Twenty Characters, Three Lines By Laura J. Oliver

I seldom donate money to anything but dire causes—children in need of food, animals in need of kindness, elections that need winning, my wardrobe —that kind of thing —but I got sucked in last week because my college played the urgency card.

“It’s your last chance, expiring at midnight tonight, to contribute to the college by buying a commemorative brick.” The brick was to be included in the renovation of the historic sidewalk in front of a dorm I had often visited on the grounds of the first college chartered in the sovereign United States of America (1782), — the only college to which George Washington gave permission to use his name and also contributed 50 guineas.

Each donor was to fill out a form indicating what they would like engraved on their brick. If GW could fork over 50 guineas, surely I could part with 150 George Washingtons, (although each of his guineas contained 22 karats of gold and mine were on VISA). But who wouldn’t want a piece of that action? And for a good cause? The conundrum being, what to have engraved? Three lines, a 20-character limit per line, including punctuation and spaces, to lie beneath the footsteps of students walking into their futures as I once had.

This shouldn’t have been hard, but it was ridiculous. My name seemed like a no-brainer, but my last name changed five days after graduation. Use both? Middle initial? Of maiden name or middle name? A wish for future generations? A quote from someone wise? A joke only one person would get?

What would you say? Three lines, 20 characters.

You leave home all possibility and unformed desire—searching for a stand-alone identity. I had arrived on campus at 18 with a crippling romanticism I still haven’t offloaded and the notion I might one day be a writer.

As I sat in my living room counting spaces and characters I remembered being told at a dinner party of a mysterious brick with a message on it embedded in an Annapolis sidewalk. I had walked these streets for years, looking down frequently to avoid breaking my neck on sidewalks uprooted by massive trees or those which age alone had hefted toward heaven. But I had never spotted a brick with letters on the surface. Who would have put it there and for what purpose, I wondered. I began looking down with a mission other than staying upright. I was on a treasure hunt across time–the treasure being a satisfied curiosity. Or perhaps to be the recipient of anonymous goodwill. Which is what I try to be every day.

After weeks of searching, one afternoon when I wasn’t looking at all, (lesson here but I won’t point to it), I looked down and there it was. A brick embedded in the sidewalk at a slight angle with two words engraved on it. No spoiler alerts– I’ll let you find it. Pro tip. It’s within sight of a very old church.

When the Main Street power lines in my town were buried in 1995 all the old bricks had to be taken up and were given away. I took one to use as a doorstop just because, well George Washington may have walked on it. Or Thomas Jefferson. Then I discovered that collecting bricks as pieces of history is a thing — there is a Facebook group called “Crazy about Bricks.”

I won’t be joining, but I do wonder if objects can hold onto energy. The way psychics ask to hold something once owned by the person being inquired about. How about all those clay handprints the kids made we have squirreled away. Were their hands ever that small? Is their energy still there? You know it is, or you would have tossed them out by now. How about that pocketknife you inherited? The ring? Can my brick hold all the hope for the future I brought to school from my past if it’s made in the present?

Have you figured out yet what you would carve into yours? Your name? Your dream? How it turned out?

Because now it is life that is playing the urgency card. From the far end of that pathway, how would you succinctly identify yourself, your calling, what you made of the gifts you were given, your precious time on the planet, circling the sun, a third of the way out on the arm of a spiral galaxy. What of yourself are you leaving behind?

The clock was ticking, and I had to pick something—anything– from the far end of the journey that had begun on that sidewalk. For all the dreams in my life that haven’t worked out, I decided to acknowledge the one that has.

Laura J. Pritchett
(Laura J. Oliver)

Writer. As planned.

Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.