Tag Archives: growing up

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.)

Remaking with Layers

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We’re starting again before the planned six months’ hiatus is up, stepping gentle back into this space.

There is not much new to tell you except that all things are being made new. This is hard to remember because usually newness comes in layers, like pale watercolor seeped over paper again and again or translucent fabric laid over and over itself, until what was sheer becomes solid, vibrant, real. This imperceptible, unhurried layering is how relationships form roots, how children grow, how people are transformed. 

The last few weeks my classroom has held more tears than usual: over Henry V, over test grades, over The Velveteen Rabbit, over friendships, over Dickinson poems, over endings, over everyday—which is to say eternal—pains and joys.

None of these tears have been mine—teenagers’ emotions have the volume turned up on them—but I have been grateful for them each time because they’ve reminded me of the becoming that’s happening before my often-short sighted eyes. On one hand these are just kids, but on the other, no one is just anything. Their tears, their laughter, even those occasional holy mixtures of the two are another sheer layer of film, another millimeter’s thickness in the story God is telling. We forget too often.

But sometimes we’re reminded. Thursday night was the much-beloved Senior Recognition ceremony at Caldwell and as each of the students—some of whom I frankly struggled to teach last year—rose in turn to be spoken to by their teachers, I thought that though they stood quiet, they were loud in feeling. So many of them looked raw, just-hatched, shining, frightened, hopeful, transformed. For a moment, I could see all their layers at once.

I was struck by the same changed look on their faces, the different angle to their shoulders, the next evening at their graduation. This newness was a wild mystery, and it brought home to me my own ineptitude. After, I drove from the graduation venue to school to see the newly-minted seniors paint the rock—their rightful territory—for the first time. But the whole drive, I couldn’t stop thinking about the kids I’d left behind, whether I had taught them well enough, whether I had loved them well enough, how badly I had failed them, and most, beyond my own sometimes-misguided efforts, what a strange, unknowable work God was doing and would continue to do in their young souls and frames, what he was building with a thousand repeated whispers.

And then, as I stood at ten p.m. in the parking lot of what was my high school and is now my vocation, watching students chase each other to slap wet pink handprints on their friends’ arms and legs, the mystery of divine remaking sat heavy on my shoulders. They blasted country music from one speaker and then another and I wondered whether these kids could understand the color, the wholeness, what the Lord wanted to build within them.

I suspect the answer is no, they do not comprehend, just as I do not comprehend. We will none of us understand what it means to be real, saturated purple and gold people, to step fully into the presence of the God we were made to image until we reach that other shore. But I am glad that these kids can weep with remorse when they have hurt someone and shriek with joy at a song they love, that they can abandon self-consciousness, tilt their faces to the sky, and let God get down to the slow and certain work remaking his people, his world.

A Thanksgiving Blessing for My Students

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Your dreams will change one day. They will be less ideal, less monetary, less shiny. The chrome will wear off. I suspect you will dream of reasonable estimates on car repairs. Of a comfortable afternoon sat on a friend’s couch or porch, of the far-scattered people you love all together in a room for once, of keeping the sticky fingerprints off the glass of your storm door.

I can’t tell you much more than that—only that you will change and your dreams along with you. What I can tell you is that I have dreams for you, hopes for you, blessings I want to lay across your shoulders like an ancient robe. There are already too many of them to count and I am sure they’ll only multiply with time, but they begin like this:

May your fingers and toes stay warm in bed and may you laugh so loudly for joy that it startles the birds out of the trees. May you wander to the far ends of the earth, but never be gone from home too long. May you gain calluses from chopping wood or making music or knitting very small hats, or any number of the good tasks hands are for. May reading fill you rather than drain you. May everything you cook make the kitchen smell good. May you learn to love The Wind in the Willows and may you own at least one truly comfortable chair. May you treat both your grades and your bank account with the dispassionate responsibility which is all that ephemeral numbers deserve, and may you, at least once or twice, need to wait for the city bus.

May you learn the strange wisdom of both patience and action. May you always sing out. May you resist resentment and get good sleep and may memorized scripture run through your mind when you least expect it. May you sometimes stand alone in the stillness of the woods. 

May you never assign a number or a letter or any pronouncement from human lips to your worth, but instead consign your worth to Love. May you weep most often for others and laugh most often at yourself.

