A Back to School Entry

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Right now my computer is nestled on an improvised little cooling pack I constructed from the hotel ice machine so that it won’t overheat. This is not a joke. I really want to write to you. Tomorrow morning I move in for my last year of college. I’m nervous—I didn’t think I would be, but I am.

Coming back to school after summer always seems a little unreal. Three months is just long enough that college has stopped feeling like a concrete part of my everyday life and become just a story I’ve been telling myself for a while—something to entertain me on slow days. Yet it’s a story I’m about to be thrown into. A story about a little apartment, and two final semesters full up with eighteen credits each, and stacks of pretty old plates bought from Goodwill, and a novel waiting to be written, and baking on a Sunday, and Latin to be learned, and Fam Pan pot luck dinners, and looking for a big-girl job, and a magazine of which, for some funny reason that I can’t remember, I’m going to be editor. Though I’m an hour south of its beginning, I still don’t quite believe it. It all feels so foreign.

But sometimes I do believe it—that I am going back tomorrow to places and people in which my own tears and joys have worn hollows. And then I am scared.

In seventh grade I went to a new school, a school that was not Caldwell. I cried the whole first day. They did not know what to do with me so they bumped me from one classroom to another.  I sat in the back of each by the little row of computers till the teacher tired of me, and my contemporaries craned round at me and asked curiously “What you cryin’ for?”  (For them, of course, it was simply the first day of school, not the end of the world as they knew it.) The second day, I was so frightened to go back that I threw up. My dad made me go anyway, and I made a friend.

A year ago, I was waiting to move into, not a new school, but a one which had already been mine for two years. I was as scared as my seventh grade self, though I handled the fear a little better, I think. I didn’t throw up, but I sat up for most of the night and read The Man Who Was Thursday in its entirety. I’m fairly certain I sobbed through the last couple chapters. After move-in, I was generally happy, but it took the anxiety weeks, maybe months, to wear away. (I don’t remember. I keep close track of many things, but not of that.)

As for tomorrow and this week and this year, what I am afraid of are the lurking disappointments, the weeks I cannot carry, the nights I cannot sleep. I am afraid because tomorrow, when senior year begins at last, it will no longer be my own pet fairy tale—Someone else will be telling it.

But then, He told seventh grade, and He didn’t do too poor a job. I made several close friends and we had long involved sleepovers. I learned nothing of academic value. I made up a secret language. I got my first dramatic haircut. I was beaten to death in a class skit about slavery. I was the star of the seventh grade cello section. My skin got a little thicker. I learned to loathe busy work. My fashion sense hit an all-time low involving oversized hoodies and ripped jeans. I made a couple cool dioramas. I was happy in a place in which I’d planned to be miserable.

He told last year too and I started winning at game night. I wrote a story I really liked. I watched in awe as friendships healed. I gave a paper at the Herbert conference. I went through a brief and unenthusiastic running phase. I fell in love with my classical ed class. I learned a little more about grace. Sarah and I made a “Things Done” list. I received my weight in Wall Street Journals and built a somewhat successful table from them. Dr. Messer asked me if I’d be senior editor of The Quad. I cleaned Dr. Brown’s house. I performed a scene in Shakespeare class while on the verge of fatigue and was told that I portrayed Imogen with a “kind of frail madness.” My God gave me so much beyond my desserts.

He will tell this year too. I don’t know what turns it will take, and I’m sure the denouement is beyond my comprehension, but if I wait upon Him He will renew my strength. He will walk with me. He will grow my fear to awe. He will show me Himself.

Coming Up Clean

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I’ve just put lotion on my ankles to soothe my bug bites and I am tired. I’m in a slow and simple mood this evening, so I’ll just tell the story from the beginning, though it is not spectacular. Perhaps because it is not spectacular.

Last Friday I got up at four forty-five and my dad drove me to the airport in Raleigh. I met Mary in Nashville at about eight-thirty and we set off driving up through Kentucky and Illinois. We stopped at a rest stop around lunch time and made sandwiches on top of her trunk out of rye bread and cookie butter. We laughed so much that some nice people at a nearby picnic table asked us to join them. We are so magnetic. However, we said ‘no, thanks’ and instead walked around and contemplated ousting small children from the see-saw so we could have a go. But, of course, we had already had our turn on that same see-saw when we were their age. We’ve driven this road so many times.

