To School Pictures

Me. Maybe kindergarten?

Your bangs are too long. Your collar is turned the wrong way. The photographer says, “Smile!” and you squeeze your cheeks all the way back to your ears. You’re trying so hard.

When you’re young, your mom brings out the heavy brush or the ponytail holders that hurt. Or your dad tries to teach you to tie a tie so you can put it on just before the picture. Finally he just ties it himself, loosens it and pulls it, still tied, over your head. He puts it in your bookbag. You never take it out. Shirt buttoned all the way to the top.

Me. 6th or 7th grade.

You’re such a dork. You try every time to be your best.

This picture is you in 3rd grade. You in 8th grade. You in 10th. One pose caught against a grey-blue background, passed around in homeroom 3 weeks later. This is how you smile, how you turn your chin, how you hold your shoulders when you know it counts. It is both the most natural and unnatural pose you make. The one you practice the night before and fail at the morning of.

You’re grown now and gone. You live 658 miles away and you have 7 people reporting to you. The Henderson data is due tomorrow and you just now noticed the words “in aggregate.” You weigh whether or not it’s ok to have a beer while you work? Maybe you should wait?

Keith, 14. And his cool ELO t-shirt

But your parents still love each one. Every wallet size is tucked sequentially into the picture holder or hung on the wall or laid out carefully in the family photo album, your name, year and grade number written in pen underneath each one. They love all the you’s. Even now, you roll your eyes when you see them. They can’t understand why you don’t love them all.

To Full-Service Shoe Stores

As a kid, buying saddle oxfords for school, one pair to last the year, we would go to the Stride Rite store in Northpark mall. The salesperson would take out the metal measuring plate and size us up, calibrate the width. “Stand up straight,” she’d say, holding my foot in place.

She’d bring out the shoes and pull up the little stools with the ramp. She’d set down all the boxes, one a size too big, one size too small and one just right. Just to compare. She’d set one on her knee and lace it up, pulling them up and even. She’d put the shoe on the little ramp and I work my foot in while she eased it in with a shoehorn. I’d walk around a bit and my mom would make sure I had at least one thumb’s width worth of space to grow.

Source: The Linen Lavoir

 We leave with colorful helium “Stride Rite” balloons tied to our wrists and fresh shoes in bags.

I had forgotten about those trips. I’ve grown so accustomed to the serve-yourself shoe bars of the big box stores, the ones where I scan the rows of boxes looking for my size. I like these stores for the low-pressure shopping experience. I can roam up and down the aisles as much as I like, try on this or that without holding anyone up. No salesperson is sitting on a little stool waiting for me to decide if I actually like the heel this high, the leather this shiny. Maybe? I don’t know. Shoes are complicated and take time. The look from the side, from the front. The fit at the toe, at the heel. It can take hours.

But after looking for months for a simple low-heeled black shoe that will work with dress pants or a skirt and having no luck, I decide to hit the pricier store. If I don’t buy shoes again for 5 years, it will be worth it, I tell myself.

They have a silver tray of cookies. An urn of hot water and a selection of teas. The customers are many, but the selection is few, which, as it turns out, is not a bad thing. I gather shoe samples and when a salesperson asks to help, I let them tumble out of my arms onto the seat and say, “Work shoe, almost flat, black. No ribbons. No bows. Not too casual.”

“I’ll bring a selection,” he says.

And for three minutes and 27 seconds, I sit. I watch people, some turning a shoe over, looking at the price, putting the shoe back, looking at the next. Some are clearly looking for the shoe to inspire them in some way, that crosshatch woven leather, that dangerously narrow wedge. One woman keeps asking her friend, “Do you like these? What do you think?” The friend is, apparently, very easy to please and therefore, no help at all. She is eating the cookies.

He comes back with seven shoe boxes. He pulls up the little stool and reaches down for my foot and takes out the shoehorn. I work my way through all seven pairs in less than two minutes.

“Too casual. Too high. Too tight at the toe, too wide at the heel. Too sparkley. The edges feel rough. I could never walk around campus in these.”

“Let me try again,” and he disappears.

I do not mean to be difficult. And every time I reject a pair, I decide when the right one comes I will pay a little bit more for all the work I am making him do. I will try on every appropriate shoe in the store, and I will not leave empty handed.

I do not eat the cookies.

To Pleas in Love Songs

I remember the first time I heard, really heard, John Lennon singing, “Oo ohoh, darling, if you leave me, I’ll never make it alo-ho-ho-hone.” I was in middle school and we were vacationing in Gulf Shores, Alabama. I was little more than arms and legs and big pink glasses and a yearning to have grace, purpose. I’d like both but would prefer either.

I found the record, Abbey Road, at a used books and record store we somehow managed to stop in. I bought it for a dollar The pain in that plea exactly matched my own, though I didn’t dare allow myself a crush. Mine was not directed to a person, which perhaps made it more bittersweet.

Years later, in high school, unable to endure the pop music of the early ‘80’s on the radio, I found Janis Joplin, some guy taking her heart piece by piece, and she, strangely strong and broken at the same time, calling him out on it. “Didn’t I make you feel…”  

When I finally saw a picture of her, she was even better than I imagined: her long hair, her round wire sunglasses, a smile that said she was either just coming from or just about to go to a whole mess of trouble. I was no Janice, but I could imagine myself as her, after all, we were both from Texas. We loved poetry. We felt deeply.

I sang along with all of them--Melissa Etheridge, Tracy Chapman, Natalie Merchant--as we waited outside windows, drove down highways, begged our brothers not to go to war. Whatever the cause, whatever the desire, I was in it, trying to button something in my life to those pleas for love.

As I write this, I can hear the music coming out from under the closed door of my son’s room. When we are gone, he plays the music as loud as it will go and it shakes the windows. The dogs hide. The pleas in the songs he listens to are angrier, the bass stronger, the need greater than those I used to play. I try to let it sink into me, a foreign language, strange. Familiar.