May your bar for those you allow to be in community with you be as low as the wide threshold of your front door. May it admit the weak, the wounded, the weird, the sick, the sore, the huddled masses who have very little in common with you beyond the hearts in their chests which are twisted into the same tight knot. 

And may your bar for kindness be high. May you be quick to listen, slow to speak, and quickest of all to forget yourself. May you be like my grandpa Billy, so certain in the knowledge that Jesus is his friend and that his life is greatly blessed through no particular wise act of his own, that you regularly allow those around you to take advantage of your gentleness and generosity, because what are those blessings of your life for, if not sharing.

May you do the work that falls to your lot and ask for help when you need it. May truth always be more important than success. May you remember that, like every person around you, you carry great power to both heal and destroy, and that you will rarely know when you are wielding it. Step softly and don’t worry so much about the big stick.

May your life, over its many years, become a map of the many things that both you and those around you may have intended for evil, but which God intended for good. May wildflowers burst forth from cracked pavement and fresh springs from dry ground. At each turn, may you raise an ebenezer to remember what he has done. May you carve it into your heart as eternal blessing and pray its words over your children and all that fall into your care. May you not be shy in thanking the Lord for his gifts.

Waiting in the Wings

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I have more than one piece waiting in the wings to be written. There is a short essay for a church program—I know that will happen and it will make its way on stage, but the others are slower and less certain. There’s the piece I started a few months ago about my absurd adventure on Amtrak this summer. I planned to submit it for a competition, but the due date cheerfully came and went while the essay remained only a couple dense pages of notes on my google drive. And then, of course, there’s the friendship book which I intended to draft so much of this summer. But I’ve found unraveling my own thousand and one thin, tangled anecdotes and weaving them into a telling is both hard and solitary. It gleams bright with difficulty from every angle.

But why writing has been difficult is not the point. The point is, it has been. Writing has been difficult for the last couple years in a way I hadn’t known before now. The front of my classroom is now a much easier space for me to inhabit than an invitingly blank page. If you had told me at twenty-three that I would be saying that, I’d have laughed in your face, but here we are.

I’ve taken to picturing my writing mind, my writing self, as a barren field which used to yield all sorts of things and now, simply, does not. Some days I tell myself that my mind is lying fallow, resting itself in the shade, leaking out all its contaminants, gorging itself on water and light, readying for some full-bursting harvest in a few seasons’ time. But on other days, winter days, I really begin to suspect it has been abandoned, that the soil in which good things once readily took root is eroding over time and time and time, in the cold, careless wind.

But it has occurred to me that I have the power to choose between these two options. I can choose to care for my words in their dormancy or I can choose to desert them. And of course I want the former. Of course I want light and life to spring from the dim stillness of rested soil. I hope my persistent writing of these words proves as much both to you and to myself.

And even before my realization of that decision, I think the fallowing had begun. Because writing has felt far from me, I don’t really have the words to explain, but there is some kind of softening happening inside me. “Peace has come with work to do.” A couple weeks ago I was reading an old book from childhood aloud to my sister—the chapter in which Mona Melendy gets a haircut and manicure then comes home and cries about it because she wishes that she hadn’t and growing up is so hard—and I almost got choked up myself because I felt for her—with her—so deeply. This stilling of the sentences running through my head and my fingers has perhaps led to a second adolescence, far different from my first. It seems to consist mainly of a kind of humility I have not before tasted.

Earlier this week a freshman girl came to my room after school to ask hard and good questions about God and truth and other things of that sort, and though I couldn’t answer all of them, I did what I could. I gave her a couple books to borrow. I gave her my friends.

In that same spirit, I’ve opened one of the packets of poetry I recently compiled to teach from, and looked to the words of even more of my friends. As my quiet ground waits for its coming season of good green things, I will allow those friends to tell me the story of things to come.

