But then again, so had I.
It didn’t really make any sense, but for whatever reason, I continued to love that car—as much as a person can love a big hunk of metal and plastic, at least.
And you know what else didn’t make any sense? The fact that, for whatever reason, God continued to love me.
But I’m so thankful that I knew He did.
I AM WELL aware that some people come into this world with a driving ambition and a steely determination to pursue their God-given talents no matter the cost or sacrifice. Ain’t no mountain high enough, ain’t no valley low enough, ain’t, no river wide enough, etc. and so on and so forth.
I, however, was not born with that particular disposition. Plus, I grew up in the House Full of Practical People, so any grand, dream-chasing pursuit has always struck me as sort of pie in the sky. There have been a few odd occasions when I’ve decided to be bold and speak a goal out loud—something like, “Hey, I think I would really like to complete X, Y, and Z over the course of the next year”—but I’m inevitably embarrassed by how sidetracked I can get on the way to finishing what I’ve started. What’s sad is that I can’t even say I get sidetracked because I become superpassionate about something else. I get sidetracked because Bravo has a new show about wealthy British women or the SEC baseball tournament is in town or OH WAIT! OUR STEIN MART HAS BEEN REMODELED! WE HAVE TO GO!
I should probably be ashamed to tell you that I didn’t even have to make up those examples.
So, since I’m not what you would call, um, driven, my daddy had the good sense to talk with me before I went to college so he could make sure I’d really thought through the process of deciding on a major. To my credit, I had given the subject some thought; for most of my junior year in high school, I was dead set on being a psychology major, but then my aunt Chox told me a story about a friend’s daughter who got a degree in psychology and couldn’t find a job anywhere in the country OR EVEN THE WORLD.
It may not have been quite that dramatic. But the thought of not being able to find a job was a serious deterrent. Even for me.
Once I’d put my psychology dreams aside, I shifted gears at the beginning of my senior year of high school and made up my mind that what I really wanted to be was an English major—which was clearly far more sensible than that psychology hogwash. After all, I think most of us know that when it comes to choosing a career, there are few fields more lucrative than the liberal arts.
I will pause at this juncture so you have ample time to guffaw and also chortle.
. . .
. . .
Daddy, who is one of the most sensible people I have ever known, was iffy about the English major and really wanted me to think in terms of what major would provide me with the most opportunities after college as opposed to the most enjoyment during college. It was a solid strategy, and I absolutely understood why he had reservations about English. He was reluctant, to say the least, to invest in four years of my college education so that one day I’d be able to quote an impressive array of poetry to my manager at the local Blockbuster Video.
I’d say he had some valid concerns.
So one Saturday morning, when Daddy and I were on the way to State for a football game, he called our college planning session to order and offered some counsel. The first major he suggested was computer science; since technology was growing by leaps and bounds and computers were becoming more common in people’s homes, Daddy felt like I’d have my pick of jobs once I finished my degree. I didn’t say anything as he made his case; I just nodded my head and pictured endless rows of ones and zeros and wondered what good it would be to have a job where I made a bunch of money if said job made me feel dead inside.
His second suggestion was business. Unfortunately, I am unable to summarize what he said, because I quit listening the second I heard the word business.
The third career option that he proposed was engineering. Mississippi State has always had a phenomenal engineering department, and thanks to their co-op program, most of their students have jobs lined up by spring of their senior year. I don’t know that they have 100 percent placement, but it’s close, and Daddy thought I’d have some incredible career prospects if I channeled my academic energy in that direction.
We sat in silence for a few seconds after he finished talking, and then I said something profound.
“But, Daddy, engineering requires a LOT of math.”
“Well, that’s okay,” he replied. “You may just have to study a little harder.”
I paused for a second before I responded.
“But, Daddy, I don’t really do math.”
“You can do anything you want if you put your mind to it,” he said. He was trying so hard to stay positive, but I could see a hint of frustration along his jawline.
And I understood why. He wanted me to dream big and strive for excellence. It had to be challenging to try to motivate a child whose fallback strategy was to aim low. His intentions were great, but what Daddy didn’t realize was that he was severely overestimating my academic ambition.
Plus, I’d loved to read and write my whole life. If the adage “The work you do while you procrastinate is probably the work you should do for the rest of your life” is true, then an English major was the only choice for me—limited employment prospects aside.
So that is what I did. I went to State and I majored in English and I never looked back. The only bump in the road was when I was a sophomore and decided I wanted to double major in English and broadcast journalism so I could work as a news producer like Jane Craig in Broadcast News. Certainly you could argue that it was somewhat foolish to add an extra eighteen months to my degree program just so I could imitate a fictional character in my real life, but I was blinded by the prospect of getting to work behind the scenes on a real-live news broadcast.
I clung to that dream for one whole semester.
Eventually I arrived at the conclusion that the idea of an extra year and a half of undergraduate work was deeply flawed—so flawed, in fact, that I skedaddled over to my adviser’s office and reworked my schedule for fall. The double major was a lovely but shortsighted experiment. Daddy agreed—and asked one more time if I’d considered majoring in computer science.
Bless his heart. I couldn’t help but admire his persistence.
