I did not want to
be thirteen, which cast me as something of an oddity among my friends, who were
practicing with lipstick and the ratting hair comb deep into the belly of the
night. Mary couldn’t wait to be thirteen. She stuffed her bra, packed away her
dolls. Susie had been pretending she was
thirteen for two years already. Kelly
said thirteen was a lot more fun than anything that preceded it.
But I did not feel
finished with childhood. I was hanging
on like a desperado, traveling my own skinny road. The world of adults seemed grim to me. Chores and complicated relationships,
checkbooks that needed balancing, oppressive daily schedules, and the worrisome
car that always needed to have its oil or its tires changed (“bald tires”
sounded so ominous)… Couldn’t I stay where I was a bit longer?
I stared at tiny children with envy and a
sense of loss. They still had cozy,
comfortable days ahead of them. I was
plummeting into the dark void of adulthood against my will. I stared into the faces of all fretful,
workaholic parents, thinking condescendingly, You have traveled too far from
the source. Can’t you remember what it
felt like to be fresh, waking up to the world, discovering new surprises every
day? Adulthood is cluttered and
pathetic. I will never forget.
I scribbled details
in small notebooks-crumbs to help me find my way back, like Gretel in the
darkening forest. Squirrels, silly
friends, snoozing cats, violins, blue bicycles with wire baskets, pint boxes of
blackberries, and random thoughts I had while weaving 199 multicolored
potholders on a little read loom. I sold
the potholders door to door for twenty-five cents each, stomping around the
neighborhood, feeling absolutely and stubbornly as if I owned it. No one else had ever loved that neighborhood
as much as I did.
If I wrote things
down, I had a better chance of saving them.
Recently a friend
sent me an exquisite wreath in the mail.
A tag was attached to it: A SMALL AMOUNT OF DEBRIS IS TO BE EXPECTED FROM
THE VIBRATION OF SHIPPING.
Well, of course.
But who tells us
this when we are twelve? Who mentions
that he passage from on era into another can make us feel as if we are being
shaken up, as if our contents are shifting and sifting into new alignments?
Earliest childhood:
skillets and a fat soup pot and two cake pans and a funny double boiler with
lots of little holes in one pan, lids
and a muffin tin and two blue enamel spoons and an aluminum sifter with a small
wooden knob on its handle, all living together in the low cupboard next to the
stove.
A trove of
wonders! Daily I was amazed and happy to
take them out, stack them on the floor, bang them together a little, make a
loud noise. Then I could put them back. There were ways they fit and ways they
didn’t. The door to the cabinet never
shut perfectly. I can close my eyes even
today and feel its crooked wood, its metal latch, and the lovely mystery of the
implements living in silence inside.
My mother worked at
the sink nearby, peeling potatoes, running water over their smooth, naked
bodies. I felt safe. My whole job was looking around.
It strikes me as
odd: I cannot remember the name of a single junior high school teacher. I cannot remember any of their faces
either. Yet I recall all my elementary
and most of my high school teachers very clearly. What happened in between?
In junior high, I
stood proudly in the percussion section in the school band, smooth wooden
drumsticks in my hands. I clearly recall
he snappy beats we played to warm up. I
still feel my cheeks flaming when I was forced to sit down, runner-up in the
spelling bee, because they gave me a military word. I remember the smooth shiny hair on the back
of the head of the girl in front of me in Spanish class better than the
subjunctive tense in Spanish. Some
things stayed, during those rough years of transition, but not the things I
might have dreamed.
What do you want to
be? People always ask. They don’t ask
who or how do you want to be?
I might have said,
amazed forever. I wanted to be curious,
interested, interesting, hopeful-and a little bit odd was okay too. I did not know if I wanted to run a bakery,
be a postal worker, play a violin or the timpani drum in an orchestra. That part was unknown.
Thankfully, after
turning seventeen I started feeling as if my soul fit my age again, or my body
had grown to fit my brain. But things
felt a little rugged in between.
In college I met
Nelle Lucas, who wore billowing bright cotton skirts and lavish
turquoise-and-silver Native American jewelry.
She taught ceramics (favoring hand-building techniques-coiling rolling,
smoothing) and showed us how to prepare our own basic hand-mixed glazes. I think I took her class three times.
Nelle and her
husband had built some modest, rounded Navajo-style hogans out in the Texas
hills, and on weekends, they shepherded little flocks of art students to the
country. We dug a big hole in the ground
to fire our pots and sang songs while the pots baked under the earth. Sometimes the pots disappointed us-blowing
up, or cracking. One person’s pot might
compromise someone else’s-after exploding, fragments stuck to your own precious
glaze. Or someone’s glaze would drip
strange configurations onto your perfect iron oxide surface. It was a tricky operation. Nelle sneaked wisdoms into every line of art
instruction. She wasn’t terribly
impressed with anyone’s pots, but she loved the process and she loved us
all. Also, she made us laugh. She experimented. We slept in a circle, head to toe. We patted whole-wheat chapatis, cooking them
over an open fire for our breakfast.
Nelle loved freshly mixed granola, wild deer, and patience. She urged us to slow down and pay better
attention to everything. She was
radiant, enthusiastic, unpredictable. And
she was older than all our parents.
Somehow, knowing
Nelle when I was in college gave me all the faith about “growing up” I
needed. At every age, a person could
still be whimsical, eccentric. A person
could do and think whatever she wanted.
She could be as spontaneous at seventy as at seven. I felt incredibly relieved.
Midway between
Brady and Mason, Texas-two wonderful hill-country towns-there’s a mysterious
general store called Camp Air. A small
red stagecoach sits out front, and a little sign says the store is closed on
Fridays and Saturdays, but I have never seen it open. Some cows with very short legs are penned up
nearby, next to a “watermelon shed.”
There’s a larger sign: HEY IF YOU NEVER STOP YOU’LL NEVER KNOW WHAT YOU
MISSED. I always stop. And I still don’t know. But I like it. I like it a lot. “Camp Air” has a good ring to it. That’s where I want to live, every day,
inside my timeless brain.
If you have a
voice, and aren’t afraid to spend it...
If you have many
voices and let them speak to one another in a friendly fashion…
If you’re not too
proud to talk to yourself out loud…
If you will ask the
questions pressing against your forehead from the inside…
you’ll be okay.
If you write three
lines down in a notebook every day (they don’t have to be great or important,
they don’t have to relate to one another, you don’t have to show them to
anyone)…
you will find out
what you notice. Uncanny connections
will be made visible to you. That’s what
I started learning when I was twelve, and I never stopped learning it.
Every year unfolds
like a petal inside all the years that preceded it. You will feel your thinking springing up and
layering inside your huge mind a little differently. Your thinking will befriend you. Words will befriend you. You will be given more than you could ever
dream.
-Naomi Shihab Nye
San Antonio, Texas, 2004
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