For Love of America

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Over spring break a friend and I went on a road trip through the American midwest and my mom gave me a portable sundial to take along. This country has a huge number of paths and byways—roads and porches and on-ramps and off-ramps and faces peering through windows. It was nine days and eight nights of good weather and three different rental cars and many different friendly faces and nine different states. The first evening we ate a Hawaiian pizza off the hood of a flashy white Genesis in a parking lot in Atchison, Kansas, the origin point for the Santa Fe railroad line and stayed the night in Leavenworth, down the road from a clean, symmetrical Neoclassical federal prison. 

The next morning I sat on that Kansas balcony just past dawn and thought about spring—the cruel aching of its becoming. The day before we had seen fields and fields of purple where later in the year, wheat will grow. At first I thought it was clover, but a little research let me know that it was a lowly little weed called henbit. The midwest has been lodged somewhere beneath my breastbone since birth, but I’ve rarely—if ever—seen it in the springtime, so the unexpectedness of that constant purple in my periphery gave me fresh eyes for everything.

My main quiet goal of the Missouri day was to see the house that used to be my grandparents’ and to go by their graves. In my eagerness to get there, I kept trying to turn off of US-35 too early and having to embarrassingly reverse course. Everything looked like Highway F to me, like the road that would take me home, but eventually, as always happens, the right road was the right road. We saw the lake, which had risen all the way to the top of the spillway, and then we walked up to the cemetery on a hill.

Car trouble sent us out of our way to St Louis and we eventually crossed the Mississippi at eleven pm near Alton, Illinois, north of the city. The river was only a yawning black expanse at that hour, but we wound along beside it for a while anyway. And there was good morning light the next day at our AirBnB in the heartland of Illinois for writing and for filming (though I found myself baffled by the sundial, for the time being.)

And then Chicago was a quick succession of glassy, shining Navy Pier, families of Hasidic Jews lining up to ride the ferris wheel, turning in a lost iphone found mysteriously on the ground, and then Lou Malnati’s for dinner. The next morning I bathed in a family friend’s apartment in her deep, square bathtub with water the psychedelic color of ancient minerals. Chicago runs its roots deep.

At midday we left and drove up to Madison where my insides turned all to mush. That year I lived there was hard and I was unhappy, but the place itself—the people and Dunn’s Marsh and even the strange traffic patterns to merge onto the beltline—were all kind to me, soft when I was not always able to be. This was my first time back since I moved away, and I missed my client Bonnie who died in spring of 2023. She was Madison to me—she was its parks, its newspapers, its hospitals, its markets, its lakes—and now she is gone. The city itself misses her, even in spring.

The next morning we left before eight and drove north, slowly, through country, to a two-day-a-week mechanic and lawnmower shop and along two lane roads where Amish buggies occasionally rattled past us, then up further north of that, where most of the signs advertised upcoming shops with the simple statement, “CHEESE.”

The Upper Peninsula reaching out over Lake Michigan was grey and open and quiet, as if it knew it was April, but wasn’t ready to talk about it just yet. Shunted backward in time and season, we wandered on a beach in the chill. I flew for a moment on a metal swingset that sang shrilly in the wind and followed two geese out across the sandbar. Spring had arrived on other shores, full of blooms and thawing laughter, but not here, not yet. The only thing that place could do was trust the earth in its turning. That night we stayed in a warm cabin with a Mennonite family down the way. The garbage man waved to me in the morning.

Good Friday brought us to Detroit where my uncle’s tenant let us into his house and we loaded up my grandma’s big table from which I ate so many summer Sunday dinners growing up, and then I sat on the dining room floor and crumpled old Parade magazines to pack bubble glass into boxes. I wrote about Detroit here almost a decade ago and the city has sat up and stuck its chin out since I was there last. It’s dusted off its shoulders and smiled and you can feel it. I stayed in that evening, but Tze went into the city and made friends every which way—on parking decks and sidewalks and in restaurant kitchens. The next morning, Saturday, his friend and her husband walked us through the open air Eastern Market with its thick carpets of flowers laid out in plastic flats, waiting to be planted in earth.

