Nomading

A hard year

noreply@blogger.com (Kayla Smith) — Sun, 30 Jan 2022 16:01:00 +0000

For the past 8 years now, I’ve written a blog post reflecting on the past year. This year it took me until the end of January to realize I hadn’t done it.

It’s felt impossible to write about this year. It feels like we’ve collectively exhausted all words—what more can possibly be said about these last couple of years? Last year I wrote about how a lot of 2020 was recognizing that fear and grief don’t negate gratitude or joy. I feel the same way today that I felt then, but I also couldn’t have imagined how much more relentless 2021 might be with its cruelty. I can sort through for the good pieces (of which there are many!) and try to paint 2021 as a time of growth and optimism and moments of joy brightening difficult circumstances. Or I can be honest and admit there’s been quite a bit of anger and frustration amidst that gratitude. That it has been infuriating to spend part of my time in a state that has barely acknowledged that a pandemic ever existed. That it has been horrifying and astonishing to watch as guidelines and suggestions gradually, and then entirely, began to disregard the safety of immunocompromised people who don’t have the luxury of deciding to be “vaxxed and done.” That witnessing the way leadership in my hometown and in the faith communities I grew up in have handled this has caused me shame and embarrassment. For all the terrible things this pandemic has caused, it has at least done something useful in revealing to us with total clarity which people are considerate and caring of others and which people care only about themselves. (And to be clear, this is not a political statement or about differing options on vaccines—people of either opinion about vaccines can be caring and considerate of others. I’m talking about the type of person who publicly tells their Facebook friends to buy a fake PCR test so they can get on a plane when they know they are sick with Covid—these are the people we now know with certainty care only about themselves.) How do you explain to someone that they should care about other people? I’ve had to remind myself again and again this year, you can’t. You can’t make people care about others. You just can’t.

2021 was a lot of waiting. Waiting for something to change, waiting for the latest wave to pass, waiting for a break, waiting in hospital waiting rooms, waiting for test results, waiting for doctors to call. It was glimmers of hope and vaccine appointments that felt like terror and relief at the same time. It was getting to hug Sam and Sophie for the first time in over a year at the crawfish boil Michael had for me and the dusty pink of Harry’s Japanese magnolia tree when I finally found the perfect one. The first time I ate in a restaurant in over a year at that dim sum place in Houston. The house floats during Mardi Gras that felt as magical to me as any parade. Hockey games and Michael winning the crawfish eating competition. A few weeks of milongas and remembering how to dance and doing circus tricks and buying an international plane ticket and dipping my toes anxiously into something like normalcy. The beach trip with my family that felt like an unimaginable gift after more than a year of fear.

And then. And then it was the phone call from my mom that morning in Austin when she wouldn’t say the word “cancer,” but I knew. A couple of days later, the vet called to tell me that Pudgy had cancer, too. It was the terror and shock in the waiting room as we waited for the results of the CT scan. Being horrified of the Delta variant during the first round of her chemo and the Omicron variant during the second round. There was my grandmother’s sudden sickness and her death three weeks later, then Pudgy dying later that same day.

But it wasn’t all a before and after. There was joy mixed in with the grief and anger. There was getting to pick Elijah up from the airport after almost 2 years of not seeing each other. There were the last few hours with Pudge, and Michael and I holding him that night on the floor as we waited for the vet. There was a hurricane evacuation and a night spent in the animal shelter, an Amtrak trip to Jackson, so many paintings of Pudge, and the delight his bucket list brought us. There was Chewie comforting us afterward and always making us laugh. My birthday petting zoo from Michael, and the last time I spoke to my grandmother on the phone when I stepped away from it. The last meal at my dad’s parents’ house before we sold it, and then the hours I spent rescuing the things I didn’t want sold at their estate sale. (There was the battle I had with the woman who tried to buy Maw’s yard-art hens. Don’t worry. I won.). There were chocolate croissants on Saturdays and the discovery that Whole Foods sells Levain Bakery cookies and then the doctor telling me that actually I should avoid gluten. There was oral surgery and not being able to eat solid food for two weeks. There were 6 different international trips canceled but an appalling number of hours planning hypothetical trips that still might happen. There were 82 books read (55 physical and 27 audio) that helped take me somewhere else when I felt trapped in monotony, dozens of letters written, a million emails and zoom calls with students who are just as burnt out as I am, Pudge and Chewie in their hoodies for Christmas photos, the relief of getting to work remotely, optimistic and kind doctors, boosters, and a Christmas together.

There is so much to be thankful for and so, so much hope. And even though the hope feels delicate, it's strong enough to keep pulling us forward.

calculating something like normal

noreply@blogger.com (Kayla Smith) — Wed, 24 Mar 2021 01:00:00 +0000

Last week made a year ago that I went to work in person for the last time. The students were notified on Wednesday the 11th that they would need to go home the following week to start taking classes remotely, but staff intended to continue working in person. That weekend I spent a few hundred dollars buying groceries that I could freeze. It was the last time I entered a grocery store for almost 6 months. We got an email that Sunday telling us not to come in the following day, and I haven’t been back to work in person since.

Mari Andrews posted recently about how losing something implies that you once had it, but so many of us this year have been grieving things we never had in the first place. “I can remember the sweet days of an alternate life that I’m just now admitting will never exist,” she says.

I think about every visit I never got to have with my grandmother in the nursing home while I could still be sure she recognized me and the funeral we didn’t get to have for her. I think about Harry going to sleep for the last time without me holding him. I think about every tango I never got to dance in churches and living rooms and foreign countries. I think about the patatas bravas at Mimi’s that I’ll never get to eat. About all the meatball and taco dinners that I didn’t have with James, the year’s worth of dinner parties that Sophie never got to host, the craft party we never had with Katie and Derrick, the cookies Elijah never brought me in the airport, conversations we never had in Sam and Nick’s living room. The people we were pulled away from or pushed suffocatingly close to. The flights I never booked and that beach trip we had to cancel. The Rusty Nail bar trivia we might have won. I think about the writers who might have inspired me at the Dogfish readings that never happened. I think about the alternate versions of ourselves that we’ll never know if we might have been.

Of course there is also unforeseen beauty and joy in this new reality we’ve found ourselves in that we wouldn’t have known to miss if things hadn’t turned out this way. New relationships born in spite of these circumstances but in strange ways enhanced because of it. Reconnections with old friends who might have always remained distant. New hobbies. New appreciation for the things I once took for granted. Sometimes I have to remind myself that it’s okay to grieve a previously imagined present while appreciating the current one.

I got my first vaccine dose last week. It felt simultaneously like it changed nothing and everything. People are smiling without masks in public and talking about glimpsing normalcy now, but I don’t know how to stop calculating. Calculating the number of days since the vaccine and the number of days until the next one, calculating how many people have been in my proximity in public and how many feet they were from me, calculating how long ago I might have last been exposed to the virus by that stranger who walked by too close in the grocery store, calculating the number of days that have passed since a casual interaction that to me felt like a close call. A year ago I would have told you that this level of hyper-awareness and paranoia is absolutely not sustainable for any extended period. I’m here to tell you that I was wrong about that because here I am, over a year later, still vigilant, still calculating. It is very hard for me to recognize the fine line that exists between a justifiable level of caution and over-the-top paranoia. Which is to say, I do not think there will be such thing as a tidy “after the pandemic” cross-over for me. I do not think that a switch will flip two weeks after my second vaccine where I assume I’m safe to re-enter the social world with carefree ease and joy. I think instead that new levels of normal will gently and gradually seep into each other in small increments. My family and I are planning a beach trip together since we will all be vaccinated. I’m thinking about international travel in the hopefully-not-too-distant future. These feel like things worth poking my head out of my bunker and looking forward to.

The pharmacy where I got my vaccine was empty when I arrived. I thought it would feel momentous, but it felt strange instead—walking into a pharmacy I’ve never been to to let a pharmacist jab me with substance I don’t want to think too much about. (I didn’t even know pharmacists give vaccines.) But while I was there, a man and his elderly father came in together for their vaccines, too. We were across the room from each other and didn’t speak, but we made eye contact for a second. A moment of recognition. Now my father will be safer. Now my family can be safer. This moment may feel mundane, but it is life-altering and we are experiencing it together. Then the pharmacist said, “Kayla, you can go.” And even though I had only waited for about 5 minutes instead of the generally required 15, I got up and left, and somehow the world looked normal outside.

Grief and Gratitude

noreply@blogger.com (Kayla Smith) — Sat, 23 Jan 2021 19:51:00 +0000

I re-read all my New Year’s blog posts recently—7 years worth of them. I always do a recap of things I want to remember about the year—obsessively documented statistics about the number of books I’ve read (I did keep track, for the record! I read 59 this year -- 47 physical and 17 audio) and miles I’ve traveled and the sentimental images that will always pull me back to that specific time in my life. And I’ve tried to write it, over and over I’ve tried to write about 2020, but it’s felt impossible. How are you supposed to write about a year that felt like 20 years but also like such a haze that it might have been 20 seconds instead? What else can possibly be said about 2020 that hasn’t been said so many times already that it’s lost any potency? What can be said that isn’t depressing or trite? But here I am, still trying.

There’s this steady refrain of guilt I feel at the ways in which 2020 was far less cruel to me than it has been to countless others, survivor’s guilt about near misses and silver linings. 2020 was the year I lost my grandma. Covid took away the last 3 months of her life that we could have visited her in the nursing home without a closed window between us, but at least the staff let us in for the last week and half of her life to tell her goodbye. 2020 was the year I lost Harry. Perhaps I’d never tried harder at anything than keeping that poor dog alive, and because of Covid, I wasn’t allowed in the veterinary hospital to be with him at the end. But at least I got to spend 2 months at home with him during quarantine that I wouldn’t otherwise have gotten, and at least the vet was willing to bring him to the door so I could tell him a last goodbye. At least, at least—these versions of consolation and reminders of gratitude play on loop. And to be clear—I DO feel grateful, immeasurably so, and a lot of 2020 was about recognizing that fear and grief don’t negate gratitude or joy.

2020 for me was the Skull and Bones gang as the sun rose in the Treme on Mardi Gras morning. It was midnight tango dances until there was no one left to dance with. It was unreciprocated gifts and unanswered letters, extended hands pulled back again and again, broken promises and empty gestures, the sound of the rats in the walls at night before my apartment became habitable only by ghosts and monsters. It was fear and mental calculations and collective anxiety that made us feel better that at least we didn’t feel it alone. (At least.) It was the 3 months at my parents’ house, the outdoor funeral (at least we got to have a funeral, at least no one got sick afterward), the guitar I picked up from a stranger’s front porch and taught myself to play. The words I sang to no one. The bike rides through pot-holed streets, porch concerts, letters to and from strangers who were desperate to feel less alone. (Could there be a better city to live in during a pandemic? At least we got to be here where the musicians play on their balconies and raise their glasses to you as you bike past in the evening.) It was so, so many paranoia-induced Covid tests, and that moment of doubt after each negative result when I asked myself, “But how do I know it’s really negative?” It was a hundred thousand emails and zoom calls and “It’s not so much working from home as it is living at work.” And then there was August and new letters and tentative park visits, a new apartment with a balcony and an herb garden and fewer monsters. It was Michael surprising me with a new foster dog and the foster dogs who’ve let us borrow them ever since. It was reunions and reconnections with kindred spirits who felt like friends and with old friends who feel like new ones. It was levee paths to the end of the world and back. It was camping on mountainsides, apple-picking in valleys, fall leaves to make us forget the hardest parts of the year. It was hurricanes, swimming pools, s’mores in fireplaces, camping on my parents’ front porch, and election results on my birthday. It was Pudgy and Chewie wearing their winter sweaters at Christmas, a million meals cooked together, surprises, generosity, and learning how to trust kindness when it’s offered.

Words felt too slippery to hold onto, so I quit trying to trap them. Now they feel bottled and as restless as the rest of us. It’s been a long 4 years. It’s been a long year. It’s been a long January already. But look, we made it this far.

Preferred obituaries

noreply@blogger.com (Kayla Smith) — Mon, 22 Jun 2020 01:26:00 +0000

My grandma passed away last week. When my grandpa passed away just over a year ago, I wrote a short thing for the funeral. My cousins and I stood together at the front of the chapel, and my sister and I took turns reading it. I try to imagine what my year-ago self would have thought if you'd told me we would be having a funeral for my then-healthy grandma just a year later, and also that the funeral would be outside in the 90 degrees because of a global pandemic. In a way it seems fitting that my grandpa left us in a dramatic fashion--relatively suddenly and amid buckets of loved-one's tears--while my grandma slipped away more quietly, leaving us feeling surreal and numb, and letting the current condition of our country/world have the spotlight instead. Even though we didn't get to have quite the funeral that she might have envisioned for herself, my sister and I still stood with my cousins and read about her and what we want to remember. The format is the same, and the content similar, some of it even copied directly. I think being together for 70 years intertwines two people in a lot of important ways. The newspaper obituaries are impersonal and generic, and I thought I'd share these here because this is what I wish they could have said instead.

Paw Paw

After Paw Paw passed away last weekend, a few of us spent hours at his and Maw’s house flipping through hundreds and hundreds of photos. Maw has one of the most incredible photo collections I’ve ever seen. The pictures are a collage of Paw Paw’s entire life—there are photos of his parents, his childhood, his brothers and sisters, photos of boats and weapons in the South Pacific, 70 year-old photos of him and Maw looking like movie stars, photos of our parents growing up, and then photos of us from infancy to today.

Of the hundreds of photos that spanned Paw Paw’s 95 years, and even the years leading up to them, nearly every photo features the same subject—our family.

Paw Paw’s family was the center of his world. He was the foundation which our families were built upon—it’s not a coincidence that his children still live within 5 miles of each other and that half of us grew up on the street named after Paw Paw’s father. Paw Paw understood the kinds of bonds that are permanent. Both of his parents passed away before any of us were born, but for my entire life, part of me has felt like I knew them. I knew them through the photos and the endless stories passed down from Paw Paw and our parents. In a way it’s like they aren’t really gone because they lived on through their children and their grandchildren, just like Paw Paw will keep living through our parents and through us. One day, his future grandchildren that he didn’t get a chance to meet will grow up feeling like they know him, too.

We’ll tell them how beautiful his and Maw’s azalea bushes looked every spring, and how dozens of birds used to swarm his bird-feeders. We’ll tell them how he used to find the where the best blackberries grew every year so he could tell us where to pick. We’ll tell them about how he ate more crawfish and drank more coffee and Coca Cola (or “ko-koler”) than any other person on Earth. We’ll tell them about his generosity, how he’d always sneak us gas money, and how he tried to force every morsel of food in the house on anyone who visited. About how he used to feed the neighborhood pets, even though he sometimes pretended he didn’t like them. About how much he valued the simple things in life, like waking up early to sit on the porch swing as the sun rose, and falling asleep while reading a good book. We’ll tell them about how he and Maw got to spend 7 decades loving each other. We’ll tell them about every Christmas Eve at Maw and Paw Paw’s house, and how it was one of the best days of the entire year. We’ll tell them about how in the days after he passed away, we found photos of all of us hanging on the wall of his bedroom.

We’ll tell them about how how resilient and strong he was—how we never even saw him sick until he was in his 90s. About how he grew up during the Great Depression, then fought in a nightmare of a war, and how in spite of the reasons he could have been pessimistic, he chose to live a life full of love and happiness. How even during the last couple of months of his life, he told us every time we saw him, I’m feeling pretty good. He taught us about the importance of family and the importance of memories, and he taught us how to share the stories that matter most. And though he won’t be able to tell his stories anymore, we’ll keep sharing them for him. We’ll always miss him, but he won’t be forgotten. He’ll keep on living through us.

Maw

Since Maw passed away on Friday, we’ve spent hours flipping through hundreds and hundreds of her photos. Photos of her and Paw Paw looking like young movie stars, photos of her parents and our parents, photos of our entire lives, photos of laughter and joy. Maw was an incredible archivist, even though she would never have used that word to describe herself. She kept a vast collection of photos and detailed scrapbooks documenting seemingly every birth, marriage, and death that happened in Henleyfield in the past century. When Paw Paw passed away last year, we learned that we needed a copy of his military discharge papers in order to have the military play taps at his funeral. I do not know another soul who would hear this news, calmly retreat to a back room, and come back with uncreased 75 year old documents. “Oh, I just had them in my folder,” she said. We pored over this same collection of photos when Paw Paw died, amazed at how thoroughly his life was documented, but something I didn’t realize until looking through them all again this time was how often Maw was the one behind the camera.

I think this is something that was often true for Maw. She was the support for everyone around her, the one holding up the spotlight for others, the one who wanted to help everyone she knew without any recognition. Before we were born, Maw used to be an Avon representative. She’d travel door to door trying to sell beauty products to the women she met. For 20 years Maw gave all her free samples to the women on the route who couldn’t afford to buy Avon products, and she brought their children Christmas toys every year. On every Christmas Eve in our memory, we would find gifts under the tree for people we’d never met. A neighbor down the street. A friend’s cousin’s new baby. A new boyfriend or girlfriend she just found out the day before would be joining us. I never met anyone more generous or more subtle about their generosity.

