Cucalorus Film Festival

Hey, Friends & Fans.

I had the good fortune to publish another article on Arts in a Changing America.  This one is about the Cucalorus Film Festival and why everyone should go.  Here it is!

Thanks for reading.

Cheers,
Shannon

Carapace Story: Taboo

Hey, Red Crickette Friends & Fans!

Just archiving the audio of a recent story I told at Carapace, October 2012, Manuel's.  Click here to listen.

Cheers,
Shannon

Native

I wrote this piece for a competition called Write Club - Atlanta I was in last week.  I lost.  But it was a good exercise.  I was up against a writer who assigned the theme "Transplant."  Just using this space to archive.

________________________

She sat in the pale afternoon sunlight, pushing the bruised skin in the crook of her elbow, watching as it slowly changed colors after pulling her finger away.  The wind made it seem colder than it should be for a Saturday this early in autumn. Push on the bruise, feel the pleasing, slightly painful feeling, pull away, watch the yellow, green, blue, purple Technicolor show.

After a while she looked up and realized that the junkyard owner was watching her over her boyfriend, Mark’s, shoulder as they talked.  She suddenly felt very self-conscious and pulled her shirtsleeve back down.  She wondered if he thought she was a drug addict and the bruise was a track mark.  Or if her boyfriend had perhaps grabbed her a little too hard.

She looked away, over to the trees on the skyline, watching the leaves rustle in the wind.  A Japanese maple, looking quite out of place in this part of the country, shivered on the corner of the property, near the junkyard owner’s trailer.

A little girl, around 8, based on her size and sass, was playing with a puppy. The junkyard owner’s granddaughter, based on her incessant shouts to “Pappaw.”

The two men walked around to the other side of a rusted out truck. The wind blew up another cool gust, and she decided to head back to the car for shelter.

She and Mark hadn’t been seeing each other long.  Just about seven months, but she was about the most content she’d ever been in her life, given that her life, for the most part, had been anything but contented.

Her father had been a traveling salesman and itinerant preacher, which is really just a traveling salesman of a different sort. Until she was 12, they’d lived their lives on the road, chasing good sales and the Devil, or at least the next church fellowship hall run by fine Christian women who knew how to cook fried chicken.

That all ended when her father was discovered with his throat cut in an airport hotel in Knoxville. Because it was the 70s, and things being what they were, it took them a few days to find her. The police said probably a hooker was involved, but apparently there were other things about the state of the crime scene that were never discussed with her. They weren’t from around there anyway.

She was placed in foster care.  She didn’t like to think about that time, but the unpleasantness lasted for about three or four years.  Until they found her grandmother, her mother’s mother, a woman she’d only met once, and was a little afraid of because she’d thrown up chocolate milk on the good sofa.

They spent the first bit of time in a tenuous dance, the wary, untrusting teenager and the elderly woman whose daughter had hated her so much she had left home at 16 and never been in touch again. Next to this time now, with Mark, the five seasons she spent with her grandmother were the happiest.  She grew to know the power of staying in one place.  Her grandmother’s house was her home; the yard was her yard.  She didn’t have to keep memorizing where the bathroom was, mapping out escape routes.  She pretended she’d always lived there.  

One day, she came home from school to find her grandmother in her rocking chair, Bible open in lap, glasses slightly askew.  She went to her room, packed a suitcase, scooped up the keys to her grandmother’s 1978 Granada, took $250 from what her grandmother called the “heart fund”, and hit the road.  She stopped at a payphone at the edge of town to call the neighbor, told him her grandmother was dead.  She’d left the front door wide open, said she was fine and begged him please not to send anyone looking.

She lived in the Grenada for a while.  The heart fund started running low.  So she lied about her age and got a job waiting tables in a small town outside of Little Rock.  The other waitresses tried to make her acquaintance, but because she was scared they’d find out how old she was, or that she was sleeping in her car in the parking lot of the Piggly-Wiggly, she kept mostly to herself.

She got pretty good at keeping up the exterior.  Friendly, but not letting anyone get too close.  

At night, after she’d finished stocking the sugars and filling the ketchup bottles on the counter, she sat and read customers’ forgotten magazines and newspapers, sipping root beer.

A kid left behind a copy of The Little Prince.  She picked it up, spent all night absorbed with the story of the little boy from a tiny asteroid who takes care of his kingdom.

She started imagining herself inhabiting a small, lonely planet.  Her planet was her own; she was its native. 

Years went by, while she slowly improved her life by increments. Eventually, she made enough money to get a little apartment, the castle in the kingdom on her planet.  She went through her days, afraid that anyone would ever truly notice her.

She got her GED, took some classes at the technical school.  Still, her planet remained the same.

One day, Mark showed up at the restaurant counter, ordered a stack of flapjacks, and asked for directions to the local junkyard.  She told him how to get there, and started to walk away, but he started talking about how he was in search of a carburetor for his newest fixer-upper truck.  She affected interest, patting the coffee pot in her hand, and tried to back away, but he kept talking.  He was from Maurnelle, two towns over, and went on to explain how he couldn’t believe he’d never heard of this particular junkyard, thought he knew them all in a 60-mile radius.  Even as she tried to extract herself, she thought about how she liked the way he lived so comfortably in his own body, how conversation flowed out of him like cool water.

Months later, here she sat in a junkyard, one of about a dozen she’d visited now.  He had a bit of a habit, but as habits go, junkyards were relatively benign, especially considering some of the shit she’d seen in her life.

The first time they’d gone out, he’d brought her flowers.  She felt a small mountain on her planet collapse in a landslide.  Eventually, she invited him over to her apartment, her sanctuary, and fixed him a simple dinner.  She sat at the kitchen table and watched as he did the dishes after, then took him to bed for what was her first time that didn’t involve predation.  Continents collided violently.  He brushed a strand of hair from her eyes, told her that he loved her. CRASH! Huge chunks of her planet broke and spun off into outer space.

Despite the short time, she could see their future lives, as she sat in the car and felt the wind gust around it. 

The little girl and the puppy ran across the yard and mounted the stairs of the trailer.  Apparently they too were yielding to the wind.

He’d already started talking about babies.  In fact, that was the source of the bruise on her arm.  He’d asked her to go to the doctor to have the test to see if their blood was compatible, and just make sure everything else was fine.

She fingered the car keys as they dangled from the ignition.

A little more than half a year later, her planet was nothing but a small pebble, something she could fit in her hand, slide into her pocket. She’d never really imagined herself as the baby-having type. Taking care of herself seemed like struggle enough.

It was scary.  Despite everything, could she really trust him?  It was a lot to let go of. What if he went away tomorrow?  Her planet was virtually gone now. She was so vulnerable. Could the safety Mark seemingly presented really be the new place to set up camp?

She continued to fiddle with the keys, staring out the windshield.  Mark looked up at her, noticing for the first time that she’d moved to the car.  He smiled, winked, and gave her a little wave across the hood of the truck.

She smiled and nodded, keeping her hand on the keys. The wind bent the trees low.

City Cafe Story

Hey, friends, fans, & fam.

Here's the link from my story on City Cafe this week.  I was even on the front page of the WABE website for the day. It was a great honor and pleasure to have this opportunity.  Thanks to those of you who were able to listen in live.

Next stop, This American Life. ;)

Cheers,
Shannon

Some fun news on the Red Crickette Front!

Hello, there, Red Crickette Fans!

I have some fun news to share of things a-foot in my world.

First, today I will be featured on a blog called I Write Because.  Thanks very much to my friend, Lesley Howard, for introducing me to the opportunity.

Even better, on Monday, September 19, I will be on City Café, the noon time show of WABE, Altanta's NPR station.  I went into the station last week to record my story - one of my greatest hits about camp and unrequited love.  I have no idea when in the noon hour it will play.  If you're not in the Atlanta area, but want to listen live, you can stream WABE on their website.  However, I will receive a link after the fact and will be able to send it out.

Speaking of my beloved childhood camp, sadly, it was destroyed by a flood on August 5, 2012 - over $1 million in damage.  You can read about the recovery effort here.  (I have a little story on there too.)

Thanks for all your love and support!

Cheers,
Shannon

New Articles on the Interwebs

Hi.  I'm just archiving a few recent articles here.  Thanks for reading. ;)

• Art or Voyeurism? Real People Telling Real Stories - article I got published on the new journal Arts in a Changing America
• Faces of Carapace: Shannon Turner - profile of me about storytelling in the East Atlanta Patch

Don't Go Back to Sleep

Last night, I had a dream that the world had devolved in a way that seems to me very logical in the way things are going. Now, I once heard someone say that you should never recount your dreams, and if you must, you should sum up their plots in one sentence. I cannot do that with this dream, and I seem to want to share it.

It started out mundanely enough. Don’t all dreams? I was wearing a frog on my shoulder and walking, naked to middle school. Just kidding.

In my dream, I went to the Project South offices to help in the getting ready for their upcoming 25th anniversary party/fundraiser. I was preparing platters, joking with the staff that I was very worried about what to wear that night, when all of the sudden someone came running into the room with news. That was when I realized that things were quite different than I realized.