At midday we drove down through the plains to Defiance, Ohio and Abby met us there to putter around a Goodwill. She and I looked for sparkling things, like shoes and dresses, and also for tops because I was running out of clothes. From there we headed straight on to my friend Laura’s family outside Cleveland, and when her six-year-old shrewdly asked me if this was our “first stop with kids” I realized that it sure enough was. So there were books to read aloud and treasure discovered in the backyard dirt pile to admire, because children bring spring in with them from the outdoors. 

And then came Easter Sunday morning, so we drove though idyllic green valleys, where the homes nodded politely to each other all interspersed with churches, to hear a sermon about John chapter twenty, when Mary doesn’t recognize her risen Lord until he speaks her name. He knows her, and through his knowing she knows him: “Rabboni!” she says. After cinnamon rolls and omelets and watching blonde children chase down plastic eggs we drove south through wavering, warming hills on roads nestled into their sides, and found the World’s Largest Cuckoo Clock in a very quiet Sunday town.

Our last night we stayed on Main Street in Charleston, West Virginia. At fifty thousand people, it’s the biggest city in an achingly mountainous and forested and impoverished state. The porches on those neighborhood blocks were full of people who glanced at us with quiet suspicion—girls still in their Easter dresses and boys lingering barefoot along the curbs and folks crouched on stoops and a big sign on a bedsheet that said, “Welcome Home, Old Man!”

On our last day, just south of Charleston, our route crossed New River Gorge again and again. It’s a huge, old seam in the earth’s crust that busted open so many eons ago and has managed, with time, to heal itself over with spit and sweat and gumption and growing things, into a great, green scar. As we wound down through the mountains of Virginia towards Greensboro, I thought of resurrection and again, of Christ stepping out of his tomb, and then, merely by speaking her name, calling Mary out of hers.

All these places we had passed through in this shaken, stubborn country I had been before, and yet seeing them in their states of spring—expecting and tender and face-up-to-the-light and Hopkins’ “dearest freshness deep down things”—I understood how much I did not know about hope.  I see it running in veins through the treetops and the concrete and the backs of people’s hands. There is a mystery that abides. We will not know, not really know, the glory of the resurrected Son until he calls us by name, face to face. Until then, like Mary, we usually only see a gardener and a garden. That will have to do for now.

Teaching as an Offering

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Just show up with the best of what you have and what you know and offer it to them. Hold it out in your two hands, like a precious stone from the heart-vault of human experience and tell them that it is the best. It might be a story about Caesar or a poem about a wheelbarrow or a geometric proof or a neatly conjugated verb. It might be a cow’s eyeball or a song or something out of the epistles to the Corinthians. Some days, when you offer it, they will want it, and some days they will not, and some days they will take it from your hand and stuff it into their pocket without looking to wander on to the next thing, the next class, the next excitement. 

But you must continue to offer it; this is the heart of the job. Some days you will offer it and their eyebrows will shoot up and they will start asking strange questions from Timbuktu about it, and you will realize that they misunderstand what literary irony or an imaginary number even is, and so then you will slow down to explain its workings, which, coincidentally, is usually the same as explaining why you love it, why it’s the best of what you have.

So if you’re meant to teach for much time at all, you cannot possibly mind this perpetual act of offering. Because you know that you do not lose the things you offer. The things which you offer are all of the type which can be endlessly shared, so to offer them to the other souls in the room, the young ones with the sharp eyes who are in the midst of becoming, is really an act of expansion. The moment you begin to explain these things, these best-of-what-you-have, to pay close public attention them, to be curious about the way they are ordered, to point out the odd beauties and unwavering truths coursing through their veins, you are also offering your learners a steady stream of attention and curiosity and order and beauty and truth, all there for the taking. And while offering these things to others, you are also—by default—offering them to yourself. You, too, grow every time you bring these best-of-human-knowledge-and-experience odds and ends out of their cupboard into the light of day. The truths get true-r with every repetition, and every time—if you stop and notice—you know that.