In St. Louis, I unwittingly pulled off at a gas station in a rather shady neighborhood. We got out of the car and did one quiet circuit of the little convenience store, then just climbed back in and kept going. By the time we got up to Macon and turned onto 36 a few hours later, my chest felt light like it always does when I pass through that place at that time of day. The fields stretched wide arms, speckled with hay bales, and the road rose to meet us, leading up into the low, late-day sun.

We got to Grandma’s in time for dinner, and then took a walk with my cousin Hannah up to the cemetery across the highway, where we typed in the secret code at the entrance for old time’s sake. My grandparents have arranged for plots there. Hannah read aloud from To Kill a Mockingbird while Mary and I did dishes.

The next morning Mary and I began the two-day task of taking our grandparents and aunt up to camp. My grandpa is frail. He cannot lift his feet well. He uses a cane and he struggles to lift his head up high enough to look straight ahead of him. His sweaters never seem to go on right and are always hitched up over his collar. He shuffles. Our trip was full of halting steps and slow. We stopped at a Walmart north of the Twin Cities to pick up about ten things Grandma had forgotten. I had to relearn much of that sort of patience which has fallen out of use at college.

And yet, that last thirty minutes of the drive held the same glow. Grandpa started telling us miles beforehand how much the topography looked like camp, then we passed The ICO and a moment later the great big Story Book Lodge signs came round the corner and we were home. It is sixth or seventh on my list of homes, but I knew it was higher for everyone else in the car, so I borrowed from their awe and comfort.

I can’t tell camp in order. You never can, especially a family camp. Mary and I stayed in the Ark, which was very cozy with two beds and its own alarm clock. I spent lots of time with cousins. We attempted a couple games of Monopoly, which will never be enjoyable, but also went kayaking, met Hannah’s friend-boy (not boyfriend,) played Old Maid with Grandma and Sally, and drove over to Virginia after evening meeting one night to see Wolverine. It turned out that it was in 3D, which no one except the boys was pleased with, but giggling and snarky comments have improved many a cousin film.

On Thursday we threw Molly a little family party for her eighteenth birthday. We made Mary Brammer’s Black Forest Torte (a family classic), Faith passed out glow sticks, and when Joe would not come down in time to sing, our Aunt Sally scaled the stairs to retrieve him. (That was our favorite part.) We took lots of pictures. I was impressed with how we have grown up. I don’t mean that we have gotten taller and more employable, though we have, but that I saw in my cousins something better. I saw that they are kinder, more willing, harder-working, more thoughtful, and unabashed (though perhaps, with each other, we have always been that.)

But noticing more than I used to includes the less savory. I saw problems with good people in a good place. I saw imbalances, injustices, frustrations which I knew would go unaddressed, things which made me itch to change and fix them. But that job was not for me.

Instead, after every meal, Mary and Molly and I stood behind the counter to receive the rush of dishes. We scraped and stacked the platters at record pace, consolidated bowls of ranch dressing and emptied pitchers of water and milk. Afterwards we helped with pots and pans—I was always on dry-and-put-away duty. Mary had set up her slackline, which magically attracts people of all ages and sorts in clusters, so she took great joy in knowing the names of all the little kids and their intricate relations. I just liked knowing that the wide rubber scrapers went in a certain drawer in the bakery and that the cutting boards went under the microwave. It made me feel important.

On Wednesday evening my cousin Charity was baptized down in the lake along with three other teenagers. (I can call them that now that I no longer am one.) The sun was setting way over behind the island and I watched as each of them came up clean, at sharp angles with the water, their hair dripping smoothly back from their faces, their arms crossed over their chests, leaning into the arms of their fathers. Then they would slosh back to shore and stand shivering in a towel to be hugged by their family.

