Amelia Rand

"We Are Not Invisible"


Interstate 35 is an unfinished road that twists and dips and really is a southern thing. Everyone takes I-35 to go somewhere other than where they are. Construction began in the early 50's and ended somewhat in the late 60's. Interstate 35 runs all over Oklahoma and farmland in Oklahoma is still disappearing due to urban sprawl. You can see the remnants along the sides of I-35, the better-equipped plants that survived the destruction and continue to grow in patches like the spots on a giraffe. The bold colors of the Indian Paintbrush mixes with the red dirt that is somewhat unique to the Oklahoma landscape. I’ve traveled on I-35, mostly taking car trips with Mom and my brother, Thomas, down to Sulfur. Thomas and I rode along in the car for the sense of adventure and the expected family visit. Mom drove to Sulfur to remove herself from the atmosphere at home. My parents are divorced, but Thomas and I experienced the tense and argumentative environment that continued to build until Mom and Dad lived in separate spaces. My dad, still living in the old, blue house that I grew up in, hates Oklahoma. To my mother, my brother, and me, it’s home.

Oklahoma is a Choctaw word that literally translates to Red People. The license plates issued in Oklahoma have the state flag printed on them. The flag consists of a buffalo hide shield floating in a sea of light blue, surrounded by eagle feathers, and crossed in the middle with a peace pipe and an olive branch. The Oklahoma state flag and the license plates all recognize the same fact: Indians live on this land. My family is from the Oklahoma territory. We’re Choctaw, except, of course, my father. Dad is from New England, the small town of Damariscotta, Maine. Dad is Scots-Irish, far from Choctaw blood. Most of my extended family lives in Oklahoma, not far from where I grew up. Of course Norman is practically the center of Oklahoma so nothing is too far away. Mom took us to family gatherings on holidays, even dragging my father along. Oddly enough, my family celebrated Thanksgiving. Maybe the celebration was simply an excuse to eat good Indian food. My family still cooks recipes that were developed from past generations of Choctaws. The ingredients are native and still grow where houses and highways have not been built. These recipes still survived after all of the years, but the people who keep them alive are slowly disappearing like the land.

My Aunt Rosalie is one of those people. Rosalie is my grandmother’s sister, and like my grandmother has witnessed the exploitation of the Oklahoma land and its people. These women not only witnessed this abuse, they experienced it as well. In 1884, the Chilocco Indian School in Oklahoma was established. The school is located north of current-day Oklahoma City and Ponca City, near the Kansas state line. Chilocco was erected by Major James N. Haworth, the superintendent of Indian Schools at the time. Chilocco was not unique. There were several boarding schools for native children throughout the state. My relatives, including my Aunt Rosalie and Grandma, attended Chilocco School. Chilocco was an off-reservation boarding school, funded by the federal government but run by Christian missionaries. Children began at Chilocco at a young age, the school using distance as a tool in their grand plan of civilizing. The federal policymakers and the Chilocco School administrators worked together to extract the native children from their homes and separate them from their familiar cultural background. Chilocco had a mission: to transform and eventually eliminate the native culture. The children at Chilocco, like my Aunt Rosalie were spoon-fed Christian values that attempted to strip them of their language and religious beliefs. Rosalie is one of the last native Choctaw speakers. She retained the language, but my grandmother and other relatives only remember Choctaw hymns
or select words. Although the Choctaw language is almost dead, the Choctaw religion has suffered greatly.

Christianity is a pervasive and exploitive tool that continues to be used by our government. Christianity became apart of my family through the experiences with the Federal Indian Boarding Schools. There are those in my family who believe in Jesus, but only on major religious holidays, and there are those who have remained a devoted Christian after receiving a federally funded, religiously racist/sexist, brainwashed education. My Aunt Rosalie is one of the latter. As a child, I would sit in Rosalie’s living room, the television set blaring the news, and stare at the white man that hung on her wall. Rosalie had a portrait of Jesus Christ hanging on the dull, white wall of her house. I studied his eyes, his skin, and his hair, and wondered why my Aunt Rosalie trusted him as much as she did. The portrait of Jesus was a representation, a manifestation of the Christ that white culture and white Christianity wished to portray and worship. I figure Rosalie found some sort of comfort in the face that surrounded her during her boarding school days. She found some sort of comfort in her own interpretation of the imposing religion. The wrinkles in her face, the deep creases around her lips proved her resistence to resentment.

We took road-trips to Sulfur, Oklahoma to visit my Aunt Rosalie more than any other relatives. Rosalie’s street had a bitter, rotting smell that invaded the car through the open windows. Mom says the town’s name is self-explanatory. Rosalie lived in an economically depressed part of town, but when we turned the corner where the Love’s gas station stood and followed the road lined with dead grass, a fading yellow, we were guaranteed Rosalie’s shining face rocking back in forth on the front porch rocking chair. The houses by Rosalie did not have white picket fences. Chain-links guarded their front lawns with the stone frogs and leaning lawn gnomes scattered about. Rosalie’s lawn was always empty. She kept her things inside the house, except for the squeaky rocking chair on the front porch and the steeping sun tea with floating lemon slices that never seemed to disappear. My Aunt Rosalie smelled of Dove soap and caramel candies when she wrapped her long arms around me to say hello. Rosalie’s skin was a brown-red color, similar to the color of Oklahoma’s distinctive dirt, surrounded by thinning gray hair that fell just below her ears. Her laugh always whistled through the thin spaces of her dentures. Her teeth were very white and very straight. Her smile didn’t quite fit her face, but it was loving and kind nonetheless. I watched my Aunt Rosalie’s mouth enough as a child that her lips and the sounds she produced are some of the most vivid memories I have of her. Rosalie told stories to fill the empty air. She never wasted time with relatives or, as she said, “her people.” While Christianity may have converted many of my relatives, including my Aunt Rosalie, the Choctaw way of story telling never left most of them. Rosalie told stories to provide entertainment, share a life lesson, to teach the younger generations about the elders and the history of Native America.

Letters written between family on the reservation and the child outside the border and inside the schools have been dug out of the stacks of disregarded papers. Some historians have taken time to organize the correspondences and discover that the strength of the Native community was strong enough to survive and preserve their culture on the hope of written words. The publications inform the literate public, but my Aunt Rosalie and the rest of my relatives remained living testaments for many proceeding generations in their families. The children inside the boarding schools did not merely survive through outside, or, from their perspective, inside communication. The children of the schools bonded quickly through tribal affiliation and previous friendships. My relatives, my grandmother, my Uncle Tony, and my
Aunt Rosalie, attended Chilocco School together and while they may not have received letters, others from their community shared their letters with my relatives and others. Written letters spoke the language of the Choctaws and other tribes like the Kiowas and the Chickasaws and the native tongue was not lost for many decades.
I remember sitting in the backseat of our big, brown Jeep, watching Mom’s hair whip across her face from the wind of the open window. My mom drives with her left foot up on long car rides, but when she drove in Oklahoma, anywhere on I-35, Mom sparked up a cigarette and pulled her left knee up to her chest and laughed above the noise of the wind and the radio. Aunt Rosalie watched my mother often back then. Rosalie read my mother’s face and found the painful story of a child one generation away from the Federal Indian Boarding School, coping with the hatred of their skin color by their parents. I watched my mother like my Aunt Rosalie watched her and began to see the warning signs. Mom was tired of the constant uphill battle. Rosalie would pray. I would do well in school. Thomas would make her laugh. Rosalie also told stories to share a message unique to our heritage. Rosalie turned in her seat and spoke to my brother and me saying, “Sissy, these children know Choctaws became known as landless Indians, don’t they? People think we don’t got houses or homes where babies grow up with warmth and love, Babies. But you know that ain’t true, honey. We were moved and marched so many times by that government they got going there, we just learned to make a home for ourselves, but don’t get attached. We know our land, we know where we are.” Rosalie put her faith into Jesus because as a child his image never changed, the school promoted one portrait of Christ: fair-skinned with Caucasian features, and this remained a constant for her. The land, Oklahoma’s red dirt, and the flat skyline were constants for Rosalie as well. Maybe that’s why she invested her time in cooking the recipes her family cooked. The recipes weren’t complicated because the style of food preparation of the Choctaws is not elaborate. Choctaws used the resources they had around them and eventually the food they received from the government food bank. My Aunt Rosalie cooked wild onions and eggs, prepared her favorite blue grape dumplings, and made the traditional pashofa dish. Pashofa translates from the Choctaw word for cracked hominy corn. Pashofa is mainly a corn dish, but the ingredients also include meat and seasonings that Choctaw found accessible to them. I can still see my Aunt Rosalie working methodically on the side of the old highway, picking wild onions and placing one inside the basket at a time. Rosalie’s tropical colored house dress ballooned and fell in the dry summer wind. She was continuing the traditions in simple, subtle ways.

