Georgetown University’s Newspaper of Record since 1920

The Hoya

Georgetown University’s Newspaper of Record since 1920

The Hoya

Georgetown University’s Newspaper of Record since 1920

The Hoya

Once Upon a Time, in This Hoya’s Fairy Tale

Lindsay Anderson/The Hoya Michael Grendell (SFS ’06) soaks himself in the warm sun while lounging on a brick wall in Dahlgren Quadrangle outside the entrance to Healy Hall.

Once upon a time, in a foggy town just south of San Francisco, there lived a boy .

Fine, I admit this isn’t the sort of material that makes a great fairy tale. While my upper-middle-class upbringing in the Bay Area suburbs, and later in Westchester County, N.Y., was certainly charmed by any standard, my feverishly imaginative brain found all the comfort and stability decidedly underwhelming.

Didn’t I deserve drama, mystery and magic? Apparently not. I’ve survived numerable disasters, natural and manmade, and every time escaped with negligible damage and not much of an exciting story. To my detriment, I bear the guilty burden of being relatively gifted, lucky and mostly undisturbed.

I found out in a profoundly traumatic way that real life doesn’t offer fairy tales. Before setting out in a car ride through Germany on a vacation trip, my mom stoked my excitement by mentioning that the upcoming drive would speed along the “Fairy Tale Road,” known as such because it passed through the villages that inspired the stories of the Brothers Grimm.

To my disappointment, this road was not the theme-park wonderland I suspected: a world of evil old witches, helpless maidens and giant beanstalks. Instead there were farms, churches and long stretches of forest. It was a complete letdown. My mom laughed at my innocence and fantastic expectations. I’m still smarting from the incident.

And so my life passed with minor incidents and adventures and a lot of daydreaming. I moved from one side of the country to the other, making the journey in a sometimes fascinating, cross-country road trip. It was new and exciting, and for a while it shook up the monotony. I thought a new epic was about to begin once I reached my destination, but then only a new routine set in.

The move was supposed to unleash the wonderful, hidden forces within me which had previously been kept under wraps. I was supposed to be a genius, popular, dazzlingly athletic and eventually world-famous. In New York I was still smart, but not that popular and clumsy with a ball. Another trip down a fairy tale road had foiled me again.

A Jesuit education in the Big Apple failed to transform me into the superhero I thought I could be. My grades were not high enough, my friends not numerous enough, my mile times in track not fast enough. My wanderlust had to be sated by the minor daily odysseys on subways and commuter trains, with their mildly captivating Calypsos and their not-so-seductive Sirens. That fairy tale road was dirty, slow and crowded, and I felt anonymous and disappointed.

College offered another chance at weaving my long-awaited magical narrative. I was independent, far from home and free to make my own glorious destiny. I was a mess that blasted loud music, desperately grasped for friends and stalked parties wherever I could find them.

I just wasn’t that cool, or cut out for a legendary college experience. The lifelong villains of my story, internal demons of doubt and despair, started to get the better of me. So I collapsed, worn out, and only a quarter of the way through the saga.

I was resilient, however, and determined to finish with a happy ending. So I bounced back the next year with a fresh set of fantasies of perfect grades and stellar extracurricular activities. I resumed my post as editor of the sports section at The Hoya and waited my turn to take the reins. I became the senior editor of the section and felt driven to make it a paragon of journalistic perfection. I did not come close to this goal; meanwhile, my grades suffered and I often felt like the living dead. A zombie story was not the fairy tale I wanted.

After sophomore year, I retrenched and went to Peru for the summer. The experience offered its share of magic moments, and my trek on the Inca Trail may have been the closest I got to my fairy tale experience. Instead of satisfying my hunger for the mythical and enchanted, however, it only whetted my appetite for more.

Junior year did not provide a follow up. It brought along a cast of devils and saints, new friends and opportunities. I stubbornly refused to be impressed. Instead, I locked myself in the tower of Village C East, a stunt I had pulled so many times before, and awaited my rescue.

I dreamt of a phone call, a knock on the door or a tug at my hand to take me away to a new, thrilling destination. You would think someone would care enough to provide me with these things, but none of those wishes came true in the way that I wanted.

That left senior year. Slowly but surely a new awareness started to dawn: If there hasn’t been a fairy tale yet, there wasn’t going to be one. I could no longer cocoon myself in fantasies. My talents and extraordinary abilities, if they existed, would not blossom overnight. Adventures would not spring themselves upon me. Most importantly, people don’t come to rescue those who lock themselves away or stumble around waiting to be saved.

I wish this trite moral could have come to me in a fable-like epiphany. Instead, understanding has been a slow, unromantic and begrudging process of thinking and over-thinking, of small steps forward and falls backward.

As I strike out on another chapter, I no longer look for a fairy tale road to start down. I am not a stock hero of a bedtime story. I am a complex, prickly and sometimes wonderful character in my own right, spinning away my own narrative of everyday occurrences and subtly magic moments. I no longer want to obstinately hold out in my tower waiting to live happily ever after. I just want to live, with the imperfections and the possibilities.

So I turn the page, and begin the next chapter.

Michael Grendell is a senior in the School of Foreign Service. He is a former senior sports editor, features editor, contributing editor, associate editor, and member of The Hoya’s editorial board.

More to Discover