Dustin's Smell

This post originally appeared on another blog of mine on March 4, 2014. I'm transferring some creative non-fiction over to this one.

Here's the story:

I'm feeling bloggy again. I know exactly why. I started reading Annie Dillard's The Writing Life over lunch, took a walk (during which I remembered the 400 stories I still need to tell), and then couldn't recover from the experience.

Here's a story:

When I was about 14, I had a huge crush on a boy that my parents didn't approve of. He wasn't a bad kid, but when your mom and dad both teach at the junior high, they know pretty much everything about anyone you might ever want to date. "Dustin doesn't do his homework," my mom said, with seemingly complete assurance that this piece of information would kill my teenage desire and end the conversation. It didn't.

He asked me out. I was a super nerdy, kind of tomboyish, average-looking sort of girl. I had a million friends, but boys, especially boys who didn't do their homework, didn't ask me out every day.

Going out meant sitting next to each other at the movies with a big group of friends, but even to that, my parents said no. I accepted my fate with tears and yelling and wringing of hands, but I accepted it.

I yearned for this boy. It was no "OMG, he is so cute!" squealing with your girlfriends kind of yearning. It wasn't heady, wasn't champagne bubbles; it was guts-deep, raspy-sounding desire.

He came to my house one afternoon. "He's the kind of boy who just drops by without calling," said my mom. I didn't let him in, but I talked to him a minute on the porch. After he hugged me goodbye, the smell of his cologne stayed on my clothes. After more than 20 years, I can still remember exactly what it smelled like.

Occasionally, I pass a man on the street, in the mall, at school, who smells like Dustin, and desire surges up through me, reddens my face, drops the pitch of my voice. Lovers' faces blur in my memory, but even though we never kissed in 1993, I still remember Dustin's smell.

Racism and My Childhood in Mississippi: Inspired by The Help by Kathryn Stockett

I just finished reading The Help by Kathryn Stockett (a novel about the relationships between black maids and their white employers set in Jackson in the mid 60s), and I enjoyed it very much. But this post is not a book review. After reading Kathryn's afterward about growing up in Mississippi and about writing the book, I feel inspired to write a few memories about racism from my childhood.

I am 32 years old, so I grew up in the 80s and 90s. That sounds all modern when you write it out like that, but it's not quite that simple. We were integrated, of course--sort of. Black children went to school with me; my Girl Scout troop had black and white girls; and black people could go into all the public places.

But we weren't really all that integrated, except legally. There were (and are) black and white churches, black and white neighborhoods. I hardly ever saw interracial couples until I came to Atlanta, and when I did it was a shock. Only white trash girls dated black boys, and I cannot remember ever seeing a white boy with a black girl.

At school, black and white kids segregated themselves completely by middle school. You could be friendly with kids of the other race, but you weren't really friends. I had a black girl that I called my friend (and I wish we realy could have been), but when my mom and I drove her home from school, we had to drop her off two blocks away from her house so that her daddy wouldn't see her get out of the car with a white lady. I remember once when she went to church with me. That's literally all I remember; it was a shocking enough thing to do that such a little nothing event still stands out after all these years.

I remember that the word "nigger" was used in ways that were so commonplace that it almost lost the power of a racial slur, like calling a wimpy boy "pussy" or calling a disappointing event "gay." My parents were very progressive, and I would never have said such a nasty, racist word, but I frequently heard a game called "nigger-ball" or a kind of firecracker called a "nigger-chaser." I knew that it was wrong to use that word, but it was only years later that I really understood how built-in the racism is when little children use names like that completely nonchalantly.

When I was learning to drive, my mom took me to a cemetary to practice. We stopped when we saw a very newly and terribly defaced grave. It was James Cheney, a young black man who was killed along with two other civil rights activists in Philadelphia, not far from my hometown, in 1964. It was still being defaced, apparently, in 1995.

One of the murderers, Edgar Ray Killen, a local preacher, was acquitted at the first trial, but he was retried and convicted in 2005. It was a big freaking deal then. I was so proud because I had heard the story of how my mother had driven one of my relatives to a homecoming in a church where Edgar Ray Killen was going to preach, and she wouldn't go in. She just sat in the car. Thank god Mississippi finally did what my mother had known all along was right.