The young man was arriving from what had started out as the Occupy Atlanta movement. He was urging us to get down there right away because we were under attack. I started to remember, in my dream reality, that the whole world had settled into two encampments. Do you remember the Stephen King book and miniseries, The Stand? It was a similar scenario.

In my dream, all people who identified as liberal/Democrats/progressives were in one camp - literally - and all conservative/Republican-types had settled somewhere else though nearby enough that guerrilla warfare could ensue. Independents, libertarians, and anarchists had finally had to make their choice to be in one camp or another, or else they were literally living independently—out in the wilderness. Sometimes, the most ruthless of the independents acted as messengers or traders between the two camps.

The scene changed to inside the liberal camp. At the heart of it was a stadium, not like a football stadium, more like an ancient Roman amphitheatre or arena for battles between men and tigers. The crowd was restless and chanting; it was hard to discern the nature of their unease. I made my way to the front.

There were two young, white men bound, a little bloodied and stripped to their waste at the center of the fray. They had laurel wreaths on their heads. In my dream, I thought to myself, they kind of look like frat boys on their way back from a bacchanalia. The frat boys were from the conservative camp—infiltrators, spies! They vigorously wrestled with the leather ties at their hands and spit on their captors, looking at them with utter disdain. The throngs of people in the stands chanted for their deaths.

And then, my friend, Elise, came forward, stepped in front of the young men, and held her hand out to the crowd. “No,” she said quietly.

The dream changed again. We were in a small cabin on the outskirts of our encampment. The young men had been given showers and new clothes. I was skulking around the door, listening and peeking in, as Elise attended to them. Even though she was taking care of them and had spared their lives, they were still taunting her.

“This is just what a liberal would do!” one mocked.

“Careful,” the other retorted, “she’s secretly a fascist. If they win, that’s really what they’ll do. They’ll turn us all into fascists!”

“Young man,” Elise quietly said, “do you know what a fascist is? My family is from Europe, and I can tell you that you don’t know what you’re saying.”

There was an awkward pause, where everyone seemed to be thinking.

Again, scene change. I was somehow able to travel the whole world quite rapidly, with ease, but without things appearing to go by too quickly. I was gliding very close to the ground. I was working with someone or something unseen. My task was using stop-motion photography and global positioning technology. We were trying to capture every possible image of every possible part of the globe. Even though I was enjoying these beautiful, lush landscapes, there was a strong sense of urgency to what we were doing. Everything needed to be captured and catalogued as quickly as possible, but I wasn’t sure why.

After having traversed many beautiful landscapes, I paused and took a break. I was hovering over this beautiful lake with a mountain and forest spread out before me. A light mist danced across the lake. In my ability to just sort of lay in the air wherever I wanted, I reached down and dipped my hand in the mist and swirled it around. I watched as that stirring made the mist dance in ripples further and further away from me. My glance made me look up to see dark black clouds had started rolling in. They were as close to the ground as I was and were eating everything like The Nothingness from The Neverending Story.

I suddenly remembered something the two young men had said when they didn’t know I was listening in on their conversation.

“They really are being nice to us,” one boy said.

“I know. It makes me feel bad. Perhaps we should stop the clock.”

With that, I awoke with a start in that way you do from dreams when everything becomes frightening. Because somehow, I knew in my dream that what I was experiencing was the world coming to an end. Something had been set into motion by humans that couldn’t be reversed, and my body was about to be enveloped by nothingness.

* * * * * * 

I do this thing when I awake from nightmares where I try to keep myself from falling right back to sleep. My logic is that it’ll prevent me from going right back into the same dream. As I lay in my bed and tried to get every muscle to unlock, I thought I know what the answer is. I was sweating a little bit. I know what the answer is! But I swear, this morning, as I write this, I can’t remember the answer anymore. I’m not even sure what the question is. *

* * * * * 

Post script: After I finished writing this initial text, I went on to other things. I was soon re-reading an email from an old college friend who had just seen the latest version of Godspell in New York. He thought that “Turn Back, O Man” was a song that I could really rock someday. [Clearly, it’s been too long since this friend heard me sing.] Still, being unfamiliar with the show, I went and found the clip on Youtube. I was struck with the words and their timeliness in relation to my dream:

Earth might be fair 
And all men glad and wise 
Age after age 
their tragic empires rise 
Built while they dream 
And in that dreaming weep 
Would man but wake 
From out his haunted sleep 
Not till that hour 
Shall God's whole will be done 
Now, even now 
Once more from earth to sky
Peels forth in joy 
Man's old undaunted cry 
Earth shall be fair 
And all her people one 
Turn back, oh man 
Forswear thy foolish ways! 
Old now is earth 
And none may count her days

Beth's legacy

Audio of this story as I told it at Carapace, August 2011, can be found here.

Often times in life, we meet people along the way who leave a lasting impact on us. Sometimes it’s for things they do. Or don’t do. Or for the things they do to you. Sometimes it’s for the example they set.

When I was in high school, my father’s job led us to move back to a town we’d lived in before, Kingsport, TN. It was halfway through my junior year. As hard as it is to move that late in high school, you would think it would have been easier to move back to a place I’d already lived. In some ways it was. In others, it was every bit as hard.

One joyful part about it is that I got to know new people that I had not known before, somewhat in partial thanks to the large church we were serving in Kingsport 2.0.

The person I put at the top of this category was Beth Griffin. Beth was one of those ethereal creatures who was seemingly always happy. She could find the good side of anything.

I remember sitting in her lap after Bible Study one night - teenage girls have a unique way of sharing affection with each other before they become completely jaded - after I’d gotten a regrettable perm on my 17th birthday. I whined about how it took so much work to maintain (so much product!) and how it felt as though my hair would never be the same again.

Beth just smiled and said, “I like it. And besides, it doesn’t really matter. You always look pretty, and you’re absolutely beautiful on the inside.”

*Sigh* It was one of those moments that makes you zing. Though I remember at the time wondering why I couldn’t get a boy to say those words.

After we graduated, Beth went to Agnes Scott, a women’s college here in Atlanta. I really wanted to go there too for my own reasons. But life led me in a different direction, and since that was before the days of email and Facebook, we lost touch pretty quickly.

Time marches on.

We all graduated from college and moved out into the world in a variety of ways. Beth got an internship with the Yerkes Institute, which is an animal research center also based here in Atlanta. She’d always dreamed of working with primates.

I, on the other hand, graduated with my B.A. in English literature and women’s studies and proceeded to dive headlong into that existential funk that is a natural outcome of such majors and minors. If you didn’t want to go immediately into a master’s program in English, and you didn’t want to become a teacher, there weren’t a lot of options laid out before you.

Thus began a wandering path traveled by many in their early 20s. In the 2 years after I graduated from college, I lived at a camp, worked in a video store, acted in dinner theatre, moved to Blacksburg to work in a bar, temped, cleaned for wealthy people, and got fired from a substitute teaching job. It was not my finest period.

About six months after we graduated from college, when I was living part-time at camp and part-time at home, I came home one day to find my mom in the kitchen.

“I have some news for you,” she said. “Your friend, Beth, is quite sick.”

She explained that everyone on our old church’s network was talking about it. Apparently, when she was transporting a monkey cage from one counter to the other, a bit of “monkey matter” flipped up into Beth’s eye.

She wound up contracting Herpes B, something that is common amongst monkeys, but which, when transmitted to humans is nearly always fatal.

Still, given that she was only 22 and was an extraordinarily healthy person, we had a lot of hope that she would be able to fight it. In the coming weeks, we watched (most, from afar) as the paralysis slowly crept up her body all the way to her eyes. And then, it started to subside. We thought she was going to win. But, she didn’t.

It was a scandalous, national story as the issue of workplace safety swirled around her death. Protocol should have meant that Beth was asked to wear goggles in that milieu, but there was no protocol to protect her. It wasn’t the only time in my life where something in my personal life was also a national headline. I can tell you that it’s a very strange, double-vision kind of experience to see your friend on Dateline.

Time marches on - again.

I had moved to Blacksburg for no better reason than to try something different. I was working 4 jobs, and one of those was waitress in a nightclub. At about 2:30 in the morning, as I scrubbed a toilet that some co-ed had puked in, a bit of toilet water flipped up into my eye.

I can only describe this as one of those big, epiphany-like moments. In that instance, everything seemed to distill down to one little kernel of light, and I became one with the universe.

By the time she died in such an untimely way, Beth had danced in Japan and ridden her bike across Europe. She was using all her God-given intelligence and human-given education in the pursuit of knowledge and for the betterment of something she loved.

What if I got sick from this incident? What if I contracted some strange, foreign disease because I was cleaning toilets in a bar?

Not that there’s anything wrong with the janitorial profession - I have continued to have cleaning jobs on-and-off throughout my adulthood to support the bills - but I wasn’t in pursuit of anything greater. I was not using my intelligence, talent, or education for anything other than the internal struggle. Who was I to throw my life away when someone like Beth had hers cut tragically short?

