I didn’t have my own hat-in-the-sky moment until about eighteen years later. And naturally I didn’t literally throw my hat in the air because, as best as I remember, I didn’t really own any hats until I turned thirty-five and started to see the sun as my face’s sworn enemy. However, I very much had a figurative hat-in-the-sky moment not too long after I turned twenty-five.
Perhaps this is a good time for me to tell you about that.
I’d applied for a job at Elliston High School—right outside of Jackson, Mississippi—because I very much wanted to live closer to the friends who knew me best. By then I’d spent almost two years teaching Spanish in Myrtlewood, and I was beyond ready to dig into some literature. So, with my principal Mr. Pearson’s blessing, I took a personal day to interview at Elliston, where I was hoping to get a job.
(For some reason it’s important to me to tell you that I wore a matching lightweight-sweater outfit to my interview—as in camisole sweater, cardigan sweater, and SWEATER PANTS.)
(That’s right. I said SWEATER PANTS.)
(Why’d you hate me, nineties?)
I was scared out of my mind before that interview started—probably because I knew I looked ridiculous in that head-to-toe, coral-colored sweater ensemble—but for the first fifteen minutes, it was mostly an easygoing discussion with the principal, Mr. Dumas. Eventually, though, we started to talk about what I might be teaching if he hired me.
I felt free to chime in with my thoughts.
“You know”—I paused here for a second to establish some really rock-solid eye contact so he’d know how earnest and sincere I was—“I’ve really tried to analyze what grade I’d like to teach, and it seems to me that ninth or tenth would be better. I mean, I could be comfortable with eleventh or twelfth graders, but I really like the reading curriculum for the freshmen and sophomores.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Mr. Dumas replied.
“Plus,” I continued, “since next year will only be my third year in a high school classroom, I’d probably be more comfortable with the younger kids—but I have taught the older kids in Myrtlewood, so I guess I’d be okay with them, too. I just like the idea of sort of getting in on the ground level and helping those ninth graders learn how to write an essay, you know?”
“Sure,” he said.
Then I leaned forward in my chair and smiled way too big while I waited for him to tell me what grade I was going to be teaching.
Finally he broke the silence. “Well, Sophie, here’s the thing.”
“Yes, sir?”
I had a feeling that “the thing” and I weren’t going to be BFFs anytime soon.
“I just don’t think I’m going to have any openings in English this year.”
“Sir?”
I knew exactly what he’d said, of course—but I needed him to repeat it one more time so that maybe I could gather my thoughts and form a coherent sentence.
“I just don’t think—well, actually I know—that I’m not going to have a place for you in English.”
By this point I was silently begging myself not to cry. I was supposed to be a professional, I was supposed to be a grown-up, and I was not supposed to break down in front of a man who I had known for only a little over a half hour.
“Oh. Okay.” I did my best not to look crestfallen—and tried to figure out what to say next. Finally I decided to go with whatever I thought Mama would have said in that moment, because I knew that Mama would have said something kind.
“Well,” I began, “I sure do appreciate your meeting with me today, and who knows? Maybe something will work out down the road!”
My words may have technically been kind, but they sounded an awful lot like disappointment.
I started to reach for the folder I’d carried into the interview because, well, carrying a folder into an interview is just one of those things we all do, I guess in the event that someone hands us some important papers. Surprisingly, though, Mr. Dumas interrupted my attempt to make a gracious exit.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” he said. “I haven’t been very clear. We’ll have a position for you next year. Just not in English. But I’m almost certain that there’s a spot for you.”
A wave of unbelief passed over me—because surely not. Surely not.
SURELY. DANG. NOT.
And then, in the most matter-of-fact way, he said it. “We have an opening for a Spanish I teacher.”
And that’s pretty much the moment when I wanted to set my hair on fire.