I thought about coming up clean out of the water and out of the “soul-cleansing blood of the lamb,” not just once but over and over. The best message of the week was on Friday morning. Ben Scripture talked about trading in excuses for simple confession. We confess and Christ is eager to intercede. We are always needing fresh washing, new garments, but they always come free. They come free and they come strong. I must let my Father cleanse me of frustrations and weights which are not mine to carry. They are His, as I am.

We left camp on Saturday morning. Sunday morning we passed the fields of smooth, white windmills in northern Iowa. I remembered why even when we were younger, my cousins and I always got so quiet at this stretch of highway. They are unimaginably big and rather beautiful, but they are also frightening to me. They call up a small, stubborn Don Quixote out of my chest, ready to fight a hundred other battles which have not, in reality, been given to me.

So I came back to Missouri in peace, handing my grandpa his cane at rest stops along the way, and stopping at a Russell Stover outlet for my grandma. Back to the only place I am comfortable hanging all my laundry out to dry, even my most inexcusable underwear. The pool filter needs to be run. This is the job my Father has given to me, so I will come up clean, tend to those bug bites, and have a chat with my sister. There’s more road before us.

How We Look

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Just to quickly get you up to speed: my mother bought a ping pong table, I bought an ice tray that makes cubes shaped like lightning bolts, Kate Middleton had a baby who will be king and her hair still looks gorgeous, and at the moment I’m holed up in my Dad’s library study at UNCG, wearing the ancient sweater and corduroys he keeps in here over my own clothes, because this place is cold.

It’s with a few healthy tons of trepidation that I’m writing this entry today. It’s something I’ve wanted to write about for a long time. I’ve been afraid of saying the wrong thing, but at last I’ve decided to just go ahead and put this out there. Maybe I feel ready for this because I’ve finally achieved Gandalf-and-Solomon-level wisdom, or maybe I’ve just been reading enough C.S. Lewis that I think I have. I’m not sure.

What I have to say is about the way we look, specifically the way we women look, how others look at us, how we look at each other, and how we look at ourselves. There are two prevailing cultural attitudes, both strong, which tend to sit in our guts and battle it out all day long.

First, there is the all-powerful objective of female beauty that every man, woman, and child knows and accepts to some extent. I generally have pretty high self-esteem when it comes to my looks, sometimes too high, but I find that if I look at Vogue for more than fifteen minutes, though it was just to see the clothes and though I thoroughly understand the risks, afterwards my own reflection looks faded and plain in the face of such mighty photoshop. Features of which I was previously proud look second-rate and pitiful in comparison to the powerfully glowy women in glossy color.

In order to combat these images and the unhealthy habits which follow in their wake for some, we are told (mainly by the internet) that we are all gorgeous and bikini-ready, that the best thing is health and confidence, to love our scars and our flaws, and that what really matters is just to have beautiful insides. Well, it’s hard to adore acne scars, (they have not yet tried to force us to think acne itself beautiful, thank God,) and my actual heart is not a very attractive thing—to the best of my knowledge, though its ability to keep me alive is admirable, it’s slimy, filled with fast-moving blood, and is currently making sounds like a mudsucker.

So with all these quiet comparisons of one benighted attitude to another and the size of our own waists with that of the girl walking past us on the street, we come to the muddled conclusion that we are supposed to love ourselves and fix ourselves into a more lovable state, all while seeming to care a great deal about the female self-image in general, but not what we see in our own mirror. By no means should we think and talk about the way women look any less than ninety minutes a day, and with each analytical session, we should come to an increasingly complex understanding of our physical appearance, such that we must eventually write a book (or blog entry) to purge ourselves and begin anew. Essentially, we learn that secretly it is part of our duty as women to be slowly and subtly exhausted by the fact that we have bodies and they are visible to the naked eye.

Well, perhaps I am not Solomon or Gandalf or even C.S. Lewis, but I was raised by two fairly wise people and one of the most valuable things they’ve bestowed on me is a healthy sense of the ridiculous, which I’m just now clumsily learning how to use. By all means, take your God and your work and your play quite seriously, but upon most occasions it’s best to assume that you are a bit silly. As Liesel and I used to tell each other, “People are funny.” You are a funny, truculent child, who never quite understands what he is being taught, and who, when he does begin to grasp truth, immediately misunderstands it on purpose and endeavors to be offended.