When I came out of my light-kernel moment, I felt like the universe had just thwacked me on the back of the head. Six months later, I was in AmeriCorps. Which led to a full-time job with the YMCA. Which led me to grad school. Which led me to where I am today.

And, I just want to say that I’m so grateful for all those little moments in life that open up a new path, a new understanding. And I’m especially thankful for friends who have helped to light the way.

_______________________________________________________

Just so you know, I’m not the only one that Beth’s passing affected. Her family and friends have established a foundation for the promotion of safety in scientific research. Well done.

Everybody's Got a Story

I remember a while back CBS Sunday Morning used to do this thing - maybe they still do. It was called "Everybody's Got a Story." The correspondent would stand in front of a giant map of the US and throw a dart behind him. Wherever it landed, there he would go. Upon arriving in said town, he would then open up the phone book and wherever his finger landed, he would call up that person and ask to come interview them.

It was fascinating.

Well, I've been thinking...

Some of you have been complaining that I haven't had enough to say on this blog lately. I seem to be in a quiet period. Not enough embarrassing or epiphany-driven moments of note have come along. The Writing Muse has been absent around these parts. But, I still think about all of you out there in the world with whom I once shared a parallel path.

I know some fascinating people. Musicians, yoga teachers, writers, cosmetics salesmen, teachers, people who travel the world, and some who've never been out of their home state. You've all got stories.

Another inspiration for this project is that I recently heard a great NPR show/podcast called "On Being" where the person being interviewed remarked on how little news these days has to do with what's good in the world. It's all sensationalism and spin. If bad stuff is what we always focus on, then that's the world we'll continue to create.

So, for the next undetermined period of time, I'm gonna go about getting in touch with some of you and seeing if you'll share your story with this small party of 100.

Where were you born? What do you love? What are you most afraid of? Who was the most fascinating person you ever met?

So, be ready. I'm coming. You can go ahead and write back to me now and declare your intentions. "I can't wait" or "Did you know that I had an affair with a sultan?" or "Don't even think about it."

All of a sudden...
Shannon

ROOTS Fest 2011: A team, a feat, a rite of passage

Dear Friends,

It is my great pleasure to tell you about the accomplishment of the largest project with which I've ever been associated.

Over the last 18 months, we at Alternate ROOTS have been planning our 35th anniversary celebration. All of that planning came down to the 5-day period of June 22-26, ROOTS Fest 2011: Many Communities, One Voice, in Baltimore, MD.

The week was divided up into 2 distinct parts:

• A National Learning Exchange, which brought together artists, academics, administrators, community members, etc. into a 3-day dialogue around Art, Culture, and Creativity and the way that all these things have the ability to build resilient communities and transform the lives of everyday people.
• An Outdoor Festival over the weekend which brought together 10,000 people to celebrate the community of West Baltimore.

If you're unfamiliar with West Baltimore, it is an area that was devastated by a botched highway project in the 1970s, as unfortunately so many of our communities of color are the first places to get razed by "urban planning." Many people know it as the place that was portrayed in shows like Homicide: Life on the Street, The Corner, most recently and frustratingly, The Wire.

I recommend watching this video to learn more about that series of events, as well as some of the amazing people who are why we ended up landing there for our 35th anniversary.

I could say many things about this project and how it feels to be on the other side of it after working so hard for so long with so many other people. Fortunately, for you, I'm very tired, and the words are neither at the tip of my tongue nor flowing out of my fingertips. I thought, instead, I would simply share with you the words, images, and videos of others that I've collected as a small sample of the magic that happened last week.

Below are some of those materials that I'm sending along, especially for those of you who don't do Facebook and therefore have not been privy to (victimized by) our incessant posting of late. I wanted to archive them here as much for myself as for you.

Finally, I just want to say that now, more than ever, Alternate ROOTS could use your support. If you could use another tax deductible source for your charitable giving, please consider this creative, scrappy, hard-working, visionary organization as a worthy recipient of your good money. You can donate here or consider joining our Friends & Family program here.

Thanks to all of you for being in my personal network of supporters. I always enjoy hearing back from you after I make a post, and this is no exception. Please be in touch.

Love,
Shannon

Pre-Festival Press:

• Carlton on the Tavis Smiley Show
• Great article in The Baltimore Sun

Pictures:

• Part 1
• Part 2

Videos:

• Carlton kicks it off
• Sunni Patterson delivers some amazing spoken word poetry

Hit the Chickens

I know this might surprise you, but I have a story to tell about camp and unrequited love.

Now, there are some things that I need to let you know right off the bat in order for this story to make sense. First, most people call me Shannon today – it is my birth name after all - but for a period of time in my adolescence and on into my twenties, many people called me Crickette. It started out as a camp nickname; it stuck around for quite a while. Mostly because camp itself stuck around for quite a while. And many of the people I met at camp showed up at other United Methodist youth activities, so the name sort of spread, like a virus or a bad rumor.

The second thing you need to know is that I had a driving force keeping me away from my given name, and that was my arch nemesis. Her name was Shana. We met when we were 11. Shana thought very highly of herself. And her flute. And the way she played her flute. She found many, many reasons and times to play her flute. She also thought that she could stop walking along, bend down and find a four-leaf clover anywhere. I never saw it work. Not once.

Whatever camp week or assembly I went to, whatever Resurrection retreat weekend I signed up for, somehow magically Shana was there. Our dislike for each other was completely unspoken. On the surface, we were friends.

The third ingredient in the story is Tim. Tim was a camp counselor extraordinaire. One of those camp personalities that become legends. Try as they might, they can’t really define themselves in any other way besides camp, and so eventually, they just succumb to the gravity of it and move in. Camp was Tim’s whole life. Year in, year out. He moved up through the administrative levels.

Of course, I had a huge crush on him, but he was ten years older than me, so he was safely out of my reach and somewhere around rock star status.

By the time I eventually became a camp counselor, Tim was an Assistant Director. Still out of reach in my mind, but at least now I was cool enough to sit around the fire at night and not be sent to my sleeping bag as soon as my belly was full of s’mores. We could sit around and shoot the breeze and tell stories about college and, you know, stuff…

One night, during our staff training that first year, our evening plans got rained out, so the staff was sitting around in the lodge doing various hang out activities. Tim was casually strumming his guitar, and somehow we got on the subject of his cat, Guinevere.

“Did you know that she had a brother, Arthur?” Tim asked.

“No,” I said nonchalantly. “Don’t most cats have siblings?” I’m not much a fan of the feline family, so let’s be honest, I wasn’t terribly enthused by this track of our conversation.

“Yes, but I mean I had the two of them together for a while.”

And that’s when he proceeded to tell me the most heart wrenching story about how the cat had become sick in the middle of the night and, knowing that he would be unable to find a vet, he stayed up all night long, holding it, while it passed away. And then he looked me straight in the eyes with this look of complete pain and sadness.

I. Was. Undone.

I felt this stirring deep inside me like I’d never felt before in my life. This was no little crush I was feeling. For the first time, I knew what grown-up love was. But I still didn’t know what to do about it.

I decided to do what I always did in that situation - hide and wait.

As the weeks of camp passed, my feelings grew stronger. I started telling a few people about it, and they all echoed back the same sentiment that I was feeling – you know, Tim’s a lot older than you are…

Right, right.

But, lest I forget something, there was Shana. She too had started being a camp counselor right along with me.

Standard operating procedure on Friday afternoons after a long week of work together was that most of us would get cleaned up in the camp showers and go hang out together. It was sick really. I’ve experienced this same phenomenon with people who are in the cast of a play together. You spend all of this intensive time together, and you should want to run screaming out the door at the end of your obligation. Instead, you crave even more time when the opportunity for recreation comes about.

On one particular Friday afternoon about six weeks into the summer, I noticed that Tim and Shana were not joining up with the rest of the posse. They went off by themselves and started building a fire. Looked like they were starting a cookout. Seemed suspicious to me. I tried to write it off though. Maybe he’s going to do this with each member of the staff to get to know us better. I had a few ideas in mind for how mine could go.

But that night, it was all the rest of the staff could talk about. The speculation was rampant. And those who knew about my feelings kept looking at me with knowing empathy.

That was hard.

But nothing could compare to what happened a few weeks later. No one was quite sure exactly what the status was on the whole Tim and Shana thing. They appeared to be keeping their relationship under wraps. Until one day, I walked into the lodge and they were on the other side of the room. Tim’s back was turned to me. Shana took the opportunity to give him a big, juicy hug. And as she did, she grinned at me over his shoulder.

I turned around and walked back out the door because I knew in that moment she had won a contest that had never even been declared.

* * * *

Tim and Shana lasted for a long time. I had other crushes in between. I sat on the sidelines and watched. Eventually, Shana pressured Tim for a ring. He got one. They got engaged. I pretended to be ecstatic for them. And then, it all hit the skids. I pretended to be sad for them. They broke up. I pretended to be sadder still.

I waited the appropriate amount of time. Really I did. Like a year. And eventually, I started letting myself feel hopeful again that maybe something would happen between Tim and me. Like really hopeful.

