Incredibly, the thought didn't occur to me until Celia broached the idea. 
"You have to do it," she said. "It's your thirtieth!"

We were finishing up the Prentice Loop on the 7, and the bus was empty. Sitting at the long red light on 57th; it makes sense somehow that big ideas are birthed in small places, the hushed excitement of voices daring at the possibility. I was skeptical. She wasn't.
"A birthday party? Really?"
"Yeah! You can make it a big thing!"

The next person I talked to about it was Leroy. I mentioned the idea, but also shared my trepidation that no one would come. Isn't the whole thing a bit frivolous? Who would show up for this thing, anyway?

"Shut the fuck up," he said. I started laughing. "Nathan, seriously. You really need to shut the fuck up right now. I love you, you saved my life, you're a great person, everybody loves you…. just shut up already! You're Nathan Vass, the–"
"Dude, no, no–"
"Shut up, Nathan! You think people aren't gonna come? Do you remember what happened during Paris last year?"
"Yeah, I guess there was that…."
"Uh. Yeah. Don't even worry about it. If you have a party, they'll come. Hell, I'll make them come!"

In a way he did, as he ended up catering the event. He was a Le Cordon Bleu student at the time. We quickly realized there'd be far too many people to feed with only catering, and the party became a potluck as well. 

I'd like to share something regarding how this all came together that you might find interesting. I find it miraculous.

The party was originally planned to be on the roof of The Post, the luxury apartment building downtown. Kate Alkarni, of Kate Alkarni Gallery, lived there at the time, and she offered me the space (click here to watch a speech by me concerning my first and last time catsitting for Kate at The Post). All she had to do was reserve the roof on a date of our choosing. She did so. 

A week beforehand, Leroy and I stopped by The Post because, as a chef, he would benefit from reviewing the kitchen facilities and appliances they had. I wanted to take a look at the walls to see if we could hang art. I still remember the guy's name at the front desk. Brian Chow looked us over skeptically, slowly, telling us no such reservation had been made.

He was the fellow you talked to about such things. Not only had no reservation been made, the roof had been reserved by another party, and despite the rule that the space could be reserved for only four hours, it had been blocked off for the entire day by one of the senior staff members there, and as such there would be no chance of any party, especially not mine, happening anytime at all on that date. Brian Chow pretended to look into the details, to see if there was anything he could do. The minutes ticked by. Leroy, who could see over his shoulder, would later tell me Chow had simply been surfing the net during those moments. A strange man indeed.

Bus driving isn't even on the top ten list of most stressful jobs. Event planning is. It's just a few rungs down from air traffic control. I'd always wondered why; now I knew. I'd just invited a thousand people with time and place details which were now inaccurate and unrealizable. I called Kate. What had happened with the reserving of the roof? She didn't know. No one knew. She proposed we have the party spread out in three locations– her apartment, The Post's game room, and a nearby movie room. Discussion with Post staff (I insisted on talking to someone besides Brian Chow) quickly revealed this would be impossible. The quantity of our guest list was a hilarious violation of fire code, and staff would be forced to lock the elevators to prevent any more attendees from overflowing into rooms with capacity limits of twenty, thirty-five and fifteen. Fuhgetaboutit. For reasons we couldn't fathom, The Post was dead in the water. 

I was despondent less at the thought of no party than the thought of disappointing people, coming up short. Friends had gotten time off work. They were telling me what they were cooking to bring. They were excited. I resolved that the new venue needed to be secured in 48 hours, had to be in the same neighborhood as The Post, and take place at the same time on the same day. I spoke with galleries, restaurants, hotels and other event venues and faced dollar amounts far beyond me. Reserving a space for hundreds of people in downtown Seattle on a Saturday, with two days notice? It was comedy, the level of rejection you get from that one. My 48 hours were almost up.

The hero of this story is Chad Solomon. Friend and former bus driver, now streetcar operator, he saw me wandering anxiously about Pioneer Square as he finished up a shift. 
"Hey, Nathan!"
"Hey, Chad."
"Are you looking for a new venue?"
"I am!"

Moments like this make me believe in angels. He knew of my search by way of social media, and happily showed me his building. Like Kate, he lived at the time in a luxury apartment building, not just downtown but a few blocks from The Post. Like The Post, it had a roof, except it was much larger. Was it available on the day we needed it? Yes, but in the afternoon, not the evening as I had planned. That's fine, I said. That's completely fine. I couldn't believe my good fortune. O, Chad. Thank you so much for reaching out that day. And for happening to walk by me at just the right moment.

