Category Archives: Essay

Fallen Reader

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pages

By Tamara Shoemaker

Apparently, I’ve been ruined as a reader for all time.

Grrrrr!

Back in the day, I used to sit down with a nice, fresh book from the library. I’d rifle through the pages, inhaling the scent (you fellow book lovers know the scent to which I’m referring — you Kindle lovers who never crack a book will not understand), and I would crawl onto the couch or the bed or the floor or the park bench and settle in for an unparalleled flight of fancy.

The authors never made mistakes. The tone, structure, narrative style never even hit my radar. I simply immersed myself in the story and digested every word with absolute satisfaction.
Fast-forward a few years. I wrote a book, then two, then three, then four, five and six. Every word was studied, every adjective used, then discarded, then used again. Sentence patterns were read, and reread, flipped around, reversed, turned upside-down, then right-side-up. Books were read aloud until my throat ached and my voice rasped. The overuse of adverbs galloped through my nightmares.

Plot lines! Oh, dear goodness, the torture of a hole in my plot line!

A college professor once told me (and perhaps it wasn’t an original quote, but the first time I heard it, it came from him) that to be a good writer, I had to be an avid reader. I took that to heart. Every night for years, after the kids were in bed and I’d closed up shop for the day, I crawled in my bed and cracked open a book. The hour didn’t matter; it might have been midnight or one or two in the morning. I would still read.

Sometimes, I would only make it through two paragraphs. Most often, a chapter. A particularly engrossing book might have kept me awake till four in the morning as I’d tell myself, “Just one more chapter. That’s it.” Until the next cliffhanger, and then I’d burn some more of that midnight oil and keep going.

But the simple, relaxing enjoyment had flown.
Now, I study every adverb, every adjective. “Why did they put ‘slightly’ in there? It would have made a stronger sentence without that word!”

The occasional typo presents itself, and I smirk. “See, I’m not the only one.”
I grow green with envy when a particularly interesting adjective or simile pops up. “Now why couldn’t I have thought of that first?”

I went with my husband to see Catching Fire, the second story in The Hunger Games trilogy. My enjoyment of the movie was tinged with the fact that jealousy ate away at my innards.

Fie on thee, Suzanne Collins! Why must you come up with such an interesting story?

All joking aside, if I had a choice whether or not I would begin this journey again, this relationship with my keyboard, I wouldn’t refuse it.

Yes, it does affect my view of other literature, and yes, it is often frustrating that I can’t simply sit and enjoy.

But on the flip-side, I’ve known few activities more enjoyable than the pleasure of allowing my fantasy unparalleled freedom, of constructing a world in which other keen readers, like myself, can wander freely. Perhaps I will never be another Suzanne Collins, author extraordinaire, but I am Tamara Shoemaker, weaver of ideas.

And I’m fine with that.

Tamara Shoemaker’s books include “Broken Crowns,” “Pretty Little Maids” and “Ashes, Ashes.” She lives in Virginia with her husband, Tim, and their three children.

Mold Time Machine

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mold

By Jason Ropp

In a childhood development class I took in college I learned about retention rates — how much we remember. The professor said that if students sit and listen carefully they will retain only 10 percent of whatever the teacher labored over and meticulously presented. This made sense to me. This is why those gimmicky shows like “Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?” work so well — and why they should probably change their name to, “Did You Bother to Remember Something You Learned 30 Years Ago Better Than This Kid Who Just Did a Report on It?”

There are tricks to improving memory, like group interaction and visualization. Being a guitar teacher, I wish it were a matter of saying something once: “Here kid, the quarter note gets one beat.” We would spend most of our time working on things like hand placement or memorizing Hendrix licks. But I’ve been doing this long enough to know that Hey kid, the quarter note gets one beat, will be repeated, demonstrated, and quizzed 75 times over the next six months — at which point I will still be greeted with blank stares every time I ask.

This is both maddening and job security.

But then there are information and events that need no tricks, an event that leaves an immovable reminder. Sometimes it’s traumatic — the kind of scar you might not brag about — perhaps a failed art on wrists that get covered with long sleeves. Other times it’s nostalgic like the raised white lines on the knuckles of little boys, a mark of manhood shown to every girl who will listen, “Yeah, I’ve got a pocket knife.” But either way they stay with us at the forefront.