As for the education of the young minds: some students, of course, will walk out of a classroom with many specific gifts from your lessons—how to give a speech, how to cite a source, how to avoid another Holocaust, how to build a roller coaster, how to parse a poem. That’s some students, you say, but what about the rest of them? (We know who those rest of them are.) Well, I say, if you offer every class you teach something you love, and if you offer these things over and over like gifts that glow, with sincerity and awe, then even the most unwilling, lethargic, obstreperous child will be unable to shake off the distinct impression that there are things worth knowing and there are things worth loving, that attention to God, his creatures, and the world which stumbles and prospers around them is a valuable pursuit.

Journey in Poetry

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Back in October, I gave you a little collection of poems that were perhaps talking to one another, and I’m doing the same today, just to remind both myself and you that though it is the end of February, we can remain confident that we will see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living. All our running in circles will not bring us either farther from or closer to him. If we are in him, he is with us. So here’s Walt Whitman (who did not know any of that), a draft-poem of mine called “The New Lazarus” which feels perpetually unfinished, and the middle passage of Psalm 139, which has been stuck pleasantly in my throat lately.

From Whitman:

Facing west from California’s shores,
Inquiring, tireless, seeking what is yet unfound,
I, a child, very old, over waves, towards the house of maternity, the land of migrations, look afar,
Look off the shores of my Western sea, the circle almost circled;
For starting westward from Hindustan, from the vales of Kashmere,
From Asia, from the north, from the God, the sage, and the hero,
From the south, from the flowery peninsulas and the spice islands,
Long having wander’d since, round the earth having wander’d,
Now I face home again, very pleas’d and joyous,
(But where is what I started for so long ago? And why is it yet unfound?)

“The New Lazarus”:

Come along out! I want you out in the light.
You think it’s you alone, but we are many,
We mothers of our own exile,
Our teeming selves, but worse,
Imprisoning lightning behind our breast-bones, 
In our wrist joints, at the base of our skulls
Where it sears us, marks us.

Show me those well-documented failures.
Come out in your grave clothes,
Your skin pale in brazen light,
Show me the hilly scar,
The busted ear, the lips chewed to silence,
The huddled back, the head so wrapped in refuse
It thinks you can’t be made new.

Now, tell him, go ahead and tell him,
Tell the good doctor:
“Lord, the one you love is sick.”

Psalm 139:7-12:

Where can I go from Your Spirit?
Or where can I flee from Your presence?
If I ascend into heaven, You are there;
If I make my bed in hell, behold, You are there.
If I take the wings of the morning,
And dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea,
Even there Your hand shall lead me,
And Your right hand shall hold me.
If I say, “Surely the darkness shall fall on me,”
Even the night shall be light about me;
Indeed, the darkness shall not hide from You,
But the night shines as the day;
The darkness and the light are both alike to You.

Christmas in London

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On the Friday before Christmas, I oversaw a bunch of teenagers decorating a gingerbread house while wearing my Christmas tree dress, then went home and changed into corduroys and a big sweater and got a ride to the airport from a friend. My first flight was delayed, then when we did board the pilot had us waiting on the tarmac before take-off for fifteen minutes “because we would make up time in the air,” and then after we landed there was no gate for us for some reason so we waited on that tarmac for about twenty minutes, and I was so convinced that I would miss my second flight and have to wait to travel till the next day that I’d already texted my family and said as much, but when I got off the plane I ran to the other gate anyway in an act of good faith. Another man ran along with me, though perhaps not for the same flight, and more than once we got stuck behind people on the people movers who did not really seem to want to move, but then I made it to the gate, and it was still open and I boarded and sat in my seat and it was a miracle.

This Christmas was a miracle, the kind I often forget to expect.

I landed in London the next morning, and then serendipitously ran into my own brother at Southall Station as if we have spent all our lives living around the block from each other in a small town (which we have not).

