Whatever Melts Your Butter

Growing up, I spent Sunday dinners next to my cousins Melissa and Brent at the kids’ table in my grandmother’s kitchen. When your parents, Wayne and Sherry, were once high school sweethearts whose families still live on opposite sides of the same Indiana town, you tend to spend every holiday and three-day weekend driving to see them.

Aside from serving ourselves first and taking way more than any kid could eat, our seats at the yellow and brown, plastic-coated card table left the three of us feeling left out. My grandpa used to place two phone books on my chair so that I could reach my plate and, unlike Melissa, I was just tall enough to see the adults’ table. I used to watch as my dad told animated stories to his three oldest nephews that left everyone laughing so hard they had tears streaming down their faces.

After dinner, my grandma used to let each of us reach our sticky hands into her buttery cookie jar. It was the kind of cookie jar that, no matter how many we ate, we never seemed to make a dent in the number of cookies. While we stuffed our full bellies on sweets, the adults played Trivial Pursuit. I’d hop up on my dad’s lap and he’d pass me unused turquoise “pie” pieces. Why no one ever picked the prettiest color was something I never understood.

From my post-dinner vantage point, I concentrated on my twin cousins, Shawn and Shannon. Wow, I thought, imagine cars, girlfriends, real jobs, chest hair, beer… The whole idea of becoming an adult still didn’t mean much beyond sitting at a different table. I had no real need for a car to take me anywhere or for a beverage my grandpa claimed was likely to put hair on my chest; it wasn’t yet an enviable age.

As I grew up, as lanky and awkward as any teenager, Shawn and Shannon remained eternally 25 in my mind (something to do with being impressionable). The twins were the first “kids” I knew who were old enough for the adult table, and still young enough to be scolded by grandma. They made me so nervous to talk to that I'd blush with embarressment, so I hardly knew them at all. I looked up to them more in a literal sense and envied their parental freedom.

It’s possible that I was a particularly imaginative child, and it’s also possible that 4-year olds rarely interact with 25-year olds, but for the next 21 years of my life, I expected to turn 25 and wake up to four kids, a husband, a real job, and a big house of my own.

It happened a little differently.

The fact is that I turned 25 while vacationing in Maine with two of my closest friends. On the morning of September 6, I woke up in a quiet, comfortable bed, with no diamond on my finger and no one sleeping next to me. To no surprise, things in life are not always what they seem. My cousins, in fact, didn’t start having kids until their thirties, but how many 4-year olds do you trust to get story right?

When I asked another friend how he felt when he turned 25, he admitted that he, too, had misconceptions. We agreed that 25 feels particularly in-between. In between married with children and re-living college on homecoming weekends, between commuting from Connecticut and stocking liquor store shelves for an hourly wage. Twenty-five is between where you dream of living and the town where you grew up. In fact, 25 might not be in-between at all. It might just be just right.