essayist

My job is to teach essays.  Oh, I teach composition and professional writing too, and I am good with poems and fiction, but my primary area at my current position is teaching creative nonfiction writing. 
That seems kind of ironic to me at this point in my life because when I was a child, my mother did not allow me to keep a diary.  Well, I kept one once, and when she found it and beat the heck out of me because I said she was mean in it, I lost my incentive.  So I wrote poetry, and mostly song lyrics.  I had a guitar from a store called White's Auto that was kind of like Western Auto and also sold appliances and lawn mowers, and around December, lots of bicycles and guitars and drum sets.
The guitar was a Catalina.  After that I had a Kay and finally graduated to an Ovation and a Fender classic.  I was not much guitar player, and I know I can never go back to it till the new world because of Arthur Itis again.  He inserts himself into my life in some annoying ways.
And, in case you are wondering, my mother was mean to me on the occasion about which I wrote.  All mothers are mean once in awhile because all mothers are imperfect.  My mother was pretty consistent with favoring my brother and when I got the belt for something that only resulted in his being scolded, I found that mean.  Go figure.
My kids say I am mean too.  I try so hard to be impartial but both of them still tell me that I favor the other one.  Carly says Kimberly as the baby never gets into trouble and Kimberly says Carly is my favorite because I am a firstborn too.
Sort of.  My father had a previous family.  But that is another story.
Ruth says she is following my blog and getting to know me better.  I remember going to her house out on Wedington Drive, passing a Sonic on the way, and staying with her for an hour or even longer, sometimes with the girls, sometimes just me.  She had this big Old Yeller kind of dog named Brandy, but Brandy has since died.  I loved the way Brandy would hear my car and come running, and as soon as she realized it was me, she'd be tail wagging the way dogs get.  When a dog is happy, she is happy with her whole body.  I always had some bone or scrap for her.  I used to save all my bones in the freezer for those trips.
Sometimes I'd get something along the way to share with Ruth, and sometimes I would go to Sam's on my way there.  Since I was buying in bulk and she was not, I'd root around in the trunk and get two tomatoes out of the dozen carton, a few yeast rolls, what have you.  Mostly though, I'd bring her stuff from my house.  I am always cooking a big pot of beans or baking a big casserole or cake.

I tried to lay off the cake since both of us don't need the sugar.  She's doing a lot better at it than I am.

And I would talk to her for hours, and I did most of the talking and going home Carly would get on to me that I didn't let Ruth get a word in edgewise and I would feel bad.

I get that feeling writing here sort of.  I don't want everybody to get to know me better.  I'm surprised by that because I thought everyone did know me because I never shut up.  The funny thing is, that no one will believe, I'd much rather write you than talk to you.  I hate talking.  Well, I love talking if you mean lecturing my classes.  I'm the boss and I know what I'm doing and that's it.  But when a conversation is back and forth, I always feel a little out of my depth.  I like email so much better than the telephone.  The other day I was reading something about the phone company and the article said that they are experiencing a new sector of customers in deaf people.  They can text with their phones, and so finally they have an interest in having a phone.
I'm socially deaf.  I don't hear cues that other people hear.  I have finally decided that must be my problem, because I get so surprised so often when I find out what people meant and what I thought they meant.

I wish everybody would write stuff down and we didn't talk at all.  Only singing.  That's a good thing to do with voices.  I know I know.  I'm the Lone Ranger on this idea.

In the mid-90's I wrote a newspaper column.  It was called Mommy Tracks and ran for four years.  It was about trying to be a mom of two girls and juggling bills and broke down cars and not being mean.  It ran in the Frederick Leader, in Frederick, Oklahoma.  I had no idea then that there was something phenomenal about approaching a newspaper editor and proposing a column and actually getting published. 

One day in the United Supermarket, a woman came up to me when I was wheeling the two girls around in a cart and asked me if I was Me.  I said yes.  She said, "I just want to tell you how much I love your newspaper column.  You always say what I want to say but I can't think of the words."

