The Drowning, MVP Donkey with Horns

Today, like Gatsby, I put on my bathing suit, jumped into the pool of the AP English discussion and, to make a long story short, drowned. I did not completely realize the irony of the moment until Ms. Serensky began begging Elliot, my writing partner, to jump in and save me. Of course I failed miserably when discussing Gatsby’s participation in a sport/athletic pastime. We all have heard the story of my swim team failure. But, I fail in much more than that. For example: everyone remembers the seventh grade football unit. Some students triumphed and others struggled, but few failed as miserably as I. I struggled so severely that while playing football, students upheld one basic rule: Do not, under any circumstances, pass the ball to Meghan Judge. Despite that rule, I somehow found myself with the ball toward the end of the period during a tied game of football.  In a state of utter panic, I threw the ball randomly, hoping my teammates would somehow cross the gym from where I stood alone and catch it. Unfortunately, I threw the ball to a member of the other team, who proceeded to run and score the winning touchdown. The other team voted me their MVP. I often look back on that gym class. I remember how I laughed and thanked her and went home and jokingly shared my great achievement with others; I even shared the experience years later with my interviewer for Johns Hopkins. I suppose, for some strange reason, I value these failures. I constantly repeat my memories as the other team’s MVP, as the last place swimmer, as the girl who also shared in discussion last year that McCourt compared a priest to a donkey with horns. Maybe I value these moments because they taught me the humor in imperfection and the need to keep moving forward, to save myself from drowning. So, we all must score the other team’s winning touchdown and drown in discussion. We must teach ourselves to not depend on our writing partners to jump in and save us, even though Elliot did so quite well. So, join Gatsby and me in the pool. Make sure to bring your flotation device.    

Pygmies in the Mist: Part Deux

I come from a family of amateur writers. From my great-uncle Bud to my aunt Francine, a poet 20 years in the making, my family has striven for generations to join the ranks of Fitzgerald and Hemingway. I clearly recall one of my first experiences with the unappreciated writing of my relatives. My family and I dug through boxes in my Grandmother’s house which held the belongings of the deceased Uncle Bud, a World War II veteran who enjoyed embellishing the truth. As I dug through the medals and photographs and pages of old manuscripts, I came upon a bound story with an intriguing title: “ Pygmies in the Mist.” Apparently, he had unsuccessfully attempted to publish the story, a tale of an African tribe of pygmies attempting to escape a cloud of mist. My grandmother swears publishers had not selected it as they simply could not recognize creativity and genius. She, too, likes to embellish. My grandmother, however, trumps “ Pygmies” with her own novel which has yet to grace the shelves. She and her reverend joined creative forces to produce the precursor to Fifty Shades of Grey (a la science fiction). Critics (my mother) found the novel “offensive, yet exploratory.” On the other end of the spectrum, my Aunt Francine writes an annual Christmas poem which serves as her crowning achievement of the year. Surprisingly, the public has celebrated my Aunt Francine’s work the most; she published her work in a Christian children’s magazine and received $25--four years ago. As each generation of my family has seen its own amateur writer, I suppose my family, particularly my grandmother, has prepared me to realize that role. When I visited my grandmother as a four-year-old, I would sit at the kitchen table with her as she drank her "splash" of wine and we would talk. As we chatted, she would make up tales of a little girl who lived in New York City. She gushed over the little girl's life and how she wrote, painted, and sold hats in Central Park. She shook her head when she shared that the little girl walked on the grates in the sidewalk and would fall down them. Her face lit up magically when she told of how the little girl turned into a swan one afternoon. After she told me each tale, I would smile up at her and tell her, “Someday, Grandma, I will write the stories and you will illustrate them. Everyone in the world should hear our stories.” In response, she would always gaze down at me sweetly and tell me that she truly believed me. We shall see.  Maybe, someday, my family will finally produce a Hemingway or a Fitzgerald. Until then, we must navigate the literary world like my Uncle Bud’s pygmies, constantly searching for the place in the forest where the sun shines and the mist lifts and we can finally see.  