But I’ll tell you, there is mystery all wrapped up in humor and incredulity—we laugh at things we don’t understand, at things which don’t make sense, which are beyond our comprehension. Our physicality is part of our humanity—we are physical beings as well as spiritual (see the incarnation)—but it’s obvious that our bodies are pretty ungainly and silly for sacred vessels. C.S. Lewis says that the fact that we have bodies at all is “the oldest joke there is” and Saint Francis regularly referred to his physical self as “Brother Ass.”

So as women who own mirrors and occasionally see other women, what does this mean? Well, I’m only just now trying to figure that out, but I’ve made a little progress. Remember your body is on loan, but that you’ll have it for a while, so treat it with affection. Look in the mirror and laugh, walk away and forget what you saw. Buy lovely clothes and sometimes wear them. Stand up straight. Accept compliments gracefully, but walk away and forget those too. Make friends with those you’re tempted to be jealous of or judge. Use nice-smelling conditioner. Think you’re beautiful or think that you’re not, but don’t think it very often, and remember that in either case that fact has no bearing on the incredible reality that Christ died for you.

For our bodies, all beautiful and silly and ugly like they are, are just a small, funnily-warped reflection of a glory ahead of us. But I don’t understand that yet, so, for now, I’ll just wait and look and laugh.

Letting Her Die

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When I was a little girl I had all sorts of plans for the great lady I was going to be when I was grown up. I was going to be elegant and kind and sought-after and I was going to wear the best sort of clothes and have one of those bell-like laughs you read about in less-truthful books. I was going to be infinitely wise and glisteningly beautiful and able to leap tall buildings in a single bound.

Sometimes, when I am having a good day or week or month, I flatter myself that if eight-year-old Alice showed up on my doorstep she would suitably impressed. She would think that I was Her. I get all warm and fuzzy when I think that and then a little voice in the back of my head says, “Of course, she’d be wrong.”

Because little Alice is pretty easily satisfied, really. Give her mascara and some sparkly stuffs and she’s delighted. The goal self, the dream self has grown since then.

She now knows everything worth knowing and has read everything worth reading. Her clothes now are not only good, but are completely singular and they never wear out or need dry cleaning. She never runs out of gas or leaves awkward voicemails and she always knows what to make for dinner. She is impervious to fire, water, poor grades, rejection, and heartbreak. She has a group of friends who are just diverse enough that they all still get along, and just talented enough that their abilities complement Hers. She never has to be brave because she is never afraid.

Her legend in my mind continues to grow. Even comfortable self-deprecation is just another round-about way of reminding myself of who she is and who I am not. And every time someone gives me one of those extravagant compliments—the kind you get from people who don’t know you well enough yet—She absorbs it. A friend says I am well-spoken? Well, I know I’m not, words only occasionally come out of my mouth in the right order, but She will be, along with brilliant, and beautiful, and best-selling (just to dip into the B’s).

During those good times when I’d like to have little Alice round for tea, I almost think She’s real—but then my own feet will trip over themselves and I’m back where I begun. One of the reasons Sophomore year hurt is that I was so clearly not what I should be. I was not Her. It’s not that She never cries, but She doesn’t exactly bust open at the seams and ooze anxiety for months on end.

This panic has been coming back to me in smaller doses this summer. I’ve struggled to write, because nothing I write is good enough—all of my words limp and plod, already weary after five minutes on the page. They do not measure up and neither do I.

So  then I turn to my reading, which is currently very overwhelming (I’m backlogged with four summers’ booklists) with books that I don’t think I’m going to enjoy very much at all, but I know I can’t possibly be Her until I’ve learned to.

And as for the music she is supposed to like I am so intimidated by the thought of it that I avoid listening to anything at all, except alone in my car. Every way I turn right now, She seems to have laid out expectations for me. She’s getting pretty pushy.

