Author: Anne Elrod Whitney

Anthropologists from Space

What will the anthropologists that visit us from space make of it all?

What will they make of our face masks… protection from a virus, or just adornments for our mouths, like an heirloom brooch or cheap flashy earrings?

What will they make of all these words on our t-shirts: Coke, Obama/Biden ‘08, Penn State, IZOD, 6th Annual 5k Race, It’s 5 o’clock somewhere!? Will they see advertisements, souvenirs? Or perhaps holy creeds, or clan-identifying garb? Or will they think they’re our names, like the name on a dog’s collar?

What will they make of the braces on my teeth? Will they know they were good for my teeth, badly needed and the best our age has? Or will they see a weird fashion, like big plumes on hats, or some kind of punishment for a gossip or a liar?

What would they make of the stack of books on my table? A true crime story, a feminist memoir, a history of the Maya, a novel about moms, a book of crossword puzzles, an empty journal. Will they look like instruction manuals? Orders from above? History or philosophy, of my culture or someplace else?

And what of me? Will they see me as a writer, teacher, mother and friend? As smart and strong and beautiful, blossoming? Or as a crone, or a symbol, as very young or very old? Oh, a priestess!

Maybe they’ll find our museums, but with all their labels worn away. Maybe they’ll have watched TV en route, like Mork. Or was it Alf?

I’ve looked at artifacts of Ancient Rome, a museum of modern art, and Mayan ruins in the same week, and I have questions!!

What will they think of Groot mixed in at this non-ancient Mayan tourist stop?
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From the crayon box

Akumal, MX

I know I’m not the only person who loves the brand new box of crayons, the bigger pack the better. All those tips not yet worn down, all those colors laid out in their tidy rows. And that brand-new-crayon smell!

I had a favorite crayon color: blue-green. It was in the 64-pack with sharpener, of course, and in the satisfyingly square 48-back too. Its color was more like turquoise than aqua. More azure than teal. Closer to cornflower than to royal blue. It was blue like a blue sky, but not like the ones in Pennsylvania. It was the blue of a summer mountain sky, late in the day over a body of water. It was blue-green and not at all green-blue, which was a crayon color of its own.

It’s one of the blues just at the horizon of a Caribbean ocean view on a sunny day. It’s not the foamy greens up close or the baby blues just below the clouds. It’s just past the second line of breakers, yet lighter somehow.

Blue-green almost like dreamy old eyes remembering. Almost like the egg of a robin, which is bluer. Almost like the muddy turquoise of my kitchen walls, left behind by the people who had my house for fifty whole years before me— but that’s greener. Blue-green like the scales of an imaginary dragon. Like a soft shirt I loved but outgrew so soon.

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“I’m getting to know a different side of you,” he said

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Which of the ones folks know is me? The one who writes, a lot, boldly? The one who has three books in progress but works on none? In one place I’m a leader, in another, behind. Among teachers, an author and friend; among academics, someone who had potential. Or still does? Senior colleague or deadwood? I can’t say.

To a regular person (do I know any of those?), in a regular town (not my college town of super-people), I’m a person who has written a book. Ok, four of them. An Author.

Which of the ones folks know is me? The one whose kids skip grades? Who throws good parties, or volunteers at church or school? Or one who cries, overwhelmed, that she can’t do it until the laundry is put away? And the laundry can’t be put away because it’s piled up; it’s un-beginnable. And I can’t wash laundry until laundry is put away, and I can’t tidy up with all this laundry everywhere, and I can’t work with everything so untidy, and I can’t tidy because I have too much work, and I can’t work because I’m too overwhelmed, and, and, and. That one? And did I take my meds today?

The teacher-writer? The full professor? The ex-wife? Wayward daughter? The program lead, the one who forgot, the committee chair, the fuckup? The girlfriend? The single mom, the MILF, the middle-aged, the grey? The extra ten pounds, the “hx hysterectomy,” the grumpy, the short kid, the bookworm, the blonde? Yes, that’s my real color, no highlights, no makeup. No filter. Except when I give in to wanting a filter. And on Zoom. Every professor deserves a damn Zoom filter.

Which one is me? The wounded kid or this take-no-shit feminist? The liberal, the radical? The Christian, the Sunday school teacher, the mom bringing cupcakes? High test scores, or self-hatred? ADHD or genius? Metal head or choir singer? Optimist?

A light under a bushel, or a fucking volcanic eruption of Big Feelings?

I had a magical friend who gave me the best gift when I was away at summer grad school in Vermont (camp for adults!), missing my female partner and sleeping with a man who didn’t deserve me. (He would write me, five years later, only to learn that by then I had married):

“Anne,” she proclaimed. You’re allowed to be complex.”

And I have been!

From my chair, Akumal, MX

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Clumps of sargassum afloat

Sips of mojito

Two marimbas playing the Super Mario theme

Wisps of cloud and dollops of cloud

Strawberry ice cream

Green coconuts on a shade tree

A spectrum of skin from burnished mahogany to piggy pink

Iguanas mating not far from a cool pool

A pelican cruising for fish, low and smooth

Magnificent Magnificent Frigate Birds

Warm sand chunked with washed-up coral

Woozy bouts of half-sleep or reading

Nothing noisy, nowhere to be

Walking home from school

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This one last year, I get to walk up the hill at three o’clock to wait at the school doors for dismissal. Ding dong, ding dong, ding dong! “Allllllll right students, please listen carefully! At this time all kindergarten is dismissed!” Then “all busers! Busers please!” “Curbside pickup!” “Vans!” And the kids stream out, almost all of them so much smaller than mine now, carrying artwork and too-big backpacks, wearing sweatshirts that say Pokemon! or Penn State! or Pegasus Power! 