Just South of Heaven

We drove toward the development at nine in the morning on a beautiful spring day in Wilmington, North Carolina. My family had arrived earlier that week to tour houses and to investigate different communities in the city, so we could better choose a location once we moved there. We approached the development cautiously, hesitating at the tall black fence with barbed wire that stood before layers of dense trees. Two gates marked the entrance where security guards waved Mercedes SUVs and BMWs into the gated community. My brother balked at the community’s security: “It looks like they have prepared for the zombie apocalypse”. The real estate agent, who sat with us in the car, laughed as the security guards waved her through the gates and she welcomed us to the community just south of Heaven—Landfall. As she drove down the well-manicured lane to the welcome center, she reminded us of Landfall’s heavenly facilities: two golf courses, a country club, personal docks, and an Olympic size swimming pool. Feigning enthusiasm, my family left the car and hopped onto a golf cart to begin the tour.  The real estate agent drove incredibly slowly, probably to encourage us to relish this sheltered utopia. Brick houses seemingly smiled at us and the multiple landscapers waved as we continued down the street.  Women who had already showered and applied their makeup wearing designer clothes walked out to retrieve the morning paper while waving away. My mother scoffed in hushed tones: “These women have definitely had work done. Why do these people keep waving?” I shrugged as I too felt confused, but I waved back to a gaggle of women strutting down the street while calling to their neighbors to join them for brunch at the Country Club. As I sat in the golf cart, waving uncharacteristically, I could not help but wonder if when I had entered Landfall, I had left the real world.  Looking back on my encounter with this rare community, I cannot help but compare it to the two Eggs in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Like the islands, Landfall does not sit atop perfect land as lakes and forests wind through it; nature misshapes the land which the community attempts to perfect (5). The people themselves live fantastically in their palaces with their BMW cars and other material possessions. But, more so than anything, I find myself “perpetually confused” when observing Landfall (5).  Do the residents truly care when they wave incessantly? Does knowing the business of every neighbor truly make them happy? How much does the plastic surgeon of Landfall make? Have the people in the community ever actually ventured past the ten-foot-tall gates to realize true reality? I suppose, to them, they live in the real world, in their own strange slice of Heaven, or at least, just south of it.  As for the answers to rest the questions, I will let you know, as we may move there this summer. 

Love Thy Fence

Police cars zoomed in the distance, their sirens piercing the crisp summer air. Birds flew from the trees, their wings fluttering as they soured into the sky, overlooking nosy neighbors peering from behind their fences. A short, stout police man parked abruptly in front of my neighbor’s house and quickly stepped out of the car. He then signaled to his partner, a slimmer man, who stepped out of the passenger side nonchalantly. They strutted over to my neighbor’s door, rapped on it several times, and peered into her small living room, yelling, “Police!” As silence met their call, one man walked to the back door. Suddenly, my neighbor, her hair flying behind her, dashed from her front door as the other officer cantered forward, wrestled her to the ground, and slapped handcuffs on her. The next morning, my parents built a fence. My father hammered wood polls into the ground while my mother rolled evergreen wire around the property. They planted trees that have since grown to ten feet along the border of our property. Then, they clipped the police blotter description of our neighbor’s crime (holding her boyfriend-of-the-week and his children “hostage” by locking them in a room) and hung it with a plaque of their favorite proverb: “Love your neighbor, but do not pull down your fence”. This fence and my parents’ obsession, both a blessing and a curse, overwhelm and restrict me, like Barthelme’s balloon, always protecting me from harm--and from the neighbors. Even though some days, like the day of my neighbor’s second arrest for theft of credit card numbers, I feel a “sheltered, warmed” feeling, most days, I feel “constrained” (3). Most days, I find myself dreaming of taking risks, scaling the fence and escaping my parents’ secure little world. Yet, I still find myself building internal fences, never letting down my own guard, rarely leaving my comfort zone. One day, I suppose, I may scale the fence; but I know that inevitably I will reconstruct that barrier, forgetting the constraint, only remembering the warm brown and evergreen hues of the fence my parents simply loved.    

An Unlikely Pilgrimage

I vaguely recall my emotional state. I had just turned the final page of The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry after a day of reading and had begun to descend into the emotional chaos of post-inspirational-book disorder. Despair, profound happiness, obsession, and an overpowering emptiness overwhelmed me. In my state, I managed to reach into my desk and retrieve a pen and a note card, flip through the book, and copy down my favorite quote: “It was hard to understand a little and then walk away”. Setting my book down, I took the note card and hung it on the wall right next to my mirror—my quote wall—with a piece of tape. The quote joined the 41 other poems, quotes, and lyrics. As I stood back and read the familiar words on each card, I could not convince myself to look away.  However, I reminded myself I never truly distance myself from quotes; I never really look away. In fact, I probably read more quotes daily than I see people. Every day, hundreds of fragments of sentences resonate with me, if only for a moment. 42 excerpts hang beside my mirror. One quote greets me every morning in English class. I told myself that my quotes always stay with me because they allow retrace my steps, return to their familiar words when I cannot find my way. Whether admiring the wall or not, I can still revisit them because they provide wisdom and comfort. They help me understand a little about myself and my past while pointing me in the direction of my future. Leaving the wall does not mean I have to walk away. A while after I re-read the note cards, I convinced myself to leave the quote wall and placed the book back on the bookshelf. The emptiness still lingered, but quotes flooded my head to fill the void. As always, old memories resurfaced: images of me, as a young girl, toiling with contributing in class in elementary school, middle school, high school; visions of me, a bit older, struggling to determine which talent I should pursue, which path I should follow to fulfillment. Once again, I stood and returned to the quote wall.  The words welcomed me warmly and reminded me of a childhood dream. My fantasy of a day when students will walk into first period English, look up to the board and read my words. I could not walk away.