I was slapped once in a racially-motivated incident. A little friend of mine, a truly sweet girl, won our class's citizenship award. Another girl in the class said to me that she only got it because she was white. I replied, "She won because she is way nicer than you." She slapped me across the face, hard. Of course, I just tattled on her because I was Hermione Granger all the way. I wish I could tell you that I slapped her right back. That would make a better story.

When I was in about the 7th grade, I entered an essay contest for Martin Luther King's birthday. It was good. I remember nothing about it but that it was really good. I always won everything. That's bragging, I know, but you have to understand that I was a far better writer than any child in school. I didn't win the essay contest, and I was pretty sad. But when I found out who won, a girl that I knew could not have written an essay better than mine, I was furious. I remember my dad explaining to me that they were not going to pick a white child, that would look bad for publicity. I cried and cried and yelled Martin Luther King quotes about the content of someone's character (and essay) being the important thing. And I remember my dad saying, "You're right. MLK would be horrified. But this is the way things are."

I don't know what to say about all these things. They are wrong, all of them, though some much more horrible than others. I just wanted to get them down, to share them with people who may not have grown up with that kind of thing. I just wanted to say that it's not as over as some people think it is.

Short Piece Written in a Park

For my composition pedagogy class, I had to visit a downtown park very near the university and write about it. The teacher gave no other criteria because the point of the assignment was to see how personality affects writing style. I liked what I came up with, so I thought I'd post it here. Keep in mind this was the product of about an hour with very little editing, not my usual turn-in-able academic writing.


Kelly Elmore
Composition Pedagogy
Park Assignment

I follow the stream of students moving away from campus. Our line cuts through the park on the diagonal. We walk like a line of ants, looking neither right nor left but only forward to our destination or down at our moving feet. This pathway might as well be walled in with concrete, windowless, with thick insulation to keep out sound. It’s as if the campus moves outward with the students, passing through the surrounding city, borders lying near to each other, but never touching.

Where the diagonal path crosses the circle that rings the park, I turn right, away from the students and into the park. Suddenly, when I cross through the wall that separates campus and city, I am conspicuous. I suddenly realize how white and suburban I am. I imagine that my education, which, in this moment, seems ridiculously prolonged, is visible all over me, Greek rhetoric and Middle English hanging around my neck like gaudy costume jewelry.

As I walk along the loop, people turn to look at me and then return to what they were doing before I walked by.

A man sleeps on the grass in the field enclosed by the loop. He has removed his boots, and I can see his large brown feet.

A woman, pushing a baby girl in a stroller, has stopped to talk to a group. She stands with her hands on her hips, talking loudly, pointing at the listening people with her finger. The child doesn’t look up from
the stroller but plays with her fingers.

A group of old men play cards at a table. They laugh loudly, while one of them deals, and a very fat man, leaning back in his chair, rests his cards on his belly.

A young man asks me about my shoes. He laughs at them in a friendly way and wants to know where I got them.

I wish that I could disguise myself and move among these people like a spy. I’d like to sit down on a bench and hear what the woman is telling her group. I’d like to lean in over the shoulder of the fat man and find out what game the old men are playing and hear the joke they laugh at. I’d like to be able to talk like them and look like them and feel invisible among them.

I finish the loop and fall in with the stream of students walking back toward the university. Suddenly, when I cross back into the flow of moving campus, I can’t feel the color of my skin or the place where I live.
My education seems to shrink back to a normal size and fit down inside of me again, hidden. I am camouflaged, invisible in front of the background that looks and sounds and moves just like me.

The Day I Became an Atheist

I went to college at the University of the South in Sewanee, TN. If you haven't seen it, you can't imagine how beautiful it is. Don't even try. Just get in your car right now and drive up there for a visit. This story ends in All Saint's Chapel, the religious and architectural center of campus. You can see some pictures of it and read some descriptions in this blog post about our recent road trip through Sewanee.

