Home Is Where My People Are: The Roads That Lead Us to Where We Belong (17 page)

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 no 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.

So I did what most twenty-three-year-olds would do under similar circumstances.

I took the cat home and named her Prissy.

I don’t even know what else to add to this story.

I’m only speaking from personal experience, of course, but when you’re twenty-three and you have very few friends living in your town and you pretend to be a smoker and you own a cat, you might be tempted to wonder when the fun, grown-up part of your life is going to get cranked up and start moving forward. In my case, I alternated between telling myself I was perfectly content and then putting my hope in all sorts of ridiculously unrealistic scenarios, like how maybe that boy I had a crush on in high school would show up on my doorstep and declare his undying love, or maybe I’d be walking to class, lock eyes with someone who looked like Jake in
Sixteen Candles
(Jake is the pretend-boyfriend gold standard for Generation X girls), and get totally swept up in a whirlwind courtship, or maybe I’d tour the
Southern Living
offices in Birmingham, strike up a conversation with an editor, win her over with witty pop-culture references, and land myself a full-time internship where I’d get to type all manner of documents and sample food from the test kitchens ALL DAY LONG.

The occasional bout of desperation doesn’t really breed realism, now does it?

My parents never confronted me about my general state of restlessness, and even now I’m curious if they knew what was going on with me during
my early twenties
 
—if they could see how I was struggling to figure out who I was and what I believed. But I do know this: smack-dab in the middle of the literal winter of my discontentedishness (totally a word)
 
—and probably in the middle of watching
Real World: New York
when I should have been grading essays
 
—Daddy called and said that he and Mama wanted to send me to a weekend retreat that had meant a great deal to them when they’d attended several years earlier. I agreed to go because I didn’t want to disappoint them, but in the back of my mind I wondered what in the world I was going to do for a whole weekend at a campground outside of Jackson, Mississippi, where I would probably be the youngest person by a mile, people would talk about Jesus nonstop, and I wouldn’t be able to smoke like a sorority girl (quick inhale, exasperated exhale, then repeat).

I mean, give me a little credit. Because despite all of my issues, I still had the good sense to know that it was tacky to smoke at a church camp.

And for the record, I’m certain that there have been some lovely, God-fearing smokers at church camps throughout the years. I am just trying to communicate my twenty-three-year-old thought processes, flawed though they may have been.

I don’t remember many specifics from that weekend at Camp Garaywa, but I do remember my Big Takeaways:

• I had a lot to learn about living a life of faith.
  
• I had a lot to learn about the Bible.
  
• I had a lot to learn about God’s character.
  

BUT.

• I knew that I
  wanted
  to learn.
  
• And I knew that I loved Him. Still.
  

This felt like significant progress.

It’s interesting in retrospect because it was so unexpected, but Camp Garaywa was the first thing that had ever made me ready to leave Starkville. In fact, I was so camped out on the mountaintop experience of Jesus! and love! and joy! that I actually had a hard time going back to Starkville when the retreat was over. Instead I drove to Mama and Daddy’s house, called Dr. Dearing, and told her I wasn’t going to be able to make it to
Tuesday’s classes. I finally drove back to Starkville that Wednesday, kicking and screaming my way down a significant stretch of Highway 45.

I’m pretty sure I must have missed the memo about doing my work as unto the Lord.

And clearly, Jesus and I had a few more kinks to work out in terms of my views on personal responsibility.

Considering how I had struggled with feeling like I was stuck in the in-between while everyone was moving on with their lives, I was almost relieved when I left Camp Garaywa knowing that it was time for
me
to move on too. I still needed a couple of classes to complete my master’s, and there was an unfinished paper hanging over my head, but I wanted to find a job and move into the next phase of my life. On one hand, I knew that grad school had been worth it because it had made me a better writer, but on the other hand, grad school had been so challenging emotionally and spiritually that I couldn’t wait to get the heck out of Dodge.

Or Starkville, as it were.

Unfortunately, I didn’t have the foggiest idea where to go.