It’s time I stopped feeding the tyrant. My dream-self is getting fat with my own expectations for Her, anyway. Bloated. I do not know how to stop except to simply get up and walk away from Her, to spend my summer re-reading favorite children’s books and plugging away at my story, chanting quietly, “I’ll revise later. I’ll revise later.” That will do for a while.

But really, if she is to die, for good and all, like Ozymandias, I’m going to have to come before my God and let her be torn away. And then I will need to be washed and then I will need to begin to learn freedom like the widow bringing her mite, and the fear of the Lord like Paul. It’s a long, arduous process. But He has promised me that it is finished, that He has done it, and that He loves me. So I, like little Alice, will be satisfied.

Summer Readings

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Since it seems less and less likely that I will find much in the way of summer work (though I’m still certainly open to the option,) my main occupation for the summer has become that of reading and writing.

Since I’ve been home I’ve been forging my way through Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel. I do mean forging— my mom finally started to say encouragingly, “Alice, why don’t you read something for fun?” I finished it last night, but, man, Eugene Gant drags his feet getting from ages zero to eighteen—I swear he grows up slow and sticking as molasses. His father, Old Gant, spends a large part of the book wasting away from cancer and alcoholism, then right near the end, Ben, the only character Tom Wolfe has deigned to paint sympathetically, comes down with pneumonia and up and dies, bringing the whole dysfunctional family together and causing me to cry at a book I didn’t even like. On top of all that, Old Gant is still alive at the end, and Eugene has never had a love affair with a woman who isn’t at least five years older than himself or even achieved a decent haircut.

It’s all part of my summer reading, see, which is intended to spur on the writing of a story about a teenage boy and his little sister. Several of the other entries on the list are re-reads, including The Great Gatsby and Catcher in the Rye, which I’m very nervous about now that I’m no longer sixteen. I also want to re-read all of The Mennyms books, which are a British children’s series about a family of life-sized rag dolls. I’m sure they’ll help me incalculably. Right now, though, I’ve begun a collection of sweet and simple essays by E.B. White. Following on his heels will be some Henry James and Eudora Welty.

I want to love books again this summer. I want to love them the way I used to. My book-habits now involve stacking them in pretty towers and smelling their pages and touching their spines reflectively and taking pride in how quickly I can find my favorite bits with having to fumble through any unnecessary pages. I’d like to read them again.

When I was a kid I sometimes read three books in one summer day. I would block out my little brother’s kicking feet and my mother’s requests to set the table and my sister’s demands to not hog the bathroom for hours at a time, and I’d simply fall into pages which pulled me along at a pace I never questioned, to the homes of lifelong friends I’d made the hour before.

If, on occasion, I did have to leave a book, to eat dinner with my family, or go to bed, or some such, I would, an hour or so later, get a funny hunger in the pit of my stomach. The uneasiness would grow more and more acute until I realized: I missed my book. I’d been holding my breath since I put it aside and I needed back in so I could breathe again.

I remember being in awe that some light little packet of paper which I could hold in my hand could captivate me for hours. Even at the time, I think I was aware that in actuality there were much smaller pieces of technology with much larger memories, but they did not impress me in the same way. I could see and account for everything that made the book what it was: the paper, the ink, the words, the little punctuation marks, and yet I couldn’t understand it. I sat down to consume the story and it ended in consuming me. A good book was something beyond.

So in the next couple months, I will remember how to love in a book, not what I pretentiously claim are its finest features: its paper and stains and ink and splendor on my shelf, but its expansive pilgrim soul which, in this world, always remains just out of reach.

 

Names

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Summer is a convenient time for losing your mind just a little. Like just now, I decided to count all my t-shirts. I went by twos and covered my bedroom floor with little pairs of “t-shirt buddies!” (exclamation point necessary.) I felt they had to match each other, so that friendships could thrive. There were thirty-nine overall, which meant an odd man out, so I am wearing him to make him feel less lonely. (I think my brain is turning into tumblr, y’all. I can’t even.)

However, I have done some more constructive things today: I helped my little brother clean his room, got a pedicure, and finished applying for a job, but those are less fun to tell the internet about.