Thankfully, though, I recovered enough to murmur and nod my way through the rest of our conversation. By the time I left Mr. Dumas’s office, I’d agreed to accept the Spanish position at Elliston High—pending the superintendent’s approval. Sure, I was slightly bummed about teaching Spanish again, but I was elated by the prospect of moving to Jackson, which felt like the first truly independent decision I’d ever made.
I walked slowly out to the parking lot, and before I opened my car door, I stopped to look around and take in what would more than likely be the backdrop for the next phase of my life. I felt like a combination of Melanie Griffith at the end of Working Girl, Lily Tomlin at the end of 9 to 5—and our girl MTM at the end of her opening credits. Granted, all the details of my new job weren’t set in stone, but the strong possibility of it felt like a major step forward.
It was my personal hat-in-the-sky moment.
Or sombrero, as it were.
Every once in a while I wish I’d kept a list of the good decisions and the bad decisions for each year of my life. It’s not because I’d like to pat myself on the back for all the good ones and slip into some quality self-loathing over all the bad ones; it’s because I think that, for the most part, the things that I thought were such a big deal would make me laugh.
For example, if I had chronicled some of the more trivial bad decisions of, oh, 1990, the list would have looked a little something like this:
Letting my hair grow out to one length (it looked like Andre’s on The Real World: New York, only Andre looked way better with a ponytail than I did)
Engaging in a short-lived flirtation with whiskey (some lessons you can only learn the hard way, I reckon)
Developing to a strong allegiance to the musical stylings of Paula Abdul
Participating in an ill-advised three-day workout kick that left me unable to bend my knees
Wearing a blue-velvet dress with shoulder pads so huge that my date to a fancy dance actually introduced me to people by saying, “This is my date, Sophie—and these are her sleeves.”
On the contrary, if I’d made a list of my good decisions in, say, 1995, the list would have been short and to the point:
Overcoming an obsession with honeydew melon candles that can only be described as a stronghold
Finally balancing my checking account, thanks to some loving intervention
Moving to Jackson
Moving to Jackson
Moving to Jackson
Not that moving to Jackson was a big deal or anything.
And it wasn’t that Myrtlewood had been bad. The people there were great, and in the grand scheme of my life, I learned more about myself in those two years than any two years since. Jackson, though, meant that I was once again in the same town as my childhood friend Kim, along with my college friends Marion and Tracey. We were all in different phases of life by then—Marion and Tracey were mamas, Kim was married, and I was single—but it didn’t matter. It was comforting just to know they lived in the generalish vicinity of my little one-bedroom apartment that was right across the street from the mall.
(I know. I lived right across the street from a mall.)
(It was like all my childhood dreams had come true.)
It was sort of a strange and unexpected development, but from the moment I unpacked my first moving box in Jackson, I was determined to be a more responsible person. The changes didn’t happen right away, but gradually I incorporated a pretty good measure of consistency into my life. I stuck to a budget, I exercised
, I decorated my apartment, I worked hard at my job, and I finished my teaching certification in English and Spanish, because GET A CLUE, EUNICE—THE SPANISH SEEMS TO BE A PATTERN. For the first time I had a genuine awareness that I was making a life for myself, and I savored it. I really did.
The best part was how quickly I felt a sense of community with the people around me. My coworkers, who included Kimberly, were a social bunch, and from my very first day at Elliston High they welcomed me into the fold. They included me in their weekday lunches, their Thursday night dinners, and their just-because get-togethers. It was a group full of storytellers, and I’d spend most of every outing listening as if my life depended on it and laughing so hard I might as well have done a thirty-minute ab workout.
I was only about 120 miles from my grad school apartment in Starkville, but I might as well have been a world away.
In the South there are three cornerstones of society that most people hold in high regard: family, church, and high school football. College football is a big deal too, of course, but those other three things bind communities together. Elliston, Mississippi, was no exception.