The shift to an afternoon time turned out to be another stroke of fortune; it was a Sounders game day, and parking and traffic would've been a nightmare for all. We managed to avoid all that. O, Universe. You really are too kind!

Even that, however, was not the ultimate marvel. The real miraculousness is this, friend. At the last possible minute, Kate Alkarni got called away to Los Angeles to attend to an ill family member. If that original reservation at The Post had been correctly logged, Kate would not have been able to let anyone into her building, due to her unforeseen obligation in L.A. No exaggeration: the birthday party would have had to have been cancelled on the day of. 

Brian Chow, how I love you.

In a recent post I described the guests thus:

There people who came all the way from Florida to be there. There were people who came out from the hospital against their doctors' orders, bruises still on their faces. There were people who spent the night at their jobs to get the day off. I'll never be able to adequately express my gratitude.

Other people get married; this was my wedding, a celebration not of me but of the goodness in humanity which I so dearly love. I bungled somewhat the speech I gave at the party, overcome as I was with excitement; I was trying to link the thankfulness in the bus incident I retold with my thankfulness for everyone present, my indebtedness to the mysterious ways of this world we live in.

​There's an architecture we can't see from here on ground level. We scoff when coming upon a deux ex machina in stories, but that's only because fiction, as Mark Twain said, has to be plausible. Life doesn't. In life, it is not unreasonable to entertain the possibility of miracles. Help yourself in your journey, but trust yourself too, and trust in the universe to provide.

---

Just as the group photo above sadly leaves out as many people as it contains, the pictures below don't cover the half of it. What I mainly want to stress here is the cake. Look at that thing! It's an anatomically correct German chocolate version of a favorite coach type of mine, with a coach number and route I drove regularly (photos of the bus included below for reference!). It involved months of prep (unbeknownst to me) and its positioning and stand is based on an old photograph of mine (which contains the same route but a different coach type), also included below. Courtesy of one Hazel Margolis, who was eleven years old at the time. Will I ever receive a cake that grand again? Obviously not! It's all downhill from here, cake-wise...

Our conversation was drifting on to other topics, but I needed to clarify something.
"Hold up. Did you say that game was at eight o' clock in the morning?"
"Yeah."

For us swing shift folk, making it out to an event at that hour is akin to your average joe showing up to something with a three a.m. call time. He was referring to his daughter's basketball game, which he enthusiastically supported by attending, despite the jarring conflict with his sleep schedule. I was impressed.

"You're a good dad, man. I can respect how hard it is to get up for something at eight o'clock in the morning."
It was another late night on my way home. I was happily exhausted, sprawled out in the front seats, as he navigated the bus through another intersection. "All I need's my coffee, I'm good to go," he replied.

"Right on. That means something, that you're there. I'm sure she appreciates you being there. That means a lot to kids."
"I try to flatter her with confidence."
"Yeah." I reflected further. It felt okay to share, out here on the empty night bus. I saw this operator about every week, and I once trained him on the 7. We'd gotten to know each other. I said, "I try to make sure I never break promises that I make to kids. You know?"
"Yeah. They don't forget stuff like that."
"They need people they can trust."
"They don't never forget stuff like that." After a pause, he shared further himself. "I was state in high school. One of the top athletes in mah school."
"Cool!"
"My dad never came to not one of my games."
"You serious?"
"Not one."
"I'm sorry. That's not cool."
"Yeah, I still got three shoe boxes of medals and pennants and stuff. Kinda hard for me to throw them away, you know?"
"I hear that."

We were stopped at a long red light. He explained, "I had a half scholarship to USC. That was when my mom got colon cancer though. So I stayed."
"I woulda done the exact same as you, man."
"Oh yeah."
"In a heartbeat. Easy decision to make."
"I didn't even question it."
"She woulda done the same. She did. She gave up all her hopes and dreams for me."
I reeled at the weight of his sentence. Wow. "That's not easy to do," I said.
"Yeah, well."
"We can find ways to be happy."
"Other pleasures in life."
"For sure."

He said it with the humble peace that comes from immense gratitude. He was aware of his mother's sacrifice, and that for him, loyalty to those he loved would give him greater solace than achieving his aspirations in sports. 

I'm a big subscriber to the notion that despite superficial shifts, the pillars around which human life are built remain largely constant. Everything changes, and everything stays the same. 

