My job is in the Hennepin County Recorder's Office--land records. We are developing new software to be used by our customers--mainly real estate lawyers and title insurance abstracters--when conducting their searches. Testing successive versions of this system is one of my tasks, a bleak one that I try to make interesting by conducting name searches on people I know who may own real estate in the county. I've learned that old college acquaintances with whom I have lost contact work best. You never learn anything interesting by examining the trail laid down in the County Recorder's Office by people you know well. You have to know the subjects well enough to be interested in the details, but not so well that you cannot be surprised by those details.
So what surprising details do you turn up? I have been startled by the number of divorces. Maybe it is not out of the ordinary, given the divorce rate in the general population. But when you know the people, however superficially, they don't seem like good candidates for divorce. The college is affiliated with the Lutheran Church and makes much of its effort to instill in students "Christian values." My memory is of serious classmates who studied late into the night, attended the college's daily chapel service, and spoke earnestly of "vocation" in dormitory bull sessions. Oh, sure, some of us were revellers and miscreants, but, proportionately, there was a superfluity of these models of college-aged intelligence and maturity.
I can say that they do not appear to have failed in marriage on account of a lack of funds. Expensive homes. High incomes. Alimony obligations that exceed my annual income. Despite their intelligence they sometimes do not appear to have learned any practical lessons. One high-achiever, a Phi Beta Kappa graduate and alum of one Ivy League graduate program and another Ivy League professional school, was divorced from three different wives inside of five years. Needless to say, I have a cheap-and-easy theory to explain why their college successes were apparently more predictive of financial success than of domestic stability. Near synonyms of "earnest" and "serious" are "humorless" and "pain-in-the-ass." Twenty years of that is more than enough. But let's leave the disenchanted former spouses out of it and imagine, at age 40, someone who acted 40 while still a teen-ager. They listened to their parents and teachers and the school counselors and the minister of their church and they took it all to heart. Two roads diverged in the wood, and they knew which one they were to take. They did everything they were supposed to do, so they got everything they were supposed to get, and perhaps became very disagreeable upon beginning to suspect that they should have done something else. The stuff advertised on TV during golf tournaments does seem a meager prize for all the hard work. The spouse reminds them of how they spent their youth preparing for a success that now seems like too much dessert. On the other hand, those who are more appropriately casual about their "career path" may end up working in the County Recorder's Office, and that is not the greatest, either.
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