I want to be a person of epic proportions.

I want to be a person of epic proportions. After today, I know this for certain, though I know with the same amount of certainty that that is just not in my personality. I do not live large. I'm too subdued, too interested in other people's lives, whether fictional or otherwise. Too modern, I sometimes think. Like Minniver Cheevey, born too late.

Today I went with my mother and great aunt and uncle to visit my great-aunt's oldest friend, Allen. She has a summer cottage that is one room with bunks, perched on the rocks above the water. It is beautiful and quaint and enchanting and old-worldy in the best possible way. And so is she. There is a lot of lore about Allen. I'd like to be the sort of person about whom there is a lot of lore. She is always planning to come up to Maine, but never actually does, so I couldn't quite believe it when my mother came home and told me that she was going to tea with Allen, and would I like to come. I, of course, wanted to meet this mythic figure, and the actual person was not disappointing given the stories. I do not mean that she is seven feet tall and breathes fire, nor was she dressed particularly glamourously. She was dressed in her "Gloria Vanderbilt" jeans as she called them (with a reference to how whenever she sees Anderson Cooper, she thinks 'I'm wearing his mother's jeans.' She then proceeded to say "I met Gloria Vanderbilt once."), a shirt with rips in it and no bra over which she then put an old sweater, and no shoes. While she can be described as witty and exciting and fun, it could also be said that she is an old woman with an over-fondness for cats and her slightly skewed memory of her dead husband Max. She is delightfully real, while simultaneously being more interesting than I could ever hope to be.

We sat in the cabin as she and my Great Aunt Penny recounted marvelous food-related experiences they had including escaping Harvard boyfriends and fleeing to a cabin where they made pineapple upside-down cake over a fire and camped in france where they ate delicious french food out of a can and drank bourbon. Why isn't this my life?

They also discussed a trip to the Soviet Union they took in the 70s when they would steal food from their hotel and shove it into their purses so that they could picnic for lunch and not sit in restaurants for hours waiting for non-existent food. When the trains were beautiful and there were stores selling one tomato and that was it, and they brought tang because it was the only way to get vitamin C and mixed it with Vodka. Where there were restaurants with names that translated into English were things like 'The Garden of Fireplaces' and people were always trying to separate them so that Allen and Max got to look at the Old City in Tallinn and Aunt Penny wasn't allowed to leading her to sit on a curb and sob. They would have picnics in fields full of wildflowers and gaze at beautiful churches.

Glamourous Allen married glamourous Max and they lived in Greenwich Village, and then in various amazing flats in London and Paris and a rented chalet in Switzerland near Montreux. They drove around in a little car, and my mother always had a fantastically fun time whenever she visited them. She speaks wittily and writes wittily and lives wittily. They never had money, but they house sat or stayed in friends' places, and they always were the most amazing places. There just are people like that. And I want to be one of them. I have for a while, but today just solidified that. It almost feels like the world is too full of people for life like that to happen now. And we can't just repeat ourselves--I need to find a different way to be fascinating. But that is what I want--not humdrum today. Maybe in fifty years nowadays will seem as charming as her life does to me now. Things always look better in retrospect, not because you realize mistakes, but just because they do.

It's like a conversation I had recently with my friend Beah in which we discussed how we'd like to be enigmatic. But we decided that we aren't aloof enough. We like talking and emotions too much. Allen somehow manages to be both real and larger-than-life, and that's what I want. But I think I read too much. I spend too much time in other worlds. And I don't have that personality. Neither do my great aunt nor my mother, but they spent time with her, and had entirely other lives as well, and that sounds pretty good as well.