnished—horribly, but still, they came equipped). The first time I bought furniture! It was, most importantly, my first experience with workplace culture. I was incredibly lucky, because I got a job doing what I wanted to do (write) but even if I hadn’t, that first job would have been my initial exposure to that adult phenomenon known as work family. Via my work family, I found the friends that became my foundational pals, still actively important to me, and my first husband, not so much.

Portland, Oregon, my (brief) home sweet home

Those Portland years were the first time I really did whatever I wanted. As a kid, my parents monitored me, of course. By comparison, college was a lot of freedom, but there were still deadlines and structure and grades and expectations. After that, ka-boom, the doors blew open. I was in charge of me. And yet it was also the first time I was tasked with any genuine responsibility: Taxes, rent, showing up on time to work.

To return to the topic of first husband: Those years after college, that passageway, often issues in the start of serious romance. I had a full-time boyfriend through college, and we moved to Portland together, but things got much more real once we were shacked up like rookie adults in the wide open world. Not surprisingly, the relationship sputtered. One reason was his enthusiasm for drinking, which seemed merely spirited in college, but then started to seem much less fun and a lot more dysfunctional once we were in Portland. Things were weightier in that post-college time, especially bad things, as if the gravitational pull of adulthood suddenly and seriously clicked in.

Sometimes when I’m in Portland I can’t believe I only lived here for four years—when I explain that to people I always add, insistently, that the years back then were longer than the years they make these days. Nowadays, years are highly discounted. I’ve lived in Los Angeles for eleven or twelve years, but I always feel like we just moved here, and I’m thoroughly embarrassed when asked when exactly we arrived. Ok, twelve years sounds like a long time, I will say, but they were the new variety of years, the short ones. It feels like yesterday.

SHOW NOTES

—I’m teaching a video class December 8 and I hope you’ll join me! It’s called Five Things I Learned About Writing Memoir. Here’s the link: My Five Things. I’d be thrilled if some of you Substackers showed up!

—I stumbled on a very interesting designer here in Portland named Laurs Kemp (her website is https://www.laurskemp.com/ ). She reworks vintage items in a clever, cool way. I ended up buying a blazer (vintage) with a pair of ladies’ gloves appliquéd across the chest, and manages to do it without looking cutesy or vulgar. I had a hell of a time taking a picture of it, but here’s the best I got:

My selfie-in-the-bathroom-mirror game is maybe not what it should be, but this was really challenging. Also, my mirror has toothpaste splatters, which I only realized after I took this picture and uploaded it. I promise higher quality photography in the future.