Mercy Blog, Part 3: A Nearly Christian Apology for Eighth Grade

They taste about the same, don't worry.

So, the other day I was in Piggly Wiggly (or as U.L. calls it, The Pig) to purchase an eggplant, and while fondling the produce, legally – i.e., all fruits and vegetables were at least 18 days or older – I overheard two people, down by the locally grown peanuts bin (the peanuts were locally grown, not the bin – it was cardboard) discussing the stupid behavior of one of their other friends…I imagined the friend was the topic of conversation as the result of some weekend revelry.

One said, “And I was like, God, this is stupid. You’re being so eighth grade about it. Grow up.”

The other said, “Yeah, she needs to grow up.”

The banter didn’t register much higher on the Good Ways to Converse Chart.  Then again, maybe they weren’t people. Maybe they were kids.

I selected my eggplant, it weighed 1.3 pounds which was good enough for my experimental ragout (this is the correct way to spell this word, FYI, not ragu). And unlike Aggy’s pronouncement, it’s way more than just plain spaghetti sauce.

As I put the eggplant in my basket, I had this thought: What the heck has happened to people that eighth grade should be so maligned? I can’t tell you how often I hear people refer to bad behavior, or misjudgment, or rudeness, and so forth and so on, as “being eighth grade” of them.

Personally, I loved eighth grade. Seventh grade (and even fourth) for me were the ones that were, for lack of a better term, stinky.

Yet, in my rather unusual circles of socialization (both from strangerous people and those I know well), time and again, I hear eighth grade used as the butt of all things petty and ridiculous. By the way, strangerous is another word I made up. Sorry.

I guess it’s because, for the majority of us, eighth grade is the peak of hormonal shifting?

I really don’t know.

So, on the drive back to my house, I thought long and hard about my eighth grade year.  Actually, eighth grade pretty much dominated my thinking right on through to what, if I do say so myself (another confusing parenthetical), was a delicious ragout. NOTE: I’d forgotten to purchase chickpeas, and so if you’re interested in knowing what I substituted for them, I’ll just go right ahead and tell you: black-eyed peas.

(They were a delicious replacement).

So, for me, eighth grade, was not a bad year. I mean, not school-wide, publicly…personally, though, I can see a resemblance between the approach to unruly behavior in eighth grade as well as those of us entering our 30s – a.k.a Real Life.

For time’s sake, let’s take advantage of the concept of Summary, here, in discussing my eighth grade year: sexually confused the entire time (that’s not really faded, yet); I’d just returned from trying to live with my father in Germany (that’s not really faded yet, either); I was playing tennis; I was not doing well in Math, though, we were still learning to write checks in class, for some reason – how obsolete; I was in T.A.G, which stood for talented and gifted – we got to skip a whole day of class each week to do smarter things like leave the school and eat at Pizza Hut, a cultural field trip of sorts; I made fun of Band People; I knew a white girl named LaShara; I had headaches constantly; started shaving for real, my whole body; wanted to be a girl, really badly; brought my lunch, almost everyday; was a librarian’s assistant which basically involved a two-voiced woman (reverse tracheotomy) who made me re-bind books and regaled me with stories of the two natural disasters she’d survived, one on the Coast and the other in Kansas; I had serious dreams like the time I dreamed a teacher’s father drowned and then he did, Firestarter, anyone?; also, my sister taught at the same school which I’m sure had a lot to do with tempering my behavior.

You can't travel the world without a good spine.

So, you see, it was an interesting time to be in school. Avoiding truancy, but still, when in the middle of statewide standardized testing, looking out the window and wishing with all your heart that you were the guy on the lawnmower, because at any minute, he could decide enough was enough and stop, and have some Gatorade or something.

Despite the relatively low-key eighth grade year that I had, one thing affected all of us (maybe it was the heat, or the lack of uniforms) – Understanding Our Bodies and Emotions.

Oh, god, I mean any little thing was magnified a 1000% during junior high, depending on when you cut through the chrysalis.