And then there are also memories more like midnight campfire conversation that lulls in and out of consciousness, free of awkward impatience with silence — no worries about a reasonable bedtime since no one sleeps well while tent camping anyway.

Campfires are social magic. Long talkers who do so because they are afraid of being alone when the conversation ends can finally sit and stare at coals, trusting that if conversation does end that everyone will stay anyway, entertained by dancing orange and guarded by surrounding black.

And so with fat mouths like myself, enamored with electrons hopping from one spectrum to the next, patiently and silently ruminating on some idea or another — the quiet ones find their voice, or rather just room to speak what I perceive to be prophecy, but is really just good editing. After months and years of being interrupted by my machine gun nest of untested (read: unthoughtful) opinions, they’ve carefully itemized their strongest ideas. And since this moment of listening ears may very well be their last, they might as well offer their dying words. And dying words are usually beautiful, if only because of the sacredness of scarcity.

In the same way, good memories know how to sit and wait until they are desperately needed — bringing themselves to the surface rather than being recalled by will. And the best memories don’t come out of hibernation until they are absolutely sure that they won’t be intruded upon by a text message or some silly conjuring of nostalgia for the sake of an interesting blog post.

But when you catch a whiff of that musty attic smell, you sneeze up a picture of yourself, sleeping in an upstairs room in Oklahoma at your cousins’ house. Or rather pretending to be asleep because you know there is something notable and grown up about sleeping in as long as you want. For whatever reason, it is a skill you consider noteworthy. And noteworthy skills are important when it comes to the cousins you are staying with, particularly if there are both boy and girl cousins involved.

Boy cousins on one hand are continually showing off to each other, talking about all the cars they are going to fix up. It becomes a competition of aspiration really. Because when you are a kid you still haven’t learned that most people don’t actually end up doing even half of the things they say they are going to. Instead of that book they were going to write, they got distracted by their wife walking by in a towel, and so all that imagination was directed toward making love, which resulted in the world’s most predictable surprise. But kids don’t know this and so they experience the joy of a ’68 Camaro and then the envy of the fact that their cousin’s ’68 Camaro has a 1200-cubic-inch engine and a 15-inch subwoofer that thumps as they drive on the Autobahn at 175 mph, after they had it shipped over there on their speedboat. You don’t have to worry about getting speeding tickets on the Autobahn. It was cheaper this way.

But girl cousins, they are different. They are both family and the first girls that you find irresistibly beautiful, though not in any erotic sense. In fact it is because of that taboo that we are free to find them beautiful without being severely self conscious. No one is going to tease you for wanting to spend all day with girl cousins. Nor are they, or you, suspicious about your intentions. So even a chubby boy finds acceptance and friendship with girls who would otherwise find him awkward and embarrassing to be seen with. And your parents, they let you stay up talking late into the night, not afraid like they will be when you finally blurt that you have this girl you want to go to the movies with.

In fact, girl cousins serve as a sort of testing ground for boys who are terrified of being rejected. Because family is family, and so the bond is there and permanent. There is no accepting or rejecting to be done; someone else has arranged the terms of relationship for you. And so freed of relational decision making, you become your best self that a kid can and know that a female your age loves you for or in spite of it.

And all of it comes to you in a flash as the correct proportion of mold and dirt hit your olfactory.

Cultural Harmony in English Class

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English class

By Amanda Miller

Sunlight streamed through the dusty glass slats of the two windows, illuminating the wrinkles of time in the wooden floor panels. Though stale air lingered in the four cement corners and in the folds of the tied-up curtains, fresh life breathed in the middle of the classroom. A few minutes ago, there was just a motley collection of iron-framed chairs around an embarrassed uneven table. But now I saw the chipped yellow paint on the chairs and the elbow-worn spaces on the table as proof of so much more.

As the students meandered in, they all argued about what time English class was actually supposed to start. Incidentally, everyone but the quietly amused American teacher thought they had arrived in plenty of time. We were encouraged multiple times to give the extra-tardy potentials “just two more minutes.”

As we killed time, the young-adult students explained why the previous week’s class didn’t happen; apparently last Tuesday was a major Muslim holiday. All Somalis here in Nairobi, Kenya, stayed home that day, whether because there was more chance of getting police attention and not having legitimate identification, or because their families were celebrating Eid, or because everyone else would be celebrating and there would be nothing to do anyway. Neither the men nor the women had any idea why they celebrated Eid, just that it was something they’d always done.

