Chronicles of a Life in Linden: Shae vs. the Tornado

My first Texas tornado that I can remember happened when I was ten years old and in school. We'd had drills for as long as I could remember but we'd never had to use them. Tornadoes were legends in Texas; I expected to hear a train, though I remember wondering if I should be listening for the clack-clack of its wheels or a shrill whistle. I didn't hear either. In fact, everything was silent, which was quite a feat for the fifth-grade hallway, where several kids were hunched over, faces touching the dirty floor, the top of our heads touching cold lockers, tiny hands covering the backs of our skulls. As if that would protect us from the ceiling that I just knew was going to fall on our heads. The sky turned green. The air became so thick you could eat it. The only other time I've felt something like that was during hurricane Katrina, when my old house breathed in and waited to exhale for what felt like days.

That's when Shae started to chant. It was weird because he was sitting cross-legged -- a direct violation of duck-and-cover tornado code -- and saying words I didn't understand in an even monotone. I was grateful because he'd interrupted the deal with God I was making that I surely would be unable to keep (I promise I'll be good forever; I promise to clean my room every day; I promise to give my book money to the communion plate). "What are you doing?" I asked him. "I'm talking to Buddha," he said. And the storm stopped.

Now, you have to understand that Linden didn't have any Buddhists, at least as far as 10-year-old, sheltered, close-minded Kacy was concerned. You were either Baptist or Methodist or you wore long skirts and spoke in tongues or you were a heathen; Catholics had to drive 22 miles to the closest church and so that didn't count. Why had Shae's God stopped the storm when mine didn't?

Shae was already mystical to me because he could eat an entire hoagie sandwich without any help. In my memory, he brought one to school every day piled high with shiny delicately sliced meats -- I imagine mortadella, salami, chorizo, and serrano ham with lettuce and tomato peeking out of the side. Now there's no way that's true because Milsteps only carried Carl Buddig turkey and bologna and something vaguely resembling meat studded with olives and pasteurized cheese. But the way I remember it, he carried a feast with him. Somehow Shae's ability to eat man-sized sandwiches and to stop tornadoes made him magical. Maybe he was.

Chronicles of a Life in Linden: The Country Store

The Country Store sold icees, stale coffee, those sugar-coated orange slices, and something called "potato logs," which my dad used to buy me for "dinner" when mom took night classes in Texarkana. You could buy gas there and you could count on it being overpriced, or, like the old men who hung out at the tables inside, you could treat it as a place to read the paper and buy black coffee and see your friends when the domino hall shut down. Primarily it was a spot for socializing.

Since it sat at the crossroads of 59 and the gateways to downtown, it was the ideal meeting place. The only problem is that no one really met there to go anywhere; the Country Store was the destination. It was a classless place: the dopesmokers, cheerleaders, rodeo-riders, nerds, freaks, and everyone in-between mingled there, and by mingled I mean that they stood on opposite sides of the parking lot and glared at one another. This so-called party would only be broken up by a fight, a curfew, sheer boredom, or a run to the county line for beer. As a girl with a perpetual twelve-year-old's face (or a judgmental goody goody reputation), I was almost never invited to the latter.

Miss Paula, who wasn't a "miss" at all and should, by Southern standards, never have been called by her first name, bought icees every morning of her life from the country store. She lived in the boonies -- yes, that's a real place -- but made the drive anyway and as far as I know never missed a day. Someone tried to buy her an icee machine once but she never used it. I never really understood the draw but now that I live in a place without a country store, maybe I do.

Chronicles of a Life in Linden: The Dairy Queen

I've always wanted to write an autobiography, not because my life is interesting, but because the people I grew up with were. I'll never have the time to do it, so instead, I'm going to tell you about Linden, the little town where I grew up, in a series of blogs I'm calling Chronicles of a Life in Linden.

When I lived there, Linden had 2,000 people and one stoplight and only two official hangouts I was privy to: the Country Store and the Dairy Queen. This is about the Dairy Queen.

The Dairy Queen sold fried steak baskets with fries and gravy and a heartstopper called the DQ Dude which was a fried steak sandwich on two fat butter-laden pieces of bread slathered with mayonnaise. I'm almost positive the side dish was a coffee-can of bacon fat with a straw. My friend Lauren and I would beg for our parents to bring one to us while we were stuck at the daycare, trying to weasel our way out of eating string beans the consistency of cornmeal mush and overcooked macaroni noodles. I divided my fries into even numbers and dipped every other one in the DQ's peppered white gravy and tried to chew each one the same number of times as the last one, an early sign of the OCD nature that would get me my PhD.

