Say Yes to Things

In the summer of 1993, during the interregnum between my official Coast Guard Academy duties and my sophomore year, I took a short trip to visit with my half-brother in Georgia. His mother had rented a condo at Lake Lanier. I had no experience with the place; I would learn later that it was something of a redneck vacation spot. There was a water-slide park, among other things. We spent a few days jackassing around in the summer sun.

One night, we went to the movies to see The Firm, the legal thriller starring Tom Cruise and Wilford Diabeetus Brimley. It was a low theater, wider than it was long, with an enormous screen, and if you remember what going to the movies was like back then: a lot of people went to the movies. The theater was packed, with not a single empty seat. We got there a bit on the late side, so ended up about six rows from the front. I went in first, my brother followed me, and I sat down to the left of a mixed-race girl about my age. She smiled.

I sat and looked straight ahead. Out of the corner of my right eye, I spied on her. She was with her boyfriend—or her brother—I could not tell which. She had long curly hair in ringlets held back in a ponytail, and glasses. She seemed happy, the type of happiness that is only attainable by being 19 years old, with a maximum of possibility and a minimum of responsibility. She was well-cared for, well-parented, that much I could tell. She smelled of water lilies.

The movie begins. About 15 minutes in, I attempt to place my right arm on the armrest, bumping into hers. She did not yield; our arms stayed there, touching. I looked over at her and smiled, and she smiled back, shrugging. Something funny happened in the movie; we looked at each other and smiled again. I could feel every micrometer of her arm touching mine. Her hand was just out of reach. Over the next 30 minutes, I moved my hand slowly, imperceptibly, until it was within range of hers. Unexpectedly, she grapsed it, and I felt the electricity coursing through us. We held hands for the rest of the movie. I looked at her again—still smiling, but mostly I was looking at the boyfriend. He was completely disengaged, staring at the screen, and possibly asleep.

When the lights came on, I was presented with a dilemma. Do I ask for her number? What about the boyfriend? I wasn’t much in the mood to get my ass kicked in a movie theater. But the boyfriend was the least of my concerns. I played the tape forward. I get her number, and go back to Connecticut. We write each other letters. I talk to her on the pay phone outside the company dayroom. I save all my money to buy a plane ticket to see her. There was the possibility of explosive sex, but relative to the amount of effort I would have to expend to have it, it seemed too hard. I didn’t know anything about her. Maybe her family was ultra-religious. Maybe being a dental hygienist was the best she could do. Maybe a lot of things. She stood there, looking at me expectantly, wishing, hoping that I would ask for her number, with the boyfriend trailing behind, and I could only manage a grim smirk as I fled the theater behind my brother.

Easily one of my biggest pet peeves is when someone says they have no regrets. Really? Every course of action in your dumb life has been the correct one? You’ve never had a lapse in judgment? I have lots of regrets. I regret not asking for that girl’s number. I do. Not because things would have turned out better—they undeniably would have turned out worse. But these days, I try to say yes to things. When given a choice between an opportunity and the absence of an opportunity, I always choose the former. Because as the great Joaquin Andujar once said, you never know. Introduce a little chaos into your life and see what happens. It’s like a binomial tree. You could go this way, or that, and then this way, or that. The only thing we know for sure about your current path is that it’s boring.

I don’t regret doing things; I regret not doing things. I regretted not getting an MFA and pursuing a career in writing. I regretted that for two-and-a-half decades. Ultimately, my Coast Guard career didn’t work out, but I don’t regret giving it a try. I would have regretted not trying it. Lehman came to an ignominious end, but I don’t regret that, either. I regret saying no to things. I passed on going to my youngest brother-in-law’s graduation, because I was “too busy” at work. It was important to him, too. If you want me to go to a graduation, wedding, bar mitzvah, dance recital, or baseball game, I will be there, because today, I say yes to things. Note: weddings are optional, funerals are mandatory.

The world opens up with possibilities when you say yes to things. It puts you in a position where you can help people. It is a cure for isolation. You learn things, and have new experiences. This is a typical example: someone invites you do to X. You say, I don’t really do X. X is not my kind of thing. Come on, let’s go do X. No, I’m not going to do X, I’m going to stay home and watch TV. But if you said yes to X, I can almost guarantee that you will enjoy it more than you thought you would. For a lot of people, X might be opera or ballet. For me, X is fishing. There is a get-together of finance people in the woods of Maine that I have avoided for years because I don’t like fishing. Fishing isn’t my thing. The only exceptions to this rule are when someone asks you if you want to do drugs or something illegal. While that may indeed expand your horizons, the potential consequences are usually not worth it.

The point here is to be constantly exposed to new things, new people, new places, and new ideas. When I went back to grad school, I knew for sure that I would be exposed to new people and new ideas. I had to be open to receiving them. Calling someone closed-minded is a not-so-nice insult, but the truth is that just about all of us are closed-minded in some way. Soccer is boring. Art museums are dumb. Your family sucks. No, no, no we say, over and over again, closing ourselves off to life. The people who really close themselves off to life are the people who go to the same bar after work every day and get loaded with the same drunks talking the same shit all the time. I had a dear friend from the Academy who never posted on Facebook, but every day he would “check in” to the local bar. His world was pretty small.

I will give you an example of a time I said yes to something: a high school friend gave me the opportunity to go watch professional wrestling with him at the Hammerstein Ballroom in New York City. My first instinct was to say, no, I’m not going to do X, I’m going to stay home and watch TV. Wrestling is fake and dumb. But I went, and it was one of the most fantastic nights I have ever had in my life. My guess is that you have never been to a professional wrestling match. You should really go. It’s an experience. And you’ll have a much greater respect for the wrestlers once you do. The highlight was when the referee went to kick one of the wrestlers and his shoe flew off, hit the balcony, and landed squarely in my friend’s lap.

As for the girl. For sure, social anxiety was part of it. I have never been particularly outgoing. But I felt like I was going to make my life unnecessarily complicated. Only an insane person says no to pretty girls who hold the hands of complete strangers in movie theaters. Only a complete dildo doesn’t get the number. Oh well—things worked out for the best.

But they don’t always.