I also never met someone stronger or more resilient. Maw had quadruple bypass surgery when she was in her mid-70s, but no one even remembers the details because she never complained for a second, never slowed down, and never acted like it was a big deal before or after. In the late 80s, she went to Walmart and asked to talk to the manager. She told him, “I want you to give me a job right now,” so he did. She started working as a door greeter the next day, and kept working there for the next 28 years. She loved working at Walmart and only stopped a few years ago to take care of my grandpa. At 89, she spent months going to the hospital or the nursing home every single day to sit with my grandpa for hours. She never stopped to rest, never complained, never left him alone except to sleep, and always arrived with perfectly styled hair.

When I think about Maw, I’ll remember how she welcomed everyone. Every person she met was invited in for sweet tea and a meal. I’ll remember how she never hesitated to speak her mind. She was honest and sassy and she would let you know just what she thought, but she was always calm and dignified. I’ll remember how she cooked my favorite meal for me every Sunday for lunch for 18 years. How much she loved Sunny’s pizza and going to eat at the fish house. How we spent our childhoods watching the VHS cartoons she collected for us in her living room. How her azalea bushes grew to the size of small houses. How she insisted on giving us gas money, even after we had jobs of our own. How she woke up at 3:00am every morning to cook breakfast for her and Paw Paw, and how they’d sit on the porch swing as the sun rose. How she and Paw Paw spent 7 decades loving each other. How we spent every Christmas Eve at Maw and Paw Paw’s house, and how it was one of the best days of the year. How she was born during the Great Depression, lived through a World War, and lived long enough to meet a great, great grandchild. How I can still hear her telling us, “Ya’ll stand over there and let me make your picture.”

Maw taught us so many things by example. She taught us how important it is to collect memories. To recognize moments of joy as they happen, and to be able to share that joy for generations and generations. She taught us about the importance of having a marriage filled with laughter. About the importance of family. To always speak our mind and to remain kind while doing so. And to always, always invite people in, offer them coffee and tea, and welcome them to our table.

Though we will always miss her, we’re so lucky to have known her and to have these years of memories. I imagine the reunion she had with her parents, her brothers and sisters, and Paw Paw, who has certainly been waiting for the past year for her to come on and make the two of them a pot of coffee.

Parade Drums and A New Year

noreply@blogger.com (Kayla Smith) — Sun, 23 Feb 2020 04:57:00 +0000

I can hear the drum beats from the parade bands at my kitchen table. One of the best things about my apartment is that it’s close enough to the Uptown parade route that I can walk three blocks and be there, but it’s far enough away that only the bass from the loudest bands reach this far. This Mardi Gras season feels much different than the last one. Last year was my first Mardi Gras in New Orleans, and I felt like I needed to gobble up every moment of it. I saw 20-something parades last year, all but a couple of them by myself, in rain, mud, freezing wind, and sunshine. This year I recognized that on the days when there are multiple parades back-to-back, they mostly blur together. I’m not so afraid of missing out this time.

2019 Mardi Gras

For years now, I’ve written a reflection post at the beginning of the new year. I’ve done more thinking than writing about it this year. Instead of thinking about the past year, I thought more about the decade and about my twenties as a whole. I kept thinking about the things I wanted to write, and then struggling to actually write them. I want to write about Harry, and about dancing, and about my trip abroad, and about finding communities where I never imagined I’d find them.

I hope that two months isn’t too late to still reflect on last year. Last year was full of a lot of firsts—my first solo aerial performance, my first ever attempt at dancing, my first Mardi Gras as a New Orleans resident, my first time adopting a dog (not counting that one false alarm a few years ago), buying my first bike since childhood. Last year was the year we lost my grandpa and the year I lost Moses (my pet bird of almost 20 years). I think I shed more tears in 2019 than I did in all of the past decade combined. But last year was full of so much joy, too. I spent a lot of nights and early mornings dancing in churches and dancing in bars and dancing in friends’ living rooms and on sidewalks and under the late night street lamps in the Marigny. I spent a lot of hours hanging upside down and peeling the skin from my hands in the circus gym. I spent a lot of hours at the vet and on walks and with Harry snoring in my ear. I took a train to San Antonio and Austin for the first time to see the bats and eat the tacos and to see Ian graduate. I flew with Parul to Colorado to camp in the mountains for the first time in my life—my first night in a tent, and my first time in a plane in 5 years. For these past several years, my phobia of flying felt insurmountable. But I decided last year that there are too many things I want to do that I can’t let anxiety hold me back from. A week after my 30th birthday, I got on a plane again to travel to Portugal and Morocco for three weeks alone. My first time in Africa, and my first trip to a Muslim country. I hadn’t been overseas since working in Europe 7 years ago, and I had never backpacked before. 30 seemed like a good time to start.

Flying into Lisbon

2019 was the smell of jasmine for all of spring. It was stargazing on Arabella Street and in the Sahara. It was singing with the ukulele and listening to Pugliese. It was the waterfalls in the Rockies and “Ants Marching” at Jazz Fest. It was the first time I saw Harry with his drooping tongue in his tiny cage at the rescue shelter and knew he was the one for me. It was Paw Paw’s 95th birthday when all the grandchildren faced-timed him and he said, “That looks just like ‘em!” And it was the folded flag and “Taps” at his funeral. He would have been 96 today.

The first time I saw Harry (when he weighed like 6 pounds less)

Moses and Harry meeting

Paw Paw and me circa 1995

2019 felt like facing a lot of fears and deciding it was worth it. The other day Parul gave me a scratch-off map of the world. And that’s what the past year felt like to me. Finally being able to look at the whole world and decide what direction to head next.

30th birthday

Rockies

New Year's Eve

Christmas Milonga

Sahara camel ride

Sahara sunset

The Best Novels I Read In The Past Decade

noreply@blogger.com (Kayla Smith) — Sat, 04 Jan 2020 22:58:00 +0000

This is the time of year that it seems like everyone makes a resolution to read more. People ask me for recommendations pretty frequently, and my recommendations are very tailored to each individual. But there are some book that I think everyone should read (I say this with caution--some of these have ALL the trigger warnings, and I'd only recommend one of these for anyone younger than late high school.). I've probably read somewhere around 600 books in the last ten years. (I've only kept track electronically for the past 7 years, so this is my best guess.) It's nearly impossible to name the best books I read this decade, so I've tried to narrow it down to make it easier. These are the ten best novels (because at least 75% of what I read is fiction) that I read (AND that were published) between 2010 and 2019 (in order of publication date).

Eleanor and Park – Rainbow Rowell (2012)

There have been a lot of wonderful young adult books this decade (which I still read and love), but this is probably my favorite. Rainbow Rowell is an expert observer of relationships and teenagers, and she got everything about this exactly right. John Green wrote a review of it in 2013 saying he’d never seen anything quite like it, and though many people have tried to replicate it since then, I haven’t found a book that’s come close. This is what we want teenagers to be reading.

The Goldfinch – Donna Tartt (2013)

Donna Tartt has a cult following that obsessively awaits each of her books (which she publishes about once every 10 years. There have only been 3 so far, and one of them, The Secret History, is an all-time favorite. I don't know how she functions under this pressure.). I’m an unashamed member of this cult, and though I was thrilled to hear that she was publishing a new book for the first time in 11 years, I was also worried about how it would hold up against the anticipation and expectations the reading world put on it. It turns out that it held up well enough to win the Pulitzer Prize. It’s a nearly 800 page cinder block of a novel that feels very much like it took all 11 years to write, and it’s been one of the most polarizing books of the decade because of the debates that sparked between those who loved it and those who hated it. One thing I’ve learned about writing/reading is that if everyone is content with what you’re doing, then you’re doing something wrong. I think she’s one of the most brilliant writers alive. (And please don’t watch the movie first. Or maybe ever.)

Station Eleven – Emily St. John Mandel (2014)

It’s difficult to find words to describe a book that I care about the way I care about this one. There have been only a handful of books in my life that made me cry (including two of the Harry Potter books, which made everyone alive cry and should therefore not count). This was one of them. But I didn’t cry because the book is tragic (though it absolutely is)—I cried because of the the way the characters never let go of hope in spite of their tragedy, and no other writer has ever caused me to cry those kind of tears. This book horrified me (warning to all my fellow hypochondriacs who may also panic at the thought of a seemingly realistic pandemic—read cautiously), shocked me, and filled me with wonder. I can’t name a book that was more affecting or that I think about more frequently than this one. This decade has been overcrowded with dystopian fiction (though Mandel doesn’t like to classify her book that way)—but none of them compare to this. This is one of my all-time favorites.

A Little Life – Hanya Yanagihara (2015)

I must have read at least 20 books this decade about friends living in NYC after college, and there are certainly dozens more that I haven’t read yet. (To be clear, I like these books and think they’re great fun, so carry on, Millennial Authors.) Somehow, I missed all the hype around this book when it was published. At more than 700 pages, I thought this would be more of the same, but perhaps a particularly pretentious version of it. Though this book is, technically, about friends in NYC after college, it does not belong in that category of books at all. Yanagihara fills a devastating story with the most beautiful examples of friendship so that even though this may be the most tragic book I read this decade, it’s not without hope. I’ve never read an author who is more merciless to her characters while still depicting them beautifully. Do not read this for a good time. But absolutely read it if you want to think harder about trauma, friendships, love, time, mental health, and the 21^st century, and if you want to be consumed by a story long, long after it’s over. (This book has a major cult following that you should prepare to unintentionally join.)

All the Ugly and Wonderful Things – Bryn Greenwood (2016)

This book is astonishing because based on the synopsis alone, this story should be a terribly disturbing modern-day Lolita but in rural America and with more damaged characters. This is a story that would appear in news headlines and elicit disgust from the nation. But Greenwood somehow managed to write these characters in a way that make us root for them when we never, ever imagined we could. This is a love story unlike any I’ve ever read, and it will make you question the morals and assumptions you thought you had. This was one of the boldest books of the decade, and her daring paid off in a huge way.

Homegoing – Yaa Gyasi (2016)

I believe this is one of the most important books of the decade. This is the extraordinary journey of two families through seven generations, from the mid-1700s in West Africa to present day America. This was an absurdly ambitious project, especially considering it was Gyasi’s first novel and she was 26(!!!!), but she got it right. She got it exactly right. A woman at the Mississippi Book Festival the following year whispered to me, “I don’t know why this didn’t win the National Book Award.” I hadn’t read it at the time, but I wish I could find that woman now and tell her that I don’t understand how it didn’t win, either.

My Absolute Darling – Gabriel Tallent (2017)

I knew nothing about this book before reading it except that Stephen King loved it, and since he and I have bizarrely similar tastes, that was enough reason for me to buy it. I was entirely unprepared for everything about this book. Tallent is a genius who somehow wrote one of the most deeply disturbing books I’ve ever read while at the same time one of the most gorgeous. It was shocking and daring and every form of horrific—it’s a sort of coming of age story about an abusive father and his teenage daughter who comes to understand the nightmare she’s living in. It’s hard to read, but it’s also important. Masterpiece is the word King used, and I think it’s the right one. This is one of the most affecting books I've ever read, and I think Tallent deserves every literary award there is.

The Immortalists – Chloe Benjamin (2018)

This is a story that makes you think hard about fate and determinism and free will and belief and also teaches you to NEVER go to a fortune teller because what good can possibly come of that?? It begins with four siblings who see a fortune teller as children and are each told the date they will die, and the rest of the book is about how they choose to live either believing or choosing not to believe what they were told. The questions this story asks you to consider will haunt you even longer than these characters do.

The Book of M – Peng Shepherd (2018)

The Book of M shouldn’t make sense. How do you cram a love story, a dystopian thriller, a fantasy, zombie creatures, a study of memories and shadows, an odyssey, suspense, beauty, and elephants in one book with any degree of success? You can’t, unless you’re Peng Shepherd, who is a sorceress and can apparently do anything. I’ve never read a book like this, and I’m still astonished by this story.

The Witch Elm – Tana French (2018)

I’m obsessed with Tana French, and I have not awaited individual books in a series so eagerly since Harry Potter. It was a huge test when she decided to publish her first novel that wasn’t in the Dublin Murder series. She passed the test. She proved with The Witch Elm that she can write a stand-alone novel that’s just as good as anything in her series and better than any mystery I've read this decade. I picked this one for my list, but she published 4 of her Dublin Murder books this decade that could just as easily be here in its place. I think she’s the best mystery author writing right now.

Turning 30 (and 30 Things I’d Tell My 20-Year-Old Self)

noreply@blogger.com (Kayla Smith) — Wed, 11 Dec 2019 18:33:00 +0000

I turned 30 last month. Exactly a week later, I left for a three week trip to Morocco and Portugal, and while I didn’t plan that trip as a birthday celebration (it was actually because it the cheapest week of the year for the tour, and I got days off work for Thanksgiving), I must say that a quick jaunt over to the Sahara dessert is about the best celebration I can imagine. I had a lot of thoughts about turning 30, or maybe more accurately I THOUGHT I should have a lot of thoughts about turning 30. The truth is that as of now, 30 feels about the same at 29 and 28 and 25. But when I think about all that’s happened since I turned 20 (in my grad center dorm room sophomore year with my roommates and a Paul’s Pastry king cake), I think about all the things I didn’t know yet and didn’t know that I didn’t know. I made a list of some of the things I’d tell my 20-year-old self, which are also the things I’d tell my college students now if they had any desire to hear me give them unsolicited opinions for way too long. And since no one should be subjected to that against their will, I decided to share them here.

20th birthday

30th birthday

30 Things I’d Tell My 20-Year-Old Self

(Or 30 Things I Would Tell My Students If They Wanted To Hear Me Talk At Them For An Hour)

1. You really do need to make sure you get your passport stamped when arriving in a foreign country. Even if it’s totally not your fault that the international airport is incompetent and doesn’t care if you pass through customs or not, track down someone to stamp the thing. Otherwise you might end up stuck for a nerve-wrackingly long time in the airport in Amsterdam being questioned about how you snuck into Italy for 2 months without any documentation—which is a fair and good question.

2. Never stop deliberately learning things. Read a book about a subject you know nothing about. Take a dance class in a style you've never heard of, just for fun. Learn to play chess or the piano or how to do a handstand. Sit down with the camel handler and ask him questions for half an hour about camels. Ask to sit in the cockpit of the plane to learn about turbulence from the pilot before take-off. It doesn't really matter what you decide to learn, just learn something. Don't let your life become boring to you.

3. Adopt a senior dog. Find the one you know in your heart might not have a chance at a home if not for you, and bring him home and love him fiercely. You’ll never regret it for a second. But do first make sure you have enough money for his medical expenses, and be prepared to accept help with him when it’s offered. (And never, ever take for granted the loved ones who will keep him while you’re riding camels in the desert for 3 weeks.)

4. Do NOT buy a dog from a fancy breeder and spend an entire month’s salary on him before you even meet him, even if he is adorable. (I learned this the hard way, and it will never not be a sore subject.)

5. Get to know your doctor(s) (and your pet’s doctor). Tell them things that are important and relevant to knowing you. For example, don’t be afraid to tell them that you’re a severe hypochondriac and that 90% of the time you come in you’ll be looking for reassurance that you don’t have some obscure illness that you may or may not be imagining the symptoms for. They will not judge you for this, and it will save you a lot of money in superfluous lab work.

Never stop learning things

6. But also, if something hurts or feels wrong, don’t let doctors (especially male doctors) shrug it off immediately and tell you it’s only anxiety. It very well may be, but it also may take a year, 8 doctors, and 2 physical therapists to find someone with the good sense to realize that you had a severe vitamin deficiency that no one bothered to address.

7. Do not use Web MD or any similar site. Ever. Block them all.

8. Write letters. On paper. With your hand. Put them in the actual mail. You will shock and delight someone.

9. In my experience, fear and phobias tend to get worse instead of fade. Don’t wait to address and deal with them, and don’t put off doing things you want to do because you assume one day you’ll be braver. This is something you get to decide instead of something that is decided for you.

10. Exercise truly does help with stress and anxiety. It’s not just a thing doctors say. In my experience, it helps as much or more than medication.

11. Go to reunions! I went to my 10 year high school reunion and my 5 year college reunion in my 20s. I know a lot of people who were bitter and negative about going back to a place where they did not have a positive experience (high school), but I don’t know one person who went and regretted being there. Both of those experiences were two of my favorite memories of the past decade.

12. Hold onto old friends. If you’re lucky enough to still have friends from childhood, recognize how rare and special that is. New friends are wonderful, but no one else will ever be able to reminisce with you about the time you were voted “most dependable” by the 8th grade class and were forced to go to the Valentine’s Dance to pose for a photo with the court, but how you fled before the music started for fear you might be expected to dance. And it would be a tragedy to not be able to reminisce about that with someone.

About 65 cumulative years of friendship in this photo

13. Ignore all the negativity you hear from your peers about about physically aging. The consensus I hear seems to be that after about 25, everything all of a sudden hurts and you gain half your body weight overnight and your days of athleticism are over, and it’s basically all downhill from here. When I was between 22 and 25, I was in the worst shape of my life. By the time I was almost 29, I started aerial circus classes, and at 29 and a half I started tango dancing. Ignore arbitrary timelines that don’t have to apply to you. Also, know that my friend Robert is 93 years old and goes tango dancing until midnight every Friday night. He started dancing when he was 90. And if you take away one thing from this post, please let it be that fact.

