First Year Out

"August arrives, hot and breathless and full of all the things you held on to too tightly. and all the places that defined summer start to melt together, the sand that got stuck in your hair, and the bug bites you picked at too much, and the taste of every sunset that slipped through the open car window. somehow each summer is its own lifetime, we love and eat; and the sun will spin around us without fail." 

I have no idea who wrote that quote. I've searched, and I just keep coming up with anonymous. So, dear anonymous (who, according to Virginia Woolf, was a woman) thanks for that. 

Each summer has always felt like it's own lifetime. I have always defined my life in summers - "what year was that? Oh that was the summer I went to nerd camp/theater camp/New York social justice program/Oxford film program/DC internship/was a camp counselor/studied abroad".  During high school, anything exciting that ever happened to me happened in summer, usually at one of the myriad of programs I went to. Summer meant travel and learning and adventure and a summer crush. The end of summer left me nostalgic and a little bit heartbroken for the new friends I left behind.  In college, summer was a welcome respite, but I wasn't quite so sad when it ended - leaving behind huts in the woods for my air-conditioned university apartment wasn't the most difficult transition after months of bug bites, porta-potties and screaming children.  

August now doesn't mark just the end of summer, it marks the end of the craziest year of my life.  I spent this year in the rolling hills of the country of Georgia in Eastern Europe, on the beaches of the Dominican Republic, in the heat of Texas and sleeping it all off in my home state of Georgia. In one year I have been to five different countries (six, if you count Texas...). I have ridden buses and boats and airplanes and marshutkas and carritos and donkey carts.  I have jumped into cold mountain pools and been carried across flooded mountain roads. I have fallen in and out of love. I have slept in terrible hostel beds and taken bucket showers and used outhouses and made friends with lizards and spiders and Georgian grandmothers who hit me with their canes. I have sang '90s karaoke at a bar filled with smoke and cowboy hats and Texas two-stepping.  I have walked through blizzards, burned myself on motorcycles, and prayed in tiny mountain chapels, large city mosques, and dangerously foggy roads. I have felt rich and luxurious as I ate delicious meals in Greece, and hungry and poor as I found yet another can of beans full of maggots in the Dominican. 

I have been lazy and bitter and discouraged and scared. At times I have not acted, not connected, not reached out.  I've been humbled and I've been humiliated. I've been blissfully happy. I have learned the art of silence. I have relearned the art of dancing with new friends. I have counted people as friends, real friends, when all we could use was my few words of Georgian or Haitian Creole, dancing feet and smiles.  I have been very sick and maybe near death. I have had family members pass away. I have marveled in the rain and in the sunset and at the ocean and the mountains and at the grape harvest and at my students all full of the glory and wonder of the Creator.  And I have wondered, while holding a skinny, bruised child, at the plans of the Creator.  

I have been humbled by the kindness of strangers and felt unworthy and it was true and right to know I was unworthy and to accept the kindness anyway. I have been very angry. And it was sometimes pride and cultural differences, and it was sometimes valid, raw anger.

I have had more awkward moments then should be allowed in anyone's lifetime. 

This was my first year out - outside of an institution, outside of the protection of family or school system or university. And what a year it was. 

There is an image in my mind, more like a five second movie clip, of a little boy in the Dominican, my neighbor, four years old, wearing nothing but dirty yellow undies, running down the street with his arms spread like wings in the sunshine, laughing his head off.  And for some reason when I try to package my past year this clip always comes to mind.

 I have not done anything terribly different (a lot of new graduates teach abroad) and I have not done anything terribly conventional. But somehow I know, after all the great times and the hard times and the awkward times, that I did what I was meant to do. There were things I needed to learn and to see and to live. 

And so August arrives. And so August goes, and in My Personal Calender it is the start of another year. 

Sherman

A very unscientific semi-anthropological sort of study of Sherman, Texas

Disclaimer: 'tis only a silly little blog post on my opinions of a very cursory view of one small town. The people all seemed lovely, it just wasn't my cup of tea. 

I spent two months working in Sherman, Texas. My job was fun and challenging and I loved it. For Sherman, however, I had a totally unfounded and irrational hatred mixed with intense interest, which has now faded into a dim sort of nostalgia. Somewhat like my irrational hatred for fig newtons or using the descriptor "sweet" on a person. Except that neither of these is nostalgic. Don't give me fig newtons or call me sweet.