The Comfort of Pamphlets and Starfish

In her 2008 novel, Olive Kitteridge, Elizabeth Strout, a social worker, discusses the sorrows and comfort that residents of Crosby, Maine, encounter. Before reading the novel, I had always believed that people find comfort in people. Perhaps I thought that comfort requires words or an acknowledgement that the other person lives. However, after reading Olive Kitteridge, I now recognize that people seek comfort in objects and memories and that such comfort proves fragile. For example, following the death of her husband, Marlene Bonney sobs to Olive about a basket with trip pamphlets that she and her husband had put together and mourns how they “made believe we’d [Marlene and her husband] go places together” while he was ill (179). Strout highlights the denotation of “made believe” to emphasize that Marlene seeks comfort in an illusion. Furthermore, by employing a mournful tone, the novelist stresses Marlene’s pain in seeking relief from her husband’s illness in an object, and further accentuates the fragility of the woman’s comfort. Similarly, Anita Harwood lives with the pain of her father’s death and seeks comfort in a starfish. When redecorating a room, Anita sends her daughters to collect starfish to attach to curtains. Her daughter, Julie, describes to her younger sister that their mother’s father “used to bring her starfish” (184). By highlighting the emotional association Anita has to starfish, Strout implies that the woman seeks comfort in the starfish as they preserve her father’s memory. Furthermore, Anita’s attempt to involve her daughters in her personal comfort implies that she wishes her children to better understand her, and through her memories with the starfish, acknowledge why her father’s loss pains her. However, when the starfish begin to smell in the living room, Anita throws them back into the ocean, releasing “a little scream” when she throws the last one (185). Through the desperate diction of “scream”, Strout creates a painful tone and implies that the impermanent nature of Anita’s object of comfort causes her even greater anguish. Therefore, Strout emphasizes that the memories and meaning that individuals attach to objects in which they seek comfort proves painful due to an object’s fragility. Overall, I have realized the danger in storing memories and seeking comfort in a single object as although it does not live, when the object must go, I may mourn the fragility of my comfort. 

Red Hair and a Little Burst

Last year, when studying at Johns Hopkins, I asked the security guard in the library-a woman in her sixties with dark brown hair-for directions. She smiled at me and she explained the way while still keeping watch over the entry gate to the library. I began to walk away, but she suddenly called me back over and told me how much she loved my hair and how I reminded her of her grandson. Taking her phone out of her pocket, she flipped open the cover to reveal a picture of a little boy with carrot-top red hair holding a large box adorned with bows and Christmas wrapping paper. I later walked from the library with a smile on my face for the kind security guard who had shared part of her life with me. Likewise, in her 2008 novel, Olive Kitteridge, Elizabeth Strout highlights the strain and trouble in relationships in the town of Crosby, Maine. The novelist specifically emphasizes her troubled yet extremely perceptive character, Olive Kitteridge, and Olive’s belief that while life depends on big relationships, such as marriages and between a parent and children, small affinities that she calls “little bursts” also prove important (68). I agree with this belief of Olive’s as I assert that these “little bursts” exist to balance and strengthen the larger relationships. For example, Olive defines a “little burst” as a “friendly clerk” or a “waitress…who knows how you like your coffee” (69). Strout directly characterizes small affinities as “friendly” and implies a certain intimacy, a full understanding of one small aspect of an individual’s life, through the image of the waitress. Therefore, by highlighting the positive connotation of “friendly”, Strout implies that these “little bursts” yield less hurt than larger relationships because small affinities do not require the deep understanding of each individual that larger affinities necessitate. “Little bursts” still prove important as they still require an understanding, and in turn, strengthen people in larger relationships’ ability to comprehend others. Furthermore, following her son’s wedding, Olive steals undergarments and marks the sweater of her know-it-all daughter-in-law, Suzanne, whom she hates, reflecting that the action gives Olive “a little burst” (74). Strout highlights that Olive receives a bit of intimacy with Suzanne through stealing as Olive may fully understand the self-doubt that the other woman receives from a marked sweater and missing undergarments. Therefore, the novelist implies that Olive’s “little burst” with her daughter-in-law limits the strain Suzanne’s self-assurance may have on Olive’s son and his wife.  Overall, I agree with Olive’s belief in the necessity of “little bursts” as they enable people to better understand each other, as no one can completely understand another person. I may never know more about the Hopkins security guard other than that her red-headed grandson’s eyes shine like Christmas lights as he opens presents. However, with that understanding, I may knowingly smile when my grandparents take out their cell phone to show others the picture of their red-headed grandchild, the one they know so well.