At the time, Elliston High School was one of the biggest high schools in Mississippi, and while sports in general were a really big deal, football was the biggest deal of all. The head coach was a man named Ben Johnston, and there was no question that he ruled the athletics roost in Elliston. A lifelong resident of Mississippi, he knew or knew of just about everybody in the state’s high school football circles, and when he wasn’t at school, he was usually holding court at a Rotary Club luncheon or a booster club meeting. Like many Southern coaches, he was gruff voiced from years of yelling at practice, stiff kneed from decades of running drills, and red faced from too much sun (and too little blood pressure medication).
He also happened to be hilarious.
On Thursday nights during football season, a group of Elliston teachers faithfully met for supper and no small degree of storytelling at the Iron Horse Grill in downtown Jackson. I’m not sure when the tradition started, but Kim insisted that I go with her and her husband, Jody, on the Thursday before my first-ever EHS football game. There were enough of us to take up a gigantic booth as well as four or five tables, and what I remember more than anything else was that these people were just endlessly entertained by one another.
On the surface they didn’t seem to have much in common other than their Mississippi residency and the place of their employment, but when I dug a little deeper, I found some kindred spirits. No topic was off limits, so on any given night the conversation would run the gamut from peach cobbler to politics to the problems with standardized testing. For the most part, my coworkers were people of deep faith and strong personal conviction, and I loved watching how seamlessly they moved from work life to personal life to work life and back again. There was no separation between the two—no personality that they kept tucked away for one or the other, and the wholeness of their lives was something I very much needed to see.
It was probably the first time in my life when I’d been mindful about looking for it.
I don’t know. I guess I was finally at a point when I relished the opportunity to soak up some wisdom, so those sweet people from Elliston High School were one of the Lord’s many gifts during my Jackson years.
No matter where we were or what we did, though, our unofficial host and master of ceremonies was Coach Johnston, whose slightly more rebellious personality came alive in a big group. He was loud, charming, and just a little bit salty, and I don’t think he ever met a crowd he didn’t like. Since Kim and I were almost always the youngest two faculty members at any social gathering, most of Coach Johnston’s stories were new to us, so we tended to sit at or near his table while he held court. Listening to him was like being in the front row of a Southern Gothic Festival, what with his tales of toothless fishermen, Mississippi Delta juke joints, and 1960s moonshine runs that always seemed to begin or end on gravel roads that ran alongside cotton fields.
And listen—that was just the first fifteen minutes of any given Thursday night. That was the warm-up. By the time we’d leave the Iron Horse two or three hours later, Kim and I would have heard so many stories that we both could have sworn we’d been in the presence of one of Flannery O’Connor’s long-lost sons.
(I am certainly not implying that Flannery O’Connor actually had any long-lost sons.)
(I would be mortified if I started some sort of literary scandal.)
One Thursday night before play-offs—sometime in November, I think—Kim and I were walking to her car after supper at the Iron Horse when we heard Coach Johnston’s voice behind us:
“Hey! Y’all hold up! I just got off the phone with Gail.”
Gail was Coach Johnston’s wife of almost twenty-five years, and I knew from the first time I met her that the Lord had given her extra portions of patience, calm, and understanding. He seems to do that with coaches’ wives, especially in the South.
Kim and I stopped just as we were opening our car doors and waited for Coach to catch up to us.
“So, I just got off the phone with Gail, and I was telling her that I won’t sleep a wink tonight. I’m just nervous. I need to ride around. Y’all tired? Y’all want to go?”
Kim and I looked at each other, both of us wondering what to do. We didn’t exactly have a whole lot going on other than wanting to get home to watch TV, but I think we both wondered if going riding around with Coach Johnston was within the bounds of propriety. I mean, he was very much like an older brother to us, and we felt totally safe with him, but he was married, after all, and so was Kim, and . . .
He must have read our minds, because he looked at Kim, then at me, and then back at Kim, and he started to laugh. “Are y’all worried about Gail? Lord, have mercy. She ain’t gonna care! I’m old enough to be y’all’s daddy. Now come on, you two—let’s go hit the roads of Elliston County.”