The next week-and-change was rich. I wore my sister’s sweaters almost every day. Time passed in a whirl of poems, and foggy Hampstead, and unusual non-perishable food stuffs gifted by my Uncle Jon, and hauling huge pots of paneer and rice to the church, and Christmas carols in the living room, and Asian aunties, and a Christmas group chat with my dad wearing a wig as the icon, and a fourteenth century pub on Christmas Eve, and getting motion-sick on the tube, and walks in Osterley Park (give me a path to tramp across a British field every day for the rest of my life, please), and a brewery in Bermondsey, and dishes done by our friend Zack, and a shop for Christmas dinner at Mary’s big Tesco, and a nativity play with lopsided head-dresses and clear-spoken lines, and the shoulder-to-shoulder crowds at Piccadilly, and egg-white dosas with peanut chutney, and straining cranberry sauce that was much more trouble that I intended, and cream tea at the V&A, and seven adults in a Honda Jazz, and learning that William Buckland once ate the heart of a king, and a clothes dryer piled with all the Christmas goodies like my grandma’s breezeway used to be back in 2003.

I will tell you something: I am unsure if my family has Christmas traditions anymore. Every Christmas of my adult life has been different, this one especially, full of small revelations to bask in. We followed Mary in her hat with its orange bobble through a crowded Covent Garden to track down a Christmas market that had disappeared in the night. My dad sat cheerful and quiet next to an auntie just arrived from India who speaks only Telugu and is hesitant to wear socks. George laughed a lot—often at his own jokes—and rigged up the curtain of saris for the Christmas Mela. My mom bought a floral velvet dress at Harvey Nichols where all of the dresses were very beautiful (except for one which was very ugly). And it was easy to invite in people we haven’t always had with us—my mom’s younger brother and my parents’ student this time. They too can cook and laugh and walk and sing carols and sit on strangers’ couches and hear the good news.

Because every year that news is new, every year we are children again, every year we wait to see what the miracle can possibly be. On Christmas day this year we read Tennyson: “Ring in the valiant man and free, / The larger heart, the kindlier hand; / Ring out the darkness of the land, / Ring in the Christ that is to be.” How much we still have to learn of Him, year after year.

2024 Retrospective

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On January 1st of this year, I wrote with triumph in my journal that all the mice that had been plaguing my kitchen for months were gone: “No more mice!” This did not, unfortunately, turn out to be true—full eradication would take until the spring, but we’ll draw a veil over that. Welcome to the exciting beginning of my 2024. My friend Laura sent me colorful pens for grading, and sometimes I sat in the big chair in my living room and made a mess with watercolors. 

My friend Regula and I joked that this year I entered my “club era”— full of the kinds of clubs that define your thirties. And it’s true that I seem to have become a joiner all of a sudden. Regular commitments include two—and sometimes three—book clubs (only one of which includes my parents), prayer on Thursday evenings, the women’s ministry team at church, and a couple other groups to breathe life into the curious child within me who still sometimes wants to put words on a page that preserve all the good and the odd in the world around her.

But my main commitment, in both time and heart, has been my job—spring teaching this year was hectic and sweet and occasionally made me want to tear my hair out. I cared about the kids so much I got honest-to-God angry at them sometimes and in turn they cared so much about what I had to tell them or teach that they cried earnest tears. A student told me I looked tired and when I told him that wasn’t polite, he took it as an invitation to elaborate on my lack of make up. I bought gold confetti from the dollar store to help teach a George Eliot novel, and it still lives on in my classroom to this day. And one day in mid-spring when we were all tired (not just me), I pressed pause on an honors Lit class so we could spend the period talking about the theology of clothing and I could pretend I was in grad school again.

In April, my friend Katie and I went to London to do teaching research, and it was sweet to see her experience it for the first time and also sweet to see the Victoria and Albert Museum and my sister and other people and things that matter. The week felt intense, but good for beauty and good for friendship. When it rained we sheltered under the awning at Royal Albert Hall. This coming June we’re going to go back and take eighteen teenagers with us. The planning process has sometimes been frantic, especially the financial side, because though I’m a reasonably sensible person, I’ve never been in charge of eighty thousand dollars of other people’s money before, but it will be so good to take the kids. Perhaps we too will wait out the rain at Royal Albert Hall.

My birthday was at the end of April after we returned and though some of those days felt very low, Katie and her husband threw me a birthday party with sparkly pink cocktails and at school students brought me flowers and a cookie cake and general frenetic excitement. 