By this point, I was 23 and I had been working at the camp for four years. I had graduated from college and moved back there myself to work year-round.

When that final summer started, I had to admit to myself that I had this big life plan going where Tim and I would be married and run the camp together. We would eventually grow old and sit in the rocking chairs and watch the children play in the evening. It was a good plan. I just needed to wait long enough for Tim to come around to it.

Right about the same time as I was having this big epiphany, a new character showed up on the scene. His name was Anthony. Sardonic, sarcastic, darkly handsome, and intelligent. Anthony was the perfect foil for my dreamy, scheme-y, floaty feelings. And I certainly have a darker side that can be appealed to, so we were well matched.

By that time, I too had risen up through the ranks of camp administration to Assistant Director, and part of my job was to go to town many evenings of the week to purchase vital items like Benadryl cream and flashlight batteries. As reaching escape velocity from camp before Friday afternoon was a coveted position, Anthony liked to tag along with me on my travels so that he could smoke. But, as time went by on our adventures together, I can now see that it wasn’t just the nicotine he was after. Anthony and I built up quite a rapport. Our witty, biting banter with one another – sometimes downright debates – were thrilling. I didn’t understand it at the time because I was too naïve, but I was experiencing sexual tension with this guy. Big time.

Eventually, I confided my feelings for Tim to Anthony. I’m not quite sure why. Thinking back about it, I can’t imagine why I thought it was a good idea. But remember, my pattern at that time was to tell pretty much everyone in my life except the person who was the object of my affection.

Anthony was a surprisingly sympathetic ear. He seemed to enjoy talking to me about the subject. Helping me turn the topic over and again, break it down into its parts, like compost.

As summer went along and began to come to a close, I realized that I was starting to get whipped into a near frenzy about it all. Soon Tim would go back to his year-round camp and yet another chance would have passed me by. I had been out of college for over a year at that point and waiting for him to come around to the life plan meant I was putting my life on hold. At night, I would sit up in those rocking chairs after everyone else had gone to bed, and I would cry. I would cry with this deep, deep despair that felt like my unborn children were walking away as ghosts up the camp trail before me.

Finally, one evening, Anthony and I were driving to town and were as cantankerous with each other as always. It was getting close to dusk and I was flying down this winding, mountainous road a lot faster than I should. He was challenging me that I should leave the camp at the end of the summer and do something else with my life.

“I just wish that Tim would wake up. If only he would turn around and look at me one day and maybe know how I feel about him. Then he would know. Then he might just figure it out and just know we’re meant to be together!”

“You think Tim doesn’t know how you feel about him?” Anthony fired back.

“Of course, he doesn’t…” I trailed off.

“He knows.”

And right then, we rounded the corner in the late evening light to discover a giant flock of chickens in the road. I don’t know where they came from. It was as if they had all escaped from the chicken circus and picked that very spot to stake out their new home. But there they were - all 40 of them, mostly in the road.

Anthony took one look at them, and he took one look at me. He could tell by the look in my eyes that I was about to slam on the brakes, which probably would have wrecked the car.

He fervently laid his hand on my arm, looked steadily into my eyes, and said with passion:

“Hit the chickens, Crickette. You hit those chickens!”

I didn’t hit the brakes, but I did take my foot off the gas pedal. We glided through the sea of chickens, as they parted before us. They all flew away. We didn’t hit a single one.

When we’d made it to the other side, I pulled the car over to the side of the road to catch my breath and just take in the moment in amazement.

And then it all came rushing back to me. Tim knew. He’d always known. Nothing had changed. But somehow, with shaky legs, like those chickens, I knew I was going to be all right.

What’s Going On?

[This post is inspired by hearing about the teacher rallies and Tea Party protests in Tennessee. You can read about them by clicking here and here.

Does anyone else out there think there’s some seriously messed up stuff going on out there? I don’t mean in the Middle East or global warming. That’s scary enough. I don’t mean gas prices either. I can’t really comprehend the stuff they talk about on Marketplace. Now, the political forces that have been steadily dividing our country into two distinct camps over the last 30 years have taken the fight to our teachers. And not even just to the Northwest which feels like the other side of the universe somehow. But to Tennessee – my home state. This time, it’s personal.

I was born in Chattanooga, TN, and because of my father’s job, we moved all over the Northeast corridor of the Volunteer state, living most in a small, industrial town called Kingsport.

The schools there were outstanding. I mean it. I received a great education there. Of course, being white and middle class, why would I and my privilege expect anything less?

I’m not here to talk about white privilege today though. I want to meditate on the inherent right of every child to receive a free public education like I did from wonderful, caring teachers who are supported enough in what they do that they can spend their time paying attention to their students.

The two best years of school I had were 4th and 5th grade. Mrs. Scruggs and Mrs. Spriggs – similarity of names purely coincidental.

Thanks to the newfangled technology of Facebook, I’m loosely connected to some of the people I went to 4th grade with, and most agree that Mrs. Scruggs was the best teacher that any of us ever had. I can tell you some very good reasons why that was the case.

Mrs. Scruggs was a silverfox of a woman – dapper, in her mid-to-late 40s, well dressed. She had a son our age and she could keep up with any of us on the playground if she wanted to, but she didn’t usually show it. Her giant silver hair was always neatly coiffed and did not move on her head. She was tanned and beautiful.

Mrs. Scruggs had created a reward-based system for behavior management that kept most of us constantly excited and interested and trying to do better. We each had a little pocket on the front of our desks that contained three “tickets” with our names written on them. Our desks were arranged in a giant U facing her desk. If you were caught talking or chewing gum or any of the other naughty things, she would pull a ticket. Lose all three tickets before the end of the day and you were in big trouble. But keep all three tickets and you got a sticker. Keep them for a week and you got to go to the prize box. Prizes included awesome things like box cars and princess jewelry. Keep all your tickets for six weeks and whoah – you got to go out to eat after school with Mrs. Scruggs. Usually that meant she would take you to Pal’s, the local fast food joint. This was the most prized reward, and so super cool.

Of course, I worked hard to get to that six weeks reward many times. The few times I got tickets pulled, I was so disappointed in myself for having to start over.

Everything was both clearly educational and fun. I mean, don’t get me wrong – there were moments that didn’t go so well. There was the time when she let the boys demonstrate break dancing for her and a rather large young man in our class, “Moose,” ran and slid on his knees straight into her metal desk, denting it permanently.

Years later, I came back to tell stories for her class, and she was asking me if I kept up with any members of my 1984 class. This was before the days of Facebook and so I said "not really." She said that David* (name changed), one of the few African-American students from our class was in jail. She said she’d been writing to him and that when we were in school together she had feared for him then because of the things she’d seen in his home life.

My point is, she took the time, and knew us all...well.

The next year, I had Mrs. Spriggs. Whereas Mrs. Scruggs was the epitome of aging beautifully, time and teaching had taken their toll on Mrs. Spriggs. She was a large and flapping woman, who labored to breathe just from walking across the room. She had giant, plastic grey glasses that matched her dark grey, springy, curly hair. What she lacked in physical beauty, though, she made up for in sharp-as-a-tack wit. She spoke French eloquently. I can still sing “Napoléon avait cinq cents soldats …”

Mrs. Spriggs noticed almost immediately after I got into her class that I was a smart kid. She suggested that I get tested for placement into the ‘smart kid’ resources that were available through the school system. That opportunity set me on a course that definitely changed my educational path forever.

The thing that I remember the most about Mrs. Spriggs, however, was one moment in time. A single afternoon. A conversation. And at that time, I didn’t even appreciate it for what it was.

The summer between my 4th and 5th grade years, my 30-year-old aunt died in the middle of the night from a rare adult case of SIDS. Such a bizarre and unexpected death, as you can imagine, sent my entire family reeling. I was at the perfect age for it to mess with my head in some pretty profound ways. If God can just come along in the middle of the night and decide you’re done, what did that mean for me?

I found myself acting out against the new reality in sometimes rather bizarre ways. It might have actually had absolutely nothing to do with what had happened. I was (am?) a bit hyper-prone to drama anyway, but I like to blame everything I did in that year on the easy target. All of the embarrassing little details aren’t really necessary here, but let me just say, I was a handful on occasion.

This moment of which I speak came somewhere in the early spring. I was particularly “feeling my oats” as they say, and Mrs. Spriggs called me on it. When I didn’t calm down, she told me I had to stay in at recess. I began sulking immediately. By the time recess started, I was both fuming mad and mortified at the same time. I was in that special human place where you know you’re wrong with every fiber of your being but you don’t want to admit it and so you find every reason you can to blame it on someone else. It’s an emotional state as popular with 10-year-olds as it is with people much older.

I sat at my desk, kicking it rhythmically. Mrs. Spriggs sent the rest of the class out for recess with another class and then she lumbered back over to her desk and sat down. We sat there in silence together for a few agonizing minutes. Then, she called me over to where she sat. I went over begrudgingly. She looked at me over the top of her giant glasses as they had slid down her nose. She really looked at me. Straight in the eyes.

“What’s going on?” she asked.