A few of the superficial shifts have had larger ramifications, however, and the newfound multiplicity of choice is one of them. For centuries, life involved having too few options, and choosing the best available. The contemporary western world, for the first time, faces a more complicated present: the unprecedented issue of having too many options. 

Before the economic boom following World War II, life in America revolved around surviving, as it did (and often does) in most places. The seismic attitudinal shifts between the generation which purchased homes after the war and the generation raised in those homes have mainly to do with the bewildering new concept of leisure time and how to fill it. The adults, many of them children of the Depression, saw time as a valuable resource for survival. 

The new youngsters, on the other hand, growing up in comparative luxury and with no corresponding experience, found survival easy, and irrelevant to the forming of their identities. They focused instead on what prior generations never had time for– concepts like "lifestyle" (a coinage new to the period) and defining themselves with fascinations that come from having luxury capital, like clothing and music. The concept of the lifelong sacrifice, so painfully known to their forbears, seemed unnecessary and awful to them. 

​Is living in a world with a plethora of options better than being in one with a paucity of them? I think so, but I feel the challenges of both are so diametrically opposed that it's impossible to imagine the issues of one having lived only in the other. The several generations prior to ours understood sacrifice at a level we will probably never know. We alive now struggle with what they wished for– a plethora of options– in ways they couldn't have imagined. They would scoff now when our biggest problems are heartbreak and boredom, as we might chide them for defining themselves only by their careers, neither side understanding what the big deal is. We, today, wrestle with how to draw the outlines of our identities, surrounded as we are by avalanches of stimuli, drowning under heaps of suggested goals and desires, career and life paths, new catastrophes on the far corners of the globe. Modern life is the act of editing. What quantity of all this stimuli do you push aside, such that you can still see straight? 

Marriage and family are the most obvious examples involving lifelong sacrifices. The suppression of certain aspects of self, forever, to make things work. That takes colossal guts, and I admire what my operator friend was saying above about his mother. That's a level of commitment I know nothing about. It's worthy of great respect, but concurrently, I believe with equal fervor that the danger of lifelong bitterness, resentment and depression is never greater than in such decisions. Is there a more unequivocal path to misery?

I sometimes wonder how my ancestors might behave, were they alive today. Sacrifices aren't going anywhere. We all make them. There's an excellent argument for sacrifice being the organizing principle behind all societies, and sometimes it remains the smartest thing to do, the one that benefits the most people. 

And yet. What would they do now? Would they still stick it out in situations where they were obviously miserable? Or would they use with unparalleled enthusiasm the options we have today, sensibly pointing out the ridiculousness of giving up on dreams in a world where you don't have to? 

Our operator friend's situation above has no easy solution, but what I admired about him was how fully he seemed to know his priorities. He didn't have to sit there and think about what was more important for him in life. He knew and he acted, decisively, with the peace and confidence that comes from being true to yourself. My decisions may be like his, or they may just as easily not be, but I hope one day to have his clarity of vision, to navigate truthfully in this corner of the world, where options abound.

Photo by Keira Booth.

Paul Constant is (among other things!) the co-founder of the excellent The Seattle Review of Books. He recently interviewed me for his site. We chatted about the blog and its future, my influences, the purpose of living and writing these stories, and so much more. Read all about it here.

Photo by Kristina Moravec.

[This story is now available in my book, under the heading, "Details on a Day Off: II."] Except the following closing paragraph:

At awards shows the winners read off endless lists of everyone who helped them get there. It's boring to listen to, but I know why they do it. To be bestowed such privilege feels odd when you know it's really thanks to the kindness and assistance of so many others. I won't thank everyone by name, but rather paraphrase Morgan Freeman in 2005: I'd like to thank anyone and everyone who ever had anything to do with the making of– for me, this feeling of goodwill and forgiveness and freedom and love, a love I feel from all directions. It is so dear, so precious, and I cherish its fragile beauty such that I hardly dare write these words acknowledging its existence. Thank you. 

Photo by Neda Khanjani.

This story is now available in my book, under the heading, "Details on a Day Off, I & II."

​Photograph by Elaine Cho.

This isn't bragging. I'm not bragging. Please understand. I'm just thankful. When you know the face of hard tragedy, you can get lost and bitter… or find yourself wildly thankful for the smallest of things. I'm trying to explain a little bit of why I'm so happy so often. There's several hundred stories here about my working days; I want to share with you now a recent Thursday afternoon off. 

[The remainder of this post and the 2 following it are now available in my book, under the heading "Details on a Day Off: I & II."]