And then came summer and I returned to writing (though it did not always return to me). I painted my kitchen cabinets and my bathroom. I sorted through nearly every item I own (especially the papers) and worked on applying for foster certification—including fingerprints, interviews, a fire inspection, CPR training, and a map of my home. I watched inarguably too much TV, got set up on a couple dates, listened to most of The Chronicles of Narnia on audiobook, went to the mountains for a day, and spent every single night in my own bed.

School started earlier than usual in the thick blue heat of August and for the first time I was teaching opposite one of my own former students. I took on a new role, helping manage our new(ish) house system, and spent most days teaching kids I’ve taught before, whose handwriting I know and whose growth over the years is a quiet source of hope to me, though many of them cannot yet see it. I had the same study hall advisory as last year and sometimes they argued with me about rules and facts the way kids do with their own parents perhaps because my classroom—sometimes too warm and cluttered—has some home to it. They are used to me and I am used to them.

Laura used to send me emails asking both facetiously and sincerely to hear about my adventures, because my life at the time was full of lots of unexpected newnesses, fresh delights and anxieties, but, as I’ve sifted back through, this year hasn’t seemed even to have many separate events in it, much less adventures. It has merely been long continual rhythms in various parts of my life, all layered on top of one another in syncopation. 

These have been the days of small things, the days of inviting people to this and to that, of getting a french bob and watching it grow out, of my car shutting down as if possessed while driving home from work but then continuing to operate as normal, of a long weekend in Minnesota for a cousin wedding reception by a river, of going to Trader Joe’s, of borrowing a dress to wear to a high school friend’s wedding, of leading a Bible study on Ephesians, of bringing my cello to school, of realizing that there are too many small things and I cannot, in reality, foster a child right now, of driving to Greenville in the quiet, and of going to a reading at a bookstore, hearing flash fiction, then becoming entranced by small things all over again.

December has been a gift. When I walked into church on the 1st and realized it was the first Sunday of Advent my heart made a little leap. I always love this season, perhaps because for much of it the corners of my mind become preoccupied (and therefore filled) with light. When there is more darkness than usual, things that glow become precious: light hanging from trees, light nestled in windows, light bursting out of a night sky in a blinding choir singing “gloria in excelsis Deo!” 

Tomorrow I fly to London to spend Christmas with my family, and I’ll land on the winter solstice when there will be less than eight hours of daylight. But oh, there will be candles and oh, there will be stars. In all these small things I keep remembering some lines of T.S. Eliot I discovered as a teenager, stumbled upon as if they were El Dorado:

For all things exist only as seen by Thee, only as known by Thee, all things exist

    Only in Thy light, and Thy glory is declared even in that which denies

      Thee; the darkness declares the glory of light.

The Joys of Talking About Books You Don’t Like

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I’ve always been good at critique. It’s fun to take sharp words and slice something apart so that people can see the mess inside. I still have vivid memories of reading Madeleine L’Engle’s novel A Live Coal in the Sea because I disliked it so much, and as I read I constructed scathing criticism in my mind, line by careful line, making the whole experience a delight. 

But in grad school I remember being at some friends’ house for dinner, and embarking on a treatise about either Marilynne Robinson or Wendell Berry. (Embarrassing that I can’t remember which, but there you have it. It really could have been either one.) My central thesis was that this revered author did not really understand what it meant to write fiction, only what it meant to have their head up their own rear end. I don’t think I said that exactly, but something significantly more lengthy and with nearly that effect. My speech was met with silent, wide eyes from everyone in the room. Though nobody spoke, the air was filled with reproach. And it occurred to me that perhaps I should have held my tongue.

So I’ve tried to keep my mouth shut in recent years, and when about a year ago a friend here in Greensboro invited me to join a book club she was starting, I suggested I might not be a very good candidate for it. “I’d be too critical,” I told her. “I don’t want to stop anyone from enjoying what they enjoy.” She told me that she knew what I was like and I should come anyway, which is always a wonderfully comforting pronouncement, so I did.