Tradition and family were two topics that my Aunt Rosalie never strayed too far from. Rosalie loved her sons who barely made it out of high school and her nieces who are anywhere from a professor to a beautician. She loved her people. Along with her portrait of Jesus, my Aunt Rosalie’s walls were lined with framed photographs of her family. She loved the memories captured in each smile and each face. Thomas and I were the whitest faces on those walls, but we were blood. Her walls told stories with the people that decorated them. Some of the stories were sad and a source of frustration for the family. The Indian Boarding Schools did not simply leave a mark on the generations that attended the school. The Boarding Schools continue to impact the welfare and people of our culture today. Several members of my extended family turned to alcohol and drank themselves into medical complications. Schools like Chilocco operated under Christian values that attempted to assimilate and acculturate native peoples. The schools operated under the same mode as the treaties and land allotment acts: civilize and refine. Native people were not seen as human beings. They were treated and regarded as untrained and uncivilized families whose language and traditions appeared inferior and heathen. The generations that grew up in the boarding schools with the source of hatred teaching them and disciplining them were taught to hate who they were. My grandmother is a product of these lessons learned in Chilocco School. She despises the dark tones of her skin and striking features of her face. My mother learned to examine her body the same way. The hatred for the Native body continues to be learned today. The Federal Indian Boarding Schools were a tool that the government employed to break the ties of tribal life and completely transform Indians into the white, Christian culture of the time. The treaties prove the object of the government and the ways in which the government attempted to attain it. Hatred for the Native body was blatantly promoted and funded by the United States government, the white legislators and administrators could never fully remove the native from the Indian.
My relationship to the boarding schools is not direct, but part of my own identity has been influenced by the boarding schools and by my family’s direct connection to them. I grew up learning about the injustices that Native peoples have suffered over the centuries, but I haven’t ever applied that suffering to myself. I have witnessed the lasting effects of the boarding schools and mistreatment of Native people through the alcoholism that has plagued my family and the persisting stereotypes in our society today. I don’t think it is my responsibility, or even
my right, to take on the suffering of the Choctaw people, but my internal conflict is where my role as an indirect product of the boarding schools lies.

My grandmother’s face, the wrinkles that run like directionless rivers are evidence of persevering strength that many of my family members possess. Many of my male relatives entered the armed services after the boarding schools. Their education was not sufficient for further schooling. They fought for a country that attempted to strip them of their identity, and believed in the causes they fought for. My uncles and cousins wore the skin of Native Americans, boarding school survivors, and military servicemen. I feel the disconnect from my family and their strength. I am merely two generations away from the Federal Indian Boarding School days and I am attending a well-known and celebrated liberal arts college. I am living an opportunity that did not exist for most of my family. I have memories from my childhood of standing on my Uncle Tony’s feet, a man who has been interviewed by historians for his personal narrative as a Choctaw, as we slow danced around the room. His strong arms negotiated the turns and spins, the dips and twirls of my small body. I was a child of Uncle Tony. At his funeral, after battling stomach cancer, I stared at his sunken face and deflated body. He lost his strength after nearly a century of struggle. People traveled from homes far away to say their goodbyes to Tony. The family had their time to say their final words to Tony before the funeral. I leaned over the casket, my hands holding the wooden edge, and whispered to my uncle, “I hope you can dance whenever you want now. Just remember, though, I’m the best dance partner.” My mom found comfort in knowing his struggle was over. Uncle Tony’s struggle was over, but the family still struggled in places and people. The boarding schools produced broken people, and those broken people produced broken families. I witnessed our generations of broken people. I opened my eyes and opened my ears and learned the history of our family. My relationship to the identities of native peoples may not be how Indian I look, but I know the history of my people, a Choctaw family in Oklahoma. I have listened to Aunt Rosalie, and watched my grandma’s struggle, and I know their stories and that history.
The boarding schools were colonialism starting at the source of a people. Our family’s cycle of broken people continues because most of us are afraid to look at it. Most of us are afraid to understand or acknowledge the painful history of our people. Most of us are afraid to realize we still live in a country that refuses to recognize our painful history. My Aunt Rosalie accepted Jesus, the white Christ that Christians thought would civilize Natives. My grandma suppressed her past with alcohol and self-hatred. My mother grew up in a chaotic and irresponsible atmosphere. Mom has found a spiritually peaceful and emotionally grounded way of life, and after 51 years she has found her own way to look at it. My mom studies the past of Native America as a whole and has found a way to apply that history to our family. She’s looking at the it of our family and has begun the long process of acceptance and reconciliation with the past. I know her journey because I’ve listened, I’ve watched her, and I admire her. Mom has maintained the relationships to our close relatives. Mom has stayed connected to Oklahoma, Choctaw land. Through my mother I stay connected to our family. I look at it, all of it. I look at the complexities of our family and attempt to understand them. I break the cycle of broken people, following my mother in her courageous journey of examination.
My identity is not how native I look. Every day people discover their “Indian heritage” through their blood relation to some famous chief or a Cherokee princess. A new trend is blood testing for a measurement of how native a person is. These people may find their identity on a piece of paper or a blood test, but I look to my family. I have the wrinkles of my grandma’s face, the whistle of my Aunt Rosalie’s dentures, and the wide feet and strong hands of my Uncle Tony as evidence of my identity. I have the old churches, the familiar foods, and the emptied boarding schools as proof of my history. My identity is in the days of hot summer air and fresh picked onions. My identity is in the steeping sun tea and in the red dirt of Oklahoma. My identity is my mother’s journey and my Uncle Tony’s peace. My identity is not separate from my family. My identity is apart of them all.

Kathy Brown

"Stubborn As My Hair"

I was at the park, two blocks away from home. The moon was at just the right place in the sky, directly in the top of the endless stretch of navy so made the puddles in the sidewalk flicker. It would be a perfect night for firefly chasing or searching that cloudless sky for shooting stars.

And yet all of the qualities of that lazy night came crashing to a stop when I heard someone shout “Red’s It!”

Ghost in the graveyard. Run! Run! Run!

Once more I was singled out to be It in another game. It never matters what game it is, I am always It. But ghost in the graveyard is different. It is a twisted marriage of tag and hide-and-seek played out only under the cover of darkness. The person who is It hides while the rest of the group counts. This person is the ghost in the “graveyard” street. Once the others count up to Twelve O’Clock (midnight!) they search the block until they find the ghost. When they finally spot the ghost they shout at the top of their lungs, “Ghost in the graveyard. Run! Run! Run!” The Ghost then chases down the group until she catches one of them. The unlucky person who gets caught then becomes It for the next round. Everyone else is only safe if they beat the Ghost back to the base where they counted from.

Not only am I It again, but I am It because I am the first one the neighborhood kids can think of. I am a ghost: A pale-faced, redheaded poltergeist.

My red hair has a way of defining me when I least desire it to.

I am the first to admit that I am stubborn. My hair, as a part of me, follows my lead. I once tried to dye a streak of purple in it so I could feel a sense of control over it instead of the other way around. The dye turned the chunk of my hair grey instead. In an attempt to make it normal again I tried once more, this time to match my own copper color. It turned pink. Luckily for me it was only a semi-permanent coloring and I was back to normal again after two months. But normal for me is never quite as normal it is for everybody else.

I stand out in the crowd whether I want to or not. In any given situation I am the instant outsider. It doesn’t matter if someone doesn’t notice my hair at first sight. At some point in my relationship with them, I inevitably become “that redheaded girl” as if there is nothing more to me. They know all they need to because of the hue of my hair.

On my second day of seventh grade my science teacher decided to call me Red. She thought she was giving me an endearing nickname. But in my head, she was just using my hair as an excuse to not bother learning my name. I was Red in her class all year long. I had made an attempt to go out of my way to show that I didn’t have the time to learn her name as well. I have already come to terms with my stubborn, slightly vengeful side so I don’t need to be reminded of it. It is out there for everyone to see.

I believe the teacher’s name was Mrs. Ferguson. I caught her giggling with the geometry teacher across the hallway once and started calling her Mrs. Flirtison. I wasn’t one of her favorite students that year.

It was at this point in my life that I spent the nights playing Ghost in the Graveyard with my neighbors. I was old enough to hang out with my friends alone at night and young enough to think it was cool to brag about it. I would show off to some of my friends at school that my curfew was later than theirs. What I didn’t tell them was how much I hated Ghost in the Graveyard, and how I would have preferred to be stuck inside like the rest of them instead of outside being taunted by the neighbor kids. When I am It, my pale skin reflects so much in the moonlight that the group can see where I’m hiding before they even step off the base. I lose every time. I am It for the entirety of the night.

I am It for life.

It is easy to ignore these problems, to turn the other way and ignore all troubles that redheads face if you are not one of them. But this would be the easy way out. Redheads, few as we are, still live with brunettes, blonds and all other shades of hair whether natural or otherwise. We are your neighbors, your friends, classmates and siblings, and if that is not enough we are also a dying breed. You wouldn’t go out of your way to poke fun at an endangered species, and redheads are most certainly that.

There was a time when red headedness was far more common. Especially in places like England. The first people living there probably looked a whole lot like me: slender, somewhat tall, pale and redheaded. It was a survival technique. In places like England, it was not uncommon for the sun to hide in a fog for days on end. Because of this, people needed to become as receptive of the vitamin D that the sunlight gave them as they could. Even when the sun wasn’t shining very brightly. The skin therefore dropped off much of the dark pigment melanin over time which got in the way of this vitamin intake. Without this pigment, skin could easily gain nutrients from the sun even through the haze of England.

This was not necessary in say a place like Africa where the sun was very much abundant, hence the dark skin of Africans. Both ends of the skin spectrum happened in a way that was very specific and very deliberate for survival. The gene that makes a person’s hair red can only happen with this pale skin as well. It is a two way deal. If you ever see a leathery tan redhead walking down the street you can be assured that her hair comes from a bottle rather than her genes.
Fake redheads are a fairly regular occurrence, but what about the natural ones? Red hair was such a common feature of many people, especially in Europe, but we have since severely dropped off in numbers.