And then he grinned real big.
Kim and I agreed to go—but not until we got the go-ahead from her husband. The three of us piled into Coach’s Jeep, and after he fired up a cigar, rolled down his window, and opened up his sunroof, he weaved through the streets of downtown Jackson until we reached the on-ramp to I-55. Coach turned north, drove five or six miles, then exited on a road that could have taken us all the way to Yazoo City if we’d had a mind to go.
I don’t remember what we talked about, what music we listened to, or how long we were in that car. But I will never forget how that stretch of road spoke to me; it wound around and looped and curved in the direction of nowhere in particular, and then all of a sudden it was like the whole world opened up—gorgeous, rolling hills on each side of us, wide-open Mississippi sky up above.
I didn’t have the foggiest idea how we’d gotten there.
But I was pretty certain that it was where I belonged.
And I couldn’t imagine why I’d ever want to leave.
My first year in Jackson flew by, and if there’s a big, overarching theme to those twelve months, it’s this: it was the happiest, most uncomplicated time.
So naturally that’s when David came back into the picture.
Stands to reason, right?
And when he came back into the picture, he fully intended to stay there.
Granted, our first attempt at dating was kind of a mess. But the second time around? It was just easy. We had a long talk beforehand, and David told me very clearly that, as far as he was concerned, that was it. The intention was not to hang out on weekends and take some road trips and see where everything led. The intention was that, barring something completely unexpected, we would get married.
Well. All righty then. And also: FINE BY ME.
We were both twenty-six—plenty old enough to know that we loved each other and missed each other in the least dramatic way possible. By that point I’d learned that my heart could certainly go on without him (thank you, Celine Dion, for expressing that thought through song), but I also knew that my heart was
never more at home than when we were together. Dating seemed like a really good plan.
Six months later he proposed, and my reaction wasn’t anything like I thought it would be. I didn’t feel faint. I didn’t feel like some giddy princess who had finally found her prince. I did, however, feel deeply, profoundly honored. That was the sweetest surprise.
And five months after that—a week after I wrapped up my second year in the town that I’d never wanted to leave—we said our vows at the front of the church where we’d laughed pretty much nonstop throughout elementary, junior high, and high school.
We’d come a long way since then.
I wasn’t even wearing high-top Reeboks anymore.
Our wedding reception was at the home of some family friends, and since all the moisture in the entire world had collected over Myrtlewood early that morning and poured from the clouds as if God Himself were dumping buckets of water over central Mississippi, the post-wedding festivities turned out to be more of an indoor affair than an outdoor one. David and I hadn’t planned on having a receiving line or anything like that, but it was so crowded inside that we ended up standing in a little parlor so we could talk to people and stay out of the fray a little bit. Within just a few minutes, though, a line started to form, and for the next hour and a half, we hugged what seemed like everyone we’d ever known.
It may have been my favorite part of the whole day. I’m not one to be overly sentimental, but let’s face it: people are awesome.
We were getting close to the last person when I saw Coach Johnston at the back of the line. Naturally we’d invited him to the wedding—he’d been a big part of my life in Jackson, and heaven knows he’d kept me entertained for two football seasons’ worth of Thursday nights—but it never dawned on me that he would drive over for the ceremony, much less stay for the reception.
It seems to me that every wedding has an emotional tipping point—a particular moment when, for whatever reason, all the big feelings just spill over and pour out. And I am here to tell you that when I caught a glimpse of Coach Ben Johnston as he poked his head around the corner of that little parlor where David and I were standing, that was it for me. I started to cry so hard I wondered if I’d ever stop. I finally had to put my head in my hands and surrender to full-on blubbering mode. David, who was as taken aback by my reaction as I was, wrapped his arm around my shoulders and asked me to tell him what was wrong.
Home Is Where My People Are: The Roads That Lead Us to Where We Belong Page 16