So, to return to fleeting eccentricities, the other day I wrote a fan letter of sorts. John Green (of Vlogbrothers fame) just had a daughter and named her Alice. To clear the air, I wrote her the following note. And sent it. With a stamp.

Dear little Alice,

Hello! You were born just the other day. I’ve written lots of letters before, but never to someone so small. I am a little more than twenty-one years older than you, and will probably never meet you. (We live hundreds of miles away.) However, we have something important in common. My name is Alice, too!

A few months ago, (this was before you) I watched a video, which I’m sure you’ve seen, of your parents having a chat with President Obama. You mom and dad asked the president if they should name you Eleanor or Alice. Eleanor was my Grammy’s name. She died about four years ago and I loved her very much. (Almost as much as she loved me.) Eleanor is also the middle name of my big sister, Mary, who is my best friend in the world. And Alice, of course is my name. I share it with a little girl in a blue dress with a big imagination.

Now I’ll tell you something that makes me a little ashamed. When I saw that video, I was very annoyed with your parents. I did not want to share either of those names with you, which was selfish of me. (Particularly because I know my Grammy would have been delighted to share her name with you.) I complained quite a lot.

But now you have been born and you are called Alice! So here I am, learning a valuable lesson about sharing, that I should have known since I was two. (Growing up doesn’t happen all at once—I’m beginning to suspect it takes all our lives. Probably till we’re eighty-five.)

Honey, regardless of how selfish and silly I am, I want you to be sure to wear our name well. It’s a lovely one and I know you can make it lovelier. I don’t usually like labels very much. In fact, though I like a lot of your dad and uncle’s videos, I’ve never even called myself a nerdfighter. I always figured my name, (our name,) was enough. It sounds pretty, it looks pretty, it’s easy to spell and say, and best of all, it means “noble.” So be noble, little Alice. Run with the young and walk slowly beside the old. Give as much as you can. Forgive fully and gracefully. When others talk, listen with your mouth shut. When you are angry, speak as slowly as you can. Don’t take yourself too seriously. Always say what you mean. Say ‘thank you’ when someone gives you a compliment (even if you don’t think it’s true.) Smile at strangers and say ‘hello.’ Also, remember that a handwritten poem is the best birthday present. (I’m sorry I fall short on that front this time.) Don’t forget. (I know you won’t.)

All my love,

another Alice

By the time I finished writing it, I was very much wishing I that it was addressed to little girl who did not already have half the internet fawning over her, in other words, a little girl who might actually read it someday. But then, patient advice like I tried to give above could still be good for another Alice I know—who apparently still has selfish little identity crises spurred by strangers’ unborn babies.

It’s funny really, that we wonder so much about who we are, that I feel the need to broadcast my giddy delight over forcing my clothing into intraspecies friendships, that I feel the need to tell myself to the world. Maybe I’m snobbily adverse to labels as a means of defining myself, but I still go in for stories, and clothes, and words, (and, um, a blog…)

My friend Hopkins wrote a poem called “As Kingfishers Catch Fire.” Here’s a bit:

“Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:

Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;

Selves – goes itself, myself it speaks and spells,

Crying What I do is me: for that I came.”

I love this poem, as I do most Hopkins, and yet these lines make me unsure. I am surrounded by young people like myself, who scrounge for whatever platform they can get hold up their me-ness where everyone else will see it. The internet is crammed with people nonchalantly begging for everyone else to affirm them. “Like it, will you? Like me, will you?”

Hopkins’ poem has a second stanza. (Good poets always do their best to answer the questions they pose, even when they pretend they have been open-ended.)

“I say more, the just man justices;

Keeps grace: that keeps all his goings graces;

Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is –

Christ – for Christ plays in ten thousand places,

Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his

To the Father through the features of men’s faces.”

So here we all sit, playing in mud, knowing in our gut that the self is important and interesting.  We run around and shove ourselves in everyone else’s faces asking, “Oh, is this as good as yours? Or maybe (Oh, please!) even a little better?” As usual, we have got it all wrong. We think that the self is meant to be worshipped, when really it simply is meant to worship. (Dastardly passive voice, y’all…) God intended the self to shout, to jump, to cry Abba Father, to join with all the various and sundry brother and sister selves in singing “O Lord, open my lips and my mouth shall show forth your praise!” (That’s from Psalm fifty-one. I don’t really need Hopkins as much as I pretend.)