The beginning of the story is a history of my religious seeking. I grew up Methodist and was about as religious as the typical person in the South. I went to church, sang in choirs, participated in youth group, but thought very little about God. I had a moment or two when my natural desire for life to be as dramatic and romantic as a French novel led me into some kind of fervent spiritualism, but not all that often.

When I went away to boarding school for nerds and weirdos (a very happy time for me), I gave agnosticism a spin. It really didn't take all that well because I was just so devoted to drama and ritual and a life full of symbolic meaning. The agnostic answers "Whatever" to some of the greatest questions of life, and that wasn't me. I was and am often wrong, but I never waver. I wanted an answer that was RIGHT - the kind of right that a person finds in Camelot or in Thomas More. The kind of right that was worth feeling and talking about and holding sacred.

That was a big problem. I wanted to be sacred. I wanted my words to be sacred, my actions, the ground that I walked on, the air that I breathed. I wanted a world where every tiny choice, every miniscule detail was pregnant with meaning. So no agnosticism for me.

At Sewanee, I got religious again. Very religious. Sewanee is steeped in God, and I was aware of the atmosphere in a way other students didn't seem to be. First, as I said, Sewanee was exceptionally beautiful, and that got me in a worshipful mood. It was also my first real exposure to high church Episcopalianism. There was incense! There were lovely robes, candles, ritual to satisfy even me, and a prayer book that was literature.

Before I knew it, I was starting and ending every day with church. I would go to the Eucharist (communion) in the morning before class, and at night, just before bed, I would attend and sometimes officiate compline (the evening sung service). I became an Episcopalian and thought I was set.

The only problem was that none of the stuff that was supposed to happen really happened. The loveliness of the chapel and services moved me. The pathos of Easter Week whipped me up into an emotional froth that I adored. My feelings were alive, on edge, and my thirst for beautiful movements and sounds and layers of meaning was quenched. But I prayed to be a better person, and I wasn't. I wanted God to help me know the direction my life should take. And he didn't.

I was considering switching to Catholicism, hoping to enjoy my ritual and get some practical help from God, when I read Atlas Shrugged. I was in the habit of reading my Ancient Greek assignments out loud in the chapel. You would not believe the spectacular sound of Homer echoing off the ceilings. I took Atlas Shrugged there to read, as well, for the shadowy, cool solitude that I loved. I finished the book, closed it, and thought to myself, "Well, it's this (looking at the book) or that (looking at the chapel)."

It wasn't an easy choice. I could see that God wasn't real. I could see that I had been waiting for God to give me guidance and to make me a better person, and I could see that I must guide myself and improve myself. What I couldn't see was how I could live in a world with all the awe and poetry and magic sucked out.

But I did what I look back on as one of the most courageous things I've ever done. I said to myself, "If the world is without all those things, you must be strong enough to face it. If you are to be doomed like Hector, you must walk straight out of here and face that doom with his dignity and valor." And I did. I got up, put the book into my backpack, and walked out into the sun, looking around me for the first time at a world without the hand of God upon it.

I learned soon that I didn't have to live in a world without awe and spiritual values. I see my life now as a series of moments pregnant with meaning, but I lay the meaning on the moments, instead of God. The human struggle to be better, to learn more, to know ourselves IS the great drama. To participate in it, to struggle myself and to witness the struggle of others - nothing mystical could inspire such awe or such emotional heights.

Now All Saint's Chapel has another layer of meaning for me. I always loved it for itself and for the many, many lives that are literally or figuratively inscribed upon it. And now I love it more as the site of my transformation into myself.

Bru, Or Being Struck By Lightning

When I was 16, I met Bru. I had a boyfriend at the time, and he was great. But I am not going to write about that first relationship. Instead, I'm going to write about the first time I was struck by lightning.

It was summer, the summer before my junior year of high school, the summer before I left home for boarding school. I went to a pool party sponsored by my church youth group with all my usual cronies, who were also great. They were smart and interesting. But it was Meridian, MS, and I was hungry, though I didn't know it, for something else. I wanted to be standing right in the middle of the flow of ideas; I wanted to live inside the novels and poems that I spent all my time pouring over.