Later, it'd be the place where this neighbor kid keyed my shiny blue sports car with 4 round bugeyed headlights for no apparent reason. This same kid spent almost every balmy summer night with me and Bobby on our deck listening to Weird Al tapes and eating Doritoes until the powdered cheese was so caked on our fingertips that we'd have to scrape it off with our front teeth. By day, he'd knock down forts we'd built together and attempt to tear up my family's swimming pool while we weren't home but I could never figure out why until someone told me he loved me. I stand by my own hypothesis that he must have been bipolar but, then, who could ever tell the difference?

Later I learned the Dairy Queen wasn't known so much for its food or vast parking lot full of teenagers but for the drug deals that went on in the kitchen. It's still open despite the fact that someone found a condom in his cheeseburger, sandwiched between two beef patties and a pool of greasy cheese. So much for the bucolic nature of the rural South, eh?

How a Homeless Man Called 911, or, My Adventure on the Way to the ER

The morning began, as usual: early. I was getting ready for classes when I suddenly felt a stitch in my side. It began like any kind of running flank-cramp I've had after pushing myself a bit too hard. Only this pain made me unable to breathe, and, unlike a cramp derived from exertion, this didn't go away but increased tenfold as the seconds ticked by. Nausea rolled over me and I tried to hold onto the counter, the walls, the bed. Sitting made it worse. Standing was out of the question. I needed help.

I jumped in the car and made the longest three-mile drive of my life to a doctor's office that had just opened. I dragged across the parking lot into the small office, where three nurses were working. Although I created a strange sight, surely, as I could do no more than bend over at the waist and could barely eek out words, the nurses ignored me. Cutting their eyes at me from the side, they pretended to be very busy with paperwork. "Someone please talk to me," I said, trying not to overdo it despite my penchant for hyperbole. By this point, I'd convinced myself some important organ had exploded and was leaking some vital liquid into my body cavity. To say I was worried is putting it mildly. "You a patient here?" one woman finally asked, barely taking her eyes from the paper in front of her. "No. I'm new. Something's happened to me, and I need help." She spoke over me, pointing down the highway saying, "The hospital is that way. 30 minutes." And she resumed her paperwork.

I paused only a minute to lose all faith in humanity. Then I began the long crawl back to my car. I prayed I would make it to the hospital, but I didn't. I swerved violently off of the road, which was packed with rush-hour traffic, into an empty parking lot as I fought violent pain and sickness.

On my way into the lot, I saw two feet sticking out of a six-foot rusted dumpster. These feet belonged to a man who abandoned his dig to run over to my car. I was trying not to crawl on the asphalt, but I could not longer stand or sit, and I needed to think.

The homeless man climbed into my car and took my keys from me; he started the ignition. "If this guy steals my car while I'm dying in this parking lot, I am really going to lose it," I thought. "I'm just going to park it properly," he called out over my desperate pleas for him to get out of my car and to give me my keys. At this point, Dollar Store employees just arriving for work were rushing over to me, calling out, "Are you looking for a little dog?" Apparently the only rational explanation for a woman in business attire on all fours on the blacktop would be that she was looking for a lost pet. Made sense to me.

The absurdity of my situation began to get the better of me, and while I wanted to laugh, all I could do was cough out my explanation, "No. Dog. Can't. Breathe. Trying. Hospital. So. Far." At which point, the homeless man, who had, minutes before, been ankle-deep in rotten banana peels, whips out a cell phone and dials 911. I don't even have time to think about how freaking bizarre that is before I'm pulled into an ambulance and whisked away to the ER.

The last part of the story isn't nearly as interesting as the first. My doctors treat me like a hysterical drug-seeking maniac for four days, refusing to give me the painkillers that would have allowed me to eat, sleep, or sit still. All I can do is writhe, moan, sob, and beg them to listen to me tell them that my kidney feels like a hot, swollen watermelon. On day four, a specialist recognizes the signs and sends me home with meds that allow me to swallow jello and water. Hurrah.

Seven of the most excruciating days pass before I'm able to function again. Andrew takes off of work and stays with me to care for me. I drop 7 pounds in 7 days but recover. I find myself thankful for a dedicated husband, concerned Dollar Store employees, and the dumpster-diver with hot pink hi-tops and the willingness to call an ambulance. And I wonder, do these things happen to other people? Or just to me?

Scammed

It's a well-known fact that people with PhDs have no common sense. It has something to do with spending too much time in dark rooms with books, and something else to do with idealism and ivory towers. Anyway, I'm here to reinforce that little stereotype with a story.

A young kid showed up at our door on Friday. He was wearing skinny jeans and dirty converse shoes and some nondescript t-shirt. He was probably in his mid-20s and he stood, pigeon toed, and fidgeted through a speech he'd clearly practiced. He was a junior at UF, he said, and was raising money to study with a BBC TV program we recognized. He didn't want money directly, though; he would be funded if he convinced people to purchase a certain number of books for a children's literacy program. He showed me a brochure I was too busy to examine closely; we were on our way out for the evening.