A Million Bucks

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I don’t really have or need a million bucks. The title was just for show. However, I am quite interested in money.

Most summers I’ve had a hard time finding work, but this time around I’ve had a particularly high rejection rate from all sorts of places. So, besides going down to apply at the local temp agency, I thought I should go ahead and make the internet aware of my marketable qualities, in case anyone out there is in need of my particular skill set.

1. I give really good hugs. Unfortunately, all those people with the “Free Hugs” signs have somewhat ruined the business for the rest of us. Maybe I could classify mine as Deluxe and charge 20 cents each.

2. I have a whole system for washing windows. Both my grandma and Janice Brown are in awe of my skills. I make them shine.

3. I have a good sense of direction. When we went on long car trips as a child, I always used to ask for the atlas so many times that my dad always just gave up and told me to keep it in the backseat. So if you’re in need of a passenger seat (or even backseat) navigator for a cross-country trip, I’m plenty available.

6. I can make handmade ravioli. (That’s a thing I learned in college.)

4. I’m quite good at reading aloud. In fact, if you’d like, I can even come over every night and put your kids to bed, complete with a chapter of classic children’s lit, while you go watch Doctor Who or drink margaritas or whatever it is you like to do without small people underfoot.

5. I adore ironing. Apparently everyone else hates doing this, and I don’t understand why. It’s so warm and soft and satisfying. In fact, if I wasn’t poor, I’d do it for free.

7. I can find books in the library really, really fast. (Especially if it’s the Library of Congress system and what you’re looking for is British literature.)

8. I’m a pro at crying in public. So if you have a father-in-law whom you want to make uncomfortable and guilty enough to fork over the down payment for a house or something, just bring me along and I’m totally on that, so long as I get a cut.

9. I love heights, for whatever that’s worth. (Is that worth anything? Man, I hope so. Maybe I could be a chimney sweep. I’m real little…)

10. I put the belt back on a lawn mower once. By myself… (I’ll stop now.)

If any of the abilities above are of interest, then please be in touch. I’m sitting at home with my phone in my lap.

May

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At the end of freshman year, I remember feeling sad to leave. I was sad to leave a bunch of dear girls on a hall in MEP. But I was not too sad. We could write and call, and besides, we’d all be back for three more glorious years. So I went home for a stretching summer in Missouri.

At the end of sophomore year, I was drained and hurt. There would be people to miss over the summer, but I wanted nothing more than home. So all summer, I had home: its monotony, humidity, and comfort.

This year, I did not know the end was coming. In the last stretch of class after my birthday I had an unprecedented amount of stress land on my head and try to smother me like some heavy, hellish duvet, and by the time I crawled out from under that, it was study day, and I could count my time left on campus in the showers I had still to take.

I walked back to my room from turning in a last term paper and I saw they had the big roll-away dumpsters out for the end of the year and a heaviness hit my chest which has not left since.

This morning my classical ed class had a raucous, obnoxious breakfast together in Hicks and went merrily on our way to our nine o’clock final. As I took my last Edwards’ test my chest began to feel more and more full. I have never been more reluctant to leave an exam.

At length I did, and my feet dragged. And since then, I’ve been running into the rest of my classmates all day like we’re bunch of magnets who can’t stay apart. (Well, actually, I called Megan at one point and said “Where are you? I want to see you.” I’ll take responsibility for that one.) We talk about nothing and say “Well, isn’t this weird? I guess some of us will still be here after all this…” And then the weight swells a bit more.

This afternoon, I took my SSFT study guide to the chapel and sat while Michael played the organ. After a while, he asked if he could play loud and I said I didn’t mind. After another while, he asked what my favorite hymn was and I said how about “Come Thou Fount.” The weight in my chest expanded down to my toes as I sat with my knees to my chin on the hard pew. The fans clicked high above me and “songs of loudest praise” wrapped round me.

