I think we obsess over complete stories a little -- tidy beginnings that give us all we need to know but nothing extra and neat endings that tie up all possible loose ends, leaving no questions unanswered. It’s probably a symptom of being stuck in a middle ourselves, “that awkward stage between birth and death” and all. Unnecessary sequels are often condemned, beginnings are frequently critiqued for “dragging,” and yet we still feel lost when our favorite stories end. This isn’t so much of a problem when your personal point of completion is three-quarters of the way through season 3, episode 2. Middles are kinder, more exciting places to be.
I asked my dad later about the clear box in the laundry room and learned that it wasn’t labeled in the distant past. It was a place for everything my mom had taken out of the house to work to decontaminate. If I’d asked the little kids about their chalk, they might have pointed to the birdhouse on a nearby tree.
We owe it to people to learn their whole stories, but there’s no denying that the world is stranger and safer in the middle. But, in the interest of full disclosure and one of those nice, neat endings, I have to tell you: I’m a middle child.
Lately, I’ve always seemed to come in in the middle of something. Mostly, it’s TV shows. As the crisis lingers, my mom has been eating through the archives of Netflix, so I’ve picked up a fair few shows three-quarters of the way through season 3, episode 2. She always offers to start them over, but I’ve discovered that it’s really much better this way. Learning all the characters’ names and functions is much more fun when they already expect you to know them.
It makes every story into a mystery: Collect your clues, guess everyone’s secret origin story, place your bets, and check your work. Everything’s more rewatchable if you can start again with a built-in fresh perspective, exposition intact. You get to avoid the awkward first date of many pilot episodes, give your brain something to chew on, and realize that the middle truly is the best part of anything.
The middle is the time when you’re greeted as a friend and progressing toward a clear goal. It’s also the best bit of the Oreo. And the middle is generally where we enter other people’s lives.
There’s this little clear container in my laundry room that’s labeled “DIRTY” in all caps. A remnant, I assume, from when my mom’s label maker was new, like the plastic tubs that say “BARBIES” but are now filled with paperwork. Though this label wasn’t meant for the knickknacks the box now holds, it appears to be a condemnation of the keys and jewelry in it. Something was dirty at sometime, but now that label is stuck to the same container for the lengthy middle after its creation and before its removal.
I was walking my dog across sidewalks filled with colorful chalk messages of encouragement from homebound children to restless passersby when we came across one that proclaimed ominously in orange, “Don’t let the pigeon out of the house.” Pigeon, being another word for mark, dupe, patsy, or the target of a crime, made me wonder if I’d discovered the messaging system of a ring of preschool-aged con artists.
Erin Stoeckig is a sophomore at Mayo High School. Send comments on teen columns to Jeff Pieters, jpieters@postbulletin.com.
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April 29, 2020 at 05:39PM
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Erin Stoeckig: This column begins in the middle - PostBulletin.com
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