The Living Room Times

With all the best & worst of the decade lists floating around the Interwebs right now, as we await the imminent end of the 2000s and beginning of the twenty-teens, I thought it might be fun (at least for me!) to do a personal decade list. I’ll call it Brendan’s Defining Days of the Decade.

This project is especially fun because it’s been such a momentous decade for me. When it started, I was a skinny, dorky, 18-year-old college freshman with plans to be a print journalist, with my parents’ house listed as my “permanent address,” and with a crush on this pretty blonde girl who lived across the dorm courtyard from me. As it ends, I’m less skinny, just as dorky, 28 years old, and married to that pretty blonde girl. What’s more, I’m a homeowner (!), I’m a lawyer (?!), and I’ve got two daughters (!!!).

In between times, I’ve earned a B.A. and a J.D.; I’ve had my 15 minutes of fame (and made my national television and motion picture debuts); I’ve lived at thirteen addresses in seven different states (CA, CT, NY, AZ, IN, TN, CO); I’ve traveled to three new countries and have driven cross-country, or close to it, ten times, such that I’m now one trip to Sarah Palin’s stomping grounds away from having been to all 50 states; I’ve voted in three presidential elections; I’ve seen my sports teams win four national championships (USC ’04 & ’05, Red Sox ’04 & ’07); I’ve started & stopped & started & stopped & started & stopped & started my own blog; and I’ve fallen in love with three girls (Becky, Loyette & Loycita).

The 2010s promise to be a momentous decade, too, in their own way. By the time they’re over, Loyette will be 12 and Loyacita will be 10 1/2. (And who knows, maybe they’ll be joined by a little Loy Boy or Loyelle.) Becky and I will have been married for 15 years. I’ll be knocking on the door of my 40s. I’ll have been practicing law for 11 years. A lot of things will be very different, and there will be many milestones, memories, and new experiences along the way. But my life will probably (hopefully?) never again see a decade with the tremendous upheaval, change, and frenetic excitement of the 2000s. This is the decade I’ll be thinking of when, God willing, I sit on my porch as an old man and reflect on the “good old days.” Ah, to be young again — to be back in the aughts!

Anyway, on to the list! The criteria for my “Defining Days” rankings are, necessarily I think, a bit ill-defined and imprecise — some combination of how contemporaneously memorable and noteworthy each event was, how historically important (in the sense of my personal history) it was, how emotionally significant, and how suffused with massive implications for my future — with the end result being something of a Potter Stewart standard. Which is okay, because this is supposed to be fun, not scientific.

(Besides, my own personal “defining days” list probably isn’t going to spur the sort of intense debate as, say, a list of the Top 10 news stories or the Top 25 games or the Top 50 movies of the decade. Heh.)

Anyway, I’ve come up with a Top 12 list. I’ll reveal one per day, starting today, taking a break on Christmas Day (because nobody reads blogs on Christmas) and another break on December 29 (to reveal the “honorable mentions”), and finishing up with #2 on December 30, and #1 on December 31. Whether those dates might be hints as to the identity of the top two items on the list, I’ll leave to y’all to guess. 🙂

Now, on with the show. Number Twelve!

May 15, 2003: Becky and I Graduate From College

To be honest, I was initially hesitant to put this day on the main list at all, as opposed to giving it an honorable mention. After all, it was pretty much a foregone conclusion that I would earn a college degree — it’s not like I’m one of those up-from-poverty, first-college-graduate-in-my-family type of stories — and, as I’ve said before, the actual graduation day itself is more about taking pretty pictures, and about reflecting on four years of accomplishments and memories, than about new memories or experiences specific to the day itself.

This, incidentally, makes my college graduation quite different from my high-school graduation. June 22, 1999 would unquestionably have been near, if not at, the top of a similar list from the 1990s, if I’d made one. But that was a truly unique experience, a “cloud nine” sort of moment for me, as reigning Homecoming King, town journalism nerd, camera boy, media monoplist, and quasi-celebrity of my class, who got several specific shout-outs during the ceremony itself and received the loudest cheer of any graduate walking across the Bushnell stage. In other words, it was the ultimate ego boost. 🙂 My graduation from USC was decidedly ho-hum by comparison.

And yet, upon reflection, I decided that May 15, 2003 belongs on this list because it (and the days immediately surrounding it) truly represented a crucial juncture in my life, and Becky’s life, and most importantly, our life together. For one thing, graduation was the first time our parents met each other (and it went absolutely splendidly, no hitches at all, somewhat to my surprise at the time). For another thing, graduation meant leaving L.A., which was a great place to be for 4 years, but which we were most definitely ready to move on from. And of course there is the fact of graduation itself: despite what I said above, the significance of being awarded a Bachelor’s Degree from USC can’t be ignored. It was a great accomplishment, for both of us, and a fine celebration thereof.

But most significantly, May 15, 2003 was the day Becky and I “graduated” from the easy comfort of a college relationship to the far more challenging reality of figuring out what the heck our future held. We’d been together for three-and-a-half years, and we were very much in love, but would that be enough? She was headed for grad school in Arizona; I was headed for a “year off” back east, followed by law school in either New York, Boston or South Bend. Whether we would stay together was very much an open question. Indeed, truth be told, when we took photos like the one at left, I had the idea in my head that this could be something of a last hurrah for us — that I might look back on these pictures someday as the coda to a lovely chapter of my life called “My College Girlfriend.”

Yet something about the experience of going through Graduation Day together, with our parents — both sets of them — by our sides, changed my thinking ever so subtly. I still probably would’ve had a hard time believing you if you’d told me that, just over a year later, we’d be engaged, and that roughly 2 1/2 years later, the graduation photo at right would sitting in a frame on a table outside the site of our wedding reception. But looking back, I think I started to get a stronger sense on May 15, 2003 that maybe, just maybe, Becky and I were truly meant to be together forever — that, really and truly, my first girlfriend might very well be my last, my one and only.

I used to joke that all of our friends & family realized we were going to get married long before we realized it. In May of 2003, my head was telling me it might not work: we both still had a lot of growing up to do, we were going to be living far apart — and besides, who nowadays marries their first kiss, for chrissakes? 🙂 But on Graduation Day, my heart told me something different. And it didn’t take too much more “growing up” before I realized that maybe I should listen.

Tomorrow: Defining Day #11. It’ll be less sappy, I promise!