Lee Hall houses the English department at Mississippi State, and when I was a student, room 312-B belonged to Dr. Mary Ann Dearing, who just so happened to be the director of teaching assistants, a certified Southern character, and my all-time favorite professor. Dr. Dearing’s office was special because it had not one but two windows that looked out over Drill Field, and truth be told, it was critical to keep those windows cracked open at all times since Dr. Dearing smoked Parliament Lights like a stack. Her deep, raspy voice suggested that she and her Parliament Lights had been close friends for many years, and you’d better believe the friendship was still going strong. In fact, I never walked into Dr. Dearing’s office when she didn’t have a cigarette dangling out of the corner of her mouth or smoldering on the edge of an ashtray, and as soon as she’d see me standing in the doorway, she’d say, “Sit down, sugar!” while she slowly and noisily pecked away on her nicotine-stained keyboard.
I absolutely adored her.
Dr. Dearing fascinated me because she was such a twist on her generation’s stereotypical Southern woman. She could certainly speak the language of the Junior League and the Daughters of the American Revolution, but she was also passionate about her career, outspoken in her opinions, and more than a little bawdy with her language. A creature of habit and discipline, Dr. Dearing pulled into her Lee Hall parking space at seven o’clock every morning, at which point she would step out of her car with a khaki-colored raincoat draped around her shoulders and a white thermal coffee carafe in her hands. She’d drink coffee in any form she could find it, but she was partial to Maxwell House French Roast with so much Cremora that the liquid in her Bear Bryant coffee mug resembled melted van
illa ice cream more than anything else. Throughout the day she’d pour cup after cup into that beloved mug, and between the coffee and the aforementioned cigarettes, she pretty much buzzed her way through whatever she needed to accomplish on a given day.
My pre- and post-class visits with Dr. Dearing, which started when I was a junior in her Advanced Composition class and continued through grad school, were often the highlight of my day, and I always walked away from her office with a little more knowledge than when I’d arrived. Dr. Dearing was full of anecdotes and theories and advice, and even though it has been almost twenty years since I last visited her office, I still remember the oddest assortment of her nuggets-o-wisdom:
Girls either love horses or they don’t. There’s no in-between.
Only children should wear red shoes.
A beef bouillon cube is the key to a really good Bloody Mary.
Rook is a delightful game.
Non sequitur literally means “does not follow.”
Punctuation always goes inside quotation marks. ALWAYS, ALWAYS, ALWAYS.
Respond to your students’ papers as a reader. If a student writes an ill-constructed sentence about when her dog died, don’t just mark “COMMA SPLICE” in red ink in the margin. Tell her that you’re so sorry about the dog. The comma splice can wait.
If someone repeatedly travels to Amsterdam on vacation, that person is probably not going to visit the landmarks and cruise the Rhine.
There is no finer dessert than the black-bottom pie at Weidmann’s in Meridian, Mississippi.
If you want to keep your mind sharp, work crossword puzzles and play bridge.
Dr. Dearing consistently cracked me up; I’d never known anyone quite like her. But she also challenged me as a writer, and when she supervised my teaching assistantship in the English department while I was in grad school, she never hesitated to call me out and provide a much-needed come-to-Jesus moment when it was necessary.
It was necessary more often than I might care to admit.
Dr. Dearing did something else, too, though I don’t know if she even realized it or gave it a second thought. She jumped all-in with her students, and even when she was so frustrated with them (or me) that she could have run screaming down the center of Drill Field with a cowbell in each hand, she never stopped cheering us on. She fought for us, she inspired us, and she really did love us to pieces.
One fall morning of my first year of grad school, I stopped by Dr. Dearing’s office after I finished class. When I didn’t immediately see her sitting behind her desk in her ancient roller chair (with tweed upholstery, no less), my first impulse was to leave. But since the door was open, the computer was on, and her beloved raincoat was hanging on the coat tree in the corner, I decided she must have walked down the hall for a few minutes. No harm in waiting, I figured.
I took a seat in one of the green vinyl chairs that always seemed to be occupied by one of Dr. Dearing’s colleagues or a former student or a neighbor who was on campus and dropped by with a sack of fresh tomatoes (in Dr. Dearing’s estimation, tomato sandwiches were a Southern art form, and she liked hers on white bread with mayonnaise, a touch of Durkee’s, a smidge of salt, plus enough black pepper to season a porterhouse steak), and after I looked out of one of her windows to see if anyone I knew was walking across Drill Field, I turned my attention to the wall next to her desk.
At first glance, everything appeared to be standard professorial fare: a few plaques scattered here and there, some yellowed news clippings tacked to a bulletin board, a listing of English department phone numbers taped above her phone. But there were also mementos that spoke to who she was away from work: a snapshot of her beloved granddaughter on horseback, a group picture with dear friends, a comic strip that made her laugh every time she referenced it. I’m not really sure how to explain it, but there was an air of quiet achievement in that office. Dr. Dearing loved her family well, and she’d blazed a few trails in her career, but she hadn’t sacrificed one on the altar of the other.