In today’s world there are estimates putting redheads at only 4 percent of the American population and only 2 percent left in the world. This is not including those people who chose to “become” a redhead only by dying their hair. The real redheads are those that not only have the coppery strands of hair, but the skin problems that come along with them. We are more susceptible to the skin cancer melanoma because we lack that special pigment melanin that protects skin from the sun. Instead, our pale skin can only freckle in defense from the harsh rays of light, but more often than not we are left with a crispy, painful burn.
It is a cruel fate that only a small few are vulnerable to, but living with people who do not understand this only adds to the pain. On top of the expenses we have to pay for our spf 100 sun screen, we tend to be at the butt end of objectifications directed at us for things we cannot control.

In much of the medieval world it was commonly accepted that red was a sign of the devil and that one’s fiery locks were an outward sign of an inner evil. It’s no wonder that when people think of witches they often have ginger hair under their pointy black hats.

In Sicily today it is still fairly common for people to cross themselves if they come across the path of a redhead.

In ancient Egypt, redheads were burnt at the stake because the red hair was considered a sign of the devil.

It’s really no wonder why there are so few of us around anymore.

Anyone who has ever accepted a redhead’s temper tantrum as part of their fiery personality that is so well known is just adding to the things that can make it hard to be a redhead. Some people claim that the color red heightens a person’s aggression and so it would make sense if the person who is around the hair the longest would get the largest dose of this color related anger and have it show in his personality.

But then wouldn’t it make more sense for the person looking at the redhead to have more anger? The argument does not work. Plus, red hair is not red! It is more of an orangey color darkened by brown. Red is for stop signs. It is not a natural color for a head to sprout, and if it is, call a doctor. There is no gene that comes along with red hair giving the redhead a shorter temper. I believe that instead, it seems that redheads become angry quickly because they have to deal with people their whole lives that think they know something about them because of the color of their hair. My hair color has nothing to do with the fact that I snap at my mother too often. My temper is individual to me and has everything to do with the fact that I was teased so much as a child that I became defensive and bitter.

My problem is that I have a short temper and I am ashamed to admit that I have at times blamed it on my hair color. It seemed like a way to get out of blame for snapping at my mother if I could just say that my genes made me do it. I would not be held responsible. It is like the blond who hears that she is just another dumb blond so many times that she accepts it because it is the easiest way out.
The difference is that there are a lot more blonds than there are redheads. There are fewer people to go against those claiming that redheads are quicker to anger or somehow in a pact with the devil to prove them wrong. This is why it becomes important for outsiders, those not cursed with rusty locks, to pay attention to how unique redheads are. To possibly give them a nickname other than “red” or “carrot top”, because those names mean nothing. They say nothing about the person. And giving someone a nickname that means nothing is like telling the person that they are nothing as well.

I nearly maimed my mother after I saw the movie Annie. You may not be able to see it now, but when I was younger my was hair strawberry blond and curly. I had a baby fro. I was the spitting image of Little Orphan Annie. This is not why I wanted to kill my mother. She couldn’t help passing me that sad little recessive gene that paired with the only one my red haired dad could give. It isn’t her fault I looked like Annie.

But she didn’t have to give me the middle name Anne to go along with the hair.
My third grade class had a field day when a substitute teacher called role with everyone’s middle names and everyone discovered what the “A” in Katherine “A” Brown stood for. We had watched the musical the week before.

Every time it rained one particularly evil child in my class named Brandon would ask me if the sun would be coming out tomorrow. Every time I wanted to punch him square in the nose.

I do have a temper after all.

My life changed over the summer after that year, though. My hair darkened, possibly to match my darker personality. It lost its strawberry blond hue in favor of one more like a year old copper penny. Best of all, it was suddenly straight. No more Orphan Annie cracks came out of any of my classmates mouths in fourth grade.
But I wish someone would have told me not to wear my hair in braided pigtails. It would have saved me a lot of embarrassment and my other nickname: Pippi Longstocking.

It’s only the adults who go out of their way to call me Chatty Kathy in honor of my uncanny resemblance to the original pull-string Chatty Cathy doll from the 1960s. Most of my teachers and parents’ friends over fifty tend to be the ones who bring this one up the most often. I spent most of my childhood trying desperately to keep quiet so they wouldn’t have reason to call me chatty, but I couldn’t help my desire to chatter. It was inevitable, I guess.

When I finally grew out of the name calling years of elementary school and jr. high, I finally made my way into high school. When I was there I made a friend named Rita, the first other red haired girl that was my age. We saw each other from across the crowded gym one day and I like to think we saw something in each other that made us walk towards each other, but it was most likely because we recognized each other from Girl Scout camp. We had gone to the same summer camp but had never been formally introduced.

We became fast friends, sharing with each other the hardships of being a redhead by hiding from the sun and our Navy Seale wannabe gym teacher in the shade during gym class.

One day we went shopping, as we had many other days before, but this time was different. We were in the food court and in line for pizza. I had reached the end of the line and it was time for me to pay. The lady at the register told me to wait so she could add up my sister’s order with mine. Rita and I gave each other a look. We were not sisters. We didn’t even look like we could be related. The only thing we had in common was our red hair and even that was different. Hers was the traditional blond red and mine was the shade of an old penny. She had freckles, I didn’t. She was tall and wide, I was on the short side and thin.

It made me wonder why people always thought that any redhead traveling with another must be related. I was certain that no one would make that same assumption about two brunettes wandering the mall together. The only good thing about it was that I was always able to sneak into school events with her because our tickets for sour school’s event like plays and football games were good for a person’s entire family. Then and only then was it okay that people assumed we were sisters. Rita happily became a Brown and we split the cost of school sponsored events. But there have been more recent events that make me think I will never stop being objectified for my red hair.

A week ago I fell off a ledge outside of my dorm. The reason behind why I was on the ledge in the first place is beside the point, as all actions that lead to life changing events are, but I ended up falling twelve feet to a sidewalk of solid concrete landing only on my right knee and the palms of my hands. I looked at the blood on my hands and thought about how they would sting in the morning.

It wasn’t until I tried to move that I noticed that my right kneecap had shattered.
As I waited for the ambulance to take me to the hospital I clutched my knee not knowing the problem but knowing that something was wrong. It didn’t hurt at all. My friends that stood around me told me I must be in shock because I wasn’t in pain. My leg just did not look natural. Through my new dark jeans my knee was pointy where it shouldn’t have been.

After what felt like three hours but was most likely about five minutes I was transferred to an ambulance and finally ended up in the emergency room. The doctor who helped me once I got there was so cheery that I wanted to kick her, with my good leg anyway. She bounced around the emergency room sticking me full of needles full of morphine, her only redeeming quality. Eventually she whipped out a pair of what at the time I assumed were garden sheers and started cutting away at my fancy new jeans. I cried out as she got to my knee when it sent out a jolt of pain. It was when she was ripping away all of my clothes and I was sitting on the emergency table naked and in gut wrenching pain when she casually asked me “I’m sorry dear, but I have to ask: Is that your natural hair color?”

I couldn’t speak. I was amazed by her ability to make small talk while I was in such a vulnerable position. I had never in my entire life felt as small as I did on that cold plastic table, and the doctor wanted to chat with me about my hair.
It is because she felt that she knew something about me because of my hair color. She was able to ignore everything else that was going on to comment on something as superficial as the shade of my hair. It gives people like my ER doctor an excuse to look past the pain I am in so she can pretend she knows something to say to me that I will appreciate.

Then again it did help me keep my mind off the kneecap I had managed to turn into mush long enough for her to drape me in a flimsy hospital gown.

I rarely think about the times when I actually want people to notice my red hair, but those times do exist. There are times when I vaguely find myself wanting to stand out a little bit more from the crowd. These are mostly times when I see a guy I think is cute and hope against hope that he likes redheads. It is a coin toss, though. I know as many people who find red hair attractive as I know those who turn their noses up at it.

One particularly bad memory of mine was when the boy I asked to the turnabout dance in eighth grade turned me down. It wasn’t until after I had my friend Jenny do some detective work that I found out it was because I reminded him a little bit too much of Ronald McDonald.

I had to think about what specifically made him think “Big Scary Clown” when he thought of me until I finally got it. Between my red hair, pale skin and not so dainty feet I did actually add up into a fairly neat little package all that was associated with the famous clown fast food icon.

Great. Just what I needed: To make my potential dates think of Big Macs and McNuggets as we slow dance. And I was a vegetarian.

It was enough to make me want to pull a bag over my head and never come out until someone needed me to enter a Bozo the Clown look-alike contest to save their life.
When I played Ghost in the Graveyard as a kid, I never wanted to be It because you lose yourself when you are nothing more than a thing, an It. You are the thing everyone else runs away from, the Other. My hair was something that pulled me out of the background to make me that Other before the game even started. It is what made me feel the most like an outsider: a pull-string talking doll from the sixties, an annoying singing orphan, a girl with serious braid issues and clown who is far too eager to shove French fries down people’s throats.

Although, red noses and Broadway musicals aside, I do also know that some people do in fact find red hair attractive. Some people even go out of their way to find coppery locks. After all, my mom married my dad with his flaming hair and they have been pretty happy all these years.

Missy Kalbrener

"Little Lady"
Prior to entering grade school my father explained to me that although I was expected to become an educated young woman, the real skills that I would ever need in life were the ones passed down to me by my mother: cooking, cleaning and ironing. Skills that my father never showed much appreciation for, but his good mood made a better day for us all when he climbed into a made bed and all his shirts were dryer warm and starch stiff. My father and I had been sitting on the futon in our family room, he watching Seinfeld and I doodling in my My Little Pony coloring book, and upon filling in Melody’s tail magenta I learned that the first five years of my life had been spent learning not only my abc’s and 123’s but the difference between cold and warm water wash and how to properly remove the dust from the tops of the ceiling fans. I was an only child that was taught to be seen and not heard, I did what I was told. I went about these acts for years without resistance and I was taught by the best, my mother, the domestic goddess. She was a woman who began her life successfully as a cosmetologist and gave it up for a child. She had shown me her feet spread wide and a size larger just from carrying me in her stomach, a protrusion hanging off of her 4’10” frame, and told me that someday I too will experience the joy of childbearing for my overfed executive husband. She was a woman, I was to become a woman, and I was being trained to become her.