And lo and behold, these monthly meetings have been a gift, because they’ve turned out to have things to teach me. Mostly when I talk about books, they’re what I assign, books I already like and know, and I’m talking about them to students who, though they are free to disagree, have to listen to my perspective. My perspective is what I’m being paid for. But in a book club, rather than coming to the novel as a teacher, I come to it merely as myself. Of course that’s true when I read for fun on my own time (which I get to do a fair amount of) but I’m all the more aware of it when I carry my copy into Brooke’s living room and sit down with a group of other women who have all come as themselves too.

We sit and we talk and I will tell you a secret: I’m not the only one who dislikes things. Sometimes I recommend True Grit and no one else enjoys it nearly as much as I do. And sometimes someone else proposes The Women and I dislike it with such vehemence deep in my bones that I stop a quarter of the way through. But we find a way to disagree, and we manage to explain why we think the things we think without enforcing a painful silence on the whole room. We listen to each other, and in doing so we come to understand not only the books on our laps, but one another: our tastes, our comforts, our joys, our fears, our hearts. And then we lean back and chat about everything and nothing with warmth and wine and tea and cake.

For someone like me who talks about books all day while people who know less than I do listen, this is a sweetly humbling experience. And the best experiences with books are always humbling ones, ones that leave you feeling small and surrounded and grateful that so many people out there know the same language that you do and want to tell stories with it.

On Sunday, I drove down to Greenville, South Carolina to visit some friends for a few days and on the way I listened to Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich. I’d never read it before and it starts off so funny and sharp, and even though I knew that he dies at the end I found that I deeply wanted to know how, not by what means but in what mental state, in what spiritual land. I listened as his illness pulls him down and the narrative slows, while the peasant boy holds Ivan Ilyich’s feet in a comfortable position and he struggles in terror with the value of the life he’s lived and then stumbles on forgiveness and, at last, “instead of death there was light.”

I cried passing Spartanburg, knowing myself to be small and glad. I badly wanted to talk about the book, sitting on a couch, and to hear what my friends thought too.

Poetry for the Meantime

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Alright, friends (this is the phrase with which I begin many of my classes nowadays) — this blog feels like a bit of a limbo space to me nowadays, so while I figure out what to do with it, I’m going to give you three poems: one from Emily Dickinson, one I scraped out during a Lenten exercise a few month ago, and then Psalm 19 from King David. I’ll just leave them here to be in conversation with each other for the moment.

From Dickinson:

The Brain — is wider than the Sky —
For — put them side by side —
The one the other will contain
With ease — and You — beside —

The Brain is deeper than the sea —
For — hold them — Blue to Blue —
The one the other will absorb —
As Sponges — Buckets — do —

The Brain is just the weight of God —
For — Heft them — Pound for Pound —
And they will differ — if they do —
As Syllable from Sound —

From myself:

Emily claims the brain outstrips the sky
but these days the firmament looks large to me:
      Fields of cloud tuft—falling sediment—
      A pocked and glowing moon—
      Satellites laced with human noise—
      And beyond wheeling stars and crowned planets:
      Vast darknesses that lead to light—
      Powers-that-be waging broad-chested wars—
      Blood streaming cross universes, tie-dyeing heaven—
      The hand that holds it all—
By compare,
my own self within 
is small, mute.

And from scripture:

The heavens declare the glory of God;
    the skies proclaim the work of his hands.
Day after day they pour forth speech;
    night after night they reveal knowledge.
They have no speech, they use no words;
    no sound is heard from them.
Yet their voice goes out into all the earth,
    their words to the ends of the world.
In the heavens God has pitched a tent for the sun.
It is like a bridegroom coming out of his chamber,
    like a champion rejoicing to run his course.
It rises at one end of the heavens
    and makes its circuit to the other;
    nothing is deprived of its warmth.

The law of the Lord is perfect,
    refreshing the soul.
The statutes of the Lord are trustworthy,
    making wise the simple.
The precepts of the Lord are right,
    giving joy to the heart.
The commands of the Lord are radiant,
    giving light to the eyes.
The fear of the Lord is pure,
    enduring forever.
The decrees of the Lord are firm,
    and all of them are righteous.