“All walkers! Walkers are dismissed!” and immediately my son runs out the doors, with his glasses fogging and his long hair flying back. He runs like he’s not sure how long those doors will remain open, like they’re closing, Indiana Jones-Style, just in time for him to dodge through and maybe, if he’s lucky, reach back for his hat. He runs past me, then turns and looks. He’s waiting.

This really is the wooded path! Back in fall, when the year seemed like it would last much monger.

And we start our golden walk home, my favorite ten minutes. We go down the big hill on the wooded path. We go across the street where the guard greets us with his reflective jacket and handheld stopsign (the guard who always holds up the traffic for me even without my kid). We go past the hidden Little Library, tucked under a tree where folks in cars can’t see. We go walking or skipping or running, in coats and gloves or in t-shirts and sandals, over ice or crunchy leaves or hot pavement. We go singing or excitedly recounting recess or planning the afternoon or sullen quiet. We go home to our house on the corner on a hill; we go into our home full of love. 

We walk together home from school, just like this, just this one last year.

Resting

Eating fruit

Swimming with tropical fish

Drinking juices

Listening to waves’ mesmerizing non-rhythm

Finishing a book and immediately opening the next one

Having a bite of sushi, or an avocado

Tapping toes to music wafting over from somewhere

Stretching languidly

Noticing breezes

Feeling temperature shifts as clouds drift across the sun and off again

Breathing slowly

Drifting almost to sleep

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How Hot Was It?

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Today I’m remembering the way it felt to be nine, ten years old in a Texas summer. Those days seemed so long. And so free: reading half the day (every day), going to the pool. It was hot, so hot. 

So hot it even felt hot in the pool sometimes. 

So hot we’d remark, “I wish I could shave my head.”

“God, that would feel good. But then you’d have to be bald. I wish I could take off my hair, then put it back on just as long as before. Or longer.”

“I wish I could take off my skin.”

It was so hot the crayons in my mom’s purse melted into a wax blob.

So hot your legs would burn on the vinyl backseat. That you would put on your deatbelt through a towel in your hand. If we had work seatbelts back then, which we didn’t.

So hot your popsicle melted before you could eat it all. 

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So hot a big, cold dill pickle was just the thing we wanted at a swim meet. And a Dr. Pepper or a Big Red soda to wash it down.

It’s cold today, cold like every day from mid-September to May, and I have a nine-year-old. His hair is long and thick, and he never wants to shave it off.

Imponderables

How is it that every task takes ten times longer than I think it will… except for the tasks that I most doom-crastinate about, which end up actually taking approximately 2.7 minutes each?

How is it that I feel better now that my ex has a new person, not worse?

How is it that a whole bag from Sam’s Club sat undetected in my garage for more than six months?

How is it that my feminism has not eroded my desire to be thin and young by now?

How is it that the older I get, the more new and raw and I feel?

How is it that the more I live through trouble, the more I’m grateful to past Anne for all the trouble she got me through?

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Ah, high school memories

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Remember when I had my hair shaved on one side of my head, wore clothing all the wrong sizes, and hated everyone my age?

Remember when I joined the golf team? Very upstanding! But I never broke 100, and felt dumb with the other girls, and played one tournament, then had a panic attack in the van for the next one, then stopped going. The picture in the yearbook didn’t show those parts.

Remember when I made region and district choirs every year from seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth, eleventh… but not twelfth, because I had never opened the music until the day before?

Remember when I got kicked out of gifted and honors and extra and special? Just regular was all that was left. Just regular, and I was nowhere near enough regular for regular.

Remember when I asked if I could graduate early?

Remember when I asked to change schools?

Remember in Algebra II, or was it Geometry, when Chris Thomas walked behind me and spit into my hair, and the teacher kept on teaching and I kept on sitting there?

Remember when I had an F in English? Also, remember when I won the English award?

Remember when I forgot to fill out the National Merit Finalist forms till the day they were due, so I wrote a poem on them in pencil? It was about how little an application could reflect a real person’s potential.

Remember when I ran out of gas on the way to my interview at Rice? “Must not really have wanted to go there,” remarked an adult who should have known better.

Remember the kids I had crushes on, the kids I kissed, made out with, had sex with but didn’t love?

Remember when I skipped classes to smoke under some stairs or in the parking lot? To sneak to my car and read Greek mythology, with the seat leaned all the way back so I couldn’t be seen?

Remember when I ran away from home to love purely forever and ever, only to be found and returned promptly to home, forfeiting my 16th birthday and all remaining privileges for what seemed like forever?

Remember when I removed the license plates from my car so that I couldn’t be found after driving getaway for convenience store beer raiders?

Remember all the times I stormed out of a class, or lost my temper, or burst into tears? And read all the textbooks, and did no homework? And slept through discussions, and wrote only the papers we could work on in class?

Remember when I felt like an alien pretty much all the time, everywhere?

How do you remember those days?