My parents hated my knees. I came out of my mother’s womb pigeon toed, and eventually my feet straightened out, but my knees failed to follow and they still hit and scrape themselves on everything they can reach: doorjambs, table legs, trees. I used to look forward to the weekends where I could play with my cousins, squish my bare toes in the mud with them, take turns between the seven of us riding the one scooter we had up and down the sidewalks. I could fall down on the gravel and not worry about getting yelled at by mom and dad when I came home with blood dripping from my knees down my calves. My mother clothed me in dresses to hide them and would pinch my ears when I sat down cross-legged and pressed my skirts between my legs exposing the scars and bruises from jumping off swings and too many cartwheels in the dirt. From then on it became her goal to teach me what it is to be “lady like”.

At least once a month my parents would hold dinner parties that would fill our house with twenty to fifty of my father’s middle aged employees who usually left dizzy and in cabs. I would be shoved into the purple velvet dress my great grandmother gave me, that lint covered sack made of fabric for cheap royalty, and a wide black headband would keep my hair out of my eyes so that I could converse properly with my father’s guests like any good seven-year-old daughter should. My mother loved to paint my nails the night before, usually soft pink, and put my hair up in curlers so that it would fall soft on my shoulders instead of their usual stringy locks. This is what a young lady should look like, she’d tell me as I looked at myself in the mirror, clean and tidy, then I’d have to practice my smile so that I could appropriately answer the door. And the guests came one by one hugging me and telling me how cute I was and how much of a heartbreaker I was going to be when I grew up.
I began telling boys that I was going marry them in preschool. My parents thought it would be cute to hold a faux-marriage between a young boy named Lucas and myself at their own wedding. Our parents laughed about how they were sure that we would end up together and would dream up our future occupations, our children’s names. In kindergarten I told Andy Kim that I was going to marry him while we carved pumpkins at Halloween. I told him that I had to marry him in order to keep my initials, his glasses were smeared with pumpkin strings. A boy named Clinton sat in front of me in sixth grade and while everyone else studied the civil war, I studied the mole on the back of his neck, that tiny piece of him the size of a pencil eraser. We played tennis together and he made fun of my weak serve and I cut out letters to spell out his name and pasted them in my diary. I would lay in my yard pretending to be Snow White and lift my lips into the air accepting the kiss my prince laid upon my sleeping mouth. I’d unscrew the screen off my window and throw my hair over the ledge and watch all twelve inches of it blow around in the ocean air with no male arm reaching up to climb.

My parents were always really straightforward when it came to their rules about boys. Like they always had to meet them and preferably have a meal with them. Boys couldn’t drive me anywhere or pick me up at my house, my parents always had to drop me off and walk me to every date, and no date could last more than three hours, but they sure never said anything about how to pick them. Without putting much thought into it I can easily say that I’ve dated more than four drug dealers, two auto parts thieves, a religious radical, and one mentally disabled young man. Three have cheated on me and two were gay. Oddly enough, my parents never said a thing, not even when I was running around in cropped halter tops and shorts with my ass hanging out. Maybe the occasional “Has Boy-X gotten a job yet?” but anything else awkward beyond that made me feel like I was five years old again sitting on the kitchen counter asking what sex is because that’s what my friend said she wanted to do with Michael Jackson when she grew up. It was the kind of situation that deserved one of those really uncomfortable mother-daughter talks where the mother sits and reminisces about all the boys she encountered in her high school days, but my mother isn’t the kind of person who has enough courage or even knowledge on the subject to do something like that. Both of my parents were married previously, so I guess they figured that like them I’d discover and learn from my mistakes on my own. Between classes in freshman year, I passed by two girls in the bathroom standing by the sinks eyeing me on my way into a stall. Right after I closed the door I could hear one of them mutter under her breath “slut”, and walk back out into the hall. At the time I was dating this bum that was a year out of high school and working full time bagging groceries at Times Supermarket. Now I really wish that my mother had explained to me the politics of girls and boys, and maybe more importantly, the politics of girls and girls, because in this situation I didn’t put two and two together, I just cried over being called a name.

There’s a strange push and pull that comes from having two parents that are so different from each other. I still can’t figure out what they have in common, but in terms of raising me they had the same mixed feelings of how much I was allowed to think on my own. They shied my eyes away from all the “negative” attributes of the world, they’d cover my eyes when anyone kissed on television and I would sneak into my mother’s sewing room after dinner and watch the Simpsons or Beavis and Butthead, follow my cousin into his bathroom and watch him shoot up heroin with his best friend. I also never got a sex talk from mom and dad, instead a book was slipped under my door, “A Doctor Talks to 8-12 Year Olds”. Boys were always a serious matter to them, but sex is still something we do not discuss. My father is a conservative white man from a small town in Minnesota. He did what any respectable Midwestern male was supposed to do, go to college, play football, marry your college girlfriend and get a comfortable job. My mother is a Filipina from Hawaii who went into cosmetology and ended her career for a family. Long distance phone servicing was what brought my parents together. My father was at the time running Sprint’s Asia-Pacific region, and my mother was a sales representative who walked in his office one day and began their unlikely flirtation by noticing that his socks didn’t match. I still can’t see where the spark came from. Opposites attract is the only kind answer I can think of, but from what I can see, my father just looked like a good provider and my mother a good wife, plus they both realized that time wasn’t on their side anymore.

Every woman on my mother’s side of the family has gotten pregnant in high school or shortly after graduation and most of them now have multiple children from various fathers. At our regular weekend gatherings or Christmas dinners each of my female cousins would show up with a new man, if a man at all. We don’t talk about this, we just treat him like he’s one of the family and even though we know he won’t be back again, we make him feel like he’s invited and welcome anyway. My mother was the exception. She was told that she was virtually unable to have children after trying for years, so when I showed up they thought me to be some kind of miracle. But my cousins who were pregnant at sixteen weren’t punished in the same manner as I would have been if I had been pregnant at such an age. They were supported, their mistake was overlooked and the problem was not seen as such, it was seen as something that just plain happens because it had happened to her mother and her mother before that. My mother’s half of the family is Filipino, yet another culture in which women marry and bear children as teens. My great-grandmother had her first child at fourteen on a sugar cane plantation on the Big Island of Hawaii, the father was a white military man twice her age. And here my cousins and I stand as the fourth generation in Hawaii continuing something that is not socially acceptable in the U.S. I came into the world just as they began to have kids, but by the time they were on their second or third I was aware of what was happening. I also began to understand that I wasn’t at all like them. I attended a private school, it was almost certain that I would graduate and go on to college, I didn’t go job searching the minute I turned fifteen. A certain alienation happened and I maintained a distance from them, which not only stemmed from my privileged life but also from our age difference; my closest cousin is five years older, the next is twelve.

It wasn’t until I left home at sixteen that I noticed it, the judgement, the way they looked at me and the way I looked at them. We are all judgmental whether or not we like to admit it. It’s how we make choices and decisions and form opinions; it’s imperative for us to judge and evaluate the world around us. I’ve judged my family, my mother, and found that babies, GEDs and welfare weren’t for me, instead I’ve chosen to surround myself with friends, higher education and maybe in the future I’ll be knocking on welfares door. If only they knew how alike we really are. We’ve all felt out this world through men and the same kind of men, the difference is they left their men (or rather their men left them) as soon as a child was conceived, I leave mine when I get curious, not bored, just curious. I try on the outfit until the clothes have holes and then I change. I’ve ended up with a diverse wardrobe, each reminds me of a different era of my life and a time where I’ve resurrected and rebuilt myself to fit the next outfit. Now I’m picking out my own clothes, but I will never throw out the rest.

I carry the women of my family with me whether they like it or not, I continue to judge them and extract those things that make them beautiful, they’ve sent themselves back to school, loved their children and teach them lessons through their own lives, the mistakes they’ve made, and those children have got some big dreams now. I like to think that I could have done what they did, but I got dealt an easy hand and a part of me wanted to experience what they had and I did that through men. I will never be a housewife, I might not even be a wife or a mother for that matter, but I will continue to learn this world through men until I find one who will come to my house for Thanksgiving dinner and will return for Christmas.

At three years old I would sit in my car seat, Sophia Loren sunglasses covering half my face, belting out “Shower Me with Your Love”, and that’s exactly what my parents did. They showered me with the kind of love that restricted me from playing with the two boys next door that let chickens loose in our yard, closing my door for any reason, and from being able to stay out until midnight even at my best friend’s house a block away. And I know that everyday I become more like my mother sweeping and vacuuming daily, dusting the shelves before I stack my books, but in the end its not because I’m female and that’s the role I’ve been raised into, it’s just because I like clean floors.

Lucy Samuels

"My Brother and Other Ridiculous People"

Problem: Mom and Dad sit down for a talk with their college-age son. “Son,” they say, “we think your behavior might be getting you into dangerous territory.” The son quickly does a mental review of the past few weeks of his life and comes up with little for a mother and father to disapprove of. He’s been watching the first four seasons of Friends on DVD and writing a thesis paper for his bachelor’s in Philosophy. He’s crafted a number of fantastic vegan stir-frys and gone walking around Washington Square Park almost every night. He thinks to himself that perhaps he is running a bit low on sleep, but then again, hasn’t that always been the case? Still, Mom looks worried.

