A Life Story of Sorts (also known as, no! I don't want to write in LaTeX right now).

Once upon a time there was a girl who lived in a big house in a big neighborhood in a big city. The house was on a street called Red Spruce Lane and there were tricycles in the cul-de-sac.  Business was good for businessmen in the city in those days, and the plan to build a great radio station company was well underway for three young book binders from Decatur. They decided to buy a nice office on the north side of town and the girl and her family moved to another standard-grade house in another standard-grade neighborhood.

This time was before the time of computers, gameboys, and ipod.  It was when the Sony Walkman was just coming out and wow, you could take your cassette with you? Amazing. It was too expensive for her family. They were traditionalists from South Carolina mixed with half-hearted coal-miner kids from Pennsylvania.  They were very much to structure and social pecking orders. Every day when the girl went to school her mom made her wear a dress.  She hated the dress because it meant she couldn't run on the playground with the boys.  Instead she had to sit on the slide and in the dirt with the girls. The playground didn't have a "floor" then like it did now.  It was just some monkey bars, bars, and dirt. When she came home she put on Michael Jordan high tops and biking shorts and t-shirts that she got free from the world wildlife foundation.  She inherited her male cousin's mountain bike and she would ride it from school end until nearly six PM, when she would come inside to enjoy Kid Cuisine and the Carmen Sandiego show.

As she got older, doors, literal and figurative, closed.  The family bought their first computer, an MS DOS machine that didn't even have windows.  It had a few black and green programs for learning arithmetic and typing.  On Saturday mornings before she went to Tae Kwon Do practice, the girl's mom would sit her down in front of the machine and make her practice typing.  She had to do it, because somehow the machine could tell her mom if she practiced or not. On Saturday afternoons, she'd get back on her bike and ride as far as she could, sometimes all the way to Cherokee County, crossing roads with reckless abandon.  She only got stopped for jaywalking once, about 10 years later. In the evenings, she would go to her friend's house for dinner. The friend was Jewish and her parents always made fresh hallah bread.  She would stay sometimes for a few days, and her friends mom never nagged. This was just her other home that was sometimes a better home. She learned how to say a few words in Hebrew and how to bless various parts of the meal.  She often thought about the fact that she loved Judaism-- the sounds of the chants and the somber feeling of the rituals.  And also the foods. Moreover, it was a happy place where ancient rituals superceded social systems.

The times at home were sad. Her father lost his job right after her sister was born. Broadcasting business was bad and it was hard to get rehired in the age headed towards digital media. Ted Turner was entirely to blame. Didn't he own enough stuff in Montana?  The family had hard times for many years.  Money was tight. Everyone was half-alive, and many time removed relatives were constantly passing away. When she got in trouble she was sent outside, shut out from the inside.  It was sometimes cold-- very cold-- so she would huddle by the dog door near the basement and sometimes weasel her way through onto the cement floor. Other times, she'd walk down the street and climb into the big magnolia tree, waiting for her friend's mom to get home. They had fescue lawn that never went brown in the winter.  She learned that green grass was really a key to happiness. The friend's mom put a key for her in the big planter on their deck.  She'd go there sometimes in the afternoons while the mom was work and the friend at Jewish school. Then they would all eat hallah.

Throughout this time she dreamed and wrote stories. Sometimes she'd curl up with a spiral book her friend's mom bought her and just write adventure tales about girl warriors who lived in hollowed out trees on tall mountains. They were friends with the birds and had wolf lovers. There were passionate exchanges of single kisses and glorious sacrifices for good things. They wore shirts made of falcon feathers and leather pants skinned from dragons. They fought glimmering city men who tried to tame them. She thought C.S. Lewis would love her stories, like her friends loved her stories. Her parents never read them, didn't know they existed, didn't ask. What was the most important was passing algebra, not creating things. Why was the minus different than the subtract? Or were they? Doesn't minus mean negative and parentheses mean subtract? An accountants daughter couldn't get it through her head that basic algebra didn't work in terms of loans and equity. And why bother with scientific notation when you could just write out 100,000?  When she was in seventh grade, she started a story exchange with another girl in the school. They had a notebook that told an epic tale about a class of students fighting great enemies in a fantasy world. The notebook circulated to the extent that teachers tried to pursue it from the class front.  It was never found, and the girl found herself achieving detention by other means, none of which were serious. She learned a lot when she wasn't supposed to learn anything, and found that passing school was sort of a side job to learning how to build tree forts and dig deep holes.  One day she built an irrigation system for the blackberries in her yard, but wasn't allowed to power it because they were "weeds."  Also, putting nails in a hose was a bad idea.

There came a day that she realized that something was wrong.  She was driving around at night in a silver volvo, looking for meaning. It was two am and she had incidentally fallen asleep at a friends house. It wasn't her fault that the movies were boring. The town was more brick and cement than trees and grasses, and everything looked silver at night, even the sky, because city-glow was stuck in it. She was listening to angry rock music, wanting to be able to jump and run across fields and fight great enemies.  Instead she lived in the city of plastics.  Doors were shut now.  Televisions that worked had been invented and computers made interesting games. Gaming consoles drove afterschool wanderers to a digital world. It wasn't cool to have a hand-me-down bike or an old silver-volvo.  At best, in her circle, it was okay to be a bit of a somber social slider, slipping in and out of groups without making attachments.  At worst, all the other groups filled their guts and brains with poisons that were unallowed.  She wondered to herself if they had ever seen a close friend be killed by a drunk motorist? She had been at her coach's funeral and she knew that an innocent choice taken too far could take the life of a friend and the lives of his family. The whole place had an aura of soft repulsion to it, like a bubble or a pile of half-molded wax.  You could either fit in and be absorbed, or you were destined to street drive at night, planning your escape. She drove and drove, coming home and going to bed in silence. Something was wrong, and always was. She lay in her bed on the side, waiting for whatever should be coming with greatness. She got the feeling that it wouldn't come.

She wanted to become a hero. A scientist? An athlete? A doctor? Someone who made discoveries and explored the world.  She cared less about what she did than how she got to do it-- if it took her to somewhere beautiful and happy, rugged and glorious, that was the goal. Yet she made choices against that goal-- choices that reflected on financial obligations and the social frenzy that one should stay close to home for familial respect.  It was duty to remain in the soft place and take care of your relationships.  Duty is also rolling sisiphys's wheel in hell though. There was something great in the rugged places.  On the final saturdays in that town she took her bike to Cherokee county, looking for adventure.  She ended up on creek shores or climbing on mill ruins. Some people grow out of the need to be wandering around in the woods, but she didn't.

There are soft places that people get stuck in.  They stay there forever, sometimes because they like soft places, and other times because there's nothing to pull up on to get out. I have lived in a soft place. There are some beautiful old rituals in the soft places to remind us what is real. Seizing those can help us to pretend that the place is not all bad. Or perhaps good luck can rescue us. Or tenacity to wander.  Eventually wandering far enough will probably take you to the edge of the cotton ball. Today everything is crisp. I feel air on my face and see clouds on mountain tops. My coffee tastes vindictive this morning, and I now feel motivated to get back to work.