What Happens North of the Red

Caelyn and I went to Altus a few weeks ago without Chris. That means I stayed up all night. And that means I looked through lots of old HS photos and yearbooks. . . .

I’m a pretty nostalgic person. Just last night I got nostalgic about the Little League field lights, and I’ve never played! But, for some reason, I can’t muster up an ounce of nostalgia for the town I lived in for 10 years. It’s hard to say why. Maybe because my parents live in the house I lived in from 12 to 18, not 8 to 12 (and something sweet and warm in a person gets lost after 12), or because they replaced the carpet with tile. Maybe because I didn’t love high school or because my friends have moved away. Maybe because the church I grew up in is full of different people in a different building or because the country just isn’t the same without the teenage angst.

Or maybe I’ve just turned into a big city snob.

Whatever, you’d expect me to start feeling fuzzy as soon as I cross the Red. But I don’t, not even when nostalgia-inducing events occur. This visit, my old next-door neighbor came over. Then Mom made us stop to say hello to my old band director. It was nice, but being in the band hall only made me think about how I won’t encourage Caelyn to be in band. C.C. was in town too, which was good, but it didn’t feel nostalgic. We didn’t sit around talking about the old days. We talked about the now ones.

But it was still fun to look at those pics and yearbooks. To be honest, though, I don’t remember everyone who signed them. One guy addressed me as “baby.” He was moving that summer and gave me his new number. I had to think long and hard about who he was. (To my credit, I don’t think he had a reason to call me “baby.”)

Anyway, mixed in with those yearbooks I found my Official English Paper Files for middle school, junior high, and high school. And! My Creative Writing Files for junior high and high school. I bet you didn’t know I wrote a murder mystery in the 7th grade or a courtroom drama in the 8th. There’s a romance for Freshman year, along with a re-visioned ending to Little Women (where Jo marries Laurie) and a piece about God turning outhouses into castles. I can’t not mention the state-wide anti-tabacco essay winner that landed me a “Smile In Style, Don’t Use Tobacco!” t-shirt. And let’s not forget the short-story that earned me a grand-prize trip to Electricity Camp! Of course, there were papers on Hamlet, Death of a Salesman, As I Lay Dying, and Heart of Darkness too.

But what really got me was the poetry. Not because it was gosh-awful (because it was), but because I couldn’t remember writing most of it. I don’t even know what it means! I know this, though. For all the talk about personality we’ve had on FtR, it’s a shame I didn’t have this poetry at my house. I read that stuff and thought, “Who needs to take a personality test? Geez!”

Truth be told, I’d have probably been worried if I’d been my mom and been snooping through my teenage room. (Trust me, she was snooping. And she was worried.) We’re different enough that I think it would’ve been very hard to understand where thoughts like those came from, which I guess explains why she confronted me once about channeling demons. She was worried, too, that exercises in imagery were free association practices (or something like that).

There wasn’t anything evil about the process I used. I just wrote. I didn’t know about tightening and revising and making sense back then. I only knew about thinking too many thoughts, feeling too many feelings, and loving language. But it still had a purpose. I don’t know what those poems mean now, but I knew when I wrote them. I know that they might not have channeled demons, but they did help me channel feelings. They did help me figure out what I thought and felt about some tough things. There were other writings that did the same that would make more sense now — prose, prayers, unsent letters — but I never kept them very long after I wrote them. (Remember the snooping?)

Anyway, I don’t know what this post means either. I’m not even going to make a point, so quit looking for one. I’d just been thinking about those poems and Altus/nostalgia. Then Lex mentioned something about what writing does for a writer (and the nature of the experience) in a post the other day, which I really liked. And it made me think about those poems again and some other thoughts on writing that I won’t go into now. All this — writing, my past, and nostalgia — has been tying itself to parenting and faith in my head too. But I haven’t figured out exactly how yet.

I guess I need to write about it.