14. People have a lot of very strong opinions about travel that they get from the media. A lot of people were horrified that I lived near Harlem, horrified when I lived in DC, and most horrified of all when I moved to New Orleans. I consistently got comments like, “You’re not going to LIVE there, are you??” in the same tone of voice they might use if I casually told them I was moving to Syria. It was so persistent that it freaked me out for a long time. Ignore those people. Use common sense. Don’t walk around alone on dark streets at 2:00am. Lock your car doors. And recognize that the people who say these things are people who developed these fears while sitting at home in front of their TVs instead of experiencing the place they’re afraid of. (This is especially true in regard to different countries and cultures.) Politely ignore them. You cannot be afraid to merely exist in the world.

15. I’ve blogged about this before, but it is worth saying again—don’t let being alone prevent you from doing anything. Never let not having company be a reason you don’t go to that restaurant or do that hike or take that road trip or move to a new city. It’s nice if people want to join you and if they are as excited as you are, but do not let their apathy hinder you. This is especially true for travel. If I’d waited for friends or family or a significant other to travel with me, I would have never left Mississippi. You do not need other people to enjoy traveling. In fact, I’d encourage you to deliberately travel alone sometimes even if you could choose to have company. There are few things more inspiring, more confidence boosting, or more freeing. And you’ll meet plenty of people on the way.

16. This is specific to my artist friends—be sure you support your fellow artists. As many conflicting opinions as there are about MFA programs and whether they are worth the money, one thing I truly loved about my MFA program is that it felt like I gained a team of support, and there is no price tag for that. Buy your writing pals’ books! Tell the world to buy their books! Even if their writing is not your preferred genre or your favorite thing you read this year, it will be for someone else. Few people in the world understand the work that goes into creating a book (or film or art exhibit or album or even just a published essay)—as someone who does understand, make sure you show them the support and recognition they deserve and the kind you’d hope to receive yourself. Be inspired by people’s success, not jealous of it.

Reasons to get an MFA: every one of these people

17. On the subject of jealousy, that’s easier said than done, of course. Something I struggled with for a long time after college (and sometime still) was being jealous of people who I perceived had an easier time than I did financially. Going to an extremely wealthy college meant that money was not a concern for most of my friends, and hardly any of them graduated with students loans. I pay A LOT each month in loans, and it used to make me feel bitter to see groups of my former classmates casually traveling the world together before they even had jobs. (How does one take 3 huge international trips each year when they are in grad school and getting paid, at best, a small stipend??) I couldn’t help but think about how much nicer my apartment would be, the car I could buy to replace the one I got in high school, all the travel I could do, and all the money I could save if I didn’t have to pay my student loans. BUT at the same time, there is no amount of money I would trade for my undergrad and graduate experiences. None. (And truthfully, Brown was so generous with financial aid that I went there cheaper than I could have gone to any Mississippi state school.) I will never regret the choices I made about school, and it will forever be one of the greatest gifts of my life that I had the chance to go to them. I cannot help that I wasn’t born into a wealthy family, just like my parents can’t help that they weren’t either, but I can choose how to think about money now. I can choose to pursue a career where I earn lots of money, or I can choose to pursue a career I really care about (I’ll let you guess which I picked). I can figure out how to make money work, and I can recognize how incredibly lucky I am to be able to do that and how lucky I was to grow up with the things I had. I can also recognize that I will never take for granted the things that I might have if money had always been easy.

Easily one of the top 5 most memorable moments of my 20s

18. Don’t let a lack of money make you believe that you can’t travel. There’s always a way. Start a side hustle. (I tutor, edit, and do audio transcribing on the side for extra money. I have profiles on a handful of tutoring websites and freelancing websites, advertise on craigslist, and hang physical flyers around town.) I also recently discovered credit card reward points. I got a travel credit card specifically for my big trip back in the summer and asked for help from all my my family and friends to reach the $3,000 in 3 months spending requirement. They sent me money through Venmo, then I paid their bills, and by the end of the three months, I had enough points to get my nearly $800 roundtrip ticket from New Orleans to Lisbon for less than $200. If you tell me you don’t have the money for international travel, I’m happy to tell you how you can take an international trip for cheaper than you can go to Disney World.

19. Try your best to not hold grudges. When someone treats you badly, it’s easy to turn a cold shoulder and refuse to talk to them until they reach out to you. And that’s okay. If you need to cut off communication with someone who is bad for you, certainly do that. But if doing that ends up feeling like you’re in sixth grade and giving someone the silent treatment when you’d rather feel like being the bigger person and reaching out to acknowledge the issue, that’s fine, too. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

20. There is sometimes such thing as too much honesty. As a general rule, I think most people should be more direct and honest than they have the nerve to be, as long as they are sensitive in the way they deliver their honesty. If your friend asks what you think of her new boyfriend, there are so many appropriate layers of honesty between a lie (He’s so great!) and the bluntest form of truth (He seems like a boring loser, what’s wrong with you?). It is still honest to say, “You know, I’m not sure how much I can base on a first impression, but I worry that he didn’t seem to make you very happy—what makes you interested in him?” But when it’s something unsolicited that serves no purpose except to make someone feel self-conscious, rethink saying it. Telling your friend, “I heard a stranger at the Christmas party say that your muffins tasted like sawdust and also that your tights don’t match your dress” is not productive to anyone, and think hard about why you have an impulse to share it.

21. Take pictures. Lots and lots of pictures. Even when people get annoyed at you for taking the time to take pictures. Still take pictures. You will never regret having photos later, but you definitely might regret not having them. Also, make sure you’re in some photos—that it’s not always you behind the camera. There are very few picture that exist of me from middle school through early college because I was always the one taking the photos and felt too self-conscious to include myself in any pictures. It wasn’t until my early 20s that I realized I’d want to be included in those visual memories when looking back later, no matter how self-conscious I felt in the moment. But also, don’t take ONLY photos of yourself. One day you might want to remember what the holiday lights in NYC looked like on your first visit to the city and not just what your makeup looked like that day.

22. Also, get some headshots. There will be a time when you need a professional photograph of yourself for a publication bio or work website or Linkedin profile, and if you don’t have headshots ready, you’ll find yourself trying to crop your baby niece out of photos, even though she is in your arms and this is an impossible task. (This became increasingly difficult for me as I got more things published because every photo of myself was of me and my niece, or me in an owl hat, or me hugging a stuffed llama.) My sister always told me to be sure to get some headshots in my twenties before the wrinkles, and I suppose that’s a fair reason to get them, as well. I asked a photographer friend to do some for me a couple months ago, so I just made the cut.

Example of "a photo you cannot crop for publication"

23. You’ve heard this 4 million times, but you really should unfollow anyone on social media who makes you feel badly about yourself. I used to interpret that to mean if the person was doing something intentionally harmful or negative, but really, someone doesn’t have to be doing something malicious or bad at all for it to simply not be what you need to see right now.

24. You do not need to find a spouse in your twenties or have children or even think about children or ever have children if you don’t want to. Ignore everyone who has an opinion about this that they think you need to hear.

25. Make sacrifices for people that matter. Remember friends birthdays. Show them that they matter. Show up for people, even if it’s inconvenient for you. But also keep a healthy perspective about what you’re physically able to give. Visit your friend in the hospital after surgery. Buy their kid a birthday present. Feed their cat while they’re out of town. But if you can’t afford to go to Bali for their wedding even though you’d love to, don’t feed badly or like you’re wronged them (Sorry Frances!!).

Sam made this for me 8 years ago when I was applying to grad school I didn't think I'd get into

26. Learn another language. Or at least learn the basics. I don’t speak another language, but I wish I did. I spent years occasionally and sporadically trying to teach myself some Spanish with Rosetta Stone and Duolingo, but last year I finally took my first Spanish class since high school. It meant skipping lunch 4 days a week and sitting in a classroom with my own students, but I was so glad I did it. Even if you don’t have a goal of fluency, you will always benefit from being able to communicate with more people than you currently can.

27. Read books. I believe books make people more curious, more emotionally intelligent, more observant, more generally knowledgeable, and more inspired. It can feel hard to make time to read, but everyone can read more than they actually do. I used to be opposed to E-readers, and I still vastly prefer real books, but getting a Kindle last Christmas drastically affected how much I’m able to read (I use it on machines at the gym and while on public transportation and when it’s too dark to see a real book). Always keep a book or kindle in your purse so you can read in waiting rooms, while you’re on hold with the electric company, while you’re waiting in line to get on the bus, and while you wait for your take-out order. Have an audiobook downloaded to listen to in the car and at the gym. One of the best discoveries I made in the past few years is the Overdrive (or Libby) app. All you need is a library card from your local library (which, if you haven’t had a library card since you were in elementary school, I’ll go ahead and remind is still FREE), and you can access all of the library’s Ebooks and audiobooks. You can check out like 15 at a time and there are no late feeds because they are automatically returned online once you’re done with them. It’s the absolute best and most under appreciated invention.

28. Learn how to make baked goods that are not from a box. Even though you’ll still make them from a box 95% of the time. But that other 5% of the time you might win an award at the baking competition at work, and what title could you ever want other than winner of the “weird and wild” category of baked goods?

29. Don’t be afraid of failing. What is the actual worst that can happen if you apply to that school/job that you don’t think you’re qualified for or submit to that magazine that you’re certain won’t accept your story? What do you have to lose?

30. Don’t let anyone tell you that you shouldn’t make an Instagram for your dog(/cat/guinea pig/possum).

When I think about my 20s, I’ll think about how they were saturated fall colors and ghost stories. They were snow storms that felt endless and warm socks and 2:00am subway rides. They were 8 different bedrooms in 6 different states and 7 cross-country moves. They were 2 graduations and over 500 books read and more pages than I’ll ever know written and around 600 students who had to listen to me talk about said books and words. They were magical summers on Aventine Hill and in Castile and Leon, endless hours of walking to Wickenden Street, Saturday morning coffee shops in Nashville, bike rides every weekend from Bethesda to Georgetown, rooftop parties in Manhattan, and doing circus tricks and dancing around churches in New Orleans. They were waiting rooms and hospitals and new family members and sad goodbyes and a handful of places and people who felt like home.

Mountains

noreply@blogger.com (Kayla Smith) — Wed, 25 Sep 2019 04:35:00 +0000

When I was in elementary school, there was always that day during fall semester when I’d be in the hallway and the double-doors would be open and I’d feel the outside air and realize immediately that it felt different than it had the day before. Sharper and fresher. Not yet cool, but something closer to it than we’d felt in 6 months. That was always what felt like the first day of autumn for me, and it was one of my favorite days every year. Leaving my office today, I felt it.

Blue Ridge Mountains

Adirondacks from the Amtrak Adirondack route

I told a friend recently that I’ve been thinking a lot about mountains. What about mountains, he asked, and I couldn’t figure out how to answer. About how there’s something sinister about them, something they hide that I can never reach. For a long time, I only saw mountains through the safety of car windows. There were the Smokies during my childhood, the Blue Ridge during high school, and a very gradual creeping upward through the Appalachians--the Shenandoah, the Catskills, the Adirondacks. I spent a year working in the smallest foothills of the Smokies feeling that lure drawing me closer, and then a summer in an Appalachian Trail town at the northern tip of the Shenandoah. The dirty backpackers who wandered into town to get ice cream knew something I didn’t about the secrets the mountains were hiding. I lived in DC the next year and started driving the three hours back to the mountains on weekend day-trips in search of something I couldn’t name and armed only with a camera and warnings from Google that I probably shouldn’t be attempting the things I aimed to do. I didn’t care about the warnings. I thought a lot about time. About how these mountains were born something like 500 million years ago and they were probably as tall as the Alps. About how they’ve grown tired now and softer. Do mountains ever wear down to nothing? What will the Alps look like in 100 million years? (What does 100 million years mean, and is there a recognizable Earth within in?) Will new mountains be born? These mountains are the oldest thing I’ve ever touched, and they know too much. Autumn is always when I crave their secrets the most.

Shenandoah

But the Rockies are a different species. I’d only ever seen them once in 9th grade when my dad and I drove to Grand Junction to pick up a motorcycle he bought on Ebay. I stared out the window of my grandpa’s tiny pick-up truck that we’d borrowed for the drive and watched the walls of rock and snow get bigger and bigger as we wove through them on the interstate. There were 18-wheelers on the runaway ramps, the life my dad once lived. I wasn’t afraid. I wasn’t afraid of much back then. On our way back, we stopped in a resort town just to ride to the top of the ski lift. We stood at the cafe at the top of the Breckenridge lift in our too-thin jackets for a few minutes taking in the view before riding back down. I remember my shallow breathe, but I don’t remember the view. I wonder where images like that go.

The first time I saw the Rockies

I went back to Colorado last month, this time to see the mountains up close, this time for more than one view. The Rockies feel young and wild, taunting and unpredictable. Sometimes I felt like I was in something closer to a rainforest, and sometimes I felt like the wind would freeze my blood. I’d never slept in a tent before, never carried a backpack with every item I’d use for three days, never drank water I filtered by hand from a stream, never seen the stars from 11,000 feet, never known what snow feels like in August or how bright the moon really is. Maybe part of what draws some of us to mountains and horrifies us at the same time is the way they expose things we don’t know and can’t know and will never know.

Greys and Torreys

Mirror Lake

Evacuations and Memory Hoarding

noreply@blogger.com (Kayla Smith) — Fri, 02 Aug 2019 03:17:00 +0000

My phone has been uploading photos to Google Photos for three days now. They were uploading to iCloud for two days before that until I realized that while iCloud is synced, any picture I delete from my phone also disappears from the cloud. (Upon discovering this, I frantically recovered 30 videos from my deleted folder.) Over 9,000 items I’m uploading—400 of them videos. I’ve deleted nearly every app and all my music, but I can’t bring myself to delete even one picture (or text) until it’s safe elsewhere. I would just put them on my computer, but my computer doesn’t have storage space either, and my external hard drive is too full for me to back it up and make more room. So here we are. My phone is too full to even receive emails. Because I don’t understand how technology works, I imagine the emails waiting patiently in a traffic jam for their turn to get through the road work.

momentos from freshman fall

You see, I’m a hoarder. Not the kind you see on TV who has decade-old rat carcasses scattered under the floor-to-ceiling trash in my house, but the kind who absolutely still has that ticket from that theater performance you went to together during freshman year of college. It will be in one of several dozen boxes of similar paraphernalia that is certainly, indisputably, definitively NOT trash, even though neither of you could explain the plot now. It’s a matter of sentimental principle.
I’m a hoarder of memories.

When I was little, my friends and I played these semi-morbid mental exercise games of hypothetical truths. Who would you save first in a fire? What would you grab first if you could only grab one object? What would you pack if you only had 5 minutes to leave?

Though I’ve lived in prime hurricane territory for two thirds of my life, I’ve only evacuated for 4 storms. First was Georges when I was 8. I remember that my family stopped for the night at some nondescript hotel in Tuscaloosa, and I was enraptured by the baby bat hanging on the side of the walkway. I don’t remember packing anything, or if it even occurred to me to consider what to pack. Then there was the storm in early high school (which Google tells me must have been Ivan). We stayed in a church shelter in Florence. I don’t remember being worried. The storms themselves were uneventful, almost hypothetical. Another mental exercise. What if this were real? What if this weren’t a precaution?

And then there was Katrina. Packing felt different. Should I bring all my valuables, or just put them on the bed away from the windows? Should we bring Moses (our pet bird) with us or just put him in the back hallway away from any windows with enough food for a few days. We’ll be back tomorrow, after all.

Journals from my 4 years in college--the others are in a separate box

We were heading toward Monroe in northwest Louisiana, but we never made it. The traffic was bumper to bumper until we finally stopped to sleep in the gym of a church just across the Mississppi river from Natchez. I stood with my mom in the nearest Wal-mart entertainment center for half the night watching the identical images flash across tv screens of all sizes. We watched as the Mississippi Coast was eradicated. We watched until we understood there was nothing left and the flood waters started pouring into the homes of the evacuees standing next to us. We were lucky—72 trees down in our yard, but our house was untouched (Moses was fine and singing in the dark). But there was a collective feeling that began in that Wal-mart that our lives would never be quite the same again.

And then just a few weeks ago was Barry. No one ever knows what to do with a storm like Barry. Barry—the name of someone’s jovial uncle. Or the elderly neighbor who rescues stray dogs and bakes delicious cookies. Barry is surely harmless. But then there were the floods earlier that week, not even related to Barry, but unpredicted and ominous. I left my house for work that morning and spent the next 4 hours stuck in my car on the street car tracks trying to escape the flood waters. One of my friends drove through the flood to his apartment where he grabbed a go-bag and headed straight for the airport—all of 5 minutes thought and preparation, no hesitation. One friend left promptly the next morning, and another left that night. I hadn’t intended to leave. My landlord assured me that my house has never flooded. But the Mississippi River was so high… what if?

Nothing would happen, I reminded myself as I bought Tupperware containers two days before the storm. This house won’t flood, I told myself as I piled all the books from my lowest two shelves on the kitchen table, and then decided to put my favorites in a laundry basket and move them onto the counter instead. The most important things should go in the Tupperware because it’s waterproof and can float. How do you decide what’s irreplaceable? I packed the paintings I made in high school art class. The art Sam made for me to hang on my walls in college. I packed the poems Elijah gave me two birthdays ago. The framed photo of my sister and I on her wedding day. Lily’s painted baby-foot prints. My great grandfather’s ring. The dried flowers from my grandpa’s grave. I moved the container from the table to the counter. Then from the counter to the top of the refrigerator.

