Nobody Handed Me the Rulebook Either

There's a realization that's been simmering in the back of my mind like a pot of coffee on a woodstove, and it's this: the grand illusion of adulthood is that we're all just winging it. Making it up as we go. Hoping nobody notices. It's the world's most serious game of dress-up. We put on our grown-up pants and hope they fit. And mostly, we just fumble through, trying to figure out which end is up and trying not to make too much of a mess in the process. Here's something I figured out around the same time I realized Santa Claus wasn't real , which was embarrassingly late, but that's a story for another day. The great cosmic joke is that nobody, and I mean nobody, actually knows what they're doing. We spend our childhoods waiting for the day we'll be handed the rulebook. The decoder ring. The secret map that makes all the grown-up nonsense finally make sense. It never comes. You just wake up one day and you're the one in charge. The one everybody's looking to for answers. And you're quietly praying nobody asks you anything harder than "What's for dinner?" Because past that, you're mostly improvising. ---

I think about the men in cages in the Florida Everglades, chanting "agua, agua" because the water's been taken away. They're in a place being called "Alligator Alcatraz," which sounds like a rejected title for a bad B-movie, but it's just a tent city on an old airstrip. A swampy purgatory, run by the state on behalf of the federal government. And the story there is the same old story, just stripped of all the polite veneer. No oilcloth table. No county clerk trying to seem helpful. Just a metal cage, a guard, and a paper written in English. Sign this. We won't tell you what it says. You don't get water until you do.

And you start to realize the system isn't some faceless, mechanical thing. It's made up of people. People who are just as confused and uncertain as the rest of us, doing their jobs, getting through their shifts, trying not to think too hard about what the paperwork actually means for the person holding the pen. ---

I had an uncle. Not a real uncle, but the kind of uncle you get in small-town Minnesota, where half the men in the county are somebody's uncle whether they want to be or not. We called him Uncle Sven. He was from the old country, which in our part of the state meant he was from a town in Norway so small it didn't make most maps. Sven was a carpenter. Built half the barns in the county. Hands like cured hams. Could drive a sixteen-penny nail in three swings. But English was a fumbling, second-language affair for him. He got by on nods and a formidable frown, and most people knew better than to push past either one. One year, the county sent out new forms about property tax classifications. Something about agricultural exemptions and homestead credits. The language was dense and legal , the kind of English that feels like wading through cold oatmeal. Sven wasn't a man easily cowed. He'd faced down a bull moose in rut. But this was a different animal. He made the clerk sit there and wait while he called our pastor, who called a lawyer in town, who eventually drove out and translated the whole thing , first into plain Norwegian, then into plain English. Turned out, signing would've shifted a drainage easement in a way that wasn't exactly to Sven's benefit. No malice, probably. Just efficiency. The system needed a signature to keep moving. The man behind the clipboard wasn't evil; he was just a young guy doing his job, and his job was getting forms signed. Whether the person signing understood what they were agreeing to , well, that was more or less a secondary concern. If it was a concern at all. ---

I spent a summer once working on my cousin's farm. We'd sit on the porch after supper, sipping lemonade, watching the light go gold over the fields. My cousin's grandfather had plowed those same fields with a team of horses. Different time. Slower time. But even then, there were forms to fill out. Even then, there were people with clipboards showing up at the door. That part hasn't changed much. What I've come to understand , slowly, the way you understand most things worth understanding , is that the people inside the system aren't a different species. They're not villains twirling mustaches in back offices. They're just people. Trying to do their jobs. Trying to get by. And sometimes doing their job means asking you to sign something you don't fully understand, in a language you don't fully speak, under conditions that don't leave much room for questions. It's not always malicious. It's just the way the game runs when nobody's really in charge of making sure it's fair. ---

We're all pretending, is the thing. Every last one of us. Pretending to be adults, pretending to know what we're doing, pretending the forms make sense and the rules are clear and the people running things have some kind of plan. And sometimes that pretense is enough to get us through. But sometimes it isn't. And when it isn't, people end up in swampy tent cities chanting for water. Or they end up signing away a drainage easement because nobody stopped to make sure they understood what they were holding. The real secret of adulthood, if there is one, might just be this: keep going anyway. Put one foot in front of the other. And maybe , when somebody else is the one standing there confused, holding a form they can't read , be the person who calls the pastor, who calls the lawyer, who makes the clerk wait. That's about the best any of us can do. ---

Filed under: community, public policy, rural life, immigration, human dignity, bureaucracy, social commentary, Midwestern culture