My brother, who’s 21 now, has been straight-edge since he was fourteen. He’s never touched alcohol or any drugs, and neither have his closest friends. This is their personal constitution. No mind-altering substances- they’re socially constructed to be the normal way of life and the cool way to be, and it’s become an exclusive and hurtful lifestyle for a lot of young people. No promiscuous sex- it’s disrespectful, both to oneself and to the other party involved. They don’t preach about it, they just design their own lifestyle and then live in it.

Despite his biologically ideal lifestyle, my older brother may be one of the most
dissatisfied, unhappy people I know. He’s gone through self-mutilation phases and stays up all night suffering panic attacks. He worries my mother sick. Even my dad has made comments, only partially in jest, along the lines of, “he should really just get high.” My father may or may not have been a hippie.

One night, while sharing a beat-up sofa bed in a three-room Manhattan apartment, my brother confessed to me that no matter what he’s doing or who he’s with, he is constantly feeling nagged by the poverty and starvation occurring in other parts of the world. It was 3am and I was unwilling to let myself fall asleep until I had at least begun to understand my brother, and this is what I ended up with. One of the saddest, and most difficult to believe, confessions I’d ever been privy to. We are an upper-middle-class family living in an extremely liberal community; we were well-provided-for and accepted no matter who we chose to be. Despite this, my brother felt (and, for all I know, although we haven’t had many heart-to-hearts since he moved out, still feels) palpable guilt for the plight of third-world nations.
My older brother will probably live a lot longer than most of the people we know. He’s vegan and also a bike messenger in New York City, which means not only is he getting ten times the exercise I am but he’s eating the bare minimum to fuel that lifestyle. Is it really worth it, though, if he’s going to feel heavy and trapped inside his head for the rest of his long life? Haven’t there been a number of nights in his life that he didn’t really need to be 100% aware of? I’m not saying a few shots of Captain or lighting up a joint would cure my brother of the nagging philosopher in his head that sometimes just won’t let him smile. I just think that maybe if he were willing to shut that voice up for a few hours here and there, he might find himself feeling much lighter. Maybe if he had experimented here and there in high school he wouldn’t have so many burns on his ankles from the lighter he keeps in his dresser. Maybe he wouldn’t be addicted to tattoos, or maybe he would be by now anyway. Maybe he’d sleep at night. Maybe when he laughed it would seem genuine. Maybe not. I just like to imagine.

I have a picture of my brother pinned to the magnetic strip on my desk in my room. It was taken a few years ago on a trip with some of his friends to the shore. He’s lying in the sand on his stomach, propped up on his elbows, and something is making him laugh. I can tell it’s for real because his face is all wrinkled up. You can practically watch the laughter dancing in his throat. It’s an old picture and I have a ton of more recent ones saved on my computer, but I don’t want another picture. I can count on my fingers the number of times I’ve seen him look like that in real life. It’s absolutely beautiful.

I’m 3 ½ years younger than my brother, and though his beliefs have had some effect on me, I am not at all the same. While my brother is a huge part of the reason why I’m highly conscious of the harmful nature and the stupidity of my behavior, the fact of the matter is, I like to party. To me, it’s not the end of the world if I just check out for a few hours on the weekends. High school life in particular is confusing and stressful- except when you’re drunk. There are nights I can’t remember, and this does not bother me. I’m not sorry and I’m not unique. The fact that I know I’m not unique is the exact reason why I’ve never had any qualms about admitting this kind of thing to my parents or my teachers. Sure, I could waste my nervous energy lying about what I do on the weekends, but I think it’d be a hell of a lot more believable if I just told the truth. I have never passed out, thrown up, kissed anyone I wouldn’t want to have kissed, or been taken to the hospital.
And yet, all along I’m aware that, unconscious or not, drinking is pretty much unarguably bad for me. The evidence is exhausting: stories in the news every day about young people who died in alcohol-related car accidents, neurological research about the effect of alcohol on the brain, even examples in my every day life of close friends who made ridiculous and harmful decisions while under the influence.
I sat here in Illinois and watched as most of my friends got too involved in their stereotypical “college” lives and ruined themselves. My best friend calls me the other day, and when I ask her how her weekend was, she says “I went to the hospital.” I went…to the hospital. She doesn’t sound concerned. She sees a doctor every few months because this acne medication she’s on tends to be a little rough on the liver, and between visits she’s getting fucked up and throwing up multiple times every weekend. Talk about rough on the liver.

Another one of my good friends serves as a great example for why young, attractive girls should stay away from excessive drinking. She was a little out of control in high school so I guess I could’ve seen this one coming, but every time I talk to her it’s another drunk unprotected sex story. The most recent one involved some other friend telling her that the best thing to do, considering the hassle of picking up a Plan-B pill, would be to take six or seven of her birth control pills from the pack. To me, this was almost as absurd and irrational as a coat hanger home abortion. What made this friend of hers a reliable source at all? How did she know taking all those hormones at once wouldn’t be seriously detrimental to her tiny body and constantly-ailing system? To my girlfriend in North Carolina, it sounded like the proper thing to do. So she takes seven birth control pills and spends the rest of the day sick and in pain. Who knows if those seven pills have anything to do with the fact that she is not pregnant.

I trust myself not to end up like North Carolina girl. I know that even when I’m drunk, I have a measure of control over my actions and desires. I have the ability to step outside of a situation for a moment and say to myself, if sober Lucy were watching right now, would she be ashamed? Regardless, I’m not immune or invincible. I’m losing brain cells just as quickly as she is, even if I’m not throwing up in a stranger’s front yard or getting it on without protection.

For the most part, I love my life. I want it to last as long as possible. Like pretty much everyone else in my age group, I wish I could be eighteen forever. It’s corny and unoriginal, but there’s no better way to say it. I’ll never have this body again, or this energy. So I have to ask myself, if I want to feel like this and look like this forever, why am I inviting my own death to step a little bit closer? It is an age-old question; with programs like D.A.R.E. and ad campaigns telling us to by all means avoid anything that feels too good to be true, why do we continuously subject ourselves to chemicals that gnaw at our nervous systems? Why do we, night after night, enthusiastically take part in behaviors that could kill us in a split second? With staggering rates of obesity and movies like Supersize Me in theaters, what makes us inhale those gigantic Chipotle burritos and Dairy Queen milkshakes? What a truly unfair paradox: the very activities that make us want to stay young forever, make us grow old faster.

The general consensus on stuff like this seems to be that we do things that feel good because we are drawn to immediate satiation, damn the consequences. The English vernacular includes all sorts of clichés, things like “you only live once,” and even Ben Franklin let us know, “there will be sleeping enough in the grave.” Every cigarette ad tells us it’s not safe to smoke them if you’re pregnant; same with drinking and pretty much everything else teenagers like to do on the weekends. Essentially, because of the way we’re built, if we want to have a family and a prosperous future, we’d better quit acting stupid sometime not too long after college. Squeeze in the madness before our biological clocks get done ticking.
But why squeeze it in at all? I’m not saying in an ideal world we’d be acting like good little homeowners by the time we were twelve, saving up for car insurance when we were old enough to start getting allowance, reading anthologies and spending Saturdays in art galleries during our teenage years. But when there’s other fun stuff to do, when we have the option to go out dancing or to the movies even just drive around with the music turned up, why do we so often choose to get drunk first and then hop in the car?

I suppose it’s all about time. When your seventeen or eighteen years old, looking into your future is like staring into the sky on a cloudless night and trying to picture yourself standing on a star. Not only are there a million different outcomes for you by the time you’re about done with life, but that time seems intangibly far away. So you say to yourself, there are lightyears between me and death, lightyears left to worry about calories and brain cells. It’s those lightyears that allow you one more tequila shot. It’s that infinite invisible space that makes you feel okay about climbing behind the wheel of your dad’s car when you can barely see the speedometer. It feels good and right and I have no idea when, exactly, it’s going to have any noticeable affect. Besides, perhaps, tomorrow’s hangover, and I’ll be fine if I drink enough water before I go to sleep.

The primary conflict here is the management of desire. Unfortunately, we are programmed to feel drawn to things that hurt us. Every young girl has had the experience of having a crush on a boy who was “out of her league” and I know I’ve found myself wishing glazed donuts had nutritional value. We know about consequences, we just happen to have the ability to disregard it. One day in high school, I wore a thin-strap tank top and my bra straps were fully visible. My english teacher sent me out of her class to go change into one of the ratty old t-shirts she kept in her office for this purpose and I had to wear that nasty thing around for the rest of the day. The next day I came into school wearing an even smaller top.

Alcoholism is one of the most alarming consequences of drinking at a young age, when you’re still impressionable. My mom informed me, when I was only about 13, that her father is an alcoholic. My mom’s side of the family boasts Cherokee ancestors, so this information has always made sense. Telling me this was her way of cautioning me. Alcoholism, like breast cancer and psoriasis, runs in my family. She nearly had me convinced that if I touched the stuff at all, I’d be instantly hooked. I could just picture myself ten years down the road, with a belly like my grandfather’s, speaking with his confused drawl and nodding, completely out to lunch, through most conversations.

Nevertheless, at a basement party in eighth grade, I had my first alcoholic drink: generic vodka mixed with Giant brand “orange drink.” It was terrible and I felt very grown up. I did not get drunk, but I did get in a shitload of trouble when my parents found out I wasn’t watching movies at my friend’s house. I did not become addicted that night, or the next time I chose to drink, or the next. I still have yet to feel any physiological need for alcohol. It’s just something in the background of my existence.