How do we choose the objects that deserve our sentiment? Why do we give emotional power to things that exist only as symbols? Would I rather be the person who could rush home, grab Harry and a change of clothes, and leave without thinking twice?

During the years I did gymnastics, my parents sacrificed every cent they possessed so my sister and I could do the things we loved (to a degree that I couldn’t fully understand at the time). We didn’t have extra money for a video camera, so almost no videos (and very few photos) exist of my gymnastics years. My friends’ parents would video me at competitions with the intention of making a DVD copy to give my mom and I eventually. I don’t know of a single one of those DVDs or recordings that survived Katrina. There used to be professional sports photographers who photographed competitions and then put action shots online for families to buy. My family didn’t even have a computer for most of those years, and once we did, we didn’t have money to splurge, so we never bought them. Last year, I secretly contacted about a dozen Louisiana, Texas, Mississippi, and Tennessee sports photographers to see if any of them had photos archived from 15 years ago. No luck. And why does it matter? They were just videos, just pictures. They were worth nothing compared to the lived experience. Why over 15 years later do I still think about them?

My parents took a lot of photos of Whitney and I when we were babies. Money was tighter once I was born, so even though they took as many photos of me, they didn’t get them developed. For my entire life, we’ve made jokes about how I was the invisible child. There are albums of Whitney from before I was born, and then albums where I appear suddenly as an elementary school child. There was essentially no evidence I existed before the age of 6. A couple of years ago for Christmas, my mom gave me a framed photo that I’d never seen before—me on my first birthday. Then she gave me a bag full of pictures. She'd found almost a dozen rolls of film hidden away in storage. The film was between 25 and 30 years old, and she knew there was no hope it wasn't ruined when she snuck it to Walgreens to be developed. She cried in the store when she got them back and found nothing had been ruined—all of my baby pictures for the first time anyone had seen them in nearly 30 years. It’s one of the best gifts I’ve ever been given.

Of course Barry was harmless. There was hardly a puddle in the road when I returned back to my house after evacuating to my parents for the weekend. Before I left for Mississippi, after I’d packed up Harry and some snacks and my cameras, I went back in to grab the laundry basket of my favorite books. I got back in my car and put it in drive, stopped, went back inside, and climbed up on a chair to get the Tupperware container, too.

Jasmine and Tango Lessons

noreply@blogger.com (Kayla Smith) — Fri, 07 Jun 2019 04:15:00 +0000

For weeks, all I smelled was jasmine. It was everywhere—lining every sidewalk and drifting to my windshield where I’d find it stuck after the rain. It feels distant now, even though it was just a couple of months ago. But I suspect already that Jasmine will always be New Orleans for me, no matter where I find myself next. It will always remind me of those last weeks of my grandfather’s life, and poring over photo albums in my grandparents’ house after he was gone, looking for happier memories to hold onto. Of those weeks drifting between feeling hopeful and defeated and numb. But it will also remind me of the Big Dipper and thunderstorms. Of jazz and hibiscus tea and bike rides and blackberries. Of dancing in my kitchen and finding moments of brightness in places I never expected to find them.

A friend asked me if I ever recognize that I’m happy when I’m happy. I thought about it for a while. We notice the absence of happiness, but we sometimes don’t notice its presence. Sometimes happiness feels misplaced, and it’s hard to make sense of why it feels present in spite of the grief that surrounds it. I like that these things can co-exist.

The jasmine is gone, and the temperatures have turned suffocating now. The roaches and termites are back. A flying cockroach landed on my arm yesterday. I brushed it off and forgot to feel afraid.

I started tango dancing a month ago. It’s not the obvious choice for someone whose last dance experience was when my mom tried to make me take dancing lessons against my will when I was three. (I’d sit in her lap and refuse to participate.) Tango is danced in what feels essentially like a loose hug. I am not used to being so close to strangers, but it’s remarkable what we can get used to. There is still a version of me not too far below the surface who felt nervous at the thought of holding hands with my classmates during obligatory prayer circles at youth group. I would like to pass her a discreet note letting her know that one day she’ll willingly dance with six-and-a-half feet tall men who are twice her age, and it will be just fine when they step on each other’s feet.

And all of a sudden, I’ve become a person who looks for social dancing events online each week. The tango community is another of these communities New Orleans keeps revealing to me of characters who make no sense together and who make perfect sense together. (There’s me, who you couldn’t have paid $10,000 to take a dance class a year ago, but who read a book on tango in the fall and couldn’t stop thinking about it. There’s the retired carriage driver and former boat maker. The metaphor painter. The electrician. The glamorous 70-year-old woman who flirts with the younger men. The middle-aged mom and her daughter. The avid rock climber who bikes 20 miles a day. How did we find ourselves in the same room?) We look like stiff stilt walkers as we stagger around in circles. But it’s one of those rare things that lives up to the fascination I imagined myself having for it when it was still an abstract. There are tango videos in my phone search history and heels in my closet.

Last week I got a dog that’s almost mine but not quite. Technically I’m fostering him, but I know in my heart I have no intention of giving him back. He’s elderly and mostly deaf and his tongue droops out of the side of his overbite, and you can see two of his four teeth like little tusks, but he has the happiest smile, and no one is more thrilled to see me every day. There is no part of his spirit that is old.

I brought a peace lily home after my grandfather’s funeral. I come home from work a few days a week to find it drooping, exhausted and defeated. Those days, I pour so much water in that it seeps out on the floor and rolls toward my stove. (It turns out my floor is tilted.) The next morning, the peace lily stands back up, meek and grateful. When I brought Harry home, I googled my plants and found out this one is poisonous to dogs. Now the peace lily navigates around my house from chair to table top, drooping because it knows it’s no longer the priority.

Harry has this dry cough. Last night his coughing and gagging woke me up, and I realized that I didn’t know what to do in the case of a middle-of-the-night dog emergency. There are emergency vet clinics, right? But why on Earth had I not looked up the location of the nearest one in the safety of daylight and before an elderly dog was sleeping in my bed? (I spoke with the rescue group on the phone today. They think it’s just kennel cough.) I list the beings that count on me the most. And then I make a separate list of the beings I most care about to see if they are the same. I think about the two months Harry spent in the kill shelter and then the rescue before I saw him, learned he was 15 years old, and decided that I needed to get him out of that cage. Is he happy now because he has people who adore him and pet him for hours and because he has free reign of a couch and a bed? Or has he spent his entire life happy regardless of his circumstances? Harry’s spirit and prance is inspiring. Sometimes lately words have felt far away. I climb ropes and dance with strangers and hold Harry instead.

On the Megabus between San Antonio and Austin a couple of weeks ago, the driver casually announced over the speaker, “It’s really windy, so if you feel the bus moving around a lot, it’s not my fault!” I looked out the window, waiting for a wind gust to tip us over into the bridge railings. I got bored of waiting before the Austin skyline came into sight. It’s amazing the things we can get used to.

I had a long conversation with Elijah a few weeks ago about the capacity for awe and why people lose it and why it is that the people I’m drawn to the most never do. There are things worth hanging onto as hard as you can. There are people worth hanging onto as hard as you can.

A person I care about recently revealed in a roundabout way that they aren’t sure if they find writing to be a great or worthwhile ambition. I thought for a long time about whether I’d ever made someone feel that their dreams were insignificant to me. What is the difference between challenging someone’s values and diminishing them? Do you define yourself by what you are in this moment or by what you want most? Where does awe come from, and how selective is awe for those of us who never lost it? Do our questions matter more than our answers?

Another New Year Post

noreply@blogger.com (Kayla Smith) — Wed, 09 Jan 2019 04:30:00 +0000

It’s time again for the annual New Year Blog Post—the sixth one I’ve written so that the four of you who read this can be assured of the creepy degree to which I document and hoard memories (as if you ever had doubts). I wrote the first two in New York City, then one in Tennessee, one in DC, one in Mississippi, and now here in New Orleans. The locations are the only way I can keep the years from blurring together.

2018 started so differently than it ended. A year ago I’d been living in my childhood bedroom at my parents’ house for six months. I was exhausted from incessantly applying to jobs and trying to pay my student loans while not letting myself compromise and give up on waiting for the type of job I knew I wanted. Every day I looked at the websites of a dozen or more universities for new openings, and in January I sent an application to Tulane and promptly forgot about it (I’d long given up on trying to keep track of them all). I started that job at the end of April. Those first 4 months of the year were full of uncertainty and forced patience, and then there were the next 4 months of summer that I spent trying to live between places. I rotated between 6 different houses plant sitting, cat sitting, house sitting, subletting, commuting from Mississippi, and couch surfing (mostly couch surfing), all while looking at over 60 apartments in hopes of finding one that wasn't disgusting (if you haven’t had the pleasure of apartment hunting on a tight budget in New Orleans, it’s sort of like touring the set of horror films every day. You think I exaggerate.) and that I could afford. I will be forever grateful for the friends who let me sleep in their spare bedrooms and on their couches and air mattresses for way too long. I moved into my new apartment in September, and then there were the 4 months of the fall semester when I finally felt like I was doing my job for the first time and learning what advising and living in this city is all about. This was the first time in a decade that I moved to a city that was already familiar and where not every person is a stranger. I’m still not used to it.

In 2018 I was able to reunite with some of my oldest and best friends. I felt lucky every day for the people I got to work with. I spent a night at my 10 year high school reunion. I published 5 pieces (after three years of publishing nothing). I feasted at Sophie’s dinner parties, toured dead fish collections in swamp bunkers, visited haunted houses, attended Voodoo ceremonies, and watched second line parades from my front porch. Lily turned a year old and also learned how to say my name. I made a pilgrimage to Tennessee and reunited with the first students I ever taught. I interviewed about 35 college applicants and advised over 300 Tulane students and tutored 8 students from 4th grade to PhD programs. I voted in the mid-terms, which felt very different than the last election day. I traveled less than I have in a decade, but I still squeezed in visits to Atlanta, Nashville, and Waco. I stayed for free in a haunted hotel in the French Quarter and pretended to be a tourist. I took my first Spanish class in 12 years and taught my first college class. I ate a lot of tacos and a lot of meatballs and a lot of snowballs and got used to never drinking tap water (which is not an actual rule in New Orleans but maybe should be). I read 81 books and listened to 31 audiobooks. I started taking aerial circus classes and, without really noticing, got stronger than I’ve been since I was 14. I did my first circus performance, and I’m so lucky to have stumbled upon this quirky and delightful circus community that I had no idea existed and feels to me like the real embodiment of this city.

I turned 29, which feels no closer than 30 than 23 did, really. Sometimes my friends say they’ve started feeling old. To them I suggest joining the circus and performing for an audience in a leotard for the first time since 8th grade—it’s a guaranteed way to cure aging.

This will be the first spring in 9 years that I haven’t been job searching (whether for a summer job or a full-time one). This will be the first year I work year-round without a summer break. Mostly I hope 2019 is full of feasts and circus tricks and books and publications and new places. Twelfth Night was over the weekend, which I’ve never once thought about before this year. But this time there were king cakes everywhere and the first Mardi Gras parades and people getting excited already, and I went to my silks class and flew around some and felt more like a true New Orleans resident than I maybe ever have.

An Ode to Letter Writing

noreply@blogger.com (Kayla Smith) — Sun, 02 Dec 2018 04:25:00 +0000

It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything here, but the good news is, I HAVE been writing. There was a two and a half year period after graduate school during which I hardly wrote a word. In part this was because teaching high school consumed every spare minute of nearly every day, but also because I think I just felt defeated. I had a partly finished manuscript that I didn’t know what to do with (This is still true.), and I missed being in graduate school where I was surrounded by people who valued writing the way I did, and I felt unmotivated and incapable of producing anything worth looking at. It was a year ago that I started really writing again. It began with some letters.

If you know me, you know how much I love letters. The first letters I ever received were in kindergarten. I was a socially anxious kid, miserable at school because, though I loved learning, I was afraid of talking to strangers. My parents tried to help by leaving tiny letters in my lunch box wishing me a happy day at school. My dad called them Happy Day Notes. Each of them featured one of his increasingly elaborate stick figure drawings of me, or the two of us, doing something fun and decidedly unrelated to school—us riding his motorcycle or flying in a fighter jet or, after I started gymnastics, me mid-flight above a balance beam or standing atop a podium with a medal around my neck. My stick figure’s hair was always a long wavy line sprouting from the top of my head, and his stick figure always wore a baseball cap (presumably to make his gender apparent because I don’t think I’ve ever seen him wear a baseball cap). The Happy Day Notes continued throughout elementary school. I cannot say with certainty that they succeeded in making me particularly joyful about being at school as I read them under the lunch table amidst the high pitched chatter of my fellow 6-year-olds and the unmistakable smell of elementary school cafeteria. But they did make me smile. And 23 years later, I recognize that they also taught me a lesson that I did not know I was learning and that my parents did not realize they were teaching—the lesson that sometimes written words have greater meaning than spoken ones.

By 4th and 5th grade, everyone wrote letters. The bold kids threw paper airplane notes to their crushes when the teacher looked away. The rest of us scratched notes to pass under the table to our friends. Notes elicited giggles and blushes and were full of code names in case they were confiscated. Creative note-folding was a sought-after skill that the popular students learned from older friends and the precocious students learned from library books. (In retrospect, I’m impressed by our late-90s selves for our ingenuity in the days before Youtube tutorials.) Groups of eager students sat in circles at recess to teach each other the intricate origami that would make their letters, and therefore themselves, cooler than a boring folded square.

Though talking to people was hard for me, writing only ever felt exciting. This is how I became a letter-writing enthusiast. One friend and I wouldn’t settle for our classmates’ punctuation-free scribbles about crushes, and a mere piece of paper wasn’t enough to contain all we wanted to say, so we started writing our letters in a notebook and traded that back and forth instead. We wrote more in those notebooks than I think we ever wrote for our classes, and we filled several of them by the end of the year. When it was my friend’s turn with the notebook, I wrote letters to other classmates and letters that I delivered after school in my gymnastics teammates’ lockers. After finding a way to share the things I was too shy to speak aloud, I never ran out of words to write or people to write them to.

The volume of notes passed decreased in middle school, and the content of many that were still circulating turned into R-rated confessions and cruel rumors. Gradually everyone started getting cell phones, and by halfway through high school, texts had taken the place of letters and handwritten correspondence became nearly obsolete. My handful of recipients changed and then narrowed, but a small group of us never stopped writing. Our letters were full of novel quotes, song lyrics, dramatic stories, and inside jokes. They were longer than our research papers and more passionate than work we did for any class. We started blogs where we wrote posts in second-person to anonymous “you”s—the letters we couldn’t bring ourselves to give to their recipients because they said things that felt too honest. We transcribed them from scribbled pages and let strangers on the internet read them instead. My written words communicated something far closer to what I wanted to say than I felt my spoken words ever could.

My best friend, Sam, and I left Mississippi for college—her for Chicago, me for Providence. Though we spoke on the phone every day, we never stopped writing letters. During freshman year, the letters felt like a lifeline to our “real” lives, and we sent them every week or two. After that, our college lives became our real, and busy, lives, and we tried to send letters every month or so instead. Hers often including drawings (she’s an artist), and mine were usually longer. Our letters were essentially journal entries in which we tried to untangle our thoughts and emotions by putting them on paper. I kept a journal as well, and many letters I sent to Sam were lifted straight from my journal pages. I was majoring in fiction writing and spending hours each week working on short stories, but the letters I sent to Sam felt more honest than anything I tried to convey in my fiction. And then halfway through college, I took a creative nonfiction class and realized what should have been obvious but felt shocking instead—that the type of writing in my letters was a legitimate form of creative writing, too, and that it could be more than just a hobby.

So I decided to go to graduate school for creative nonfiction writing. My roommate there, Sophie, was a letter writing enthusiast, as well. We would sit opposite each other at the kitchen table, writing memoir chapters for our workshops or editing our classmates essays. Perhaps this was the mid-20-year-old’s version of our teenage blogs—another effort to organize untidy thoughts into relatable experience. Every few weeks, we’d find ourselves together at the table without our computers, writing letters to faraway friends instead.

And then came the lull after graduate school. There were a couple of full-time jobs and lengthy job searches, both of which drained my time and mental energy. Longterm writing projects lay neglected on my bookshelves. This past fall, I realized I’d written hardly any letters in the past year. So on a whim, I embarked upon a letter writing project.

Last Halloween, I decided that I would write a letter to a different person for every day of November, mostly as a challenge just to see if I could do it. I made a list of rules for myself—I couldn’t write to the same person twice. I couldn’t write to family members (though I made an exception for distant relatives I have not met in person). I could mail a package instead of a letter, but it had to include at least a small written component. The letters had to be handwritten and mailed (except for one letter I delivered in person). When I came up with the idea, I could not name 30 plausible recipients—people who would not be confused or creeped out upon receiving a letter from me. I realized that it is nearly impossible for a 28-year-old female to ask old friends for their addresses without them assuming they are about to receive a wedding announcement. My mom kindly supplied, “Won’t the guys think you’re flirting with them?” (Would they?) It felt awkward and a little too weird, and I considered giving up on the idea. I made myself send the first letter instead.