They are more precious than gold,
    than much pure gold;
they are sweeter than honey,
    than honey from the honeycomb.
By them your servant is warned;
    in keeping them there is great reward.
But who can discern their own errors?
    Forgive my hidden faults.
Keep your servant also from willful sins;
    may they not rule over me.
Then I will be blameless,
    innocent of great transgression.

May these words of my mouth and this meditation of my heart
    be pleasing in your sight,
    Lord, my Rock and my Redeemer.

Late September

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The waters are still high in the mountains right now. In all the pictures I’ve ever seen of this or any flood the water is a creamy brown—dull, unassuming, lethal only in the way it wraps itself around the waists and necks of buildings, carries in its depths the shards of bridges it has washed out and whole shells of cars and porches.

I’ve had an unplanned long weekend down here in the low hills, since school was canceled on Friday. I read a novel set in Seoul, as well as Ephesians, did some laundry, waited out a power outage on Friday then helped put on an event at church. I walked to the corner farmer’s market in the sunshine on Saturday. Tonight I’m bringing shortbread and roasted veggies to contribute to dinner at community group, and I’ve gained a tiny, stinging blister on my finger from peeling rutabagas.

In the meantime, folks evacuate homes or drive up into the mountains themselves, toward that softly ugly water, to search out family they haven’t heard from since the storm came.

Tomorrow for me is work and Arabian Nights and Wordsworth and grading and leftovers for lunch in a classroom that’s just slightly on this side of too warm and coming home rightly tired at the end of the afternoon.

All these are the facts of the matter, and I balk at the task of ripping the threads of meaning from their core and arranging them before your eyes. You can see them well enough yourself. 

It’s late September. The sun is golden warm, knives are busy in four p.m. kitchens, and He holds our lives in his hands.

On Being Eleven (and All the Other Ages)

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When I was sixteen years old and taking AP Lit, Mr. Powell had us read a story called “Eleven” by Sandra Cisneros. I still think about it often. In fact, I’ve thought of it at so many stretching, tender junctures of my life that I suspect it’s framed much of my perspective on growing up and aging (which, though we don’t always articulate them the same way, are in practice essentially identical.)

In the story, the narrator is turning eleven, but she is having a hard birthday—hard in all the small ways that feel searing when you’re a preteen. An abandoned sweater is found in the coatroom of her elementary school, and a classmate tells the teacher it belongs to our birthday girl, who is then, to her bone-deep mortification, made to put on a sweater which is not hers, which is old, stretched out, and smells bad. She cannot find the words to explain that it is not hers, and she bursts into tears in front of the whole class on her eleventh birthday. Because, she explains, she’s eleven that day, but she’s not only eleven.

What they don’t understand about birthdays and what they never tell you is that when you’re eleven, you’re also ten, and nine, and eight, and seven, and six, and five, and four, and three, and two, and one. And when you wake up on your eleventh birthday you expect to feel eleven, but you don’t…You feel like you’re still ten. And you are—underneath the year that makes you eleven. Like some days you might say something stupid, and that’s the part of you that’s still ten. Or maybe some days you might need to sit on your mama’s lap because you’re scared, and that’s the part of you that’s five. And maybe one day when you’re all grown up maybe you will need to cry like if you’re three, and that’s okay.

It was half my life ago when I first read that passage, so now I’ve spent years and years being conscious of those layered ages as each new one stretches over me like another skin: seventeen and nineteen and twenty-two and twenty-six and twenty-eight and thirty and so on and so forth. And I know this is ridiculous, but in the last year or two, I’ve begun to feel that those previous years have gotten to be too far away, separated from the surface of myself by too many coats of film, that I’ve got to mine down into myself to reach them, and mining takes effort and a pick-ax. 