“I don’t know what you mean, Mrs. Spriggs.” I said. I tried to return her gaze defiantly.

Then, she did something quite strange to me. She got down out of her seat, kneeled on the floor and took my arms at the elbows with fervor.

“I know you, Shannon Turner,” she stated, matter-of-factly, pushing her glasses back up with a giant, sausage-like finger, “and this is not who you are.”

Tears immediately started to spring up and that place in the back of my throat that hurt when I tried to fight them back began aching.

She pulled me down gently by the shoulders until I was sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of her. “Now, you sit here, and you remember who you really are.”

A few years back I read about an African tribe that gives each newborn child a song that is as important as her name. They sing it at her birth as a ritual, and again at other rites of passage throughout the life cycle. But, if for instance, she’s done something harmful or lacking in integrity, they will come together in an ad hoc fashion in a circle around the person and sing the song to remind her of who she is.

When I heard that story, I was immediately transported back to that moment in that classroom on that wooden floor. I’ll tell you, if you don’t know what it’s like, there is nothing like the feeling. To be truly known. Even if the feeling is also associated with shame.

* * * * *

Now, what do all of these stories about a boring, white, middle class childhood in Tennessee have to do with anything going on today? Well, a lot I think.

I doubt Mrs. Scruggs and Mrs. Spriggs are still teaching today. I rather hope they aren’t. But if they were, I’m sure it would be quite different. What would it have been like if Mrs. Scruggs had to work an extra couple of shifts at the local restaurant in order to pay for chalk and paper and other supplies for our class? What if Mrs. Spriggs was too busy worrying about whether our class was going to pass some ridiculous state standardized testing to pay attention to me and my specialized needs – educational or emotional?

Now, if I could just call on that overly dramatic side of myself for just a minute longer…It appears to me that it is on the backs these everyday American heroes (heroines) that the wealthiest and greediest are planning a silent revolution. And it’s been going on for a while now.

What could really be so bad about collective bargaining? With paying our teachers a fair living wage?

The fact that we’ve come to this point in our country’s history makes me ashamed. It makes me wish that I knew a song that I could stand up and sing to the right people and make them remember who they are so that they would get right with themselves. I would definitely pull all of their tickets if I could.



Other interesting links/takes on this issue:
Michael Moore
Jon Stewart

Don't Go Chasing Waterfalls

This is a story I told at The Moth in August 2010. I didn't write it down - just got up and told it on the fly. I'm a little embarrassed by its scandalous nature, and yet still compelled to archive it here. I hope most people who read my blog don't go back and check this page.

The family business

[You can hear me tell this story live at The Moth here.]

In my family, we have this long-standing tradition of being staunch United Methodists. It’s almost as if it’s encoded in our DNA. We don’t just worship in the church; many of the men were or are ministers. My grandfather, my great uncle, my dad…You could say it’s the family business.

So, my poor dad didn’t have any sons. But, he was blessed with this extremely gregarious child – me – who never knew a stranger (as a child that is). I was known to actually crawl into the stroller with other babies to play in the store while my mom was shopping.

At some point, I started to notice that my dad would get this very particular kind of look on his face when I would do certain things, which over time I realized was the look of “aha ~ so, maybe she’s not a boychild, but she could still be the next in line.”

The first time it happened, I was about 4 years old and we were living in rural Tennessee. There was a podium in our carport that my dad used to practice his sermons sometimes. He had a speech impediment in childhood that he had overcome as a preacher, but he still had to practice, and he particularly had to go over passages from the Bible.

One day, my dad walked out of the house onto the carport to find me, standing on a stack of crates and that I’d made for myself behind the podium – I was marrying the car to the truck. The car was a 1977 Grenada, and it was the girl, and the truck was a 1979 Toyota. It was, of course, the boy. I wasn’t worldly enough at the time to appreciate the fact that I was sponsoring an international, mixed race marriage.

Sometimes in the Methodist church, there are these instances where there’s not enough ministers to go around or the churches are too small to have a full-time minister, and so several times, we would be in these situations where dad was serving more than one church at a time. He would preach at once church while the other was having Sunday School, and then he would drive to the other place and the schedule would flip. One time he served three churches at one time and I’m not quite sure exactly how that worked, but this time it was just two.

So, on this one day, something had happened, and my dad had gotten delayed at the one church and we were all waiting at the other for worship to begin. In Sunday School that day, we had learned about Zaccheus, and had drawn a picture of him sitting up in the sycamore tree, and so I went up into front of church and held up my picture for everyone to buy my dad some time because I was afraid that he’d be in trouble for being late. I told everyone the story of Zaccheus and I sang them the song when he still hadn’t arrived, I started making up new verses, and I got everyone to join in, until finally Dad walked in the back door. The moment he walked in, I just stopped exactly where I was and sang, “Amen.”

Of course, there were other incidents that gave evidence to the contrary of any sort of future “calling.” For instance, on Children and Youth Sunday, while being tasked with being an usher, I spilled the entire collection plate right under the pews. And of course, this was back in the day when many more people donated with coins, so that was a bit of a mess to clean up. I also have a very hard time keeping a secret. Unfortunately, my dad learned this problem because he confided a few things in me he maybe shouldn’t have over time. And, well, I just had a very hard time being the guardian of such powerful kernels of truth. It was too much pressure. I might even be the reason we moved once…

Nonetheless, as time progressed, my dad began to talk to me more seriously about going into the ministry. And, I did think about it seriously on occasion. But I couldn’t reconcile a few things about the whole idea. For one thing, I was already unlucky enough in the romantic department, and I was certain that becoming a lady pastor would just seal the deal on my being single for the rest of my life. For another, I’m a pretty sensitive person, and I had seen what it had done over time to my dad – having to move from place to place at the whim of committees and district superintendants and bishops. I couldn’t imagine being answerable to that many people all the time and having my job satisfaction on the line like that.

I mean, it all came down to politics, really. Those kinds of politics, and the other kind of politics.

See, thinking that he was well on his way to molding me into the next generation, my dad sent me off to a good Methodist college, same one he went to. I’m sure he thought that this would be all it would take. I’d be so inspired in those hallowed halls, under the oil painting of Bishop Emory and the smell of old books. I’d take a little Greek, a little Liberation Theology as an elective, and whammo, she’ll be off to seminary in four years or less!

What dear old dad wasn’t counting on was that in the 25 years since he went there, his Methodist school had scandalously embraced the liberal in “liberal arts” college. I did take all those things that he was hoping I would take, but I also took World Literature and theatre classes and Women’s Studies, and oh boy was that a problem! I came home for my first Thanksgiving and announced to everyone that I thought that it was completely unfair that the women should slave for days on end to prepare this wonderful meal and then the men just got to sit around and watch football and do nothing. I proposed that from now on, the men should have to clean up the dishes after the meal. Complete silence. Everyone looked at my dad like – so are you going to ask for the tuition back, or shall I?

Unfortunately, the answer to that problem was that they started using Chinette plates instead of fine china, so then they just crawled all over my sensibilities as a budding environmentalist, instead of as a feminist.

Anyway, like I said, by the time I graduated from college, I was this big, flaming liberal. But, my dad, he still hadn’t quite given up. He was even having me come and be his substitute preacher when he needed to go on vacation. I mean, the pressure was mounting. Emails were flying back and forth all the time. So, finally one day, we sat down to talk about it, and I said, “Look, Dad, it comes down to this. I can’t become a preacher in the United Methodist church because I just wouldn’t last very long.”

“Why not?” he asked.

I just looked at him and said, “Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to celebrate the marriage of Marcus and Matthew.”

The conversations seemed to subside after that.

stigmata

For this post, I experimented with a new form. You have the choice either to read the story below, or click here and listen to me read it to you (as well as look at a few pictures along the way). This story was written in preparation for this month's MothUp on Tuesday night. The theme is Scars. Hope I get to tell it! I'll let you know...



In this story, I am within weeks of turning 30. If I thought my twenties was a time of angst, railing against my lovelorn state, turning 30 was angst plus the return of Saturn.

During that summer, I attended a camp for grown-ups who wanted to learn how to sing or dance or play the dulcimer. Ostensibly, I was there as part of a micro-internship for grad school, but really, it was a great excuse to work with my friend Erica, for a week and hang out with the singers, the swing dancers, and the dulcimer players.

So I met this guy, who looked incredibly like Napoleon Dynamite. I mean it ~ he had very curly, sandy blonde hair, and glasses. He was skinny and pale as all get-out. And most days, by about 3:00 p.m., given the sweltering summer heat, you could tell he wasn’t a regular bather.

His name was Jesse.

Somehow, though, with my approaching birthday looming large, and the hormones raging, all of the sudden that special summer phenomenon overcame me… camp crush.

We would only be together for a week. I had to act fast.

Before I knew it, it was Wednesday evening—the night of the big dance—and I still hadn’t found a way to get his attention. I showed up wearing this slamming outfit – bright turquoise tank top to show off my red hair, flowy black pants to move with the dancing – I was hoping desperately that he would ask me to dance. Given that he was a swing dance teacher, I felt the chances were in my favor.