I sent letters to Sam and Sophie and my other closest friends first, which felt easy and familiar. I sent letters to other letter-writing friends who I’ve exchanged letters with before. I mailed brownies and brief letters to friends with birthdays in November. I mailed letters to old friends I haven’t spoken to in a decade, to people I’ve only met once (or in a couple of cases, that I’ve never met in person), to the elementary school friend I shared the notebook with, to the high school friends whose “secret” blogs I used to read, to my former roommates, to the teacher of my first-ever writing workshop, to my writer friends from college and graduate school. I guessed a couple of addresses and sent a couple of extra letters to make up for it. I’d worried that after running out of obvious recipients, the letters may start to feel forced and obligatory to write. None of them did. I sent letters to 25 different cities in 14 different states.

When I finished the project, I expected to be burnt out and unable to write anything else for a while. Instead I couldn’t stop writing. I started essays that have been in the back of my mind for a while. I started submitting essays I’d been too self-conscious to try publishing. I’ve been more productive with my writing than I have been since completing my MFA program. Most people were thrilled to receive their letters, and (as far as I know) no one was too creeped out. I reconnected with several old friends and have stayed in touch with a few of them. I’ve received a handful of response letters that I did not expect and was irrationally excited by each of them. I wrote them because I wanted to write them, not because I wanted responses. Maybe I instinctively knew that returning to letters, the original source of my writing, would give me the motivation I needed to write anything else.

If it’s been a while (or, say, a decade) since you wrote a letter, I have a new address I’d be happy to give you.

The Best Coach I Ever Knew

noreply@blogger.com (Kayla Smith) — Tue, 14 Aug 2018 05:02:00 +0000

I found out on Saturday morning that my old gymnastics coach died late on Friday. I was devastated. I hadn’t seen him in probably 8 years, and he hasn’t been my coach in a decade and a half. But my sadness felt urgent and all consuming instead of distant. I didn’t talk about it to anyone except my family (who knew him, too) because I couldn’t talk about it without crying, and because it felt somehow too personal, and mostly because I felt like I had no right to that level of sadness. I spent most of the day alone, just remembering, and when I sat down to write a little commemorative post, I realized I had a lot more I wanted to say.

I was a kind of impossible kid. I was so painfully shy that I practically couldn’t function around anyone who wasn’t immediate family, and my poor mom had no idea what to do to help. My sister did dance and softball — the regular things all the kids did in my hometown. My mom tried to put me in softball when I was 5 or 6. I spent a miserable season hiding from the ball in the outfield and running in the opposite direction if it flew my way. Then she tried dance class, and then acrobatics, both of which entailed me sitting in her lap for most of each class and refusing to participate in the recitals. Interacting with an instructor I didn’t know was scary, and the thought of an audience watching me was petrifying. And then when I was 6 years old, I watched the 1996 women’s gymnastics team win Olympic gold in Atlanta, and I told my mom that’s it. That’s what I want to do.

Desperate to prevent me from being a mute hermit, she enrolled me at the only gym in my town, which was a great place for cheerleading and tumbling, but also had gymnastics equipment from the 70s and hadn’t had a competitive gymnastics team in over a decade. I wanted to compete, but we didn’t know of any alternatives, so I was content to be there and learn as many new tricks as possible (without talking to anyone). Months later I was with my mom in Slidell and saw the silhouettes of gymnasts painted in the windows of a strip-mall storefront. I knew there was probably no way I could go to that gym—it was at least an hour from my house, and even then I knew it would be far more expensive than the gym in my town—but I begged her to at least let us go look inside.

A week later we were back for my first class. I don’t know if I’d ever been so excited for anything. Because of a mix-up by a substitute manager who was filling in for the day, I was accidentally placed in the team class instead of the recreational class—something that probably wasn’t supposed to happen for months. There were two male coaches in the gym—a man named Alex who coached the lower levels and an older man named Victor who coached the older girls (who all looked like Olympians to me). I was both terrified by and in awe of Victor (and his wife, Tamila). I sensed he was legendary before I even knew the details —that he and Tamila were the Soviet coaches of the ’92 Olympic all-around champion, that her medal ceremony was the first time the Ukrainian flag had ever flown at an Olympic Games (the Soviet Union had just fallen), and that they’d immigrated to America just a few years before I walked in that gym (I’m not sure I’d ever heard a foreign accent in person before I heard theirs). To my 7-year-old self, he was superhuman, the embodiment of all my unattainable dreams.

He and Alex watched me during that first practice. They took me aside and asked me to show them the skills I knew. They spoke quietly in Russian to each other. And by the end of that practice, Victor introduced himself to my mom and said they wanted to invite me to join the team. My mom knew there was no chance she could refuse because for the first time in my life, I wasn't hiding in a corner afraid for anyone to watch me. There haven’t been many single moments in my life I can point to as life-changing. But that was one.

Victor and Tamila became my coaches after my first competition season, and they remained my coaches for the next 5 years. That meant that I spent more time with them and my teammates than I did with anyone outside of my immediate family. We moved into a smaller, old gym after the lease was up on the original one. None of us minded what it looked like. Their daughter, Tetyana, immigrated soon after and became our choreographer and coach, as well (completing the best team of coaches I ever had). Then came Tetyana’s husband and daughter, who became my childhood friend. What started as two practices a week quickly became 4 and 5 practices a week for 3 or 4 hours a day, and 8 hour days 5 days a week during the summer. It’s sounds cliche when athletes say their coaches and teammates are like second families. But it’s also true.

In the gym, the shyness that was so debilitating in every other area of my life melted away. I was hungry for as much as I could get and, to the shock of everyone who’d ever known me, I was thrilled at any opportunity to perform in front of people. (And let me be clear—I was not the best. I was nowhere close to the best. I just loved it that much.) In the gym, Victor was my number one supporter. He saw something in me that I couldn’t see in myself, and he never let me forget it.

Bars was the bane of my existence. I hated the event. I spent agonizing hours in practice and in private lessons trying to get my bar skills up to speed. I was too horrified to try a giant, but Victor told me 400 times that my form was perfect so that I still felt confident enough to keep trying.

When I got my first rip on my hand from bars, he cut the bloody flap of skin off my palm with nail scissors, placed it in the middle of my palm and closed both of his hands over it. Be proud of this, he said.

I remember how secretly proud I always felt when we found out the competition order he and Tamila had chosen. Coaches generally strategize when choosing the order their team members compete. The expected high score goes last, and then essentially you work backward from there. But your first competitor should be your steadiest one, the one who you can trust to handle the competition nerves, the one who will set the standard for everyone else. I would never have chosen to go first myself. But there was no better feeling than when they chose me to go first on 2 or 3 events every competition. (Except for maybe the feeling when sometimes I was picked to go last.) There is perhaps no better way to build someone’s self-confidence than to show, for an audience to see, that you have confidence in them.

When I picture Victor during those years, I remember so clearly how youthful he was. He must have been in his 60s at the time, but everything about him seemed young. I remember how he would catch us in mid-air when we practiced bar dismounts. (Was there anyone else in my life I would have trusted to do that?) He was a small man, but spotting anyone seemed effortless for him. He had the body of a man half his age. He used to swim for miles each morning in the pool at his apartment complex (where he’d bring us to swim twice a week in the summers). It was so important to him that we balance the hard work we did with fun. During our lunch break in the summers, he’d bring everyone to the floor for dodge ball games. (My years running from softballs paid off.) He was soft-spoken and loved to laugh. I don’t recall ever hearing him raise his voice.

One of my favorite memories is when I did a kip for the first time on the low bar. (If you were never a gymnast and you look this skill up on Youtube, you will not be impressed. But if you were ever a gymnast, perhaps you understand the agony of trying and failing for actual years to get that stupid skill.) It was the Louisiana State Meet at LSU, the last competition of the year. For every competition that year leading up to state, I’d tried the kip, failed, and done it again with him helping me (yes, a huge deduction, but I had to compete the skill, and my score was going to be a disaster no matter what). Except that time, I did it. I could hear my gym’s section of the audience cheering as if I’d just won Olympic gold, and I remember seeing out of the corner of my eye from the high bar that Victor was jumping and running in circles, arms raised, dancing like a maniac. For the entire rest of the routine he danced with the whole crowd watching. He apologized to the judges afterward, then bear-hugged me with tears in his eyes and told me that he hadn’t been this excited when Tatiana Gutsu won the Olympic gold. “I didn’t cry then,” he told me, “but I cry now.” Of course I wasn’t sure that I believe him. But then again…

I was 12 when Victor and Tamila moved away for a coaching job in California. It was one of the saddest goodbyes I’d ever had to say, and I still remember crying as I walked out of that gym with my teammates for the last time that night in December. I went to two more gyms after Victor left. I never stopped loving gymnastics. (I still haven’t stopped loving gymnastics.) But no other coach ever made me feel as confident or sure as he made me feel. 14 years later, it’s still hard to talk about why I walked away from competitive gymnastics. The simplest thing to say is that I felt like I’d come to the point of picking a route forward. The gymnastics route where there was a single goal (full-paid college scholarship to a college with a good gymnastics program) and no room for error, or the academic one where options felt endless. I couldn’t do both. And I guess something else Victor taught me was that sometimes you have to leave something you love to pursue a different dream.

In college, I found out that Victor and Tamila had moved back the area and were coaching at one of my former gyms in Mandeville. I remember how hard my heart was beating when I went to visit during a holiday break. I hadn’t contacted them beforehand, and they hadn’t seen me in nearly a decade. Would they even recognize me? When they saw me, they stopped class and pulled me onto the floor to introduce me to the girls’ team—all of them the age I was when they were my coaches. Victor convinced me to warm up with the class, and then he came with me when I tried to make my body remember how to tumble on the tumble track. It was the best gift I could have asked for. They retired not long after that and then moved away with the rest of their family. I’m so grateful for seeing him that last time.

The actual skills Victor taught me were secondary to the ways he changed me as a person. Victor was one of the most accepting people I’ve ever known. Everyone, no matter their background, skill level, age, or size, was welcome in his gym. He taught me quiet confidence and pride and how the things we work hardest for should always be things we love. He taught me about perseverance, discipline, and most everything that has helped me have any degree of success in anything I’ve done since.

There’s been so, so much in the news for the past couple of years about USA Gymnastics. Child abuse and molestation and eating disorders and permanent emotional damage. It’s hard to watch as more and more people are sharing more and more of these stories, and it’s heartbreaking to see the world learning to affiliate the sport with abuse like this. It’s hard to know that parents have not allowed their little girls to start or continue gymnastics because they associate it with these cases. I wish I could tell them that there’s an awful lot wrong with elite gymnastics and the national team setup, and that there are a lot of terrible people affiliated with this sport, and those are rightful things to be wary of. But I also want to tell them that’s not all the sport is. Let me tell you about my childhood gym and my coach. This is what gymnastics is supposed to be. This is what a coach is supposed to be.

I’m thinking of Tamila, Tetyana, Lana, and their family tonight, and I’m so grateful for these memories of Victor. I’m lucky to have known him.

The High School Reunion Blog You All Knew Was Coming

noreply@blogger.com (Kayla Smith) — Wed, 18 Jul 2018 03:30:00 +0000

Because I certainly can't go to my high school reunion and not write about it.

A few years ago, my high school classmates started mentioning our ten year reunion in our class Facebook group. There was talk of dates and locations and who planned to go and who was too far away. I think I was in New York City the first time it was mentioned. And then it came up again when I was in Tennessee. And then actual plans started to develop when I was in Washington, D.C. No matter where I was in the country, I knew from the first time it was mentioned that I would go. But I could never quite articulate why.

I did not love high school. Or rather, there were aspects of my high school years that I loved, but the actual school bit was, for the most part, not one of them. My high school was the stereotypical southern variety that cared a lot about labels. (Think Friday Night Lights. Exactly that.) Aside from being one of the “smart kids” (which included all the students who signed up to take the few honors and AP classes the school offered), I was never part of a built-in group the way my sister always was. I was friends with individuals but marginal to their cliques. I knew people, because when you live in a town with four elementary schools that feed into one middle school and high school, you inevitably know people. But I wasn’t popular. I had a best friend who was (okay, is) far more charismatic than I will ever be, so some people saw me only as a sidekick. I wasn’t invited to the Friday night parties (and wouldn’t have gone to them if I had been). Instead my few close friends and I were sitting on top of cars in empty parking lots, and making movies, and writing secret blogs that only strangers and each other would read. I was voyeuristic and painfully aware of things. And though I wanted people to know who I was, I felt incapable of actually talking to them.

If other people don’t identify us the way we identify ourselves, it can feel like that identity doesn’t exist at all.

When I got into college (which was not a given at my school), part of me wanted people to know it because it would mean that maybe my peers would finally identify me the way I wanted to identify myself. (Smart, but also determined. Resilient. Bold.) For the most part, this did not happen. Very few students or teachers had ever heard of my college. Very few people understood why I wanted to go so far away. Aside from the handful of friends and teachers who knew me well, it went largely unnoticed. Though I left high school feeling recognized by the people I was closest to, I suspected that to everyone else, I was the very definition of a wallflower.

When I graduated from college, my mom begged me to let her ask our town’s newspaper to publish something about it. To our knowledge, I was the first person from my high school to ever attend any Ivy League school, and I was about to start a degree at a second one. The thought of a public announcement felt humiliating and self-aggrandizing, but at the same time, I felt like, yes, I did a cool thing that I’m proud of, and if there’s even a chance that someone else can see it and realize that they can also do whatever cool thing they’ve always wanted to do that no one else has told them they can do yet, then it would definitely be worth me feeling self-conscious. A small part of me also wanted that validation. Look town, I’m not a wallflower anymore.

But the newspaper wouldn’t publish it. They said it wasn’t newsworthy. All those years later, and I still felt invisible in my hometown. What if I could only be myself a thousand miles away? What if I could only be myself in cities where no one knew me? How had I gone from a person incapable of talking to strangers to being a person who only felt comfortable around strangers? Can you spend 18 years in a place and still feel like you don’t belong there? (The answer to this is yes, you absolutely can.)

Years later as our reunion date got closer, I saw so many negative comments on social media. Why would I want to hang out with people I didn’t even like ten years ago? I already see the people I want to see from high school, so why would I want to go pretend to care about anyone else? I’m not interested in watching people stand around with their old cliques. I understood the comments, but at the same time, I couldn’t relate to them at all. I’m a sentimental person, a memory hoarder who perpetually exists half in the past. When I tried to persuade friends to come with me, they’d ask why I wanted to go in the first place. I could never articulate a good answer. Because it has never occurred to me to pass up an opportunity to reminisce with other people I wanted to say, which is true but not the full answer. Maybe because I’m both the same person I was in high school and a different person entirely, and I want to see the ways in which that’s true for everybody else. Because I don’t have to be best friends with someone to have memories of them that I’d like to hang onto. Because I no longer need affirmation from anyone there. Because there are very few times in life when we can so clearly measure the way we’ve grown as people than the times when we can throw ourselves back into a group of acquaintances who knew us before puberty. Because sometime in the past ten years, I learned how to talk to strangers. (The only way to cure social anxiety is to move to four cities over ten years where you don’t know a soul.)

But also there’s this. It took me six years of higher education, two years of teaching at selective high schools, and these past couple months of advising college students to fully realize how thankful I am to be a product of my high school. I’ve seen the alternative, and at the time it was what I desperately wanted. But in retrospect, I’m thankful my high school experience wasn’t stressful and that the only pressure I felt was from myself. I like that I had to find my own friends instead of having a built-in friend group. I like that I went to school with all kinds of people who were different than I was. Despite how harsh a critic I am of Mississippi public education, I also know that I wouldn’t trade my experience for another one, because it’s part of my identity, too.

And so I went, with a couple of my (still) best friends who I’d spent months trying to coerce. And I don’t mind if it’s melodramatic to say it lived up to every expectation I had for it. I have never seen such collective and genuine enthusiasm from an entire group about seeing old acquaintances, regardless of whether the individuals were friends in high school or not. I had conversations with people I’ve “known” for 15 or more years but never had a one-on-one conversation with. I have never seen so many people connect with each other across still-in-tact friend groups and decade-old cliques and teenage animosity. If this was what high school parties were like, I hate I missed them. This reunion held none of the emotional weight and intensity that my college reunion did (see my college reunion post), maybe because it’s not a time in my life I would want to live again. Instead it was the less complicated kind of fun where I watched my former classmates dance together in a way that our teenage self-consciousness would probably have prevented the last time we saw each other.

My general assumption in social situations is that I will know people who do not know me. But people knew me that I did not expect to, which made me wonder if I might have been wrong about how people saw me all those years ago. Who was I to you back then? I wanted to ask, but there are limits to just how weird I’m okay with being viewed in public.

I did not mention that I write. I did not mention my college or what I did in grad school. That’s not who I am to these people, and I’m fine with that. I mostly asked questions and learned about the cool things everyone is doing and all the places they’ve traveled and met their significant others and looked at pictures of their kids and reminisced and felt weirdly proud of everyone for still liking each other this much. And then the reunion ended but everyone was having too much fun to stop, so we went to a bar and did the whole thing again when even more former classmates showed up. Letting people surprise you is always worth it. Spending a night feeling grateful for a shared past is always worth it.

*Last two photos belong to Brittany S.