I don't know what that feels like.  To be an overwhelmed frustrated mother and not have the words for it.  The words have always been there for me.  And that is why I became an essayist. 

Some people don't want the words.  They don't want it pointed out that they are mean.  It is difficult for me to say in a newspaper column in 1994 or a blog in 2011 that I am mean sometimes, yet I am.  Oh, here's an example that just popped into my head.

In 2001, I was inactive, another story, but I made the effort to come back and the girls were 11 and 12 and that is not a good age to introduce children to a new way of life. 

Carly had pink bangs and a pink edge of hair in the bottom two inches of her blonde locks.

I know, what kind of a mother am I?  Well, I'm the kind who picks her battles carefully.  And pink hair was not it for me.  If I get to pick between pink hair and tattoos, oh, I pick hair.  It grows back.  You can't say no to everything.

So we walk into the hall and there is a brother who wears a toupee.  It is outdated.  He has gone gray but is still wearing his dark charcoal toupee so there is this line of demarcation between charcoal and silver.  It's obvious.  

Carly walks into the hall for the first time in Arkansas, and the first time in five years anywhere, and I know I am about to begin the process of saving her eternal life, I am aware of the stakes here, and as she passes Brother Toupee, he looks at the brother beside him and says:  "Can you believe how some people will look walking into the Kingdom Hall?"

And I am very afraid that Carly will have her feelings hurt by this, and I am mad because I am praying at that exact moment for someone to like my child, because I never worried she would accept the teachings of the truth for being the way the world is, but people get hurt and stumbled out of the truth all the time.  It's their own fault, I know.  I have read Psalms 119:165 to myself and everybody else so many times I know it as well as 68:11.  But not at her first meeting at age 12.

So I calmly looked over at the brother and said, without missing a beat:  "At least it's her hair."  And we kept on walking to find a seat, and I thought at least if Carly is hurt by this she knows I stood up for her.

She didn't hear it at all, and when I told her about it months later she laughed.

At my very first meeting in Windber, the highlights from the Bible reading included, I don't remember exactly, but it was straight out of the Mosaic law, and about half of it was about something easy to discuss and the other half was about women and being clean and unclean during their monthly cycle.

Nobody at all commented on that half.  Not the brother conducting, or anyone else.  So I had to raise my hand and comment on it.  Jehovah put this in his book too, so who are we not to consider this part?  It disrespected Jehovah as an author. 

No, I don't think anyone was disrespecting Jehovah's word.  I think everyone was too chicken to talk about periods.  I got called on, and I pointed out that all these rules were not to make men think women were gross or lesser than men, but to remind the Israelites of the gift they had in the ability to procreate.  If you think about it angels don't get to make babies.  Some of them forsook their natural place to have sex, yes, but it also gave them creative power.  Humans have that, and Jehovah views children as a gift from Him.  He didn't want the Israelites to forget how precious was the gift of their copulatory organs.  I wish someone would remind parents of this today, in a world filled with child abuse and Casey Anthony.

Now there are some mean parents out there.  And mean children who shotgun their parents for little reason (as if there could be a good reason, and I suppose there could, but it would be extreme).  So little appreciation for the gift of life.

Every day, I thank Jehovah for 24 more hours with Arthur Itis and the girl who no longer has pink hair and the baby girl too.  And I am thankful for the words that always come and the chance to share them with you.  I hope that sometimes you know how I feel, or that you think of something in a new way and grow.  I thank Jehovah for you, sisters.  For everyday Ruth has that she is helping Jack find the strawberry plants that his failing eyesight can't locate, for everyday her sister Mary is breathing with oxygen assist, for Bip Sue the newlywed and be joyful Joyce and Sister Scully and baby Jordyn growing inside Jennifer's womb.  I am glad for everyday that all of us have enjoying the gift of life.