When it comes down to it, we just have to find a balance between being entirely cognizant of every detail of your existence, and throwing your life away for an addiction. About a month ago, I stood in the back of a liquor store reading the label on a bottle of Kahlua. It was my last night in town before heading back to Illinois for Spring Term, and I wanted to drown myself in White Russians (what can I say, I’m a classy girl). Mike spent $20 on some brand of coffee liqueur, a few mixer bottles of Smirnoff, and a cheap handle of vodka. We drove back to my house, stopping at a 7-11 for the milk we’d need, and threw together a few drinks. At that time, I was feeling like maybe taking a little break from the weight of the conscious world would be a fine thing. Leaving my drink on the kitchen table, I went upstairs to start packing. By the time I came back downstairs, it was almost 3 am and I was getting sleepy. I sat down about a foot away from Mike, and when my knees brushed his I realized all of the sudden that I wanted to be there that night. I wanted to feel every little tiny moment of contact because in a matter of hours I’d be on a plane and I’d be missing that contact a hell of a lot.

I guess my microexpressions gave me away, because Mike said, “penny,” which is short for “penny for your thoughts.” I told him I didn’t really feel like getting drunk. He seemed relieved and we poured our glasses down the sink. Any other night, things might have been different. That night, we just wanted to be around.

Crisanda Benton-Davis

"Scars: The Tape Measure of Change"


Here’s the problem. We all grow up into what we hate. No one is ever really satisfied with who they are. Have you ever met someone who was completely content in who they were? People are always trying to change themselves into something they can at least stand to be around. People are constantly trying to loose weight, going out of their way to reach what society considers to be an acceptable weight. They’ll do anything. Pilates, yoga, or ridiculous diets. They get tattoos and piercings to change their appearances, and some go to even greater lengths and get plastic surgery. Others take less drastic routes and merely get their hair cut or dyed a different color. The problem is, we hate ourselves and growing up, getting all these opportunities to become who we actually want to be, seems to just be giving us more ways of getting to where we don’t want to be. Why can’t people just become what they want to be? Why must life be this constant struggle with ourselves? And why are we so scared of change? Is it just that we’re afraid we won’t be able to change sufficiently or that we still won’t like who we are when we’ve changed? Is it all for nothing?

Robert Frost baffles me. As a fellow poet, I have no idea how he finds so many things to write about leaves and trees and gook. But it is from one of his most famous poems that I find my audience for this piece. In his "Road Not Taken," Frost begins the poem with this line: Two roads diverged in a yellow wood. This is really for people who are diverging, or who are being pulled in two different directions and have a choice as to which way to go in their life. This is for anyone who has ever made a choice that changed their lives. But especially this is for people who are in the current process of diverging, stretching their legs as far apart as they can to stay on both of the paths at once and finding they really do have to choose.
I have often been one who is diverging. People are faced with life changing situations and find they must diverge and change or die.

I missed Columbine. I had no idea that it had even occurred until many months later, and for the longest time I couldn’t figure out how I had missed something like that. I came to the conclusion that I must be pretty self involved. It wasn’t until years later that I put the pieces together and realized why I had so blatantly ignored one of the most devastating school shootings in history. Columbine happened to fall on the day that I experience my own tragedy. On April 20, 1999, the same day as Columbine, I was diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes. I had to change or die. If I didn’t learn how to give myself insulin and check my blood sugar there was no way I was going to survive.

People all over the world deal with these kinds of decisions every day. People do not like to change. They only do it as a means of survival. I learned this early on. People will resist change at every turn and bend their entire will upon not having to do it. As soon as they get comfortable in their current state and way of life, something happens, like getting diabetes, and they are faced with an ultimatum. It is horribly annoying. People think they hate change, but in my hatred of it I find an inherent love of change. Change is the only thing that saves us from our own mundane lives. I would be bored silly if I wasn’t constantly being faced with the need for change, to shift and adapt and find new ways of surviving.

This is just something for those people to think about. Something to make them question whether or not change is really the enemy. I want to show these Divergers that it isn’t the act of change that is the problem. It’s actually a solution to pain and the way in which we survive. Without change I would be nothing more than a stick in the mud. This is for those restless people in the world who want a change in their lives but have no idea how they want to change. Change has the bad habit of sneaking up on people. And ironically, change is one of the few things in life that is constant. I can be sure that I will continue to change as long as I live. And so in my loathing of change, I have come to love it because it is what I crave: something to depend on, something that will always be there no matter what else happens. I will always be changing

My father has always called me Pookie. God knows why, but it has been one of the few constants in my life, one thing that I am sure will never change. But, then again, I’m also sure that change is a constant in my life. Things will always be slipping and sliding around. To hold still, to give up, is to die. I can depend on change as much as I can depend on the fact that my father will call me Pookie until the day he dies. When my family moved from Nebraska to Kansas, he called me Pookie. When he and my mother got divorced, he called me Pookie. When he moved four hours away from my brother and I and only called once a week, he still called me Pookie every time I picked up the phone.

My brother, Colin, and I spent the summers with my father after he moved to Beloit, Kansas to be the pastor of the First Presbyterian Church. That’s where I changed most drastically before coming to college. You see, my father is a horrible parent. He let my brother and I run wild in this little town. By the age of 14 I didn’t have a curfew. Colin and I could go wherever and do whatever we pleased. There were very few constants in my life during those golden summers. One of the few constants was my stars. I begged my father to buy them for me from Dollar General, and as soon as we got home I dragged him to my bedroom to help me stick them all over the ceiling. The stars were always there when I finally climbed into bed at night. I never knew which of my brother’s friends I’d find sleeping on the couch in the morning, or what I’d be able to find in the fridge for breakfast or whose house I’d end up in by lunchtime, but I always had my stars. At least I had them for 6 years.

The stars started falling sometime the summer before my freshman year in high school. I was half asleep when the first one lost its grip on my ceiling and smacked me right in the face. It scared the shit out of me. I was just floating in that place between asleep and awake when it hit me and jarred me from what could have been a peaceful night’s sleep. After that, though, it turned out to be just another sleepless night. And that is what I am. I am just the product of too many sleepless nights, which led to too many self portraits, too few of which were any good. That and scavenging the kitchen for food and never finding what I want. It’s because of those nights that I know. I know what my food is. Everyone has that one food they always crave but can never figure out what the food actually is. Well, I solved the great mystery of my appetite. It’s always Rice Krispie Treats. And through all those sweaty summer nights the stars kept falling. It took many summers. Many nights of 3 am Acapulcoan cliff diving on TV and watching the moths collect around the bare light bulb on the back porch. I grew up subtlety and changed silently.

How do I even know that I changed? Can you measure change? Of course. It is measured in the number of tattoos someone has, or the number of piercings. It is measured in how many pounds they lost that month, or how many days a week they make it to the gym. Or it can be measured in by the inches the cut off their hair, or the number of the hair dye they used It can be measure in the years it takes for all the stars to fall off of a child’s bedroom ceiling.

Another way someone might measure change is by events that were particularly painful. I believe you can measure change by the scars a person collects throughout their life. Scars tell stories and you can count them as easily as anything else. I also think that tattoos can sometimes be considered scars. Especially if the person got the tattoo in remembrance of something especially painful that they experienced in their life. Change is measured in pain. And the tangible evidence of pain are scars and sometimes tattoos. Not all pain leaves scars or is immortalized in a tattoo, I realize this, but it is a start in the measurement of change a person has gone through in his or her life.

I got my first scar when I was three years old. Not too bad. I have to give my mother props for keeping out of lasting danger for three whole years before I got away from her. I was in gymnastics and I had to wear a leotard. I absolutely loathe leotards. They look ridiculous for one, and they’re a bitch to get off. Especially when you’re three years old. One day during gymnastics practice I had to go to the bathroom. When I got into the bathroom though, I couldn’t get the fucking leotard off. Keep in mind I’m three years old, now. I can’t get the damn thing off, so I end up peeing my leotard. Then, somehow, I manage to slip in my own pee and crack my chin open on the tile. I come out of the bathroom screaming bloody murder, completely covered in piss and blood, and I’m sure I gave my mother a heart attack on the spot. It was years before she let me go to the bathroom on my own again. I had to get stitches and of course this resulted in a nice stitch shaped scar.
The next scar of importance that I received wasn’t really my fault. Really. I was nine years old and it was the 4th of July. My dad told me to hold the Roman Candle. Then he lit it. I was wearing my Pocahontas sandals that day. I loved those things. I knew something was wrong almost immediately. The wind was blowing the sparks that the Roman Candle was spitting back at me, in my face, all over me. One of the little buggers managed to wriggle its way under the strap of my awesome sandal. The right one. Right on the ankle. It burned a pretty nice little hole into my skin before I managed to pry that damn sandal off my foot. Dad apologized. Dumbass. No, really, you’re supposed to hold the Roman Candle. Maybe that’s when I stopped trusting my father.

The next scar was entirely my fault. My brother and I were spending a week with my aunt and uncle during the summer when I was about 11 years old. Uncle Vic has a motorcycle and he took me for a ride on it. I didn’t jump off or anything psycho crazy like that. I was climbing off when the ride was over and hit my leg against the tail pipe thing. It was hot. 2nd degree burn hot to be exact. But here’s the kicker, as a child I hate going to anyone but my mother when I was injured, so I didn’t tell anyone about the burn until the next day. My bad. Probably should’ve gotten it checked out before then. We went to a fair that evening and my aunt actually got mad at me for not wanting to go on any of the rides. Granted she didn’t know it was because I was in so much pain I could barely stand, but once she found out, she felt pretty bad about that one.

