The Geographer's Library

Jon Fasman
had an endless supply of ads, announcements, notices, and just plain filler we
could recycle or resize if the cub reporter couldn’t quite ride without training
wheels.
And the times when I couldn’t were getting more and more infrequent. I
had been working at the Lincoln Carrier for almost a year and a half, ever
since graduating from Wickenden University. I had friends who had slid
seemingly without thought from college to med school or law school, or to
fancy consulting jobs or some sort of literary underling work in New York, as
though those things were just what you did. I had no such prospects, nor did
I much want to go back to New York, where I grew up. Actually, I had a vague
plan to attend graduate school and eventually settle down to live the cloistered,
quiet life of a history professor in some picturesque little college town
(steeple, main street called Main Street, movie theater with a marquee),
someplace where I could get all of my aging out of the way in my early thirties
and live without crises or surprises, changing only incrementally for the
rest of my allotted threescore and ten.
I hadn’t really thought of becoming a journalist, mostly because I didn’t
really understand how one did it. I had turned out a few music and book
reviews for my college paper, mainly for the free books and CDs; I would
read or listen to something, write a couple hundred words about it, and a
week later I’d see my name above some prose that bore a passing resemblance
to what I had written. A racket, not a career.
After graduation I had just stayed on in the same apartment I lived in during
the year: I had no reason to be anywhere else. A month into that stagnant
summer, I declined my father’s offer/mandate to work as a paralegal at his
friend’s law firm in Indianapolis, where my father had moved after my parents
finally split. He made me feel so guilty about not having a job that I went,
for the first and only time, to Wickenden’s Career Promotion Center. There I
filled out questionnaire after questionnaire, and I talked to chipper recent
grads with sweater sets and pearl necklaces, loafers and the beginnings of
beer guts. I looked through job ads that made no sense. My favorites were
from the consulting firms: “You will learn to implement strategic management
protocol decisions,” et cetera. I worried that I would turn into some sort
of cyborg after three weeks at one of these places; I would return home for
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