Yet Another Excerpt From "Time's New Romans"

What is a “calling”? I think it might be a uniquely Western notion, and even more specifically, an American one; this desire to find one's "life's work." In Germany, as I recall, if a student wasn’t smart enough for college, he or she was tracked into a trade that might best utilize their skills.

“Klaus shows an aptitude for repairing things. He will be a diesel mechanic,” the test-givers decide. “Come with us, Klaus, you will be enrolled in the Schoolofdieselmechanicsforboysnotsmartenoughtobeengineers.”

And Klaus lives a happy life, we assume, where his gifts will best serve him. He puts on his blue coveralls in the morning and fixes diesel engines all day and then joins his fellow mechanics at the Trinkhalle after work to down some beers made at the local brewery by boys who went to Brewersschoolforboysnotsmartenoughtobecomechemists.

In China, I’ve been told; the state evaluators show up to the preschools one morning and put all the kids on a balance beam or a pommel horse. Those who do well at these things are taken away to Olympic camp, the rest are allowed to move on to kindergarten, where they will again be sifted for those who show giftedness toward factory management. Around third grade, the evaluators come back, looking for kids with a propensity to tell on other kids. These, of course, become spies. This process continues until their last year of high school, when the few students who haven’t been identified as workers, government drones or Olympians are allowed to move on to college, where they will become engineers, analysts, and chemists for the government. Their old classmates who got pulled in preschool are by this time Olympic coaches at the government’s Olympic camps.

In Greece, I hear; if your dad is a butcher, you will be a butcher. If he is a fisherman, that is your fate. If he is a beggar, then you will beg. Forget the Olympics. The Greeks may have invented them, but they suck at them now. You get no “calling” unless it is to the priesthood.

And what of the third world? “Calling?” they laugh. “Hey, Mama! Come here! Junior thinks he has a ‘calling’!” Mama comes over, a pot of water on her head.

“What is this you talk of?”

“I don’t feel called to opium farming, Mama! I want to write stories!”

And Junior’s parents summon the tribal council, who determine the boy is demon-possessed. Then, if the medicine man or witch doctor can’t heal him, Junior is banished from the village or put out of his misery.

Only in America have we determined that every single one of us must not only go to college, we must get advanced degrees. Every single one of us can make our own destiny. Every child gets told by his or her mother, “You could be President!” And the colleges are overfull, competitive and expensive, churning out advanced degrees for the men and women who become dog-walkers and taxi-drivers, waiters and copier repairmen, paths they should’ve chosen years ago. But drive that taxi they will, forced as they are to pay off the student loans for those advanced degrees in Philosophy, or that most ubiquitous and ethereal of degrees, Communications.

Calling. Destiny. What you were put here to do. I don’t know anymore. I thought I knew at one time, but I think those were the imaginings of a dreamer.

The latest pop sensation or football star will tell the fan magazine, "I thank God for this opportunity. I am doing what I was born to do.”

Really? You were born to sing about sex and parties? You were born to lob a ball down the field? Well, if you’ve found it, who am I to deny you of it? I’m still looking. Or when I am honest in the sleep twilight; I’m still shutting out the voice that suggested a calling I didn’t want to answer.