2017 Recap

noreply@blogger.com (Kayla Smith) — Sun, 31 Dec 2017 19:17:00 +0000

I haven’t posted much here in 2017, not because I wasn’t writing, but because for the first time since grad school, I was writing for more than the three of you who read this, and most magazines and literary journals won’t accept work that I publish here first. Despite all the disappointments of this year, writing more is one thing I feel really good about.

This is the 5th New Year’s post I’ve written in which I reveal the obsessive degree to which I document and hoard memories. The years have started to blur together now, and it’s the changing locations that help me to keep track of a timeline.

2017 was a blur of emotional extremes. There was the inauguration, the resulting fear, shock, and anger. There was the birth of my niece, train rides, and friend reunions. I spent half the year working in D.C. and half the year in Mississippi, where I never expected to be for quite so long and where I’ve been unexpectedly content. I moved out of one of my favorite apartments and away from one of my favorite cities—my 8th cross-country move. I met literary agents in New York City, read my work to strangers in Baltimore, climbed a mountain in Virginia, and hunted ghosts in Gettysburg. I participated in the Women’s March, the Climate March, the Immigration Protest, and so many other empowering and hopeful gatherings. I spent three surreal days at my 5 year college reunion. I saw the partial eclipse, fall colors in Canada, and snow in Mississippi. I learned how to hold a baby without being horrified and went on more field trips than I can count with the coolest 11-month-old on Earth. I spent 215 hours (including 7 nights) on trains, 41 hours on buses, and slept in 8 states and 2 countries. I mailed several hundred brownies/cookies and mailed a letter every day for a month. I interviewed 23 college applicants and wrote what feels like 4 million cover letters. I read 55 books.

I turned 28 last month, and though I’m not sure how 28 is supposed to feel, I don’t think I feel it. If it’s supposed to feel grown up or successful or accomplished, I don’t feel it. If it’s supposed to feel stable or settled or maternal, then I definitely don’t feel it—a fact I’m perfectly fine with. What it does feel like is that I make very good brownies, and like I’ve gotten much better at packing suitcases, and

like I’m physically stronger than I look, and like I’m not as bad at talking to strangers as I once was. I count these as victories.

Right now 2018 feels very uncertain. I don’t have a plan, don’t know where I’ll be in a month. But that has stopped feeling like as much of a problem as it once did. There are so many things to be excited about.

Ghost Walk

noreply@blogger.com (Kayla Smith) — Tue, 31 Oct 2017 18:06:00 +0000

Halloween (and fall in general) always makes me miss Providence, and my favorite Halloween in Providence was the one I spent writing my first-ever attempt at journalism for my first-ever creative nonfiction class. And even though reading my writing from 7 years ago is fairly painful and makes me cringe, I think I'd still credit this assignment as one of the main reasons I decided to pursue nonfiction for the rest of college and then grad school, and also the reason I want to do ghost tours in every city I visit. I'm so glad I found it hidden away in my email.

Google tells me that Rory Raven lives in Salem, MA, now, and if any of you are ever there for a visit, I hope you'll find him and take a tour.

Providence

Ghost Walk

It’s the afternoon before Halloween, and the crowd for the Ghost Walk is large. Parents bring costumed children, teenagers come in couples, and one woman’s brought her poodle. Rory Raven sells tiny orange tickets to each person that approaches. Shortly after 3:00, the crowd’s grown to about fifty, and Rory begins.

Brown's Halloween midnight organ concert

His voice resonates. A woman behind me says, “He’s such an interesting orator,” which I think is an understatement. He has the rolling inflections of an auctioneer, but with immaculate pauses. He’s persuaded these people to care about something that they don’t even realize they never cared about before. This is his performing voice. This is how he talks to his audiences as he leads them on Benefit Street and as he stands on stages before them in theaters around New England.

This isn’t the voice he uses when he subtly tells the woman with the baby stroller not to worry that she could only find five dollars for her ticket instead of eight. It’s not the voice he uses to talk to the couple of women on the tour that he knows personally, joking when they pose on either side of him for the camera (“I rarely show up in pictures.”). It’s not the voice he uses with me in the coffee shop a few weeks later, offering me part of his cookie and telling me about the book he’s currently reading. But I wouldn’t consider one voice fake and the other real. I would say that Rory Raven knows how to compel a crowd to listen.

He begins the tour by saying that others shared these stories with him, and that’s how we should take them –- as stories. “And one of these stories is the product of my own imagination,” he adds, “but I’m not telling you which one. He doesn’t, even when I ask him later.

“People always do this. I said I wasn’t going to tell you which one. I didn’t say I’d tell you later,” he laughs.

“But I could look up all of the stories and know it was the one I couldn’t find, right?”

He shrugs, “Well. I guess you could.”

I don’t look it up, because part of the intrigue is not knowing. It’s this knowledge of how to best captivate an audience that makes Rory’s tour so effective.

The Ghost Walk takes place almost entirely on Benefit Street, starting with stories of Edgar Allen Poe and Sarah Helen Whitman in the Athenaeum and featuring roughly a dozen more stories and locations including Sarah Helen Whitman’s house, the house in H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Shuttered Room,” and a cemetery. Rory walks ahead of the crowd and waits patiently for everyone to catch up before he begins a story. His speech seems far from scripted, and he frequently includes bonus information (“…and that’s the story of the Mansion Hotel. By the way, Geoff’s next door there –- best burger I’ve ever eaten. I’m serious everyone. Go there.”)

He ends the tour by saying that he has one more story and that he can prove it’s true. It’s the story of a disturbed teenage girl whose family locked her in the upstairs room of their house on College Hill. One day the family opened the room to find the girl missing, though there was no way for her to get the key. He says no one ever knew how she escaped. He pauses and invites the audience to “Come closer. Closer.” He pulls a skeleton key from his pocket and places it flat on his palm. The audience gasps as the key slowly turns in his hand, seemingly by magic. The crowd applauds as Rory wishes everyone a Happy Halloween and tells them that Cable Car next door has coffee and a bathroom if anyone needs them.

Later, I ask Rory about his childhood and how be became interested in all of this. I might have expected a back-story equal in eccentricity to the man in front of me, but Rory presents his childhood as nothing out of the ordinary. He was born and raised in Rhode Island and grew up thinking he wanted to be an English teacher. “I would have written those unintelligible papers with lots of subtitles,” he says without remorse for having missed the chance.

His family was Irish-Catholic, which he feels caused his love of storytelling. He recalls getting sick as a child and having to spend the week in bed. “My sister would come into the room and read me Edgar Allen Poe stories in the dark.”

But he doesn’t consider himself religious. As he got older, he grew skeptic of his family’s Catholic beliefs and went through a period in his twenties when he was

a devout atheist. He smiles at this memory and says that, “At forty-one, I’ve mellowed.”

He attended Bard College and intended to major in literature, but ran out of money and came home after one year. For the next several years he took occasional courses at various schools before ultimately deciding that college wasn’t the path for him. He calls himself self-taught, saying, “I never worked well in classrooms. I wish I had figured that out earlier.”

The tours began after he went on a similar tour in Newport and decided that Providence should have one, too. He started asking people for stories, hung a few posters around the city, and started telling the stories to whoever showed up. The Ghost Walk started in 2000. His career as a mentalist started four or five years before that. It’s hard to say exactly when the point was that he started performing for real audiences instead of just for friends at parties. When I ask exactly what a “mentalist” is, he laughs and says that the term is slowly starting to catch on in America because of the TV show. “Except people expect me to fight crime,” he adds.

He was about 25 years old when he got interested in the idea of being a mentalist. “You know, at twelve, you get a magic set,” he says, and then pauses, “—or maybe you didn’t, but the twelve years old guys did. And they’re interested in it for a little while. Well in my twenties I came back to it, but with more interest in the mental aspect.”

I ask the obvious question, “So you’re not claiming it’s real?”

“No. Am I a psychic? Of course not,” he dismisses the possibility. “It’s a theatrical performance.”

“So how does it work?”

“It involves a lot of different things –- having a good memory, being good at reading people, different kinds of psychology, some stage magic.”

“And you’re upfront about this.”

“Oh yeah, I’m not trying to lie to anyone. Of course, they don’t always believe me. I had one lady tell me that I’m the ‘other kind of fake.’ I said, ‘Oh really? And what kind of fake is that?’ She said, ‘The kind who says he’s not a psychic but really is and won’t reveal it.’” He laughs like he’s never heard something so absurd. “Now why would I do that?”

Rory’s attitude is a huge contrast from those who would call themselves believers in “mysticism.” One such man is a retired Brown professor whose special focus is mysticism and occult magic. We met in his office in the basement of the Slavic Studies department where he told me about leading numerous Brown students in activities like crystal ball gazing and card reading as well as performing exorcisms. Though he himself has never seen “a spirit” (though he has seen the “swirling fog” where another person saw a full ghost of a woman), he does believe that others see them.

When I bring up Rory Raven, he smiles like I’ve mentioned an idol. “What an elegant and powerful man,” he says sincerely. “Yes, he’s a very interesting man,” he adds as an afterthought, “though we’ve never met in person.”

I ask the professor what the difference is between someone who performs as a mentalist and someone who actually believes it. He says, “There’s a lot of overlap between a genuine occultist and a mentalist though neither wants to acknowledge it.” Both start with empathy-– sensitivity with people, picking up cues, things like skin tones, body language, and muscle tension. “So a spiritual counselor uses the same skills that Rory Raven would use to read your mind.”

“Rory Raven has worked hard to cultivate his abilities, both on stage and off, to a level that most people did not think could be done. He’s a much more impressive presence than I am,” he says. I feel that this is a pretty profound statement considering that it comes from a man who has never met Rory, looks like a six and a half foot tall Santa Clause, and talks casually about the exorcisms he’s performed.

Providence Athenaeum

I ask Rory how many of the stories from the ghost walk he believes. “Well, I guess all of them. I mean, none of it’s fibs.” Of course some of the stories are spun in a specific way, and he tends to go with the traditional oral telling of the stories instead of only telling the facts that can be proven. I ask if anything strange has ever happened on the tour and he says no, “because it’s not that kind of tour. It has to do with the tone you set, and on the tour I’m not talking about orbs and things.”

I know what he means because the Providence Ghost Tour -– the “other ghost walk”— does just that, happening at night instead of the afternoon, and lead by a guide who carries a lantern and an EMF (Electro Magnetic Field) detector (which the guide is quick to warn is not entirely accurate and has been known to be set off by text messages), and encourages the audience to take pictures of the tour sites because of the possibility of finding orbs later. The tour charges eighteen dollars instead of Rory’s eight dollars, is run by a team of guides, and seems to be a sore subject for Rory who smiles and says, “Yeah, it’s the rip-off tour,” but won’t say much more on the subject.

When a South Carolina publisher contacted Rory and asked if he would write the stories from his tour, the result was his first book Haunted Providence: Strange Tales from the Smallest State.

They contacted him about the second book and asked if he would write about the mafia. He told them no –- because he has no interest, but also because “they’re still around. I told them, ‘I will if you come start my car every morning.’” So instead the second book, Wicked Conduct: The Minister, the Mill Girl, and the Murder that Captivated Old Rhode Island, is about Sarah Cornell -– a girl from Fall River who was found dead and pregnant with what was thought to be the child of a Methodist minister in Bristol. “It was the OJ case of the 1830s,” Rory says.

The third book, The Dorr War: Treason, Rebellion, and the Fight for Reform in Rhode Island, was released just a few weeks after our interview. It’s about the 1840s voting rebellion and Thomas Wilson Dorr, who Rory calls “one of the most remarkable heroes in Rhode Island history,” adding, “You know, there’s nothing more scary than politics.”

“So you are still doing English, just not exactly how you planned,” I say.

He agrees, “That’s true, I am, but I’m also doing history in a sort of popular media way -– I’m not an academic historian.”

St. John's Cemetery in Providence

Rory love what he does. He tells me that his touring has enabled him to travel to places he otherwise never would have seen. At first he would spend days online looking for small theaters in New England. Now he’s been to theaters all over the Northeast, and he even traveled to Istanbul where a friend invited him to do a show. His favorite venue might be the Haskell Opera House in Derby, Vermont, where the stage is in Canada and the audience is in the U.S. “I just want to keep touring, maybe in some bigger houses. I’m not looking for a Vegas act or NBC show. I’m happy doing this.”

He already has an idea for his fourth book. He wants to write about the Harvard chemistry professor, John White Webster, who was accused of murdering a man and hiding his body in a waste-disposal vault at the medical school. Rory said this was so publicized when it happened that when Charles Dickens came to America on a lecture tour, he asked to see the room where the body was found.

“I’ve never heard that story before,” I say. “It’s weird how the media can be so obsessed with something and then just forget it.”

“That’s what’s fascinating,” he says. “It makes me wonder what we’re obsessed with now that will go away in one hundred years.”

I close my notebook at the end of the interview and ask if there’s anything he’s willing to share that I haven’t asked about.

He shrugs, “I mean, do you want me to read your mind?”

I laugh and agree. This is a trick I’ve seen him do in online videos, but it’s far easier to accept things as simple tricks when they’re performed on a stage than when they happen in front of you in a coffee shop.

He pulls a small pad of paper and pencil out of his bag and asks me to think of a number between one and one hundred.

“Picture the number. Picture it in front of you and imagine that you’re pushing it towards me.” He stares directly in my eyes and writes something on the paper before handing me the pencil.

“What was the number?”

“Twenty-four,” I tell him.

“Why twenty-four?”

“It’s my favorite number.”

He nods his head. “So there was some significance behind it,” he says thoughtfully before he lays the pad in front of me on the table.

I look from the twenty-four he’s written to him, both of us smiling and silent.

“Well,” I finally say. “No explanation?”

“No,” he says pleasantly.

“Do it again,” I say.

He shakes his head, still smiling. “No.”

After the interview I ask him one follow-up question in an email. “Raven’s not your real last name, is it? Or will you never confess?”

In true Rory Raven style, he sends the reply, “You might say,’ When asked such a question, he laughs darkly and deftly changes the subject.’ Have you noticed the ants are getting larger these days?”

Providence Athenaeum, aka most beautiful library ever

Reunion

noreply@blogger.com (Kayla Smith) — Mon, 05 Jun 2017 14:01:00 +0000

I’d forgotten how sticky DC is in the summer. The return of the sweat is a reminder that I’ve been here nearly a year—unofficially from the end of last June when I worked in the mountains of Virginia and drove to DC on weekends and officially since I unintentionally stumbled into a job here in August and moved here with one day’s notice. This city has been a wonderful surprise. Everything else has been difficult. I do not think I’m the only one relieved that the school year has ended and we have a moment to breathe.

I spent last weekend in Providence for my 5th year college reunion during which I slept about 6 hours in a span of 64 and walked 30 miles. My general state of delirium may have played a role in the intensity of the experience, but I don’t think that’s the only reason that reunion hit me much harder than it did most people. Maybe the same can be said of college itself. Maybe college wasn’t such a transformative place to people for whom this was the plan all along— those who went through the half-million dollar preschool then college prep school followed by the Ivy League and six-figure-first-job circuit—the people who expected the person they are now was always the person they were going to be. Maybe to them college is just a memory of fun and stress and relationships and strangeness and the things I imagine all college experiences are, and their lives move on in a linear fashion with those years a memory solidly in the past. One friend said that it felt weird being back because once you leave school, you leave this version of yourself and don’t think about it much anymore because you are no longer that person.

Welcome home

It’s harder for those of us who the past never lets go of. I’m not sure I’ve fully left that place or that I ever entirely will. I think Brown means something different to those of us for whom it was life-altering, to those of us for whom this was inconceivable. 9 years later and 5 years away and the opportunity to go to that school does not feel less shocking.

Reunions are painted as this euphoric time of reminiscing and reliving memories with your forever-friends. Social media tells us this is true. (I want to ask all of the people of social media if anything has changed in their lives now that makes being together different than it was 5 years ago. Surely there is someone it is awkward for you to see here? Surely your memories of this place are not so straightforward. Surely no person alive is so self-assured.) Then again, I guess my social media doesn’t portray something entirely different. But social media unintentionally lies, and of course it’s more complicated than that.

Prospect Park

Reunion was a lot of nostalgia. Sometimes it was that euphoric kind, and sometimes it was the sad type. A friend told me once that he believes true nostalgia can only exist when you wish you could relive an experience differently than it happened. There are things I do regret missing at Brown. I spent 4 years there as an intensely private person (which has perhaps not changed so much) with one or two best friends and only a couple more roommates/friends I felt close to. I spent the first year of college hardly speaking to anyone. In retrospect, I fear people may have perceived me as a stuck up snob. In reality, I was painfully shy and intimidated by people I believed were way too cool to be my friends. I was so busy observing everyone else that I let almost no one know me, except for those couple of people who made it their mission to try (which I will always be grateful for).

For years after college, I couldn’t forgive myself for missing out on friendships I might have had if I hadn’t been too shy to pursue them until it was too late. It took me 5 years to feel like maybe we can give ourselves second chances. Maybe it’s not too late after all. Maybe that realization was the best part of reunion.

But I believe there’s nostalgia in missing something exactly the way that it was, too. Since graduating, I’ve only visited Providence once a couple of years ago. There was no one in town that I knew, which took away the emotional impact of it. A blizzard hit, and I had to leave early, but I remember not minding much because without the people, there was nothing else I needed there. I wrote a post about how Providence felt like home before Brown did, how I had to grow into the people there before they felt like home to me, and about what home means and how we can have more than one.