God lives
on the other side of that mirror,
but through the slit where the barrier doesn’t
quite touch ground, manages still
to squeeze in – as filtered light,
splinters of fire, a strain of music heard
then lost, then heard again.
—Denise Levertov

Soul, self; come, poor Jackself, I do advise
You, jaded, let be; call off thoughts awhile
Elsewhere; leave comfort root-room; let joy size
At God knows when to God knows what; whose smile
‘s not wrung, see you; unforeseen times rather — as skies
Betweenpie mountains — lights a lovely mile.
—G. M. Hopkins

maybe the wind wound itself into a silver tree, and didn’t move, maybe
the lake far away, where once he walked as on a
blue pavement,
lay still and waited, wild awake.
—Mary Oliver

Was he balked by silence? He kneeled long
And saw love in a dark crown
Of thorns blazing, and a winter tree
Golden with fruit of a man’s body.
—R.S. Thomas

Nay, peace, I shall behold, before the night,
The feet of brass, the robe more white than flame,
The wounded hands, the weary human face.
—Oscar Wilde

Then—- O Ile leape up to my God: who pulles me doune—-
See, see where Christ’s blood streames in the firmament:
—Edith Sitwell quoting Christopher Marlowe

If ye have any thing to send or write,
I have no bag, but here is room:
Unto my Fathers hands and sight,
(Believe me) it shall safely come.
That I shall mind, what you impart,
Look, you may put it very near my heart.
—George Herbert

and suddenly I saw
the heavens
unfastened
and open,
planets,
palpitating plantations,
the darkness perforated,
riddled
with arrows, fire, and flowers,
the overpowering night, the universe.
—Pablo Neruda


So, having read all, having done all, in the shadow of your wings, I will sing for joy.

Ten Years of Reading

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When I was in middle school I sunk into a particularly pernicious Christian romance novel phase. My mom thought it was absurd and would kick me out of the house for reading too much. So at her behest, I’d take a walk, but I’d bring the book with me and read as I went. Sometimes friendly folks out walking their dogs would call out to me to ask how I liked my book, and I always felt self-righteous annoyance—couldn’t they see I was busy?

Then the other day I left my house for a walk (no book in hand) and saw a man around my age or maybe a little younger walking toward me. It was muggy out—nearly drizzly—and he was wearing sunglasses and reading a book grasped firmly in two hands. I was fascinated and wanted desperately to know what he was reading. I squinted at its back cover as I passed him, but though he didn’t look up, I knew he could feel my looking and suddenly remembered how he must feel. I left him alone, and continued on my merry way, eyes up to the world around me.

So it’s in honor of my twelve year old self and that stranger and everyone in between who has not wanted to tear their eyes from a page that I offer you what I’ve got today.

In my heart of hearts I love a bit of light data, and for the past ten years, beginning with the summer before my senior year of college, I’ve kept track of every book I’ve completed on a running document. It’s titled “The Hooray List.” (I was in an era of celebrating accomplishments, however small.)

The list contains 371 entries total (though some of those are re-reads) which means the actual  number of individual books is 337. I divided it into the summer and the school-time of each year, and the least I ever read was in the summer of 2016, when I read nine books, four of which were for children. The most I read was this past school year, 2022-23 when I read 46 books, 13 of which I was teaching. (I spent a lot of weekends reading. Those were good weekends.) In the re-reads hall of fame there are 22 books that I read twice, six that I read three times, but the big winner is The Great Divorce, which I read four times in ten years.

If it’s not already abundantly apparent, I transferred the list to a spreadsheet just so I could organize it in a variety of ways and procure all this data, so this is, transparently, an ode not only to the joy of reading, but to the joy of list-making, of ordering and organizing the good.

I alphabetized all the titles, and here are some facts that I think are interesting:

Twenty titles begin with “A” but a whopping 101 of them begin with “The.” The only first letters I was missing were X and Z (so if anyone wants to rectify that, feel free!) Four of the titles are questions, and three begin with “Death,” but only one that begins with “Life.” I also read novels titled both Original Sin and Original Prin, which I thought was funny.

And now for some awards, doled out with no regard for anyone’s taste but my own:

Oldest: Beowulf

Most Nostalgic (For Me): A Tangled Web

Complained About the Loudest: Gilead

Best Opening Line: I Capture the Castle

Best Closing Line: Invisible Man

Read It Twice Because I Forgot I Read It the First Time: The Stone Diaries

Most Fascinatingly Niche: A Discarded Life

Most Enjoyed Hating: A Live Coal in the Sea

Took the Longest (4 years): The Brothers Karamazov

Read Aloud in One Sitting: The Best Christmas Pageant Ever

Most Beautiful Non-Fiction: An Unquiet Mind

Feels Most Like Home (To Me): Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies

Least Favorite Book I Taught: The Crucible

Most Favorite Book I Taught: The Sun Also Rises

Most Frequently Recommended to Me: Jayber Crow

Most Frequently Recommended by Me: Everything Sad is Untrue or The Remains of the Day or The Mennyms

Everyone Should Read Regardless of What You Think of My Taste: Jane Eyre

Anyway, that’s that. This summer, I’ve already read a lot and walked a lot and wrote some about my childhood. I don’t like letting go of things—books, cards, scribbled notes on paper, memories. I like storing them up, holding them tight in my fist as I keep moving forward. And on occasion I’ll stop and sort through all the disparate pieces I’ve gained, and try to make sense of the picture they form when laid side by side by side.