I was hanging out in the water with all my girl friends, chatting and laughing and being teenagers, when he walked up. He was red headed with a red goatee, tall and skinny, and he seemed very, very old to me because he was in college. He was a friend of my youth minister from out of town, a kid from his last church, and I have no memory of how we ended up in conversation. I remember him walking into the fenced-in pool deck, and the next thing I remember is the two of us, far from anyone else in the pool, talking about Dante.

He was smart and passionate about ideas and open, and we talked about every book I had ever read and some I hadn't. We talked about Jewish mysticism, and he told me that he didn't believe in hell. I came from a family of slightly unorthodox thinkers, so it's not like he opened new worlds, but he was young and red headed. I was ripe to fall in love with an iconoclast and his goatee.

After the pool party, I had a date with my boyfriend, during which I constantly thought about Bru. The next morning was Sunday, and I insisted on going to the early service (which I usually hated with all those damn guitars) because I knew he would be there. I stared at him all through church and wondered if everyone could tell what I was thinking. The insides of me were in such a glow that I thought it must have been visible. After church, we skipped Sunday school and stood talking behind the youth building for that hour. He kissed me on the cheek when he left.

I thought of him most of the time until his first letter came, and then I thought of him every second. He worked as a stock boy in a warehouse, and he wrote to me during his break, as he sat in the back, looking out of the open door into an approaching thunderstorm. His letters were thick with pages, full of poems he copied out for me to read, full of descriptions of the sky at night, full of his ideas about god and literature and his future.

My letters were written on yellow legal paper with a jagged ripped edge at the top. Stationary was too small and prim for the raw feelings and hopes that I penned. I told him about what I hoped for at boarding school, about meeting him and the outside world and longing to be in it, and about books. Always books. Some people fall in love over wine or scenery or dancing. For me it was books.

When I read Tennyson again or Keats or Jane Austen or L.M. Montgomery, I felt something new. I knew about "the baths of all the Western stars" now; I wanted to row out to them in a trireme. I had seen the "huge cloudy symbols of a high romance;" I wanted to live long enough to write them down. I loved Colonel Branden and Gilbert Blythe with new intensity. I thought of Bru when I read, and I thought of reading when I wrote to him. Perhaps my memory of him is so strong now and still so white hot because it is bound up with my memories of stories and words and my own awakening as a reader.

Eventually, the letters stopped coming. I went away to school and sank into learning like quicksand. I didn't miss him much because I was too busy loving everything and everybody, and my mind was full of ideas all the time. But I thought of him, especially when my poetry club met at dusk under the trees that looked like broccoli and read out loud.

I ended up choosing Sewanee, the college where he went, but not because of him, really and truly. I can see why we both ended up there, though. It was the physical embodiment of the things that had drawn us together. It was lovely, more lovely than any place I have ever seen since, and it was old with well-worn rituals and a powerful lust for words. I met him there, was shocked to find we had both grown up and apart, and never really got to know him any better. 

But we met once, on a bridge in Abbo's Alley, after it had snowed. It was a stone footbridge with several inches of snow piled on the railing, and the sun was glaring on the frozen trees. My grandfather had died the day before, and I was taking a last walk through the lovely campus before I left to go home for his funeral. Bru was there, and his red hair flamed out against the whiteness. I don't remember much that we said. I cried about Papaw, and he told me that he stopped writing to me when his father died.

He has stayed with me while far longer and more developed relationships have faded away. I still think of him every time I think of Dante (and that is far more often than you might imagine), and I still like red heads best of all.

Mini-Con and Real Life

Hi all! I haven't posted since Mini-Con because my fun only started with that awesome weekend. After that, I had a family reunion and some rockin' cool house guests. Since the fun ended, I have been hiding in a hole. Aaron has been hiding with me, and we watched the second season of Veronica Mars for 12 hours. Seriously. So now I am ready to emerge and tell you my Mini-Con experience. It's only from the vantage point of my longed-for real life that I can look back and tell you how it was when it was not real life, but better.