I want to reach them, though. My fourteen-year-old self was foolish and dramatic and selfish, but boy, did she know about joy. And myself at twenty-two, though terrified of nearly everything, knew the value of growth. She knew how much she needed it and, more than that, she knew how to make it happen. I am firmly adult now and I too easily to tell myself the lie that the main goal of life is good administrative functioning—writing the to-do lists, making it to as many meetings as possible, being eminently reliable, having answers to all the questions that anyone might ask at any given time—when, if I remembered to be eleven and eighteen and twenty-seven as well as thirty-two, I would recall that the actual main goals of life are simpler and larger: to walk faithful and humble, to allow Love to make me new, to laugh without fear of the future.

So here’s to letting the oil of gladness soften the layers the years have made, to becoming like a little child, and to trying to make time for everything, but always leaving an hour slot open for nothing, an hour when I can walk my neighborhood in the sunshine or the rain, softly telling myself strange stories of what could be.

Adult Cool Kids

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You grew up, I think, watching movies and TV shows full of the cool kid archetype. The cool kid was good-looking and confident, had boundless social goodwill with others (usually even the grownups) and got away with being mean to the not-so-cool kid: the shy, the smart, the self-aware, the try-hard, the poor, the awkward, the lonely. The cool kid usually had hair which was a sinister shade of blond, while the outcast (never blond) was inevitably the hero. You liked these stories—everyone liked these stories—because they taught you that you did not deserve to be treated badly, that one day the cool kids in your own benighted school would be penalized (probably publicly) for their meanness, and that all underdogs would ultimately win love, respect, admiration, and maybe the country of Genovia.

Of course the word cool, when applied to a person’s general demeanor, really just means that you have social capital, that you are well-liked without seeming to make too much of an effort, that you carry yourself with confidence. But a word is never just a word, so for most of us who have ever had the excruciating gift of being an adolescent, “cool” carries the weight of all of the above. Even now, all these years into adulthood, there’s cool food and cool clothes and cool music and cool cars and cool shoes and cool water tumblers and cool bedroom furniture and probably cool gas stations, and God forbid any of us ever forget it.

And there are still cool kids. Wherever people gather, however old they are, they seem to eventually stratify, and some effortless folks rise buoyant to the top. Who these people are depends on context. Some groups of adults still unfortunately reward the mean among us, allowing them to rule: those who call the new hire “weird” behind their back, who text their friends under the table when the woman they don’t like speaks up in a meeting, who form ranks and never break them, who are horrified at the thought of inviting an outsider to book club or run club or crochet club. I hope you have managed to avoid the murky communities that foster this kind of adult cool kid. 

You probably have. You probably know that in many places it is cool to be the welcomer, the warm laugher, the one who remembers everybody’s names, who tells good stories and better jokes, who listens, who shares their cool resources indiscriminately. In the right sort of adulthood, the cool kid is the kind one.

But you cannot, under any circumstances, tell them that they’re cool. That is the rule. Sure, they will be flattered that they are well-liked, but the truth of the matter is, they watched the same movies you did when you were all twelve. They, like you, probably identified with the underdog’s journey, and they too are innately suspicious of blondes for no good reason on God’s green earth. If you tell them they are cool they will worry that rather than “having friends,” which is what they thought they were doing, they have actually been existing in a semi-isolated sphere of potentially sinister social power, awaiting their eventual humiliation which may well take place on the stage of a literal school auditorium.

I mean, fine, if they actually are as confident as being “cool” implies, they won’t worry about all that. But you still can’t tell them, because none of us like to look at our most immediate spheres of influence and think about some people having more social capital than others. And to some extent, that’s the right impulse. “Cool” is a juvenile concept. Yet the things we learn as children shape our core indelibly—they mold our bones.

And maybe the part of what “cool” has always meant to us that we can’t shake is that to be cool means to be effortless, not to have to try—not even a little bit—and still succeed anyway. But, of course, that describes none of us, not a single solitary one. We all put in so much effort. If we are accomplishing anything positive—even simple kindnesses—on a regular basis, then we are trying. So adult cool kids are kind of a mirage. If you get to know them well enough to see behind the curtain where all the strivings and the worries and the failures and the getting back up and dusting themselves off live, you will find no longer a cool kid, but a person: an underdog who does not want to have their hair laughed at and who would probably very much like to be your friend. (And so you should be. That would be cool of you.)