The Part That Doesn’t Age in Colorado

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On Labor Day weekend I flew to Colorado to join a family reunion that was already in progress. When I landed in Atlanta for a layover, I turned my phone back on and found emails from two of Bonnie’s children—Bonnie, the elderly client who I spent most of my time with last year—saying that she’d passed away about a month before. I wasn’t surprised. You can’t be surprised when death comes to a house-bound woman in her late eighties with a laundry list of serious health conditions, but she had been my friend, my good friend, and the news sat heavily on my shoulders on my flight to Denver.

The week before I left, when I told one of my freshmen classes that I was going to a family reunion, one of them immediately quipped, “Is it gonna be fun or is it gonna be awkward?” “A little bit of both,” I shot back. Maybe I thought this was true when I said it but in actuality the week I spent there was often fun, never awkward, and just about always good.

At its zenith, there were 45 people. (We thought. An accurate count was more difficult than it should have been.) We stayed in two huge cabins at a YMCA Ranch a couple hours of switchback highway west of Denver. Both had big common areas with tall windows that faced out toward the horizon of mountains and also had comfortable furniture which my sister kept expressing appreciation for. My mom pointed out that my grandma, who has been gone since 2015, would have loved this. She was always looking for a place where all seven of her children and their offspring and theirs could be all together in one room—eat meals cooked in a line-up of vast pots, sit and play cards, talk and laugh. 

And we kept busy. We were the loudest and most cheerful at a bingo night run by Y employees at the rec center, with several of my cousins’ kids ending up calling the numbers themselves. We played a game of kickball in which there were two participants under four, which necessitated a variety of paces. We were the entire population of the Y trivia night one evening, and the room echoed with an inability to keep secrets from other teams made up of siblings and aunts and cousins and uncles. And we hiked over and over in the thin air, up mountains brown and green and rocky, to see little humps of snow melting by waterfalls.

I’d forgotten how much I like the people I’m related to. We are very different, and yet there’s a unity despite our difference—maybe because of it, at times. It is a unity of practicality, of unfussy kindness, of good humor, of just saying what you mean without pretension. I found even the barriers within myself crumbling at times. The rough beauty nudged my heart into order. All year I’ve steadfastly refused to play chess with any of my students even though I have a board in my room for them, but I played a game with my cousin’s son one morning, because though I can easily turn down a seventeen-year-old, saying no to a seven-year-old is entirely too cruel. He beat me soundly, at one point saying encouragingly, “You’ll figure out how the pieces move soon, or maybe you’re just bad at it.”

I read in quiet corners of one cabin or the other where I could see out a window, and on the last day did a loop on a path through a meadow, while listening to an Austen novel, past the old homestead which housed a family of little foxes who had been darting across the corners of our vision all week. 

On Sunday, in the morning light through all the eastern windows, most of us gathered for a service in the assembly style which many of my family grew up with, sharing one-by-one what we were learning from scripture, and singing hymns acapella. I listened to our swell of song rising to the roof and realized that I knew those voices of old, and was glad to hear them again after so long.

I used to write about my cousins on here a lot—nearly every Christmas. But we are all grown now and see each other much less. We’re spread across the country and beyond—tied to the places we live by jobs and families and commitments. But watching us here in adulthood, properly on the far side of excitable adolescence, I still saw a shared and generous familiarity, a sort of assumed kindness in one another we could all rely on—this was the thing which staved off the awkwardness my students joked about. 

Also, I leaned over to my sister one night and said, “You know, we’re all grown up, but everyone still walks the same.” There are certain things we never do, perhaps never can, grow out of. Once last year, talking about my relationship with Bonnie, Abby gave me one of the best compliments I’ve ever gotten, particularly because she’s known me so well for so long. She told me I was good at seeing the “part of people that doesn’t age.” And it’s true—that odd loping walk or wild laugh that has always been and always will be is my favorite part of any person, the part I hold precious in my palm.