Eventually the grace period ended, and class began. The first step was to go around the table and introduce ourselves, from the girl whose eyes were all that escaped from the dark burka, to the young man with a swanky watch and button-down collared shirt, to me in my flip-flops and stifled enthusiasm for being back in a Somali environment. Two of the three women were reserved and hard to hear, while Eyes hid her face much more than her thoughts. The three men were all dressed more Western and confident in their English.    The real excitement in this first section of the lesson was when they found out that I lived on a dairy farm; the previous semi-decorum of the classroom erupted in eager questions. How many cows did we have, did we milk them by hand, what did we do with all the milk? The guy who seemed the ringleader of the students was intently concerned that the milking machines might suck the life out of the cows, and wasn’t necessarily convinced by my asseverations of otherwise.

“I have just one question, even if it’s like a joke.” Eyes held out her hand and commanded attention. “If you take so much milk, why are you not fat?” I shrugged and acknowledged that she’s not the only one with that question.

Class progressed and we moved from general interaction to reading a story together around the table to discussing an American proverb. The story was a traditional Muslim folktale that all the students had heard before but never seen in writing. We took turns sounding out a sentence or two (or more, if they really got on a roll). The teacher would ask the most advanced students to provide a vocabulary word in Somali when the blank intonation betrayed the occasional lack of meaning behind a set of phonics. Often an erudite tone reigned in quickly proffered additional translations, but no one seemed to mind. The room took on an almost sacred aura as history and oral tradition revealed themselves both on the page to the Somalis and in understanding to the Americans.

There was no cultural divide, however, when we came to the proverb of the week. I had incorrectly anticipated some need for exegesis on “When in Rome, do as the Romans.” Immediately voices around the lesson table piped up in easy explanation that it’s just like a Somali saying. “When you go where people don’t have eyes…” Naturally.

I have to admit that one of my favorite parts of class were probably the last couple segments. I mean, have you ever heard a motley chorus of burka-ed and accented East Africans jumping in enthusiastically along with a taped chorus of Country Roads? Once they sounded out the lyrics and heard the tune a few times, they sounded just as good as John Denver’s recording. Much more memorable, at any rate. I couldn’t help but wonder how much they longed for the same thing, what they used to call home. Most of the students had left Somalia for Kenya when they were just children, often fleeing for their lives or just looking for a place lacking guns instead of food. And they know they will probably never be able to go back to the place where they belong. It was a hauntingly poignant song, somehow laced with hope.

The dismissal prayer also filled the dusty room with a paradoxical beauty in sorrow. The teacher asked the male ringleader to pray for us, knowing that one of his life goals is to educate people about the Koran without forcing them to convert. He seemed appropriately unsure about praying to Allah in conjunction with the white people sitting beside him, but folded his hands and spoke anyway. Maybe I’m not supposed to be OK with it. Nevertheless, I found it to be a very meaningful and humbling connection. He didn’t pray for anything sacrilegious or destructive or evil. He prayed for needs and desires that are human. He blessed us, these female Western Christians. Socially, culturally, religiously, that is so not supposed to happen.

Class was over then. Throughout the hour, I soaked up the beauty of Somali faces, accents, and personalities as they whirled around me in a flurry of realtime. I feel like my heart had a silly grin the whole time; there is something deep within me that finds joy and life in an environment like this. Not only is there something restoratively right about active peace, but God is truly being glorified by these diametrically different cultures respectfully engaging each other. How can you not feel soul excitement?

I could sit here and type and type about this one ESL class period. I could describe in more detail the intricacies of the atmosphere and personalities, or I could analyze perspectives of different sociological theories and implications. I could get all emotive and express how this made me feel then and now, or I could lay out my confusion about what to actually do with this. I have so much to say — but I’m out of words. I just wanted to share, share who I am and who they are and who we are together, like we all did that day around the worn wooden table.

Amanda Miller lives with her husband in Kansas, and can’t wait for summer to arrive and remind her of Kenyan temperatures. She works at a local train-depot-turned-coffee-shop and is looking forward to gardening this summer.