Anger was a big one for me. We’ve never been the best of friends, as it is. As a matter of fact, anger has kept me from being truly close to a lot of people, I’m afraid. And I know myself well: my kind of anger isn’t a palpable one; it’s deeply seeded and hidden behind a great deal of social politics.

And humor.

I think, sometimes, it’s a lot easier to fool people than befriend them. Because I come from a school of thought where distance is a necessity. But, it takes less effort to hide in plain view, to hide right out in public than to shut every door and window.

That reads a lot sadder than it actually is. It’s not that I hate people; I try very hard to do the right thing. I try very hard to live the Golden Rule. But, there’s not a lot of reciprocation, these days.

And so, what are you left to do but to step back, as often as you can, and take a survey. What’s really important about living, not just about Life. 

I did that recently, post-argument, with a very close friend, a best friend, even, and I was glad that after the dust settled, we realized that we’d accidentally put a lot of “Importance” on things that were, honestly, a bit on the “Petty” side.

I think people do that a lot, because, whether or not you want to believe this, the Deep South is a rather repressed society. We don’t know how to argue; we know only how to acquiesce. We worry about keeping the peace, not establishing it. Unless you’re U.L. who just worries himself right through a fairly good heart, for his age.

You know, they really ought to teach this stuff in Civics. (If they still taught Civics, that is). Or Home Ec. (Again, if it hadn’t gone the way of the abacus).

The beginning of the end.

And, I guess, though I didn’t know it then, that this is something I learned in eighth grade, and I think it’s a good thing to know, to have learned: How to Argue; How to Fight; and How to Recognize the Difference.  Those are forms of Mercy, after all.

Yeah, that and How to Write a Check, those are, like, the two things I learned in eighth grade.

And to tell the truth, I kinda miss it.

Part Two: Aunt Lola

When and if I remember a dream it’s because it has some potent element to it; I’d like to think I made that point, clearly enough, in yesterday’s blog. And certainly, I would think so with the Billie Holiday dream; and those precious and upsetting few that have come true…all of which I’ve shared with you.

God is in there somewhere.

But the potency, when it’s there, is one that is, that must be, for me, necessarily Fascinating and Disturbing in its minutiae, as it invades my mind, my lobes, with its obsessive and small details; isn’t that where God is, according to van der Rohe? I make no bones about how my dreams are often too vivid and verbal, to the point of Hamletian madness; I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if I lose what little sense I have left by Christmas.  (But, I would imagine, we all have dreams like that…and that we’ll all be mad by Christmas.  That seems to be the universal deadline).

So, true to fashion, here’s the Aunt Lola dream, one that has bothered me and moved me in myserious ways, since I dreamed it a couple of years ago. It has a residue that I can’t shake from off my soul.

I dreamed that I was running late for class, for Kay’s class, (this was toward the end of my graduate degree). I got to campus and there taped on the door was a scripted note telling me that she’d changed locations at the last minute, to an abandoned nursing home, one that I’d driven by many times, and wondered why it still stood. It was such an eyesore.

It seems as if she’d made this decision because of some research-oriented assignment – I vaguely could recall, I thought, her mentioning this, the research assignment, in a class the week before but in that announcement we were going to meet at the zoo in Jackson; no one, though, was upset either by the fact that we hadn’t gone to the zoo, as promised, nor by the fact that we were sitting on the floor in the large dining hall of this abandoned nursing home. Of course, being an Educator, we’re always striving to enhance the informational exchange rate, so to speak, so nothing really surprises us: zoos, nursing homes, a cow with a glass window in her one of her stomachs (this can be actually and physically viewed and touched at the Wise Center, the famous Vet School at Mississippi State University – look it up).  

Anyway, I’m late, and there’s the obligatory long hall that I’m desperately running down, (is that Archetypal? It seems so collectively Jungian) and there’s Kay, sitting crosslegged in the doorway of the dining hall. She’s motioning for me to hurry. We’re in the process of giving presentations today, and I’m next, she mouths. Did I forget?