This time, I was back on campus with hundreds of my classmates, and glimpses of my 18-year-old self reemerged complete with the social anxiety, insomnia, and self-consciousness. 18-year-old me was the boldest of cowards and the most restless of loners. Did I really live like this everyday? Always so hyper-alert, always looking over my shoulder, always feeling surrounded by people I wanted to be sure I saw first so I could decide how to react? I spent last weekend trying to sleep in a dorm bed/brick-like-plank on the side of campus I’d never lived in, listening to downstair’s party music, wondering how I slept at all in my four years there, and remembering that I didn’t sleep all that much, in fact. I felt the same in ways I didn’t want to feel the same.

Luckily my 27-year-old self was also there to step in. My 27-year-old self recognized how incredible it is that eating 1:00am pizza with friends that random housing placed me next to as a freshman does not feel different than it did 9 years ago. Neither does trying Cambodian food for the first time with the same people who made me try my first taste of sushi/Greek yogurt/thai/salad-dressing-that-wasn’t-ranch (thanks, guys).There’s always a comfort in having friends with whom you can pick up right where you left off.

WaterFire

My 27-year-old self still needed to get up too early to go to my favorite coffee shops and walk around the city alone, the way I fell in love with it the first time back when it was the first city I’d ever lived in and places like Manhattan and DC felt so far from my reality. Providence is much smaller now, but no less beautiful. I thought of the other writers I’ve known who fell in love with this city with all of it’s strangeness and poetry. I thought of the first writing workshop I ever took during freshman year before I wrote words for anyone else to read. (I will forever be indebted to you, Michael Keenan.) I felt so clearly again how happy I was to be here. How never for one second was I not so happy to be here.

My 27-year-old self missed people. Because it is painful to try reliving memories alone that you made with others. Because you cannot separate memories of a place with memories of the people who made it home for you, and because that version of home can never exist in quite the same way it once did.

I have never felt so strongly about a place as I felt (still feel) about Brown. There was never a time in my life when I felt so constantly on edge, so self-conscious, so expectant. There was never another time in my life when someone might knock on my door at 3am to tell me it was snowing (thanks, Eric). There was never another time in my life when I spent hours painting pictures on the art building staircase, or sneaking into the old gym’s pool in the middle of the night, or climbing roofs and exploring tunnels under the dorm. Apart from grad school, there has never been another time that I’ve felt so fascinated by every person I met. There was never another time I would have passed up studying abroad because I couldn’t bear the thought of leaving that place. That I had standing breakfast dates every Friday, frequent 3 course dinner parties with my best friend, my "own table" in my favorite coffee shops, and a city I felt belonged to me. There was always a feeling of transience, of changing fast enough to notice it, of being afraid of what happened when it was gone. There was never another time when I learned so much from every person I met or when I felt so far from home but also like I was exactly where I belonged. I love that school no less today than I loved it 9 years ago.

It is hard to say who I would have been without Brown or to pinpoint the specific ways in which it changed me. It is hard to list the things I have to thank the school, students, and faculty for. One thing that Brown taught me in such a tangible and lasting way is to be bold in caring about things that matter. It was not surprising that every speech during commencement got political. In Daveed Digg’s Baccalaureate speech, he said, “What these times really need are people who challenge all explanations. Who never thought outside the box because they never accepted the premise that there was a box… We need your new ideas because our old ones have made a mess of things.” I’m glad this was my reunion year so I could hear those speeches. Because I do believe in the young people in this country. Not just at Brown, but colleges and high schools throughout America. I believe they will pull us out of this mess we’re in.

Walking through the Van Wickle Gates the first time

And 9 years later

I got back to DC on Monday and couldn’t decide if I felt like I was leaving home or coming home. I went to my last full day of work on Tuesday. I won’t be returning to this job next year, and there’s a lot of anxiety in not knowing what happens next or if I’ll be here next year or somewhere else. But I feel lucky to have been here this year, even when I might have once imagined living here during this election as torture. For now I will read all the books I wanted to be reading during the school year and try to write some things for the first time in 9 months.

Blossoms and Protests

noreply@blogger.com (Kayla Smith) — Sun, 26 Mar 2017 23:15:00 +0000

It was a year ago today that I visited DC during spring break.The cherry blossoms were at their peak, and I admired again how beautiful this city is. I never imagined I would live here.

The first time I ever visited DC was ten years ago, the summer before senior year of high school ,when I convinced my parents to take me on a college tour up the East Coast. This was before I’d ever ridden a train or tried hummus or knew I’d be leaving Mississippi. It was the first time I’d been above the Mason Dixon, the same trip I saw Brown for the first time (where I never thought I’d get to go), and Boston and New York (where I also never imagined I’d live) and Philadelphia. We stopped for a few hours in DC on the way back south. We parked somewhere alongside The Mall then walked around the monuments for just long enough that our car was towed onto a median and left with a nice parking ticket. It doesn’t seem like it could have possible been ten years since then.

The next time I visited DC was spring break of sophomore year in college when my best friend and I road tripped south and spent a couple of nights with his family here. His uncle took us on a driving tour around the monuments and Rock Creek Park. We walked around the Tidal Basin to see the cherry blossoms, went to the National Gallery, then got lost trying to find the Metro. I did not know of a DC that wasn’t the monuments, Smithsonian museums, and politics. Sophomore year felt too early to think about graduation or worry about jobs, but DC wasn’t what either of us imagined when we considered it. (He ended up here for a while 3 and 1/2 years before I unsuspectingly stumbled in.)

The forecasters didn’t think the cherry blossoms would survive our snowfall last week, but they’ve pulled through, as always. It’s the 4th cherry blossom season I’ve seen. This time it feels different.

I get Indian food on the weekends, or Ethiopian if I’m downtown. I follow the Twitter account that tells me where the outdoor movies will screen all summer long. I ride a bike to Georgetown every weekend that it’s warm enough. I can parallel park if I have to. DC isn’t the place I imagined it to be, in that I didn’t know it could feel like a version of home. (Okay, technically my address is Maryland, but the mile to the District line never counted to me.)

I worried about living in DC after the election. But it’s weirdly comforting to be in a place where people are so passionate about social justice and equality and general goodness.

On Inauguration Day, I worried that the city would turn into a 1984-style dystopia. But it seemed instead like most people ignored it. We got the day off from work because so many roads were closed, and other than a sign telling me that there was restricted traffic on Wisconsin Ave, I saw no sign of it. I grocery shopped and avoided the news and watched Netflix on my couch. It was a surreal and not terrible day.

The next day was the Women’s March. My journalist friend/former roommate was in town covering the inauguration, so we went together, and it was the moment I was proudest to call this place home. I’ve never seen so many people. I’ve never seen a group so uplifting, so passionate, so bold, so happy to be together. There’s nothing I can say about the march that doesn’t sound cliche, but every word is true. My feet hurt, and I nearly got crushed once, and we stood stuck in the crowd not moving for nearly an hour due to complete grid lock, and I regret not one second.

On social media later, I saw acquaintances and politicians from home ridicule the “Pro-Abortion March,” and I felt so, so sad for how completely they were able to (and eager to) miss the entire point.

There were protests every day for a while. I went to one supporting education, one protesting the immigration ban, and a vigil for free speech. My dad started calling me The Protestor. As in, “The Protestor is coming home to visit soon!” But it never felt like some decision to embrace social activism all of a sudden—it felt like sitting home and doing nothing wasn’t an option. One of my proudest moments of life was when my mom, sister, brother-in-law, sister’s friend, and my dad (a life-long Republican) each called the Mississippi senator to oppose Betsy DeVos for Education Secretary. My dad called me afterward to let me know he’d called two offices when he couldn’t get through to the first one. I wanted to weep.

In February, I went to New York for a literary agent’s mixer at Columbia. I was supposedly there for networking, but I mostly wanted to see my friends. I told one of my favorite professors as much and she said, “I know, it’s like a camp reunion,” before grasping me by the elbow and introducing me to some agent who I was too intimidated to look up for days. My friends were better promoters of my work than I was, and I thank them for rescuing me.

The next day, I took a 28 hour train ride to Mississippi to meet my niece. Lily cried when she met me because she was so overwhelmed with emotion and excitement at my presence. She got past it and we became fast friends. I even overcame my fear of holding her, although not my fear of picking her up. Lily likes ceiling fans, snacking, naps, and when her Auntie Kay reads her the book about the sloth and the one about the greyhound and the groundhog. She tries so hard to talk, but as she’s 8 weeks old, it hasn’t quite happened yet. Soon, though.

The sun doesn’t set until 7:30 now, and everyone has come out of hibernation. Restaurants have reopened their outdoor patios. The tourists have arrived by the hundred to catch a 5-day glimpse of this city. It feels good that I get to stick around this time.

Thanks, Obama

noreply@blogger.com (Kayla Smith) — Fri, 20 Jan 2017 17:44:00 +0000

I was supposed to be a Republican. It was an unspoken fact (though still a fact) in my hometown. Republicans were the moral ones who upheld our Southern Baptist values. They were kind and grandfatherly, familiar with their slight southern drawls. They did not have sexual relations with that woman. They did their job, which was to give long and boring speeches on TV that affected me in no way whatsoever and then carry on with whatever they did in that white house. No one in my family cared much about politics—it was never a topic discussed over meals—but I got the point, from church and from school, about whose side we were on. (And of course I’m generalizing, and of course there were people in my town with different beliefs and opinions, but as a child, I did not know those people. As a child, this is what if felt like.) Even in high school after I understood that there were issues apart from religious ones and that presidential candidates were individual people instead of cutouts of their parties, I couldn’t bring myself to care about politics.

The first time I heard of Barack Obama was during my senior year of high school. I don’t remember ever hearing so much about a candidate before—the adults couldn’t stop talking. Barak Obama was secretly a Muslim plotting against our country, I heard many of them say. He wasn’t even American—he had no birth certificate to prove he was, or if he did it was fake. He looked suspiciously happy in pictures. But what mattered most was that he was evil. Evil. Not evil like, oh, that evil teacher keeps giving me detention, but evil in the Biblical sense, like the evil that we should be deeply, instinctively afraid of. So many people said this with confidence, and surely they knew something I did not. I was treading dangerous ground anyway, asking too many questions, doubting opinions I’d always been told to have. I took AP Government that spring, and in class we researched all of the candidates for the election the next fall. Obama looked shockingly young. He didn’t look evil. I also remember taking one of those “I Side With” quizzes in class and getting Obama and not knowing how to feel about it. I was tapping hard from inside a conservative shell, the outside of which seemed tempting and terrifying. It was hard to know what was my opinion and what was placed on me by someone else.

I went to college in the fall of 2008. Until then, I had never known a person my age to care about politics. But my classmates felt so strongly about what they believed that they were willing to knock on strangers doors to tell them.I don’t think I’d ever heard of canvassing before or met anyone who volunteered for a campaign. I didn’t know that people could volunteer for campaigns. I had never met people with this kind of passion and never heard this side of the argument. I kept quiet and listened, the way I’d listed to the adults who told me that man is evil. I realized that I’d known I would vote for Obama all along, but I’d needed to get out of that cage, needed to be sure. I wondered what my family would think, if they’d be disappointed or horrified. But by the time I figured out the absentee process, it was too late to vote. (Mississippi has a notoriously difficult absentee voting process.) I regret it still.

I remember watching as votes came in on election night. Before he was even declared the winner, students started flooding the Main Green. I stood on the steps of the John Carter Brown Library, watching thousands of students cheering, crying, dancing, and setting off illegal fireworks in celebration. Some of my friends climbed onto the balcony of Faunce House and hung a sign they’d made as everyone cheered. Maybe I’d never seen real joy until this moment. My best friend, Sam, called me from Chicago where she was watching his speech live in Grant Park. I could hear the crowds cheering around her. There were some things I already knew at that point that I would never forget. Where I was when I heard about 9/11. When Hurricane Katrina hit my town. And when Barack Obama won the 2008 election. “Yes we can,” my classmates screamed from the Faunce steps. Yes, we can.

Four years later, I visited my two best friends in Chicago a couple of months before the 2012 election. One of them was working for the Obama campaign, so he gave me a tour of the headquarters. Everyone there was so young, some even younger than I was. They were volunteers, sleeping on couches and doing this work for free because they believed so strongly in things that mattered. And Obama believed in young people. In my four years of college, he’d taught me and my generation that our opinions mattered, that we could make a real difference in the country. Before I was 18-years-old, no one had ever told me that. As a 22-year-old, he’d made me believe it. I finally got to vote for him that year, in my hometown, where I no longer cared in the slightest that I would be shunned if people knew. I knew exactly what I believed, and I did not need them to tell me.

9 years later and many people back home still hate the Obamas. I’ve heard racial slurs about him and his family that you may believe only exist today in Faulkner novels and surely not real life. I cannot tell you why they hate him— maybe because of his skin color, his stance on an issue, his political party, or just because someone told them to—but they must not have spent these 8 years watching the same man that I have. I watched a man who believed in art and compassion and humility and kindness and respect and equality and laughing and having faith in people. I watched a man full of hope and love and never hesitant to show it.

I am grateful that Obama was president during my college and grad school years, the years when I was figuring out what I truly believed and stopped listening to what I’d been told to think for most of my life. The years when I started caring about politics and understanding how it affects me. I’m grateful to have had a president and first lady who were not just figures on a TV screen but true role models. I’m grateful that I had a president who made me feel like my opinions mattered, like all of our opinions mattered. I’m grateful that I had a president who inspired me.

Obama believed in my generation. He believed that young adults could impact the world. And then he proved that we could.

Obligatory New Year Post

noreply@blogger.com (Kayla Smith) — Sat, 07 Jan 2017 03:40:00 +0000

I started this blog three years ago with an obligatory “New Year Post”, and I could not have imagined then that I would find myself here three years later. Since then I’ve finished grad school, moved four times, lived in three states, spent a year sick, got better, and had four jobs. Three years ago I was trying to climb out of a difficult time in my life, and there are so, so many things that are better for me now that I’m grateful for every day. But 2016 was another hard year for a lot of us. I’ve watched this year tear people down in ways they won’t easily bounce back from. But I’ve seen a lot of renewed hope, too. 2016 had some beautiful moments. I don’t want to let the bad overwhelm those.

In the past year I left a job I really loved so I cold move back to a city (a bigger lesson in sacrifice than I understood). I went through a job search process even longer and more bleak than the first one. I finally got hired in a city that I never expected to live in but that somehow seemed to fit. I taught summer school at a military school on a mountain. I was able to start exercising again for the first time in years. I hiked in the Shenandoah, kayaked in the Potomac, read my work to strangers in DC, listened to ghost stories at The Capital, and heard my favorite band twice. I moved from Tennessee to Mississippi, briefly to Virginia, back to Mississippi, then to Maryland. I flew on no planes for the first time in almost a decade and felt very content about that. Instead I spent over 46 hours on buses, 54 hours on trains, and 15,000 miles in my car (and then had to buy him a new battery). I rode over 100 miles on way-too-big-for-me bikes. I spent 18 nights in hotels, a month in a dorm room, and 12 nights in other people’s houses in 9 different states. I visited friends in New York twice, DC before I moved here, Atlanta, and New Orleans. I saw the Shenandoah with fall colors, Murfreesboro in ice storms, DC during the Cherry Blossom Festival, and New York City at Christmas. I saw my friends make movies and win awards and get published. I got my fist invitation to a reading series. I spent my last nights in my old apartment in New York and first one-bedroom in Murfreesboro. I owned a dog (for 5 days). I said some very hard goodbyes. I spent a lot of time missing my old students and feeling lucky that I taught them. I got closer to old friends and made some new ones. I hosted half a dozen visitors and made/mailed several hundred brownies. I volunteered for the Clinton campaign. I interviewed 18 prospective Brown students. I watched one of my favorite people get married. I only read 40 books and felt horrified at myself because of it. I didn’t use as much film as I wanted. I started working at a Catholic school and attended my first Mass. I turned 27. I missed Nashville and the granola at Portland Brew and the smoothies at The Post East, and I missed New York, and I missed Providence, and I’ve finally realized that I will always, always be missing somewhere. I found out that I’m going to be an aunt.

I spent New Year’s Eve night in Alexandria watching the fireworks with thousands of people who were not sad to see the year go. I think we can work hard to make this one better.

November

noreply@blogger.com (Kayla Smith) — Sat, 03 Dec 2016 13:35:00 +0000

Somehow it became Christmas time overnight. I was walking to the Metro station last week to find that three giant, fully decorated Christmas trees have appeared in my neighborhood. I went to school on Tuesday (our first day back after Thanksgiving break) to find the single largest Christmas tree I’ve ever seen inside a building that’s not a mall or an airport. The Mother’s Club spent half the day hanging wreaths throughout the halls, and I looked out the window while teaching one of my classes to find a complete nativity scene in the circle drive by the main office. Teaching at a Catholic school apparently means that your workplace turns into a Hallmark movie setting. And I’m happy about it. I didn’t feel well yesterday, so I went to Whole Foods for some soup and came home with a Christmas tree. I think we could all use a bit of holiday spirit right now.

November has been the strangest month. I felt like it kept offering things that it never gave. I turned 27 a few weeks ago, but I mostly ignored my birthday since it was the day before the election. I spent my birthday weekend volunteering for Clinton’s campaign, and then I spent a few days in a sort of numb shock afterward.