About midway through the second set, they started to play “I Will Survive.” God, I love that song. It’s like the Women’s National Anthem. I know just what I’ll do to get his attention. Now, I’m not a DANCER but I am a sort of dance groupie and I also love dance movies. And I’ve basically studied that one dance move in the movies where they run and slide across the floor on their knees. It happens in Grease at the National Bandstand concert, and I think Kevin Bacon does it when he comes triumphantly back into the prom at the end. It is a show stopper. I’d never tried it before, but this was my chance.

In a last minute decision, I thought that I should take off my shoes so I wouldn’t scuff them.

As Gloria S. Gaynor made her transition from the slow and building “I spent oh so many nights thinking how you done me wrong, but I grew strong & I learned how to get along” to the fast, thumping “And now you’re back from outer space”, I not only HEARD the music, I WAS that music! I performed said dance move. I launched myself into outer space. It was an old gym floor, but I probably slid a good ten feet across it, and somewhere around halfway through, I knew something was terribly wrong.

Even though I was in a lot of pain, I sprang off the floor and started dancing wildly like I had just performed the trick of the century. The people who saw the move were all applauding, hooping and hollering. I just kept on dancing, smiling what I hoped was a confident smile! As the song faded out, I slowed and discreetly looked down to discover that I had giant, gaping wounds in the tops of my feet. They were angry red with gymfloor dirt crammed down behind open flapping skin. They looked rather like I had suddenly and mysteriously developed stigmata. Jesse was now dancing with someone else, and I realized he wasn’t playing it cool with me. He wasn’t playing anything at all. He didn’t even notice me.

“One way or another,” I thought to myself, as I hobbled across the dance floor to the sidelines at the end of the song, “I may survive, but this is not going to garner the kind of attention I was looking for.”

* * * * * * * * *

My stigmata took a long time to heal. It was at least two weeks before I could put on a sock, much less a shoe that went across the top of my foot. There were times when I wondered if somehow I had taken off so many layers of my skin that maybe I’d actually shaved off the first few layers of bone as well. The wounds became infected over and over again, and would seep unspeakably nasty things. It was right up there with the time when I was thirteen and had carpetburn over 30% of my face and tried to cover it up with make-up but that’s another story for another time.

Finally, six weeks after I’d left the camp behind, when the idea of being Jesse’s Girl was fading into a weird anecdote, I had to accept the cold, hard fact that I was going to bear the reminder of that moment for the rest of my life.

From time to time, I would think about Jesse, and I would imagine a different scenario on the night of the big dance. What if I had just gone right up to him and said, “Can I dance with you?” I’ll never know how or whether it would have worked out differently.

What I do know is this: the simple act of growing older, and definitely wiser is very empowering. I now have some evidence, empirical and physical, that there are better ways to get a man’s attention.

And I have some much better dance moves.

_______________________________

Click here to view a live version of me telling this story at The Moth.

Borders

Recently, I went to an Atlanta Braves game with my dad in celebration of Father’s Day. I’m not much of a sports fan, but I’m a big fan of my dad. I thought it would be sort of campy cool to catch a live game with him. Unfortunately, we sat and watched as the Cincinnati Reds ran up the score big time, including one stretch where they made eight runs in one inning. By the top of the ninth, we decided to head out early to beat the traffic. The Braves were down 9 – 3. I was so sorry that my dad had driven all the way to Atlanta, only to see his team lose so royally.

After a long, hot walk to the car and sitting in the steamy parking lot for a while, we merged onto the interstate. I thought to myself as we drove, if I go right here, we go home; but if I go left, then maybe I could take my dad somewhere else fun first.

Which got me to thinking about another time that I’d had a similar thought…

Charlie Collier was one of those guys who knew how to get you. He wasn’t slick exactly. He just knew how to work it. Intelligent and understated, with a sideways smirk. An architecture student with a ponytail ~ it was the 90s, so that was ok. He would randomly show up on a Saturday afternoon and say, “Let’s go for a walk.” Or “How about a drive?” And then he would disappear again for weeks.

I loved him fiercely. He had no idea. Or at least, I don’t think he knew how I felt about him. I never declared my feelings for him.

I need to explain something to you here:

For the better part of my first thirty years, romance consisted of only one definable trend ~ huge, unrequited crushes.

In case you’re unfamiliar, the crush is called a “crush” because of the general compression you feel around your heart most of the time, particularly toward the end of the crush period. It begins with light, floaty happy feelings, but as time goes on, when those feelings are not given over to action, they turn to what my friend, Erica, calls “fring.” The molecules spin faster and faster inside your chest creating a nearly drunken feeling, which can then quickly turn into deep, dark depression.

My crushes roughly followed this pattern no matter how old I was:
1. Meet a male human being, become friends with him, spending lots of time with him until I suddenly realize that I no longer just want to be friends with this person.
2. Tell every girlfriend I have about the way I’m feeling, do not tell him how I’m feeling, and maybe tell some of his friends in hopes that they might spill the beans but absolutely forbid them from saying anything to him.
3. Awkwardly flirt, be mean, do weird motherly things for him, and/or do nothing and pine.
4. Make mix tapes/CDs (depending on the decade) in honor of the crush. Perhaps give him the mix tape/CD in hopes that he will pick up on the subliminal messages.
5. Re-hash all interactions with girlfriends as a way of feeling that progress has been made.
6. Repeat steps 2-5 over and over until…
7. Explosion in some form or fashion (a fight, a confession) must occur so that:
a. Friendship must end.
b. Crush can subside.

I can’t really say how or why I developed this pattern or why it lasted for so long. It never – and I mean never, ever – actually progressed to actual romantic activity with a single one of my crush recipients. Tim, Bryan, Paul, Dewald (the South African), video store guy…I could write a country song about them all while drawing little heart-shapes around each one’s name.

But, we were discussing Charlie Collier.

On this particular January night, I was deep in the heaviest part of my crush on Mr. Charlie. The plan: head up to Roanoke (about an hour away) to go to a bookstore, then meet some friends for dinner and drinks, and maybe go to a movie.

When we got to the bookstore, I immediately had to go to the bathroom. When I emerged, I found Charlie in the poetry section, leaned up against a bookshelf, reading. There he was, so casually slouching, wearing his corduroy blazer and scarf, and reading poetry. Could he possible know how what he was doing to me?

And then he started reading out loud to me as soon as I walked up.

I can’t remember exactly what the poem was, but it was like Rumi or Dylan Thomas or something. Read: Hot.

It was so unfair.

Maybe Charlie really did know how I felt about him! Maybe he was teasing me?

(In case you’re not paying attention, let me point out that this is precisely the kind of activity that will bring the fring – As in, the moment when pitty-pat, pitty-pat turns to ka-thunk, ka-thunk.)

Dinner was lovely; nothing of note. Just a nice meal with lots of laughing and good food. We decided to skip the movie and head on back to Blacksburg.

Somehow, though, in the after-dinner glow on our drive back, as we approached the interstate, I said something outrageous.

“You know…if we turn left, we go back to Blacksburg, but right, we go to D.C….”

Charlie turned to me with a mischievous look in his eye. “Well, which way should we go then?”

Could I really be this girl? Spontaneous and wild?

Well, maybe I could, but the next day I had to work at a stupid temp job, pushing credit card applications at a football game. I would probably make $50 that day. At the time, that was a lot of money to me. I was afraid that not showing up would mean that I would become blackballed by the temp agency. I needed a little more heads-up time to be spontaneous. And so, reluctantly, I said, “I do have to work tomorrow. I guess we should head back.”

I saw the disappointment flicker across Charlie’s face. It was like I had offered a piece of candy to a child and then snatched it away. But then he said, “I understand.”

As we approached Blacksburg, though, we were still giddy with the evening’s fring-y energy. It was palpable in the car. Just before I was about to take the exit, Charlie said, “I’m still not ready to go home. Keep driving. There’s supposed to be a meteor shower tonight.”

And that’s how we ended up at Pandapas Pond. So, I might not have been so impetuous as to have driven to D.C. on a whim, but I was thrilled to the point of wanting to pee on myself in that hide-and-go seek kind of feeling as I found myself sneaking into a state park in the middle of the night even though it was completely illegal.

It was one of those crystal clear January nights after it’s snowed. The ice had melted off the roads, but there were still piles of snow everywhere else. A full moon made everything brilliantly incandescent.

We got out of the car and crunched across the ice that had built up on top of the snow, digging our toes in for balance. Everywhere my eyes darted, I was certain a cop would emerge from the shadows. We found our way to a clearing where we could see the stars quite nicely, and then we waited.

It didn’t take too long. He was right ~ there was a meteor shower that night. Eventually, when I was pointing out some celestial body to him, Charlie stood behind me and put his head on my shoulder. He’d done this before. He was taller than me, and he said that he was doing this so that he could see things from my perspective.

This was the second time that night that I thought to myself, “Does he know? Is he actually flirting back? Or is he just messing with me?”