And this family time away was a reminder that not only is there a part of people that doesn’t age, but maybe there’s a part of relationships that can’t and won’t age either. On Monday and Tuesday nights after the littlest ones were in bed, some of us cousins sat down to play Authors. It’s not a particularly brilliant game, a little like “Go Fish” but fussier and with the titles of more nineteenth century novels. But we played it so much at my Grandma’s when we were young that it’s in our shared DNA now. One summer when I slept on the couch because we were short of bed-space I would regularly wake up to my brother and my cousin Joe sitting on my feet, already deep in a game at 7:30 in the morning. 

When my cousin Charity unearthed the deck she’d brought last week, at first none of us could quite remember how many cards to deal. But then it all came back, and not just the rules, but the joy. We curled up in our chairs, all cares and griefs of our grown selves forgotten, and giggled for forty minutes straight over well-worn cards with pictures of Sir Walter Scott, all in a large cabin made small by a valley of snow-capped mountain peaks and the dome of a black-silk sky.

Much of May

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May has been much, much, much at school and I am grateful for it. 

I’ve struggled to understand my students in this first year back teaching. They feel not only inherently different from the students I used to teach, but inherently different from me. It takes me longer to really see them than it used to. In the last few months I’ve taken to reminding myself that the world in which they’re coming of age is quite different than the one in which I was fifteen and seventeen. History—the kind that will be written in books—has happened in the meantime and their perceptions of life and fairness and value and the way things should be are sometimes alien to me. 

I’ve cared for them and enjoyed them, but I’ve felt a gulf between us, a gulf which not only seems difficult to cross, but which I haven’t been entirely sure that I want to. I’ve sometimes fallen into annoyance and frustration rather than choosing the patience required by love.

But May has been a slow pulling together of the pieces. I gave a talk in chapel in which I was honest because that is the way I know how to be. My little all-boy class held an NFL-style draft for which elderly residents at the nursing home they’d be matched up with before we embarked on an interview project. The school launched a house system, my freshmen drew the nine circles of Dante’s hell, and some of the boys in my AP class performed “Man of Constant Sorrow” for me for extra credit. And student after anxious student recited Psalm 90, eyes boring into the carpet, then glancing up to me for reassurance. 

All these things have been tackle ropes thrown across that gulf, hooking into the soft flesh beneath my armor and tugging the cliff of me and the cliff of my students nearer to one another, inch by definite inch. 

I’ve had proper sit down conversations with a few kids this week, some of whom I haven’t even taught yet, and have been struck by the individual complexity and openness of their questions, how good it is to laugh with them. I now find myself wanting to feel gently towards them. I want to see their humanness, the lines around their eyes that Graham Greene talks about in The Power and the Glory. When I watch them stumble, I want to choose grief over irritation, love over easy dismissal.

And last week I wandered around a secret place on campus, a place on which for the last twenty years most graduating seniors have had the chance to make their mark. My own seventeen-year-old self is there with my classmates, as well as the upperclassmen I was once awestruck by and many of the boisterous kids I taught myself, all of us immortalized at that odd and painful wonder of a moment, on the cusp of we-knew-not-what.

So many things were felt in that place and then pressed into it in felt-tipped marker with immediate eagerness: joy, confidence, cynicism, vulgarity, wisdom, wildness, complacence, nostalgia. And every feeling expressed by those youthful hearts and hands, from before me all the way to after, promises loudly in that place to last forever. In the deep convictions of our emotions, we did not, a single one of us, really understand how much we would change. We considered our words to be final. 

There was an extremity in our certainty, in our hope, in all our desires which demanded fulfillment in permanent ink. And God at all times and in all moments stood watching us in that place, a resounding magnetic force, drawing the true desire rooted deep in each of us toward his center. 

So here I am, tired and content on a Friday after oral exams, digesting the assurance that my world is not so distanced from that of my students as I thought. The cacophony of the teenage years, its extremity, its color, the rawness of its desire for more and better has always been and will always be. May is much, much, much, and so are they.