After several minutes I decided I’d just swing by again the next day, and I was about to grab my purse when a large white box caught my eye. It was about ten inches wide and twelve inches long, but please don’t quote me on that because I believe I’ve already established myself as an unreliable source when it comes to numbers. I wondered what might be inside, and I quickly made a mental list of guesses.
Cookies?
A sweater?
Paperbacks?
Several cartons of Parliament Lights?
My money was on that last guess.
I knew full well that the contents of the box were none of my business. But I was twenty-two and stinkin’ curious and also stupid. So I looked around to make sure no one was watching, and oh, Lord, forgive me, I opened that box.
I couldn’t believe what I saw.
Because I instantly knew that it was a manuscript for a book.
There was a title page with an illustration and a byline on top of hundreds of sheets of white paper. I quickly thumbed through the stack of paper and saw double-spaced line after double-spaced line. Every sheet was full of her words, and while conscience stopped me short of skimming the content, that title page told me everything I needed to know: Dr. Dearing had written a memoir.
It didn’t matter one iota to me whether the book had been published. She’d written it. She’d finished a manuscript. And I thought that was extraordinary.
I’d never wanted to read something so badly in my life, but as fresh conviction washed over me, I gently put the top back on the box that was never mine to open in the first place. I picked up my purse and my backpack, took one last look at that white box, and left Dr. Dearing’s office.
Chalk it up to guilt, cowardice, or a combination of the two, but I never told her what I’d done or what I’d seen. Granted, she probably would have gotten a huge charge out of the whole thing and teased me mercilessly for the better part of a year, but I felt like I’d trespassed over a boundary that should have protected a sacred part of her life and her heart. If she’d wanted me to know, she would have told me.
In my eyes, that manuscript catapulted Dr. Dearing to an even higher level of respect. The fact that she’d never mentioned it almost made me love her more.
So from that moment on, one aspect of my career path was settled: when it came to teaching and writing, I wanted to be just like Dr. Dearing.
Well, except that as a lifelong Mississippi State fan, I wanted nothing to do with a Bear Bryant coffee mug.
That probably goes without saying.
By the winter of the next year, most of my close friends were married and doing very grown-up things like buying houses or taking trips to the beach without their parents. I, however, was as single as ever, and I was hyperaware that my days as a student were coming to a close. As a result, I knew I needed to find a job that paid real-live money—preferably something where I could earn more than the whopping $625 a month that I was raking in as a teaching assistant. To make matters worse, I was so burned out with school that I was behind in all of my classes and more committed to repeated viewings of Melrose Place than ever. Plus, that core group of friends that had surrounded and sustained me during college was scattered all over the state, and I missed the built-in accountability of their day-to-day presence like crazy.
There were people around me, of course. My childhood friend Kimberly lived across the hall from me, and our friend Gena lived in the building right next to us, but since they were both really dedicated students with serious boyfriends, they didn’t have a whole lot of free time to hang out in my apartment and talk about the latest episode of Seinfeld. I very much enjoyed doing stuff with my friends Tracie and Rob, who were also grad students in the English department, but since they were, you know, married to each other, we’d mostly just go to lunch or supper and then hang out while we graded freshman composition essays that seemed to multiply in our backpacks.
So given all of that, I was alone a lot. A LOT. There was n
o roommate, no college friends nearby, no boyfriend. And while I have always been independent and enjoyed being by myself to some degree, I kind of took things to another level in grad school in terms of teetering on the edge of isolation.
Which reminds me.
One of the tricky parts of flirting with full-blown isolation is that it can be oddly enjoyable. Sure, it’s sort of depressing, but it’s also a great big Festival-o-Self. Like anything else, that festival gets old after a while, but you don’t worry about that part so much when you’re deeply involved in a two-day Cheers marathon with well-stocked supplies of chips, chocolate, Diet Coke, and Marlboro Lights.
Yes. You read that correctly. Because I think any professional counselor would tell you that if you’re feeling sort of alone in the world, a surefire remedy is to FIRE UP SOME CIGARETTES. And here’s the irony: I was terrible at smoking, yet I persisted with it for several months—almost as if I wanted to get to the point where someone rewarded me with a certificate of smoker achievement or something. I was such a smoker poser, though; I never really understood what was supposed to be enjoyable about it, and while I fancied myself a brooding loner, the fact of the matter was that I continued to wear oversize bows in my hair along with matching polka-dot sweater sets.
I’m not trying to perpetuate stereotypes, by the way. I’m just pointing out that my ongoing identity crisis manifested itself in some interesting ways.
And if my wannabe smoker status wasn’t enough, I also made the rash (and some might say questionable) decision to get a cat. I KNOW. But a friend of Dr. Dearing’s was moving to a place that wouldn’t allow pets, and after she talked me into coming by and just “meeting” the cat, I agreed to take the cat home with me. It all happened over the course of about ten very impulsive minutes, and as I fought to hold on to my steering wheel while I drove down University Drive accompanied by an animal who, judging by her incessant hissing, couldn’t have been less delighted about riding in a car, I knew that I’d made a terrible mistake.
Home Is Where My People Are: The Roads That Lead Us to Where We Belong Page 13