Small towns and the people who live in them have always interested me in a passing way. As in, "I am going to only pass through because there is nothing here but I am very interested to know why you live here and what you do with your time." As an anthropologist, I'm always wanting to know why people do what they do. Why do people live in small towns and never leave? Why do small towns appear to be a breeding ground for gossip and scandal? I have two great friends, one from a small town in South Dakota and another from one in Virginia and I would grill them to no end about what growing up in their respective tiny towns was like. Their stories of affairs and family legacies and having the whole town watching how you did on the basketball court seemed the stuff of cheesy beach reads or Disney channel original movies.

Now, technically, I grew up in a small town. However, my small town was being steadily engulfed by the slow flood that is metro Atlanta. It was an easy jaunt into the city for shows, museums and baseball games, there were tons of theaters, parks and restaurants around, and it really came down to being able to choose exactly how small town you wanted to be. Want to just hang out with high school or church friends and never leave a 10 mile radius? Go ahead. Want to go into the city every weekend and bop around the mountains other days? You can do that too. I know affairs and gossip etc etc happened where I grew up, just as it did in my friend's small towns, but you didn't have to hear about it if you didn't want to.

I thought I liked small towns. I spent wonderful summer days in a small town in the mountains with my grandmother and it seemed like a great place to grow up. I decided to go to college in a small town. It was the most boring year of my life. Apparently, I was much more a suburbanite/city girl than a small towner. I moved to DC as soon as I could and never looked back.

I don't think small towns are evil. I just don't get them. I don't understand their ways. Like how I don't understand the pull of Mint Chocolate Chip Ice Cream. But I would like to. So Sherman seemed like an exciting case study.

Here is what I learned about Sherman from my very unscientific study of wandering around during my one day off a week and chatting with locals:
1.  Sherman is supposedly the meth capital of Texas. I can neither confirm nor deny this and neither can Google it seems.
2. Sherman has two operating bars. One is connected to a bowling alley.
3. In Sherman, chivalry isn't dead. Or, looking at it another way, sexism isn't. Either way you dice it, I got a lot of free drinks.
4. There are some great thrift stores in Sherman. Way more than seems necessary in fact.
5. People are curious and friendly and also appear very open and interested in different people. (I HATE the stereotyping of the south, and let me just say this - the karaoke bar I frequented had a very diverse clientele and everyone was mingling and friendly to each other. Of course, this doesn't prove much beyond that this one bar attracted an awesome crowd, but I had to throw it out there.)
6. Old ladies are pretty awesome everywhere, including in Sherman.

I constantly had to stop myself from walking up to young-ish people in the bars and asking "what do you DO in Sherman?" What we did in Sherman was go to a karaoke bar, sing fun tunes, and sometimes get into arm-wrestling matches. I kid you not, some of the males on staff were arm wrestling and a local came up to challenge them. He set down his beer, but not his cigarette which he continued to smoke, and defeated one of our guys in the midst of the smokey, cowboy-hat filled room. I felt like we were in an old movie.  But this outing was something that only happened maybe four times, when groups of us had time off. Otherwise I played tennis and went to Walmart.

 I got a lot of questions when I would thrift shop with friends. "Y'all must not be from the South!" We were asked once. But we all were - Georgia, Texas, South Carolina. What the comment should have been was, "Y'all must not be from a small town in the South." All of us non-Shermanites looked at and spoke of Shermanites with awe. What mysterious people they seemed, as I'm sure we seemed to them. Why did they approach us in Walmart and talk for five minutes without breathing? Why did a woman named Sunshine offer to make us necklaces (which was very kind of her)? What was a bearcat and why were they all so excited about it? And the kicker, what did they do with their time?

I did not like Sherman, though, again, my dislike was mostly unfounded. I do not dislike the South, or Texas (I love the South- and I would love to return and visit San Antonio and Austin and some national parks!). In fact, I think I could really love Texas - the glimpses I saw of it in the people and the smoky karaoke and the long sunflower fields told me there was definitely something more to discover.

Someday, I think I might live in a small town. Probably in the Appalachians. Maybe with a family. Maybe with cats and half-written novels. Maybe then I will un-puzzle the puzzle that is small towns to me.

With all my forays into Sherman - bars, tennis courts, doctor's offices, shopping centers, a church and a tattoo parlor, I still never felt like I got to the heart of the place. And I didn't, of course. Maybe if I lived there with family and friends and bartenders that I knew and a weekly tennis team and church ladies that made great casseroles then I would love it. But probably not, because that's not who I am. It's who other people are though, and it's those other people, the Shermanites of the world, who I am interested in.

If any Shermanites, or small town lovers, are reading this, tell me about yourself and your town. I'd love to hear.