Re-Gifted

In the spring of 2007, a friend of mine handed me what looked like a hand-me-down, travel-ragged, DVD case.

“The Office, Season One” it read.

The cover peered up at me from an extremely angled shot of Steve Carrell leaning back against a desk. “I think you’ll like it,” she shook it in her hands, “it’s really funny.” She was clearing out a large cardboard box overflowing with videos she no longer had use for. Skeptically, I took it. After sitting in solitary confinement on my bedside table for many months, in a last-minute packing scramble, it found itself in a bag coming along with me on a family vacation.

We were headed to the Outer Banks, North Carolina. For as long as I can remember, our family has rented a beach house there for a summer week of sun-bathing and salt-water splashing. I was eighteen. I was looking back at what felt like a floundering and flailing four years of high school and looking forward to what I could only assume would be just as brutal and uncertain. I looked out at the ocean and I thought “Well, this is just all wrong.”

One quiet evening when everyone else had succumbed early to the day’s sun-fatigue, I curled up alone on the living room couch and decided to give the dusty DVD a try. I watched all six, awkwardly funny, episodes before I allowed my eyelids to collapse for the night. And for the next twelve years, when there was nothing else of interest to watch, wherever I have decided to call home, the Office has been playing in the background.

Diversity Day is a difficult episode to watch; a lot of Season One is worth hiding behind your hands. Michael Scott, though he is adorned with a complete exaggeration, is painfully human. He reminds you of someone you might know in your everyday life; someone who feels forgotten. I told my cousin the next day that I related to him in some ways because he clearly didn’t know what he was doing. She must have thought I was kidding because she laughed.

That fall I went away to college. I had decided to apply as an art major. I was interested in advertising and graphic design and was grateful when I was accepted to a school in upstate New York. It was six-hundred and fifty miles from home. The distance ultimately quieted what I wanted to say into small whispers in my head. I felt far from the home of who I was as a child and fear was swelling in my chest like a rising tide. I was going to class, I was eating too many bagels, I was talking to my boyfriend back home on my flip-phone… I was tanking. Second semester began and a friend was coming to get me out of bed in the morning to go to class. And I was telling her no.

Dwight is stumbling out of the office toward the elevator, leaning on Pam as if his legs are injured. He’s got a concussion. It’s early in the morning and I haven’t slept. I can see dew accumulating on the glass, blurring the fall leaves into a fiery scrawl across my dorm room windows. I had stopped going to class altogether. Pam tells Oscar that Dwight is going to be okay. The considerate message is for Angela, of course, who appreciated it silently. I recall being five years old and meeting my first childhood friend. We were each standing beside our mothers, holding tight to their legs, looking at each other. Neither of us making a move; neither of us sure we wanted to meet each other at all. “You wanna ride bikes?” She was the first to brave the waters. From that day of scuffed knees onward, we were best friends through middle school.

I was suspended from college as a sophomore. I was given the orders of community service and counseling. I filled the vacant couch in front of two people I no longer recognized. They asked me what was wrong and the muted manifesto of “I don’t know” was all I could summon. I was a drug addict. How do you say that out loud?

“It’s a date.” Jim pats his hand on the conference room door frame. Pam looks back at the camera, her confessional interrupted by overwhelming emotion and she forgets what she was saying. I was lying on a mattress on the floor in a small two-bedroom apartment in Sierra Vista, Arizona. I was high. The third season of the Office was always my favorite. The Jim and Pam romance was at its height then. I leaned back against the wall and glanced at a large poster of Marylin Monroe I had taped to the wall. It was crooked. Did she ever get self-conscious, you think?

A week earlier I had hitchhiked to the nearby town of Bisbee. It was a small artsy town with many family-owned shops and galleries of pottery and paintings. It reminded me of my hometown in Vermont in many ways. I meandered slowly up the street. I looked into some of the shop windows; glass bowls, handmade jewelry, crystals... A woman nearby tripped on the uneven sidewalk. She looked up at me after catching herself and smirked. I looked at my reflection in a large glass window. The shadow of a tall cactus plant hung a dark halo about my head. I turned away from the feeling, turned my back on the little town, and sauntered away toward the open desert.

“Then it would say ‘Lanch Party’ Kevin. Would it really be better if it said ‘Lanch Party?’” Angela is really upset because she loves Dwight. She is playing it off like it’s the Launch Party that is pushing her over the edge. Why does she feel she cannot say what she means? What is she afraid of? I called my mother from my apartment’s only closet. I hadn’t left the bedroom in almost two weeks. I was trying to write in a journal by the light of a small keychain flashlight but my fingers were shaking and the scribble was illegible. Into the silence, my Mom said: “Come home.”

Who wouldn’t want to go to a Café Disco while at work? I imagine Phyllis and her confident stomping as she leaves the office becoming the first to attend the workplace dance-off. I spent my twenty-first birthday in rehab. We listened to a lot of music. From what I can recall we had something playing whenever we were not in class or in session. Nobody wanted to sit with their own thoughts in there. That would’ve been enough to make any one of us run out into traffic. Instead, we listened to the Beastie Boys, Radiohead, and Eminem. Disco it was not, necessary it was.

“…for no Goddamn good reason!” Kathy Bates shouts and slams a newspaper article against Pam’s beloved painting of the Dunder Mifflin Building. She is pissed. Her business is at risk of legal action given the unfortunate flammability of her Sabre printers. Admitting the truth would mean risking her business. The truth. I was sitting in my childhood bedroom again. The same rug on the floor, the same chilly cold blue walls. It needed a new color. I painted it that month.

I was watching Todd Packer pretending to get sober in Season Seven around the same time I was trying to tackle the 12 Steps myself. I was hoping that my efforts were more genuine than his. I took a job at a local nursing home waiting tables. A sober twenty-one-year-old shuffling toast and coffee around a dimly lit dining room. I met a woman named Judith. She was riddled with dementia and, for her, each meeting was a new experience. She would call me “darling.” I didn’t feel even an ounce of a “darling” in me, but with each pad of butter I delivered to Judith, the present moment became more and more real to me.

One of the more memorable aspects of The Office, and certainly a fan-favorite characteristic, is Jim’s consistent pranking of Dwight. From placing his stapler in Jell-O to pretending he had been murdered on a late night of corruption in Tallahassee, Florida. I was sober two years before I learned to have fun again. I was going to at least two meetings a day, and gathering with other sober addicts at every chance. Some of these friends became soul sisters. We would eat out at local diners, sitting in the booths talking for many hours. We would go bowling, hiking, we would play cards, buy outrageously expensive popcorn at the local movie theater, and walk on the street at one in the morning. When Jim came falling out of the closet and Erin screamed, I laughed. Out loud.

Pam fears that she will not be enough for Jim. Helping coordinate the Office Olympics seems so insignificant in the face of living a day to day life as yourself. Would living this quiet life with Jim, raising a family, all the less extraordinary things, be enough?

My television hums quietly tonight. Something is playing on it that I have never seen. It’s late and I am throwing something together in a large frying pan. Occasionally, I glance up at the screen, though my attention span is short-lived. I am a nurse today. From waiting tables, I trudged my way upward to a nursing supervisor in Judith’s home. I live by the beach today. When I feel the urge for the sand between my toes I wander out to my backyard. Those soul sisters? We still talk on the phone. Long conversations, late into the night. I have been sober almost 13 years.

And Pam? She was enough. She was always more than enough.

If you find a show you really love, play it in the background. Watch your hand-me-down, travel-ragged life. It may be just as surprising, uplifting, and enlightening as what you’ll find rummaging through your friend’s old DVDs.