Let me just spoil this heightened sensory reality for you. Nothing happened. Go back and read the rules of the crush. That’s how it works. After we had our fill of the falling stars, and we were nice and cold, I finally took him back to his place at about two o’clock in the morning.

As I lay in my bed that night and recounted our adventures, I reflected to myself as one is wont to do after such an occasion.

I think this is just way life goes for me, I thought to myself. Somehow, right then, at the tender age of 23, I just made up my mind that that was the way it was gonna be. Inaction, lots of frustration, time spent simply wondering if any guy was finally gonna do something!

I drew these boundaries around my heart. Set up stakes, popped a tent and lived in that place for another decade. There were a few blind dates once in a while. But somewhere in there, five years went by and I didn’t even kiss anyone.

* * * *

So that night after the Braves game, my grandmother called to check on my parents on their trip to the big city. When she got on the phone with me, she said, “Well, I’m so excited for y’all that you got to see such an exciting game. How about our team?”

I’d never known my grandmother to be capable of such deep sarcasm.

“Um, yeah, pretty sorry, huh? I can’t believe they got trounced so bad.”

“What do you mean? They won that game!”

“I beg your pardon?” I came back astounded.

I sat there, mouth agape, as I gestured for my dad to come over and turned on the speakerphone. She recounted the tale of how, in the bottom of the ninth inning, the Braves had miraculously come back from the depths of despair with every possible play, including a grand slam. Despite the odds and being completely written off by everyone, including us, they had triumphed.

My dad was completely indignant. He quickly went over to his computer to pull up the replays and stats. After much more indignation and shucks and gosh darns, his ultimate conclusion was that the only reason they won was because we left.

But again, I lay in bed that night and thought about the irony of it all and the lesson in a sporting experience I don’t typically value.

Here I sit, more than ten years after my crush on Charlie Collier. I’ve gotten a few more tools in my arsenal since then. I’m certainly a more experienced game player. And, this is the conclusion I’ve come to: If you can still win a game in the bottom of the ninth, especially by coming back from that far behind, then I suppose I can’t make any hard and fast decisions about the way life will go based on evidence gathered at the age of 23. I’m erasing the borderlines, pulling the stakes, making room for something I can’t predict and am exhausted with trying to.

I’m just anxious to find out who the contender will be.

___________________________________

This story owes strong editorial credit to Vanessa Ragland.

over the edge

I blame it all on Cliff Droke.

Cliff Droke was a local celebrity at Emory & Henry College for one reason. He had an outrageously over-the-top conservative talk radio show on our local college station. His job in life was to piss people off. And he was basically very good at his job.

Let me back up. When I was nineteen, I inherited the coolest car that I have ever owned ~ a red Volkswagen Fox ~ from the coolest relative I will ever have. My Uncle Ken was a wonderful guy who died an untimely death way too young. I'm the same age this year that he was when he died as a matter of fact. Stories about him and his passing and what that meant to my college self go elsewhere. But his car and the way I felt about receiving it definitely apply here. I went everywhere in that car. I listened to the cassette tapes I found in the glove box like I was trying to unravel mysteries about Ken’s life I didn’t know. The first day I got the car I put 75 miles on it just driving all over the Emory/Abingdon area. That evening, I went up into the Emory cemetery, sat on the hood and smoked half a pack of cigarettes all by myself, watching the sun go down, feeling sad and romantic and grown-up.

So, back to Cliff Droke. We are now about six months after I’ve received the car. On this night, Cliff Droke’s topic du jour was the gays.

I was, in fact, driving over to my college gay boyfriend, Matt’s, house to pick him up so that we could go to the Omelet Shop. It was our habit in those days to go there for two to three nights of the week and sit for hours in the middle of the night as we ingested mass quantities of coffee, eggs, toast, and Norton’s Anthologies.

When I got to Matt’s house, I parked the car as Cliff Droke was spewing Bible verses, and I was fuming mad. I went inside to tell Matt that I would be sitting outside waiting for him while he finished, you know, fluffing his hair or something.

I couldn’t have been inside longer than 90 seconds.

When I came back out, everything was dark. There were no lights on in Matt’s parking area. I didn’t think much about it at first. We were in rural, southwest Virginia. It was a dark night in early spring, a cold sprinkling rain was just starting. I suddenly realized that I couldn’t hear my car running or the radio or anything. It must have stalled out, I thought to myself.

I am pretty nightblind, and so my strategy most of the time in circumstances like this is just to walk until I run into the thing I’m trying to find. But this time, I walked and walked until I ran into the concrete retaining wall at the end of the parking area.

And that’s when it dawned on me – My car is not here!

I thought about it a bit longer. When I got out to go inside, I was sitting in a flat area, so even though it was a stick shift, I didn’t set the parking break. But when I got out of the car, I was so mad, I had slammed the door. I must have set it into motion.

I took off running down the driveway in sheer panic and then something caught my eye far off to the right in a gathering of trees. There they were…my headlights. Sticking straight up in the air. My brain couldn’t comprehend it.

I remember, in the movie Tremors, the aliens sucked this car under the ground, and the last image you saw was from far away. The headlights went straight up into the air before they disappeared. That’s what this looked like. How could my headlights be pointed straight up like that?

I ran across the yard and approached the car still not understanding what it was I was observing. Which is why, when I reached out to touch the car, my feet flew out from underneath me, and I found myself tumbling down the 15 foot, 80 degree embankment that the car was sitting in.

There I was, completely dazed, having found the barbed wire fence that the car had taken out on its way down, laying in the pool of water that was beginning to collect in the gully next to the road that I had just discovered I was now next to. Cliff Droke’s voice was still barking out hell and damnation from inside the car.

The next thing I can remember is that I heard God’s voice from above.

Are you ok?

That didn’t make any sense. God generally knows whether or not you’re ok. But the voice sounded so strange, and again, it was coming from directly over my head. Remember, I was having quite a hard time understanding the physical dynamics of the situation I was in. Finally, I started to take it all in, and I realized that God, at that moment, was my gay boyfriend.

“I’m fine, but I really don’t know how I’m gonna get out of this mess.”

The first thing I decided that I needed to do was to turn the car off. In order to accomplish this task, I had to reach up, open the door, jump two feet off the ground, grab the steering wheel with my hands (feet dangling off the ground), reach in and turn off the ignition, lights, and radio. While I was performing these Lara Croft-style antics, the whole thing began to creak like it was about to turn over. So, I let go of the steering wheel, pulled my hands out fast before the door slammed shut, and slid back down the embankment on my belly.

By this time, Matt had walked all the way down his driveway and back up the road to where my car was, um, resting so that we could walk back to his house and begin the painful process of making phone calls: 1) the tow truck; 2) my parents.

Only partial reality had begun to set in for me. I was at that point in a crisis when your brain begins playing tricks on you and you start thinking completely outrageous things. Like maybe this is a very permanent situation you’ve put yourself in.

“You don’t understand,” I found myself crying to Matt, “They’re never going to get it out of there. They’re going to have just plant flowers in it and call it the Shannon Turner Monument to Stupidity.”

When we got back to the house, I showered off a bit and Matt gave me some clean, dry clothes. Unfortunately, we did all that before I called AAA because when I was speaking with them, the last thing they said was, “Could you leave the hazard lights on for us to aid the process of finding the car?”

Yep. I had to traipse back out there and repeat the process of reach up, open door, jump, steering wheel, jerk hands out, aaaaahhhhh….

When the tow truck finally arrived an hour later, I walked up to the window and knocked on it. The driver was literally sitting there with his head in his hands. “Hi,” I said. “I’m the person responsible for this mess.”

“I just have one question,” the bewildered man replied. “How?”

You see, he didn’t understand that there was a house and land up above. He thought that I had somehow managed to drive my car directly sideways from the road up the embankment. When I explained to him the real course of events, he thought I was slightly less crazy. Slightly. It didn’t make his job any easier though.

He pretty much had to put a giant hook under the trunk of my car and drag it out. I’ve rarely heard a more sickening sound in all my life. And the visual of watching it bounce down and out, careening across to the other side of the road. It was like witnessing a slow motion wreck.

While the trunk was crumpled, the car was still structurally sound, so my dad and I decided only to get the taillights fixed. Six days after I got the car back from repairs, someone else rear-ended me, and I was able to negotiate with their insurance company that, rather than suing for damages for my whiplash, they would pay to fix the whole trunk situation.

I loved that car. I drove it practically until the wheels fell off. Fortunately, the wheels didn’t fall off that time, or any of the other times I abused it. It was one of my best friends in college.

Liberation

It was one of those days in the middle of May when it was absolutely torturous to still be in school. The smell of late spring wafted in through the windows, making us absolutely drunk with the feeling. Summer. Was. Approaching.

And not just summer, but the end of middle school. Soon, we would be free.
Actually, in Kingsport, Tennessee the smell that wafted in through the window in late spring or any season was the noxious mixture of the Eastman Kodak and Meade Paper plants. But this story is not about the environmental politics of an industrial Appalachian town.

It’s about middle school politics.