I did, but I’m almost to the room when I realize that I’ve got to go the bathroom, immediately, and I mouth this back, in response, to Kay, who grins (in real life, I often have to go to the bathroom; I say it’s because I have a tipped kidney), but she’s also silently adamant that I not miss my turn to go. She appreciates order and routine.

I won’t miss my turn, I assure her. I just need a minute or two.

I come out of the bathroom and am on my way to the “class”room, to give my presentation, when a voice to my right calls my name. I turn and it’s my Aunt Lola, who passed away several years ago, at the age of 98. She’s the same age, now, standing there looking at me, but without any complications, and most notably, without that crook in her back that bent her toward the grave before the rest of her was ready. I’d heard her say that many times before.

She looks radiant, youthful, active, if you will. She’s wearing a blue nightgown and matching robe, and again, I can’t quite describe it, but she’s beautiful, a light. There’s a corona, edging beyond her, that I am afraid to enter, to approach, and yet, I’m delighted that this fear has put me at a crossroads, a carrefour, especially in the presence of a woman I loved so deeply, as a child. This must be what happens to the dead; they become a tendril to their corporeal life. I’m sure they do that just as an effort to put us at ease, but slightly. I’m not saying I believe in apparitions anymore than I’m saying I don’t.

I cry, “How can you be here? How can you be alive?”

I’m ecstatic that she is, and I want everyone to know that God must be real, how else could she have returned; its’s so natural a thing to believe, blinded as I am by her softness. I mean, there’s no other way she could be talking to me if not for the fact that all my life the faith I’ve held in Christ and God is actual. She’s proof, right?

So, I rush down the hall to the class because I want them to know the truth, this truth.

You've been here before, right?

I’ve rarely been this fervent in real life, about anything, but all of a sudden, in my dream, this is what I must tell everyone. I must bring them into the hall and show them Aunt Lola. She will prove all things. I know this, you understand, in the dream. But Aunt Lola refuses.

Kay looks at me, upset, that I’d interrupt her class at so crucial a time.

“We’re doing presentations, for chrissake, Kris,” she says.

Aunt Lola pulls me back into the hall of this abandoned nursing home, and looks up into my face. I’m now racked with guilt. I admit to her how sorry I was that I didn’t ‘do right by her dying.’ I was indifferent; I was immature; I was afraid to see her stilled, against that plush casket. I tried looking at her in the casket, at Nowell’s, but I couldn’t. I was too overwhelmed; I’d never before been flooded with such simple reasons to not want someone to die: her homemade meatloaf, those beds and beds of calla lillies, helping her pick up pecans from the front yard.

It didn’t make sense. How amazingly, these simple things made her great in my eyes. I should have looked at her in the casket, I know, I should have. She overlooks this weakness, “Forget that. I have to tell you something.”

I can hardly look at her, she’s so bright, and she says, “You almost died the other night.”

This is the residue part. It is a chilling thing to have someone tell you that you almost died.

“I’ve come to tell you that it’s ok; it’s not time yet. Soon, but not yet. You need to live, first.”

“I am living,” I argue. I’m upset now, not just that I almost died, but also because she’d waste such time on so old a cliche. I’m hysterical at this point. She remains gentle; the dead, in my dreams, are always so gentle. She won’t tell me what I almost died from, what almost was responsible for taking my life; instead, she implies that I am not appreciating the normal, the mundane, and the ordinary.

So, now, of course, I intend to be suspicious of everything plain.

This shoe closet is messy. Sadly, it's also mine.

She tells me that’s ridiculous, guessing at my suspicion. She implies that God has put in these plain things a necessary, if to me, rudimentary, exuberance that surpasses human understanding. She is telling me to slow down, to take notice, and to take a breath.

And so that morning, when I woke up, I let my initial disappointment ebb, and found that I was quite happy, content. I crawled out of bed, and that’s when I rediscovered, and rather accidentally, a lost pair of favorite shoes.

Would that work as something simple? I felt that it would.

And that meant the whole world to me.