When I arrived at the social on Friday night, I was jittery and nervous. After all, this conference was my offspring, and I wanted it to do me proud. It was hard for me to settle down with my nerves all aflare with anticipation and anxiety, so I just flitted from person to person, giddy with my own success, like a very caffeinated butterfly. It was fun, but not too fun. I was too keyed up to really enjoy the people.

Saturday was different. Everything that could be done had been done. If it flopped now, there was nothing I could do about it. So I just relaxed and enjoyed myself. The highlights of that day for me were the classes I taught. Jenn and I had been preparing for our parenting workshop for a long time, and I thought we did really well. We jelled together in front of an audience just like we do in Jenn's living room. I loved the amazing feeling of being a team with my best friend and business partner. I think we hugged 40 times during Mini-Con. It felt like we could never be separated again after accomplishing the conference together. I found that teaching the workshops was as much fun as I had hoped it would be, and the experience cemented my desire to make Cultivating the Virtues into a business.

Teaching my poetry class was exciting as well. I was very nervous about reading in front of all those people. What if I make "Ulysses" boring? What if Keats rose up from his grave and told me off for mangling "When I Have Fears"? What if people left my class thinking, "Wow, I thought poetry was boring before, but now I KNOW it is."? But after I started reading, I wasn't nervous anymore. The poems washed over me like they always do, and the audience was very responsive. They didn't say anything, but they looked it. I could see that people were feeling the poetry, experiencing it, not as a school project, but as art and emotion. It was a wonderful feeling to read the poems out loud - to lock eyes with a person that I knew loved the poems already and to see the joy dawning on the face of someone who had never heard them. I've always thought that one of the great perks of an English teacher is the opportunity to be a person's first connection to Tennyson or Yeats or Wilbur. It's what I imagine a missionary must feel - the power to save souls.

Saturday night was the big ass party. Rather than saving souls, I was busy getting kinda drunk and singing Johnny Cash songs. It was awesome. Stoney's Pub parties are always fun, but when Lynne and Stephen Bourque and Shea Levy are added into the mix, it's liquid nitrogen fun. (Ask Aaron just how fun that is.) I stayed up way to late and drank way too much and probably sang way too much.

Sunday was more subdued (mostly due to the staying up late and drinking too much), but our second parenting class went great, as well. It was a smaller group, and we did more talking with the participants and really delving into problem solving, not just the hows, but the whys, which was awesome. Afterward, the pool party was refreshing and relaxing, by far the most chill part of Mini-Con.

So what was the best part of Mini-Con? The people. Sometimes it feels like the world is full of people who neither know nor understand me, people who are so different that sometimes I feel invisible or distorted. I swim around beneath murky water, holding my breath and constantly pushing against the pressure of the water just to move. But during Mini-Con, I surfaced and breathed in cool air and felt the sun and could see clearly. The world was beautifully crisp. If art shows us the world as it could be and ought to be, then my Mini-Con was art.

This picture is the visual representation of Mini-Con:

The Best Memory of my Life

When I was 16, I went away to a public boarding school, a magnet school, which was not only a magnet for smarties, but a magnet for weirdoes. I was in heaven.

The school was located in a lovely, antebellum town, and there was a house with a walled garden that I used to walk by all the time and stand on my tiptoes and try to peer into its depths. The brick wall was old and crumbling on the outside, and from what I could see, the garden was an old one too. The trees were enormous, and their shade made the garden seem more mysterious and more attractive to me.

I was walking by the house one afternoon with my boyfriend and a friend, and for the first time, I saw the owner of the house at the mailbox. It was an old lady, probably in her 80s, or at least, she seemed that old to me at 16. She was wearing a pastel suit and a hat with flowers. If you can imagine the essence of the old moneyed Southern lady, you can imagine exactly what she looked like.

Now, in contrast, you should try to imagine me. I had hair that was long and dyed black, and so did my boyfriend. He was wearing shorts and an M.C. Escher t-shirt with combat boots. I have no memory of what I wore, but you can be sure it was weird enough. My friend was less strange looking, but she probably took on the aura of Goth/hippie kid just by standing so close to us.