I blame my next scar on the stairs, because honestly, if I hadn’t tripped on them I wouldn’t have cracked my head open. This one takes a little explanation as to why I was running around my house at night in the middle of winter wearing nothing on my upper half but my bra. It was brother’s fault. My parents had gone to church that evening, leaving Colin and I at home alone. Bad things always happened when they left us by ourselves. We were bored, so Colin dared me to run around the house in just my bra. I was 12 so it was really more of a sports bra. No big deal really. Anyway, when people dare me to do something, I just can’t resist. That’s how I ended up drinking half a bottle of ketchup, but that has nothing to do with this other than it was a dare, which is the point I was trying to make in the first place, so, moving on...That’s how I came to be running around my house in just my bra at night in winter. It was the last stair too.

Everything slowed down to that really trippy, oh shit slow motion, and I actually had time to think, as I was hurtling toward the pavement head first, "Oh fuck." Then I hit and there was a giant flash of light and I thought I might be okay. I started screaming for my brother, who upon reaching me informed me that I wasn’t bleeding, but he was standing on the wrong side of me. After we discovered the bleeding, we fucked around for a bit trying to figure out what the hell to do, and ended up calling 911 even though the hospital is right across the street from our house.
That’s the only time I’ve ever ridden in an ambulance. It was only for 2 blocks though, so I feel kind of jipped. They could have at least taken me for a spin before dropping me at the ER. There are probably rules about that though. I had to get stitches for that one too, on the skin underneath my right eyebrow. It’s quite a conversation piece.

My last and most recent scar come from just last summer. This one was all me. I won’t even try to get out of it. I volunteer at this camp for a week during the summer, and at said camp there is a golf cart. The staff uses it to transport heavy objects or gym equipment, or to just get someplace if they are in a hurry. The younger staff also uses it for other reasons that the older staff members are not aware of. Sometimes we take it off roading on the trails in the woods, or just drive it recklessly and stupidly. It was the last day of camp and my friend Lynda was driving while I was sitting in the passenger seat. She said "Jump" so I did. Ouch. Gravel road. Amazingly I landed on my left side and did a sort of backward somersault and jumped right back up, sustaining only minor injuries to my left arm, in particular, my elbow. Looking back on this particular decision, I see now that I had actual reasoning behind it. At the time that this all went down I was in a state of fear. Totally and completely petrifying fear. I was scared all the time. Of growing up and moving out and going to college. I had never been so scared for such a long period of time. I was sick and tired of being scared, so I jumped, and I wasn’t scared to, at least for a little bit. Fuck. I jumped out of a moving golf cart onto a gravel road...college couldn’t hurt that much.

But it isn’t just our own scars that we must take into account to measure the change experienced in life. When someone I’m close to experiences pain, it hurts and affects me too, obviously.

Colin and I would also visit my father during our winter breaks from school sometimes. One year we were doing this and playing over at our friends’ house, where they have a playhouse. It was two stories tall with a ladder that lead up to this balcony and upper room. One of our favorite games to play was Ultimate Dodgeball. Two of us would stand up on the balcony and throw balls at the other two who were on the driveway below. On this particular occasion, my brother was up in the balcony and I was on the driveway. I darted underneath the balcony and as I did Colin leaned forward and launched a ball that nailed me right in the back. I was pissed off that he’d hit me, of course, so I turned around to yell some curse word at him. For a moment I thought he was just leaning over the railing. But as I stared, more of his body was slowly appearing before my eyes. He was falling, off of a balcony, right there in front of me. Even before I really realized what was happening, the scene had slowed itself into slow motion, as if begging me to pay close attention to every detail. As he hit the pavement the speed picked back up and he crumpled onto the ground, his left arm breaking most of the fall.

I can still see Colin’s green watch cutting into his swollen wrist and hear the lump in his throat as he begged us to help him take it off. I can see my father, calm and sluggish in a sea of chaos as he drove Colin to the hospital. I can picture long hospital room with two beds and no curtains.

Often, the things that stick with you are the ones that change you, even if it’s just a strange clump of seemingly unrelated details. If Colin’s broken arm didn’t change me, there isn’t much that could. Each scar brings with it a little bit of fear. The racing heart and sweaty palms. The stomach clenched in sudden worry. I have many vicarious scars. Other people’s scars have made more of an impact on my life and the way I think than my own have. I’ve learned to carefully consider my actions when other people’s well beings are involved. Scars bring cautiousness and responsibility.

Sometimes I still slip up, though.

My friend Kathy will be getting a new scar tomorrow because she jumped off a ledge today. It’s partly my fault. It was me who threw the flip-flop up there in the first place. I mean, it’s true, Gloria was the one who stole it from Liesl, but then she gave it to me and I threw it up on the ledge outside of Post 3. Every time we passed we’d talk about getting it down. This went on for a few days. And then today after lunch, we decided to take action. First we tried to give Kathy a boost up to the ledge. That didn’t work. Gloria and I couldn’t get her high enough. Next we tried using one of the patio chairs. It still wasn’t high enough though. Luckily, the stairwells have these really handy windows and Kathy was able to climb out of one of them. She started having second thoughts as soon as she was out on the ledge. She threw the flip-flop down to us and then began to ready herself for the descent. I suggested a hang-and-drop but Kathy didn’t think she’d be able to hold herself. Instead, she sat down and scooted off. It was over in a matter of seconds. Her whole body arched backward and then snapped forward and she landed on all fours, more or less, smacking her right knee against the sidewalk. As soon as she hit I could tell things weren’t right. Her knee just looked weird. The knee cap was sticking out in all the wrong places. Gloria and I both instinctively grabbed her to hold her still as she rolled onto her back. She was clutching her knee and she was obviously in pain, although she was quickly going into shock. I immediately pulled out my cell phone and called 911. The ambulance was there in a matter of minutes and my friends and I spent the day in the ER waiting room with CNN’s redundant report on the Virginia Tech massacre pounding down on us incessantly. It turned out that Kathy had shattered her knee cap and torn the tendon as well. She has to have surgery on it tomorrow morning.

When we finally got back on campus tonight at about 9 pm, Gloria made an interesting comment as we drew nearer to where Kathy had landed that afternoon. “I know it’s stupid,” she said to me, “but I keep expecting to see the outline of a body where Kathy was laying.”

I wouldn’t be surprised to find a tiny Kathy-shaped scar somewhere on my body, because Kathy changed me.

Montana Standish

It’s Not A Cookie, It’s Our Culture

My first act of vandalism took place when I was five and my family had just moved into our new house in Santa Fe, New Mexico. I was in my room and decided to hold my own house warming party by using a metal screw I found to carve the word home into the wood siding of the window. The next day my father discovered the caveman letters cut deep into the wood of his new house and asked me if I was the “artist”. Always one to be proud of my work, I took full credit for the carving; not even aware that it is typically a bad idea to take responsibility for destroying property. Unlike future clumsy accidents such as breaking the front door, I was not punished after I explained myself. I think my dad saw past the number of dollars needed to be spent at Home Depot to replace the wood and instead recognized my carving as some kind of grand sentimental statement. Unfortunately, my work to come involving a blob of melted crayons on the carpet did not prove as intellectually stimulating.

I spent the first few years of my life in California, though I have little to no recollection of my time there. My family decided to move to Santa Fe where the cost of living was even higher, and the taxes haunted us ever since. Our first year there had its ups and downs. Most people were friendly but occasionally our California license plates elicited vandalism in the grocery store parking lots. My blonde, fair skinned sister went to the public high school where there were frequent stabbings and bomb threats. She handled it quite well however, and when asked how she managed not to get beat up by
the gangs she said she just made sure never to look anyone in the eyes. Making sure not to piss anyone off seemed to be the way to get along peacefully in New Mexico but there was an instance in which my father accidentally caused some trouble. Like most Anglo newcomers, he made the mistake of sounding like a dumb gringo.

One year we were at a Christmas party and they were serving the usual holiday foods of posole, green chile, tamales, and biscochitos. I was scampering around the room, no doubt eating things I found on the floor as little kids tend to do when my father called me over. He held up a sandy brown, cinnamon smelling treat and asked me if I wanted to try a cookie. This gruff, older native New Mexican man somehow heard my father use the word cookie and whipped his head around. He scowled at my father and me for a moment as he sized us up.

“It’s not a cookie, it’s our culture!” he barked at my father in his heavy accent.

The idea of culture as an object which could hypothetically be dipped in a glass of milk and eaten was new to my family. I was too young to realize the meaning of the metaphor. Thinking of the biscochito man getting angry over a baked good induced an outbreak of laughter from me for some time. Aside from being entertaining, this incident also supports Santa Fe’s claim of being “The City Different.”

When we moved to New Mexico we entered into a borderland world of cultural tradition combined with new age hippy antics that would take years for the rest of my family members to fully adjust to. In this way, I suppose I was the lucky one of my family to be raised in Santa Fe and have a native upbringing. I didn’t cry the first time I ate green chile and seeing grown homeless men walking down the street in women’s dresses never seemed to phase me. The first time I ate salsa I reported to my dad that it burned, but I wanted more. Thus I began my love affair with spicy foods as a slobbering toddler with an appetite for enchilada plates instead of the standard American chicken fried steak. I would have been confused to hear that most American kindergarteners did not sing De Colores daily. And, until recently, I never questioned the fact that hundreds of people gather each year in Santa Fe to burn a giant puppet named Zozobra. Growing up I just assumed that it was the same everywhere. The unusual was usual to me.