At this point in Pigeon-Toed's speech, I began to hear sirens. They sounded like fire engines and they got louder and louder, trying to blot out the kid's voice. But I remembered growing up in Linden -- the capital of small town USA --, and how hard it was to fundraise, and how people always helped me out when I needed to go on a school-related trip. Andrew seemed to think the guy was OK and he has much better sense than I do. So the kid gave us his name, pointed to his house, took our check, gave us a receipt for tracking our book order, and disappeared.

By this point the sirens had dulled. Instead, I felt a gnawing in my gut that translated to "wrongwrongwrongwrongwrong."

Fast-forward to one day later. That same gnawing chewed my husband out of sleep at 2 AM. His city-boy instincts finally kicked in. He searched the internet for the scam, and there was the boy's canned speech, the general description of the types of scammers who engage in this scheme, and all of the actions people had taken to try to stop the criminals.

The rest of what happened isn't important. We put a stop payment on the check and signed up for fraud monitoring, since this crook now had our bank account number. He never got the money.

But it taught me a lesson I'd hoped never to learn about trusting young faces and supporting people's endeavors in hard times. It also taught me something frightening about the state of the economy; what kind of a person has such a hard time that he decides to show his face to the people he's robbing? What WON'T a person like that do? And why, in heaven's name, didn't I know any better?

Cacoethes Scribendi

I am a hypocritical composition teacher. Let me explain why.

I tell my students that I believe anyone can develop the fervor for writing, when really I believe I was born with a hunger to do it. This impulse used to be called cacoethes scribendi, often erroneously translated "the urge to write." While it's true scribendi means to write, cacoethes is more akin to madness than inspiration. I could no more ignore the impulse to write as I could to eat or breathe, and trying to explain that to people required to take a composition class has always seemed silly, if not strange and overtly sentimental.

I tell my students that six sources is enough for a research paper when I truly believe that scholars are born with a fire located in the center of their bodies that tells them when they can begin losing themselves in books and tells them again when they can stop and write. I don't read to get to know a subject better. I sink my teeth into subjects like a rabid dog tears into his last meal. I want to rip open every last bit of the subject before I put pen to paper and God help anybody who tries to stand in my way.

I tell my students the best work is carefully outlined and prepared when I secretly write like a woman possessed, letting the pages come out of me like some kind of sickness. When I'm done, I always think of Anne Bradstreet, not because I come anywhere close to her sense of irony or wit, but because she compared her finished product to a monstrous child, hideous when shown to the light of the world.

Sometimes I wonder how I could share this kind of thing with my own composition students without making them suggest that I belong in an asylum. How do you tell people who so desire structure, who want you to show them the steps to becoming a better writer, that it's an urge in the back of your mind or a fire in your core, and that, when you listen to your instincts, they'll take you farther than any composition textbook ever could?

Rookie

Everyone says the first year of any new job is the hardest, but really that did nothing to prepare me for what these first few months have been like.

My typical schedule goes something like this: I push my way into rush hour traffic while blaring BBC Radio 1, which I turn all the way up so that I can ignore the four jerks who will attempt to ram my car in an effort to quickly wedge themselves into the traffic, which is at a standstill.

Then I get to my office to grade and attempt to form a coherent thought before class. Some days, I steel myself for ignorance, resistance, apathy, boredom, and willful misunderstanding of the directions I spent years working into my syllabus. Others, I can barely wait to go into the classroom to discuss an important text or issue, as I think back to the first day I learned about Thoreau or Dickinson or Faulkner.

Then the tedium takes over. I sit through a meeting about a meeting, which usually ends in a discussion of splinter meetings I try to avoid getting sucked into. Someone needs someone to sign up for something on a Saturday morning, on a day late in December, which will last for 87 hours without a break. Anybody? Nobody? Come on.

I attempt to work on my research and am stymied by something. An inability to concentrate. A lack of resources. I research anyway. I can't help it. I open an email about a conference I applied to and then ignore it. It's too much to think about. I thumb through the calendar and try my best to remember why I decided to sign onto this or that project. I can't. It has something to do with tenure though; I'm sure of it.

If I'm lucky I catch dinner with a fifth floor friend. If not I eat in my office--leftover soup that is cold in the middle.

I'd go home but there's another meeting at 8 PM that goes until 11. I stagger home, tripping on a mountain of comp papers, and crash into bed, only to awaken bleary eyed to a cruel alarm clock that goes off four minutes later. I wave to the man I'm positive is my husband and begin the cycle over again.

I eventually learn secret exits out of the building where I work. It dawns on me that some papers may take a while to grade and that's ok. I figure out, slowly, how to ask for help. I apologize to the family I never see and stuff down the guilt that accompanies living in another time zone. I say no to people I like being around to make time for a dinner date with my husband (the person I like best). I get sick from the exhaustion. I make time to walk the dogs. And I stop to thank God I have this job, these friends, this life.