A Weekend

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On Friday night I went to a big basketball game in the Caldwell gym. I’d forgotten how those things go to the core of me—the rumble of the crowd and its rising yells, the sharpness of the whistle and the basketball shoes squeaking on the floor, the smell of popcorn and heat and the hundreds of faces and the youth and intensity of it all and the sound of the buzzer. But most, I am taken by those kids on the court who struggle and slouch in my class, but who spring and leap and even fly with a ball in their hands. I’d forgotten how moved I am watching my students do what matters to them. I like to see them capable and eager and playing confidently to a packed house—it’s fuller than the version of them I usually get. I like being reminded. (I also like it when we win, which we did.)

Then yesterday afternoon I went to Walmart, which is notorious as place where one can observe a subset of humans who seem unable to fit into their clothes, read a price sticker, wash themselves, or exist appropriately within the world (or so that blog that used to circulate, “The People of Walmart,” would have us believe.) But as I navigated past little befuddled-looking family clumps in the home goods aisles on my way to buy curtain rods, we spoke gently and politely to one another, squeezing our carts through, despite the blasphemy of our ill-fitting sweats and unkempt hair. And I thought to myself—”We’re all the people of Walmart on the inside, aren’t we?” I mostly thought it because it made me laugh, but it’s softened my vision ever since. 

And then last night I went to the homecoming dance for a bit. I pinned my hair up like I used to do in college and wore my charity shop coat. We ended up having to turn off nearly all the lights to get the kids to actually dance, because with them on they just milled awkwardly in groups. But in the dimness, they finally loosened up and cheered and jumped and acted like teenagers. We threw glow sticks down on them during “Party Rock,” and they lost their minds as we intended. I got out there and danced a little with a few of the other teachers. I felt full. I turned to Leslie at one point and said, “You know, in high school, I would have been glued to a chair at something like this.” A student cheekily asked me earlier in the week if everything good happens before you’re twenty-five, but I’ve rarely been more glad to be thirty and not sixteen. If only they knew.

I’m grateful that things are not always as they seem they ought to be, grateful that I am frequently wrong, grateful that God comes riding in on his donkey with his bruisable body and his broken bread and his empty tomb and says, “No, actually, child, it’s entirely different than that.”

Homing

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My dad writes poems for birthdays, so I have a box full of cards with lines of rhythmic verse in his ballpoint pen. And I’m not sure if he knows this, because he doesn’t save copies for himself, but more than one of them from the last few years is called “Homing.” Apparently, for him, coming back home, finding my way from a distance, is one of the repeated themes of my life. 

He’s not wrong. As of yesterday, I’m back in Greensboro for good and all (at least as far as I know.) I’ll be teaching in a classroom down the hall from my old one and living in a place down the street from my parents. I know that many blessings have fallen into my lap, but despite my usual grandiose tendencies for meditating on place and space during a transition, that hasn’t seemed like the important thing. What’s seemed like the important thing, what I’ve been thinking about more than ever as I’ve moved, is just human relationship. 

Three times in the last couple months I’ve cried when saying goodbye. I never used to do this. I used to do my stoic midwestern roots proud and wave people off cheerfully and go on with my day. No longer. I’ve grown sentimental and gooey in my old age—tearing up and hugging extra tight, trying in vain to stuff down the unseemly rip of grief in my chest.

That’s one explanation at least, but as plausible as it is, I rather suspect the larger thing that’s happening is that I’m coming to understand what we all are to each other. I’m coming to understand that when you know someone for a long time or a short time or any time at all, the friction of the contact, of the bumping up against one another’s shell, wears away at the hard edges. And more quickly than we know, we carve out space in each other—I in you and you in me. We do this over and over, at every turn of our lives. 

Sometimes the process can be painful and sharp, but eventually—in the best relationships—these carved-out spaces become soft, welcoming, just the right shape. Eventually, each person you’ve been close to carries always with them a brief home for you to come to. Because even though they can be hard to access at times, these holes we wear into each other never really go away. And so the more people we meet, the more we love and are loved, the more we’re likely to end up walking around like Swiss cheese people, full of holes just the right shape for people out there who in turn bear the shape of home for us.

Anyway, that’s what I’ve been mourning in those leavings, I think. I’ve been mourning those homes cleft in friends that they carry away with them as we part–the comfort and the goodness. But I don’t “grieve without hope.” I’m well-practiced at homing. I always find my way back.