Middlebury: Common App Personal Statement

My grandmother keeps a jar of buttons on her windowsill in Daegu, and the summer I was fourteen I spent an entire afternoon sorting them by the year I guessed they were made. ¹I had no method. I just decided a cracked tortoiseshell one looked older than a shiny red one, and built outward from there. That is, embarrassingly, how I discovered I am obsessed with how we know how old things are. The technical word, I would learn later, is chronology, and it turns out almost nothing about it is obvious. ²How do you date a layer of mud at the bottom of a lake? A skeleton with no label? A painting a forger swears is four hundred years old? I fell down the first of many holes reading about tree rings, because the idea is so stubbornly simple it feels like cheating. A wet year makes a fat ring, a dry year a thin one, and the pattern of fat and thin becomes a barcode you can match across overlapping trees, dead and alive, until you have a calendar stretching back ten thousand years. ³A drowned Roman dock and a living oak can, in principle, shake hands across two millennia. I find that almost unbearably beautiful, and I cannot fully explain why, except that it makes time feel like a thing you could hold. When I want to learn more, I am not very dignified about it. ⁴I turn to a chaotic mix: a secondhand textbook on radiocarbon dating that I do not fully understand and read anyway, a retired archaeologist named Mr. Halloran who answers my emails with paragraphs longer than my questions, and a forum where people argue, with frightening intensity, about the eruption date of a volcano called Thera. I have watched that argument for two years. ⁵One side dates it by ice cores in Greenland, the other by olive branches buried in ash, and they are off by a hundred years in a way that makes both sides a little crazy. I have no horse in the race. I just love watching smart people care that much about being right. What captivates me, I think, is that chronology is where the hard sciences and the human stories are forced to sit at the same table. ⁶A physicist measuring carbon decay and a historian reading a clay tax record are, whether they like it or not, arguing about the same thing: when. When did the harvest fail, when did the king actually die, when did the ash fall on the people who did not run. Every date is secretly a claim about a person who once stood in a specific morning. I still have not sorted my grandmother's buttons correctly. I checked, eventually, and at least three of my 'ancient' ones were from a coat she bought in 1998. ⁷But she lets me re-sort them every summer, and every summer I am a little less wrong. I think that is the whole appeal. Not the certainty, which I will probably never have, but the slow, stubborn, deeply human project of getting closer to when things really happened, one cracked button at a time.

For three years I was the kid who could fix anything, until I met a printer that taught me I mostly could not. ¹I ran the repair table at our town's little volunteer fix-it cafe, where people bring broken toasters and lamps on Saturday mornings instead of throwing them away. I loved it. I was good at it. Then a woman named Priya set a dead label printer on my table and asked if I could save the addresses stored inside, because the business it belonged to was her late husband's. I said yes too quickly. ²I always said yes. The problem was that this machine did not have a loose wire or a jammed gear, the kind of thing I understood. Its insides were a small computer, and the data she wanted lived on a chip behind a password nobody alive had written down. For two Saturdays I pretended I was close. I watched repair videos at night, I bought a cheap circuit tool I did not know how to use, and I kept telling Priya 'next week.' ³What I was really doing was protecting the idea of myself as the kid who could fix anything. On the third Saturday I shorted the board. ⁴There was a faint smell, a thread of smoke, and then the screen that had at least turned on before would not turn on again. I had not just failed to recover the data. I had destroyed the last working piece of her husband's business with my own impatient hands. I have never wanted to disappear so badly. I told Priya the truth, all of it, including the part where I had known for two weeks that I was out of my depth and said nothing. She was kind, which somehow made it worse. ⁵She said her husband had been the same way, allergic to admitting he was stuck, and that it had cost him more than one customer. That sentence rearranged something in me. The flaw I thought was harmless confidence was the exact flaw that had hurt the man whose machine I had killed. What I learned is narrower and stranger than 'believe in yourself.' ⁶I learned that the most useful sentence I own is 'I do not know how to do this, but I know who might.' At the fix-it cafe now, there is a whiteboard I started called the Maybe Wall, where we write down repairs that are past us and the name of a person across the county who could actually do them. We have sent out a clock, a sewing machine, and a beautiful broken accordion. ⁷I am prouder of that wall than of anything I ever fixed alone. I could not recover Priya's addresses. ⁸But she comes back most Saturdays anyway, usually with cardamom cookies, and last month she helped a teenager half my skill level wire a lamp while I watched, useless and delighted, from the side. I used to think being capable meant having the answer. I think now it means being honest about the moment you run out of them, and trusting that the room is bigger than you. That is the repair I am still learning to make.