There are few places I can think of more depressing than a DC high school the day after the election. I went to work in a daze and sat down in the English department room where my coworkers silently trickled in. We gave each other weak smiles and raised eyebrows instead of real hellos and we sat without talking until one of my coworkers finally voiced what all of us were thinking—“What am I supposed to say to the kids? What do I say?” Which no one had an answer for. Some teachers let their kids talk about it in class that day. Others let their students journal on a piece of paper that they were then free to rip up. I didn’t know how to talk about it that day, so I tried to avoid it instead, which went about as well as you might imagine. One of my 9th graders asked quietly from the front row, “Ms. Smith, how did this happen?” and I had to say, “I don’t know. I really don’t know.”

I stayed in DC for Thanksgiving and spent half of Wednesday volunteering for the Salvation Army. My official job was to register other signed-up volunteers (check their name off the list and give them an apron or t-shirt), which I did while having an intense 4-hour conversation with two of my fellow volunteers (one of whom is a delightful woman in her 60s who embraced me before I left, told me that she thought we were long-lost sisters, and who declared us new best friends). On Thanksgiving day I made a pan of cornbread dressing and ate more of it than I will ever publicly confess to. I thought of some really excellent ways to procrastinate grading the giant stack of essays I brought home. One of my friends and I watched Fantastic Beasts together, and by together I mean we went to screenings of the same movie at the same time, even though we are 10 hours apart. This worked very well, except his theater showed one extra trailer, so my movie was about two minutes ahead, which meant I kept accidentally texting spoilers. I went to Annapolis. I went to Alexandria. I finished half a dozen college candidate interviews. I watched Gilmore Girls.

I had to say a hard goodbye to a friend who’s moving away for work last night. Even though I’ve known I would have to say this goodbye for a long time, it didn’t make it any easier. I’m bad at goodbyes. I either want to avoid them altogether and sneak away unnoticed, or I want to prolong them indefinitely and create a spectacle of melodrama and too many words (which I stop myself from actually doing). The result is always underwhelming and full of things I mean to say but don’t. What feels like the real goodbye exists in my mind, but what plays out in real life is something else. It happens more than is fair that there are no words that would mean the right thing.

I hang on hard to things. People, places, moments. I exist in a perpetual state of nostalgia and what I enjoy in the present I recognize as fodder for future nostalgia. Scorpios have the longest memory of all the signs supposedly, and I am the truest of Scorpios for my tendency to replay and replay and replay and remember everything. But November, for once, I’d be alright letting go of.

Autumn

noreply@blogger.com (Kayla Smith) — Sun, 06 Nov 2016 01:08:00 +0000

The first quarter of school has ended and autumn is here and I’m almost 27 years old. I keep accidentally lying when I tell people that I “just moved here” because it’s been two and a half months already. Even though I still don’t have my paintings on the wall or my landlord-required rug on the floor, my apartment has started to feel like home.

DC keeps tossing me small gifts. It’s been a year and a half since I lived in a place full of chance encounters. I ran into a college classmate in a bookstore and another who I took my first creative writing workshop with and haven’t seen in about 7 years. I got to visit with another college friend who was in town for the weekend, and I got to go see one of my favorite teachers when he came to DC to promote his new book. I feel connected to strangers because I feel like there are fewer degrees of separation between us. It’s the same feeling that I felt in New York—that the world is both fuller and smaller.

One of my oldest friends, James, came to visit last month. James and I haven’t lived in the same place for almost a decade, but when we’re together it feels like nothing’s changed. Those are the kind of friendships you want to hang onto. I forced upon him some new experiences. Like trying a vegan smoothie (which he liked!). And sweet potato fries (not impressed). And a square millimeter of chopped, raw tomato (also not impressed). We went kayaking on the Potomac and bike riding around the monuments, and I took him to see my favorite band which I have a secret hope is now his favorite band. He never complained about how I unintentionally tried to kill him by making him walk 12 miles on already-sore feet.

Another friend, Elijah, came to visit a couple of weeks ago. Elijah is the type of human who you find standing in the middle of Union Station sketching the ceiling. He is the best expresser of the awe that I feel at things most people find mundane. A beautiful ceiling. The Metro. Street performers. Carrot cake. The right phrase. When someone expresses your feelings for you better than you do, it’s how you know you’ve found a friend. We browsed bookstores at midnight, got way too excited about the Library of Congress, biked around, and took a ghost tour.

It’s nice to have friends visit to accompany me on my adventures. But here is a thing that I wish more people knew/believed—being alone should never stop you from having adventures. “I didn’t have anyone to go with” should never be a reason to not do something you want to do. Sometimes people act surprised at the things I do by myself. Yes, I did eat at that restaurant/go to that concert/tour a cemetery/take a road trip/bike 20 miles/hike up a mountain alone, and why should being alone have stopped me from doing any of it? (Unless you want to hike up a mountain that includes a rock scramble that the internet warns you may be too difficult for those 5 feet tall and shorter, which is a different story entirely. Just watch me, internet. Just watch.) There’s this weird stigma about doing things by ourselves that if I paid any attention to would have prevented be from ever even leaving Mississippi. And people are generally way too preoccupied with themselves to notice or care that your by yourself, so forget about the stigma. And doing things by yourself makes you appreciate your friends so much more when you do get to spend time with them.

I’m trying to get back to writing, so I looked up reading series in DC and submitted to one and was thrilled when they asked me to come read for them. I’ve only ever read in front of my classmates/friends who already know my work and who I trust to get what I mean. It is a nerve-wracking and liberating thing to read in front of complete strangers who you are half afraid of offending if the sarcasm doesn’t fall just right (or maybe even if it does). But there are few things more validating than when those strangers laugh at the right moments and tell you afterwards “I know just what you mean.”

I opened my mailbox the other day to find one of the best surprised I’ve ever received—a Webb yearbook that my students from last year signed for me. The notes they wrote were some of the nicest things anyone’s ever said to me. I thought of emailing them or sending a letter to tell them how much their words meant to me, but I came to the conclusion that the words do not exist in the English language for me to fully express my gratitude and how I miss them, so I baked 100 brownies and mailed those instead.

The leaves peaked in the Shenandoah over the past few weeks, so on a whim I got up too early last weekend and climbed a mountain to see some. October was a good one.

Blog Posts I Started and Never Finished

noreply@blogger.com (Kayla Smith) — Tue, 20 Sep 2016 01:27:00 +0000

1. The one where I hiked to this waterfall.

2. The one where I rode a bus from New Orleans to Atlanta to see one of my college roommates/favorite humans get married. The one where I reminisce about reunions and late-night talks and how random dorm room assignments 8 years ago brought together a (now) husband and wife and how absurd and beautiful relationships (all types of them) are.

3. The one where I spent a night in New Orleans with three of my best friends and realized that I could not remember the last time that I was with more than one of my friends in the same city.

4. The one where I share some thoughts about women’s Olympic gymnastics.

5. The one where my sister found out she's having a girl.

6. The one where I was, yet again, jobless until mid-August and then in a span of a few hours I got an interview (then a second, third, and fourth), and two days later a job offer. Then the one where I packed everything I could fit in my car in one day and drove to DC with no apartment or plan other than showing up at work two days later.

7. The one where I crashed at a friend’s apartment while starting my job (5 days after all the other new hires started) while trying to find an apartment at the same time and teaching myself how to parallel park.

8. The one where my new school is a Catholic school and I had to attend my first Mass afraid that I would accidentally reveal to my new coworkers that I had no idea what was happening.

9. The one where I found an apartment in Bethesda, which I only knew to be the home of the girls in The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, but is, in fact, a delightful town less than a mile from DC where everyone has enough money to attend $30 per visit exercise classes daily.

10. The one where I attend a couple of said exercise classes (for the $15 first visit discount) and had some thoughts to share about them.

11. The one where I slept on an air mattress in my empty apartment for 9 nights until my heroic parents drove a U-Haul here with my furniture, stayed exactly 24 hours, then had to go back home so they wouldn’t miss work.

12. The one where I live next to a Capital Bikeshare stand (where you can rent city bikes) and have ridden something like 50 miles in the last three weekends.

13. The one where I try to figure out how to teach 5 classes of over 20 students each when the largest class I’ve ever taught was 15.

14. The one where I discover that I’ve somehow landed at one of the best high schools for athletes in DC. (Perhaps the country.) Which is not a thing I can ever say I imagined.

15. The time where my car died in the school parking lot and no one could start it for three days, so I had to Uber to and from school until I finally got it towed to a repair place where they put in a new battery.

16. The one where I finally finish unpacking and have an apartment that actually looks like a home.

17. The one where I tell you all about DC and what it’s like to live here so far and how incredibly nice everyone is.

18. The one where I describe each of the smoothies I splurge on every weekend. Because that truly deserves a post of its own. Though I will never confess how much I pay for them.

Summer

noreply@blogger.com (Kayla Smith) — Tue, 26 Jul 2016 01:18:00 +0000

I’m in a different state and town than I’ve ever lived in. The mountains outside the window of my classroom belong to the same range as the ones I used to live near. Nine hours apart and from opposite sides, but they still feel half familiar.

I left my job in May after nearly ten months of knowing I would. It was a job I felt lucky to have and a job I really loved. But I left the rural south the first time because I no longer felt like it was where I belonged. I never really believed I could force myself to belong there again.

Even though I couldn’t see myself in the rural south longterm, it wasn’t easy to willingly leave a job that I looked forward to every morning, or coworkers who welcomed me even when I was hired in a moment of desperation two days before school started and looked the same age as the students, and students who made me laugh and made me proud and made me feel like the things I said mattered to them.

I started applying for new jobs months ago in hopes of getting back to the East Coast. As luck would have it, I still have no offers.

I’m teaching two classes at Randolph-Macon Academy’s summer school right now, but it feels less like teaching and more like private tutoring. I have one student in English 11 and two in creative writing. Each class is three and a half hours each day and half a day on Saturday, which makes for a very long week.

But sometimes on slow days, we walk downtown to the ice cream shop where Bill, the ice cream man, lets my students write essays requesting a new ice cream flavor and then invites us to come back so he can teach us how to make it. Sometimes I bring my mentor group to eat dinner at IHOP, even though it means I have to drive a school van. And sometimes I buy my students cupcakes and then walk 8 miles around DC carrying the giant box of them in the 100 degree weather and wanting only to stop and eat them all. (I resisted.)

Being at a military school is a little like being in a foreign country that I didn’t prepare to visit. When my boss explained during our orientation meeting that students who broke the rules would be sent to the commandant and assigned tours I spent a while on Google learning what a commandant was and trying to figure out what exactly they’d be touring. I’ve learned the rules about never (ever) wearing “civilian clothes” or close-toed shoes, which means some stealth is required when I leave to go to the gym in the evenings. I’ve learned not to be alarmed when the Junior Marine campers start chanting things in deeper-than-natural voices during meals.

I’ve been spending my weekends in DC feasting and visiting and exploring. One of my best friends just bought a condo there. It’s beautiful, with these wood floors and skylights and a balcony and a million windows.

I don’t know how I got old enough to have friends who buy condos. I’m still trying to get used to being old enough to rent an apartment. Purchasing an actual home is a level of permanence that feels so far away from me right now.

One of my coworkers asked me the other day if I had any kids. My first instinct was to laugh, and I had to remind myself fast that that was a perfectly reasonable question. That, in fact, that stopped being a silly question many years ago, somewhere around the time that my friends started getting married and buying houses and being something very much like real adults. I can't decide if they've somehow become actual adults or if they're just very good at acting.

During the spring, I was talking to my students about success and how the concept is completely relative. When I asked them what they thought personal success would look like for them in ten years, one of the girls said, “Well, I definitely want to be settled down by then.”

“Define settled down,” I told her.

“I mean, I definitely want to be married and have a kid or two by the time I’m 25 or 26.”

“You’re looking at a complete failure right here, guys,” I told them. “You’re looking at the world’s worst role model! I can’t believe they let me teach you!”

Another student who grew up in Europe said, “26!? You want to be married when you’re 26?! No one gets married before they’re 30!!”

I hope I taught those kids a little more English than they knew before. But more than that, I hope I taught them that success can look like a lot of different things, and those things do not necessarily involve a spouse, a kid, or a house when they’re 26.

One of my friends is getting married in a couple of weeks. Another friend’s having a baby at the end of the year. Some of my friends teach and some make art and some are still in school, and some make more money than I can comprehend and some make very little money at all, and some own nice houses and some live with their parents, and some are married and some are not, and some have kids and some know they never want them. And I don’t feel like any of those things have anything inherently to do with success or a lack of it.

My friend in DC and I had a long conversation about how few people we know who don’t hate their jobs, how there are even fewer people we know who are genuinely excited about their jobs (regardless of how much or little they get paid). I don’t know why people consider success anything other than being excited about what you do everyday and figuring out how to make a living doing it. And that’s my motivational speech of the day.

Now that the general public of Facebook has been alerted, I can

finally announce the news that I’m going to be an aunt! My sister’s baby is due in January. I refer to it fondly as “the fetus” and she and I are perhaps equally excited about teaching it to read when it’s three, which is the approximate age at which I will stop being afraid to hold it.

Spring

noreply@blogger.com (Kayla Smith) — Mon, 04 Apr 2016 01:30:00 +0000

Spring is always full. Somehow it’s already the last quarter of the school year and time for short sleeves and not being able to breathe through my nose. I ordered my first iced coffee of the year a couple of weeks ago. It’s been over two years since I’ve been able to drink coffee at all. Maybe we lose things temporarily so we can be fully grateful for them later. (Like walking without a knee brace. And finally being able to workout in a gym again.)

A few weeks ago, I coerced a friend into coming to teach my classes poetry. I told him he would make me cooler by association and offered him fancy cheese. (It worked a little too well, as I think my students like him better than they like me. Justifiably so.) In the grocery store, he told me that friends from grad school only exist for him in New York, not in reality. But here we are, he said, walking around a regular grocery store, like regular people.

I remember the weirdness of first trying to place people outside the context in which they existed for me. Friends from home visiting me at college, visiting college friends after graduation, meeting people now in the places they’ve scattered. For me there was always the worry that the relationship would be different if the setting changed. Sometimes they were different. But it’s easy to tell when a friendship exists because of proximity or convenience and when it’s made of stronger stuff.

I started last week with a virus that caused me to miss work and lie on my floor with my muscles on fire, eating soup for every meal. I worried I’d have to delay my spring break trip, but my last night with fever was the night before I left. Again with the thankfulness. I drove to Knoxville to catch a bus to DC then a train to New York. Everyone thought I was crazy for taking a bus, but really, the lack of security lines, anxiety, million dollar parking, claustrophobia, and pressurized air made it worth it. I had a skylight, a second floor view, gas station snacks, and two seats to myself, and what more can you ask for? And if given the option, I don’t know why anyone would ever travel any other way but by train.

On my first night in New York, eleven of us feasted in my old apartment (still my roommate’s apartment), and it felt like the last twelve months hadn’t changed anything. I wondered for a minute if I should have stayed in New York. If I should have spent another year trying to turn my manuscript into something I know what to do with instead of a pile of intimidating pages on my bookshelf. I could have tried to teach at Columbia and tutored to pay rent. I could have had dinner parties and joined a friend’s writing workshop and gone to readings every week and splurged on Levain cookies and weekend bus rides to DC and Boston and Providence. I could have walked with all of my friends at graduation.

But I don’t regret graduating earlier, and I’m grateful for that, too. Because as much as I miss all of them, I knew it would feel like I was treading water I stayed, and instead I get to be part of that tiny fraction of people who wakes up every day and goes to work excited to be there.

I filled Easter and the next few days in New York with coffee visits, dinner visits, and the food I’ve craved for ten months (Silver Moon gluten free blueberry muffin, I dream of you still), and then I told my old apartment goodbye. Sophie will move out at the end of May, and that was the last time we’d all be there together before everyone scatters again. My number of cities to visit will grow.

I took the bus back to DC and spent a couple of days exploring and visiting older friends who’ve know me since I was a silent, nervous 18-year-old who had a hard time speaking to strangers, had barely been outside of Mississippi, and had never tried hummus (Or Greek yogurt. Or bagels.). We’ve come a long way, guys. (Why did you talk to me back then?) I biked around the Tidal Basin and National Mall on a bike a foot too tall for me, saw the cherry blossoms, visited Bei Bei the baby panda at the zoo, and walked a million miles. I used a friend’s guest pass to workout in a gym that supplied me with a chilled eucalyptus-scented towel (which alone probably costs more than a month’s membership at my regular gym). I feasted with people who still feel like a second family.

My students think I have only have two friends, because they’ve seen one and heard another’s name. When I told them I had this suspicion, one of them said, “No, Ms. Smith, we saw a picture of you with three people. So you must have three friends.” I fear they think I imagined the others. I’m glad I didn’t imagine the others. (Students, if any of you are creeping on here, I didn’t imagine the others.) I’m thankful for friends who travel to sit in my living room floor telling stories and eating pretzels until way past bedtime. And for former roommates who still feel like roommates even when we live in different time zones. And for friends who teach me how to bench press without even making fun of me (audibly).

Ten days and 34 hours on the road later, I made it back home. I thought about grading papers, but I ate a dark chocolate bunny instead, because I know about priorities.