The moment that I exploded came during a Monday morning homeroom. Morning announcements were over. The pledge of allegiance had been said. Most had settled into that quiet five-minute period when everyone was supposed to be concentrating on the homework they should have done the weekend before.
My concentration was broken by a quiet snicker.

“Get a look at those things.”
“What?”
“Those shoes. They look like clown shoes.”
“Oh, hell yeah. They look like they could walk up walls or something.”
“What are those? Buddy Keds?”
“More like Super Keds!”

And that. That is the moment where I broke. I stood up, took the shoe off my foot, shoved it into the offender’s face and yelled…

“Do you see this shoe? Do you have anything else to say about this shoe?! Because I don’t appreciate you talking about me as if I and this shoe are the same thing!...”

I should back up here and explain a little more about the details, the context behind what led to this moment of inexplicable courage and unsolicited sermonizing.
John Sevier Middle School was made up of a class structure as strict and distinct as any third-world country ever invented. When we walked in the door of sixth grade, we were practically handed assignments on the first day.

Preps. Nerds. Rednecks.

The distinctions were unique, never to intermingle. Who were these different factions? Well, let me take a moment to introduce you to the various parties…

In this corner, and generally at the bottom of the social order, we had the rednecks. Rednecks were a little bit scary. They generally wore black t-shirts, often for country or heavy metal bands, and their hairdos involved mullets and highly teased and hairsprayed bangs that defied gravity. They smoked in the bathrooms and out back after school. Approximately 2-3 of them got pregnant per year.

Next were the preps. Being a prep was the most coveted status at Sevier. Their parents were doctors, lawyers, and executives at Eastman. Preps wore the best brand name clothes – British Knight tennis shoes, Sebago loafers, Guess jeans, Coca-Cola jersey shirts. They tucked their jeans down into slouchy socks with complete precision. Their hair was silky, even when permed, and perfect. They coupled off with each other. Back then, we followed their romances, like teens today follow celebrities. And even though they were only thirteen years old, we knew that their children together would be beautiful.

Finally came the nerds. Nerds were not necessarily smart, but many of them were. Nerds often wore off-label clothing and tried very hard to be cool despite their social awkwardness. A person could sometimes randomly and without much provocation be moved into the nerd category simply by falling from grace. My friend, Jeremy, had become a nerd when he earned the nickname “Skidmarks” on a band trip after getting food poisoning.

I, of course, was the queen of the Nerd Herd. I desperately yearned to break out of this mold. I knew that I could be better than this label. I loved my friends and knew that they were better than this stupid pigeonhole they’d been shoved into. Occasionally, we turned on each other. That was nasty.

But worse than the bickering amongst ourselves, there were the public and private, the big and the little, ways that the system picked apart our dignity on a near daily basis. Sometimes hourly. Everything about the way it worked was built on keeping us bullied and cowed and in our place. I quietly tolerated the abuse.

The movie Dirty Dancing came out in 1987, the summer between seventh and eighth grade. Among other things, it skyrocketed Keds to top of the charts of our middle school clothing fantasies. Well, Keds and cut offs. Cut offs I was able to score quite easily. The Keds were another thing altogether.

My mother was a particular non-believer in name-brand clothing. She would gladly buy me a $5 pair of Keds-style tennis shoes at Wal-mart, but they were always missing that extremely important blue tag on the back of the heel. I had fantasies of going into a regular shoe store, discretely ripping the blue tag off of a real pair of Keds and hot-gluing it to the back of my imposters.

On the weekend before this fateful Monday morning, I had been helping my mother clean out her closet in preparation for a yard sale. Somewhere, in the back of said closet, I found them. A pair of Keds so dirty, grass stained, and old, you would have barely recognized them. Let us be clear. They were from the 70s. They had red stitching and laces. These were not the current fashionable Keds that I had so long yearned for. But they were Keds. And so I had gone tromping out of the house that day wearing shoes that were two sizes too big for my feet just because of the blue tag on the heal. I just didn’t get it. Nor did I know what I was in for.

So, back to our scene…

“Get a look at those things,” said Tommy.
“What?” asked Pepper.
“Those shoes. They look like clown shoes.”
“Oh, hell yeah. They look like they could walk up walls or something.”
“What are those? Buddy Keds?” chimed in Cameron.
“More like Super Keds!”
“Can I get a demonstration?”

“Buddy” was the worst insult you could attach to anything. Buddy was a way of indicating something was not the name brand or exactly the right conformity and therefore just generally subpar.

As I sat there, listening to the taunts build, I started to feel this intense pressure start to build up in chest. I imagined myself like one of those cartoon character teakettles. In many ways, this was really no different than the casual-to-intense ridicule that I and my other friends had endured on countless other occasions. I’m not sure why, on this day, I reacted so differently. Perhaps it was the spring air.
Perhaps it was the complete indignation that came from the particular insult, hurt, and confusion that came from striving so hard around the whole Keds issue.

For one reason or another, like a teakettle, I began to scream.

I shoved the offending object into Tommy’s face.

“Do you see this shoe? Do you have anything else to say about this shoe?! Because I don’t appreciate you talking about me as if I and this shoe are the same thing. Do you have anything else to say about this shoe?”

Stunned silence.

“Here. I’m going to leave this shoe here for you to talk about it while I’m not in the room. And here you can have the other one too.”

With that, I took off my other shoe and threw them both down at Tommy’s feet. I booked it for the door. Now, I don’t know where I thought I was going at 8:30 in the morning with no shoes on my feet and no money in my pocket, but I was getting the hell out of there. When I got into the hallway, I heard the voice of my homeroom teacher, Mrs. Byrd, behind me: “Stop right there.”

I turned around; there she stood. And behind her were Tommy, Pepper, and Cameron looking like they had just seen the door to an alternate universe open up before their very eyes. She looked at them. She looked at me. “Now, I was just wondering if you have anything else you’d like to say to these people.”

“Well, yes, I do…! I’m so sick of you and you and you and ALL OF YOU and the way you make fun of us all the time. I’m so sick of it. It’s not human. It’s been three years of this crap. Who do you think you are?...”

I went on and on in this long stream of consciousness monologue. I was JFK. I was MLK. I was Ghandi reincarnated in a 13-year-old white middle school girl's body. I said everything that I’d ever wanted to say. And I said it well…

“…And just because my father doesn’t work alongside your father doesn’t mean he doesn’t put his pants on one leg at a time. And from here on out, I’m telling you, I’m not taking your shit anymore.”

With that, I came to a screeching halt. I knew I’d crossed a line by using the swear word in front of the teacher. And really, I’d meandered into a little bit crazy territory with the father/pants part. Mrs. Byrd looked at the three perpetrators and asked, “Do you three have anything to say?”

A quick and half-hearted round of “sorries” was passed out. With that, they all turned to go back into the classroom. And that was the moment that my seeming triumph turned into complete and utter horror. I realized that every single doorway on the entire eighth grade hall was open. Dear God. Every person in the entire eighth grade had heard my tirade. And then it dawned on me. If they hadn’t heard it first person, they would certainly hear about it through others in short order. I went back into the classroom, put on my shoes, gathered my books, and waited for the bell to ring. The first two periods were remarkably quiet. I thought that maybe, just maybe, it wouldn’t be that big of a deal after all.

But then, in third period Math, we had a substitute, which generally provided the space for a lot of sparring and banter. The energy in the room was very weird. I wasn’t entirely sure if it had to do with what had happened, but I had a sense that maybe it did. At the end of the class, a girl I’d never spoken to in the entire three years we’d been in school together dropped a note on my desk:

“Dear Shannon: I know we don’t know each other very well, but I heard about this morning. If you ever want to hang out, I’d really like that. You seem cool. Chrissy”

At lunch, all of us Nerds had an opportunity to gather and reflect on what a coup I had managed to pull off. We were joyous. We walked around with our heads held high, meeting people’s gazes straight on. My friend, Jeremy, joked that he wanted to make a t-shirt that said “I’m proud to be Shannon’s friend.”

Just after lunch came gym and that’s where stuff got even stranger. Girls from every part of the social spectrum surrounded me. I think some were just fascinated – like maybe they thought I was going to kill myself and they wanted to get a look at me before that happened. Most of the rest just wanted to talk about the outrageous course of events.

By the time I made it back to my locker, I found that it was crammed full of notes. Expressions of good wishes. Kids asking questions. A few were less than well intentioned. But even that didn’t bother me. Because for that one day, I was the most popular girl in school. As embarrassing and strange as it was, I had somehow managed to transcend.

Two days later, someone thought it would be very cute to trip one of my friends on her way to the bus, thus ending our brief foray in the sunlight. Soon enough, we would all go our separate ways for the summer. And then would come high school. High school brought the promise of reinventing oneself. Two middle schools came together there. Lots of room to spread out. You could specialize more with activities. Get lost in the pursuit of things. At least, that was the dream we all clung to.

And sometimes, even today, when I’m feeling bad about myself, like I just don’t do enough to make this world a better place, I think back on that day and smile and remember the way I led my people to a new place by simply standing up and taking off my shoes.

_____________________________________

Click here to view the live version of me telling this story at The Moth in Atlanta.