Preamble: I tricked you. Once last blog for the road. :)
I wish there was a book called "Why We Write," a coffee table book for English geeks. I wish it had smartasses (like Daniel) and sweeties (like Kristen), as well as high school teachers, professors, authors, and children. I wish we all had written such a book.
I remember what saved me, both figuratively and literally. I was in Lakeland Detention Facility, New Jersey, and hated everything. A vagabond, a thief, a liar, a druggie, and all of the "Mes" that I was sat in a chair in required form for a lesson--a brief essay about myself--that ended up balled and hurled at a young English Teacher Intern whose name I have sinfully forgotten. He pulled it out of the trash and said: "No one will ever hear you if you don't write." He found my secret: I needed to be heard, to scream in ways that could not be quelled or ignored, and I needed it like air and candy.
It's what saved me, often, but no more than the night I cried on my side in a Project apartment with a baby big in my belly and no way out. No money. No food. No husband. No peace. Laid there all night, watched the sun come up against that institution-white sheetrock, and dug in for a reason to breathe. And there it was. That teaching intern tiptoed up from behind all that madness, still 20 something in my memory world, and whispered to a grown-ass woman: "No one will ever hear you if you don't write."
I also remembered a story my momma told me about motherhood. Good, salty, Southern advice.
You are on a plane. Suddenly, there is trouble--one air mask comes down-- in front of your panicked, precious little girl. Who gets the air first? You do, Kathi. You cannot save her if you cannot breathe. Shocking. Blasphemy. Truth.
(That was the night I decided to sell everything I owned, move all those babies to Auburn, and march up to Admissions with a 7th grade education as if there no such thing as failure. I wrote and wrote and wrote myself right into a doctorate and a class of Englishy youngsters, circa Summer 2011. And two of those babies are now students here, War Eagle, instead of project kids.)
Do we know when someone saves us? Not usually. Do we know when we save someone? Hardly ever. Does it really matter? Not a bit. Just the saving.
I know that we all have different reasons, this motley band of Englishy sorts, and all of us have a line in the sand about how far we are willing to push the envelope in our little, worrisome, and orderly worlds. Perhaps some of us will never save someone through writing truth or justice or hope or rough and brittle commentary. If that were our only goal, the end would not justify the means. But, if we are lucky, if we are truly blessed, in the end we save the one that needed it most.
Ourselves.