When I saw the lady who obviously owned the house, I forgot that I was in rebellion against everything that she and the South and the Church stood for. I snapped back into the girl, deeply moved by the beauty of the world, that I was underneath all the rebellion, and I told the lady that I loved her house and her wall and the trees that I could see growing behind it.

I will never understand what made that tiny, old woman look past my boyfriend’s black eye makeup and my hair color, but she did. She might have acted out of Christian charity. She might have been mostly blind and had no idea what we looked like. But I like to think that she saw past my clothes into the feeling behind my words, and that because she loved her house and her walled garden, she was kind to someone who loved them too.

She was leaving, but she let us into the garden and told us to look around as long as we wanted to. When I think of that, I want to be kind and good to everyone I meet, to smile at every stranger, because without knowing it, she gave me my best moment, and I don’t want to miss my chance to give that gift.

So, we went into the garden. I’ve found that when I have anticipated and imagined a good thing for a long time, I am usually disappointed by what it turns out to be. But not this time. The garden was like an alternate dimension. The wall blocked out the sound of cars; the huge trees blocked out much of the sun. The town disappeared; our century disappeared. I had walked, in those five or six steps, out of the world I lived in and into the world I wished I lived in.

A green lawn stretched from the gate through about half of the garden. It was that lush, deep green that grass used to be before the yellowish kind became the fad for subdivisions. I immediately took off my shoes. We were alone now; the lady had left and closed the iron gates behind us.

Where the lawn ended, a rose garden began. Tan colored gravel walks were laid out in intersecting straight lines all through the roses. Behind the rose garden was a shady, damp walk along the back wall. The shade came from a giant, ancient wisteria vine that twisted in and out of a rickety looking wooden pergola. The wisteria was in full bloom, a fact that I consider one of the greatest pieces of luck I ever had, and the smell of the blooms (indescribable) mixed with the earthy smell of wet, rotting leaves. Under the vine, there was a tap in the wall, an old one shaped like leaves, and water dripped slowly from it. I turned it on, though it was rusty, and drank cool water.

I have a tendency to get carried away with the stories that I invent for myself in my head. That, and my youth, will be my excuse for what comes next. I said to my companions, “This is the Garden of Eden. This time, let’s not talk to the snake.” Overcome with the beauty of that idea, I took off my clothes, every stitch, and stretched out sunning myself on the lawn. I would have no fig leaves, no original sin, only the sunshine and the smell. My boyfriend and my friend did not take off their clothes, having less courage and imagination and more good sense. We talked as I soaked up the sun, and then I got dressed. It was late afternoon now, and cooler.

Our peace was interrupted sometime later by a middle aged man who walked out of the house and demanded to know who we were. We told him that a lady had let us in, and he huffed and puffed and blew us right out of that garden. I suspect the man was the lady’s son, just come home from work, and annoyed that his aging mother had been taken in by wierdoes like us. We left, still happy. The snake had come and we were driven out, but we had not fallen. I could still feel the heat of the sun on my arms.

That night, I wrote a letter to the lady. I told her how beautiful her garden was, the happiness it brought me, and how thankful I was that she had let me in that day. I left the letter and a bunch of wildflowers on the porch that evening. I signed my name, but told her nothing about who I was or where I lived.

Two days later, I was called down to the dorm office. I had received a telephone call. The message said that the lady who lived at ___ would like to see me again. She had assumed by our looks that we went to the magnet school (so she wasn’t blind after all) and called to get in touch with me. The message said that I was invited to tea the next afternoon, and I was to invite the two other young people as well.

Of course, we went. The lady gave us tea in beautiful china cups, gave us a tour of the house, told me the history of her family, and pointed out the portraits of her ancestors. She also made an apology for her son, the kind of apology that let me know she had taken my side and routed my enemies, without ever saying anything negative about her son to me. She practically glowed with the godlike social skills that old Southern ladies use to control an entire region without ever asserting themselves at all.

I never saw her again after that day, but I left gifts sometimes on her porch. They were offerings really, a portion of anything I baked, a part of any bouquet given to me by a boy, a tithe of all my good things as a thank you for the good thing she gave me that I could never repay.