It’s just growing pains, I think. My God is “tuning my heart.” There’s no tears or melodrama, just an ungainly hurt that stings of eternity.

For now, I go to read for Lit Crit and clean the room for a favorite sister who’s coming. His goodness will continue to bind me even when I do not look for it.

The Sacrament of Birthday

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Yesterday was my twenty-first birthday. At midnight Jackie and Renée came shuffling into our room singing, with a cake and lighters, because they’d forgotten to get candles. The four of us ate the cupcakes, and put on the little plastic rings that had come with them. I read them my Dad’s birthday poem and opened the package from home that had been on the top shelf of my closet for three weeks. There was jewelry and chocolate and a teabag-rester and a book on E.B. White, in which my mom had written “For Alice’s Web.”

Then that morning I got up at seven-thirty so that Sarah could braid my hair. She was listening to a contemporary piece for music history class, but then it ended, and I sat in silence in the dim light as her fingers neatly shifted my hair back and forth over and under itself. I thought of school mornings growing up, sitting at the breakfast table, gulping my milk, while my mother performed the same task. But it was not quiet then.

In Classical Ed, after a few false starts, they sang happy birthday to me and I didn’t know where to look. We had plans to hike and bring along champagne to celebrate. But that fell through so Sarah Bryan and Megan Rossi kindly walked Pinchalong with me. On the way back down Pine Street the rain and wind swelled up out of the ground, it seemed, and we were wrapped and lifted in it. Our eye makeup ran and we laughed.

The three of us went to Elephant and Castle for dinner. We had hot food and I had spiced cider with a bit of rum. We talked and remembered and I was grateful. When we got back on campus I borrowed Megan’s hair dryer, took a hot shower, and blew my hair out. I put on my third outfit of the day and was warm.

Then all us Classical Ed kids went bowling and Dr. Edwards and RJ came too. I bowled one spare and a lot of zeros and we ate leftover cupcakes. We sat close together and laughed, hands on one another’s shoulders and knees, and I made everyone take a picture at the end. They called me birthday girl.

And at the last Sarah and Jackie and Renée, my girls, took me out to Rachel’s. I had whisky and wine and peanut butter pie, which was tall and creamy. We stayed a while and sat. Then Jackie, the baby of the group, drove us back through the dark. I slept heavily till about five this morning and fitfully after that. Finally I got up, and listened to part of the morning prayers online, and then sat in silence with the softly greying sky.

My grandparents are ill and are suddenly in the hospital and I am frightened, but the sun rose this morning. The Son rose.

Good Company

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Last week was Grove City’s Christian Writers Conference on George Herbert. My dad came and spoke and there was a poetry liturgy and I gave a paper and there was a banquet and my brother George sequestered himself and his laptop in a thousand different corners. It was a wonderful time and I am grateful to have had it. There were lots of careful words on truth and beauty, and one cannot have that much goodness poured into ones head without it getting stuck there.

But I don’t know if I’m going to get anything worthwhile out onto the page tonight. We have our windows open, because the air is warm and soft at last. I just got back from the last “Conversation on the Virtues” I’ll be going to with my Classical Ed class. This semester with them has been a tiring, tense, funny, and sweet adventure. I think the world of them, as evidenced by the gratuitous number of hours Megan and I spent making them sugar cookies last week. I’m looking forward to a long summer and a fall semester with a fiction writing independent study, but I will miss these people.

I have plenty of friends who are very dear to me, but I am usually best one-on-one. Yet, these kids (or nearly-men-and-women, if you will) are my favorite when we are together, when we are not myself and himself and herself and yourself, but ourselves, sighing and insinuating and reading and asking and contradicting. Actually, at the risk of sounding like I’ve learned precisely what I was supposed to, I’d say we’re learning the awe of neighborliness. I do not know which of us began Samaritans, and which began Jews (or perhaps I do, but I’ll never tell), but I know I have been humbled by unexpected friendships. As Lewis says in The Four Loves, “Who could have deserved it?” Not I.

But this marvelous spread of good company is what has been offered me, so as my friend George Herbert and more importantly, my God, would require, I will not delay, but “sit and eat.”