My parents never came right out and explained this to me. They didn’t sit me down and warn me that I would experience culture shock later in life. The realization that New Mexico was different from other places came slowly. It came from watching movies and wondering why all the houses had pointy roofs and none of the towns had Spanish names. It came from cross country road trips and observations of how green the grass was, without even being watered! Most of all, the realization of being different came from tourists from the outside world. I never noticed the unique aspects of living in the Southwest until I had them pointed out to me by foreigners. Slowly I began to piece together an understanding of my home based on my own experiences there and the perceptions of others.

What makes my own journey to understand and define the place I call home so confusing at times is that the Southwest is both a real and imagined enclosure. It has inspired some of the country’s most fantastic misperceptions and myths to the point where truth and fiction bleed into one another. Foreign ideas about New Mexico have
mixed with the desired image of the natives to create the place that I live in. My experiences growing up there and the public perception of what it means to grow up there are equally important. More often than not, depictions of the Southwest have grossly exaggerated the idea of a wild frontier where the barbaric natives are so backwards they still live in mud huts. I once heard a young tourist boy ask his parents where all the cowboys and “injuns” were as they strolled along downtown where some of the country’s most impressive art galleries are. That young boy did not just imagine the misperception; his parents planted the idea somewhere in his mind even though they also must have been aware of Santa Fe’s modernity if they had chosen it as a sight seeing location.

In contemporary times, the Southwest has been highly romanticized as some kind of desert utopia full of open minds and the real issues of racial tensions, poverty, and drunk driving are glossed over. I learned just how far off most of the country is when it comes to understanding New Mexico when I moved to the Midwest for college. Until I left my home, I was unaware of all the mystery and confusion that surrounds my home. It seems that many Americans have yet to even recognize New Mexico as an actual state even though the United States claimed the territory in 1912. Nearly a century later and people are still under the impression that New Mexico is just a cleaner, fancier part of Mexico. When I was working at a cafeteria in Illinois, an older woman asked me where I was from. I told her New Mexico to which she said “Oh Mexico must be real hot this time of year.” When I corrected her, adding in the “new” part, she shrugged and said it was the same thing anyway. A large percentage of people who do accept New Mexico as a state have completely vague perceptions of its geography and culture. In the minds of these folks, New Mexico is some indistinguishable chunk of hot desert located near Texas where we ride around on horseback slaying rattlesnakes all day.

Yet the cafeteria woman wasn’t completely wrong in her comparison. While New Mexico doesn’t belong to Mexico anymore, it can’t exactly be called the United States either. The fact that the American government never thought up a more creative name to set the state apart, and instead just tacked a ‘new’ on to an already existing country could also explain why New Mexicans themselves don’t fully accept their place in America. We are a relatively new state and changing into a completely assimilated culture takes time, assuming that we would even want to become the same. The native New Mexicans are in no rush to become a clone of Maryland and so we grip to old traditions and ways of life, and outsiders who move there do so because they want that way of life as well. For many people, my state is as close as they can get to escaping modern corporate America without fleeing the country. I have never lived in a house with adjustable heat; we use a wood stove.

Much of New Mexican identity comes from cultural and geographical distinctions. Sometimes the distinctions are real differences and sometimes they are just misperceptions, but New Mexicans thrive off them either way. We need people who don’t know about our culture for us to feel that we are part of a unique community. A certain amount of exclusion must occur if our culture is to stay alive and ours. On certain days, I catch myself getting angry at tourists who don’t understand my home for what it actually is. I see them walking around the plaza in cowboy hats wearing gaudy turquoise jewelry that they probably bought here and will never wear anywhere else but here. Yetthese people, these tourists that we so despise, are also our source of identity. We depend on their foreign perceptions to fuel our tourism industry and our own native pride. I may not like the pasty white guys in moccasins asking where to get some good “tay-cos”, but I am always flattered that they chose to visit my home.

When I describe New Mexico to my Midwestern friends, I play off the already existing clichés which make the state seem far more romantic and mysterious than I typically see it as being. Instead of a snake, it was a rattlesnake, and we were drinking tequila not Coors Light. My friends walk away from the story thinking New Mexico is as exotic as they imagined, and I trick myself into believing, if only for a moment, that New Mexico is a mythic place where I just happen to live. Of course, not all details need to be embellished. There is really no way I could describe a New Mexican blood orange sunset or a summer lightning storm and make it sound anymore beautifully thrilling than it already is. The truth about New Mexico is usually more interesting than anything else.

A truth that few people know about New Mexico is that it is always being tugged back and forth by different groups who want to call it their home. The space is shared but not always by choice, and coexistence is often less than peaceful. From the time when Spanish conquistadores first fought Native Americans for the Southwest, to Anglo America’s war for the land, there has always been a struggle for ownership. There has been conflict over land, but more importantly over culture. Whoever posses ownership of the land, also dictates what the culture surrounding that land will be. This is where the clear definitions of culture in the Southwest begin to get as messy and muddled as the Rio Grande’s water. Land in the Southwest has been stolen, given back, sold again to
different people, and infringed upon by outsiders like my own family all throughout history. At this point, no one group of people can claim the history, geography, and culture of New Mexico as their own creation. That is not to say that any group should try either. Even the oldest families of New Mexico had to move to there at some point. People don’t remain outsiders forever once they assimilate into the shared space. New Mexico is the product of hybridity in which Native American, Mexican, Spanish, and Anglo culture and tradition have all fused into one.

Since New Mexico is a combination of all these influences, the issue of cultural ownership comes into question. There are some who believe that ethnicity is the only way that a person can claim ownership of a culture. If that is true, then it would seem nothing separates me from any other Anglo kids living in Americaville, USA. I know this can’t be true because there are abstract and physical differences between myself and an Anglo from anywhere else, as I discovered living in Galesburg, Illinois. When I dress in a way that is acceptable back home, I am scoffed at and ridiculed for looking like a floozy. I try to explain that New Mexico is in a hot, desert climate so of course we wear less clothes, but it doesn’t change anyone’s attitude towards me. They believe that I should fit in with their culture and I try to resist. Once I start fitting in to the place I am living, I will start assimilating and becoming one of them. As soon as I lose my culture, I lose myself.

Since I am an Anglo New Mexican, there is some debate over what I can rightfully claim as my culture. I can’t point to Mexican, Native American, or Spanish culture as mine because I am not any of those ethnicities, and it would be wrong to do so.What I can call my own and identify with is the culture of New Mexico, because that is where my home is. Not everyone claims their culture in the same way either. I have white friends who have not adopted and embraced New Mexican culture to the extent that I have. These are the undeniably WASP-y kids who could be dropped into the suburbs of New England and no one would know the difference. My friends sometimes tell me I’m not white, I’m New Mexican. That’s only half true though; while I am white by default, I am New Mexican by choice. Culture is not something that necessarily just falls in our laps. We have the choice and ability to seek culture out and decide how much of it we want to incorporate into our own identities.

Since I grasped on to New Mexican culture so tightly, I knew it would be difficult to leave my home. I have always placed a great deal of importance on saying goodbyes—to people and places and even things. I see goodbyes as a kind of ceremony. I hate the idea of leaving without first spending time to reflect and make peace with the place and people. On family road trips I was always adamant about saying goodbye to each hotel by collecting the little soaps and on vacations I had the impulse to remember a place by taking dirt samples with me. I procrastinated and put my goodbye with New Mexico off until my very last night there.

That night I sat in my backyard under the heavy blanket of a thunderstorm. It was late summer and there was a chill in the air but the rain was warm on my face. Lightning struck the mesas in the distance, illuminating the desert landscapes in bright flashes that faded as quickly as they came. My view of the land was fleeting. I saw everything but only for a few seconds. Those few seconds were long enough for me to remember how
much I love New Mexico and need it. I always told my parents that I would never live in New Mexico as an adult; that I would find some place else. My sister said the same thing growing up. She was dead set on moving to New York and becoming an important big city girl. Years later and she is now looking for her own house in Santa Fe. That night in the rain made me realize that I may wander around for awhile but I will always end up back home.

I tried to make my goodbye with New Mexico a meaningful parting between two longtime lovers, but I still catch myself feeling like I am cheating on New Mexico with what is to me (ironically) the exotic state of Illinois. I enjoy the humid mornings here and the way the grass is everywhere, green and natural. Winter was interesting for me; I wore layers of sweaters and had never before seen ice cling to tree branches and power lines. ‘Freezing rain’ made its way into my vocabulary. Most of the food I eat here is in one way or another fried, and then covered in thick orange cheese sauce as opposed to the green chile that is offered as a condiment on any New Mexican menu. I actually like my new all-American diet but I still call home requesting bottles of chipotle salsa that I later hoard for months at a time. My life is very different here, but I haven’t changed as much as I expected.

I do not regret moving to the Midwest but I am homesick always. I can spend months at a time in a foreign place, but I can’t spend one day without thinking of my home. When I think of New Mexico, I think of pressing my face against the sun warmed brown stucco walls of my house and walking barefoot through the garden after it has just rained. I think of that man who says the cookie is his culture. I’m beginning to think he is on to something, in a sense. Culture is as abstract as it is real. It’s like a cookie you can crumble in your hands, and it can fall apart or be created just as easily. I’m starting to realize that my home is the same—it’s a place on a map (somewhere near Texas?) I can drive to and it’s a feeling. My home is the choice I make of where to return to. I was in a cab one afternoon in Galesburg, Illinois when the driver, who was sporting a combo mullet and John Deere hat, asked me where my home was. I braced for it and told him, to which he said:

“Ahh, you must talk pretty good Mexican then, huh?”

I just smiled, told him sure I did, and looked forward to telling that story back home.