Mountains

When I was in elementary school, there was always that day during fall semester when I’d be in the hallway and the double-doors would be open and I’d feel the outside air and realize immediately that it felt different than it had the day before. Sharper and fresher. Not yet cool, but something closer to it than we’d felt in 6 months. That was always what felt like the first day of autumn for me, and it was one of my favorite days every year. Leaving my office today, I felt it. 

Blue Ridge Mountains

Adirondacks from the Amtrak Adirondack route

I told a friend recently that I’ve been thinking a lot about mountains. What about mountains, he asked, and I couldn’t figure out how to answer. About how there’s something sinister about them, something they hide that I can never reach. For a long time, I only saw mountains through the safety of car windows. There were the Smokies during my childhood, the Blue Ridge during high school, and a very gradual creeping upward through the Appalachians--the Shenandoah, the Catskills, the Adirondacks. I spent a year working in the smallest foothills of the Smokies feeling that lure drawing me closer, and then a summer in an Appalachian Trail town at the northern tip of the Shenandoah. The dirty backpackers who wandered into town to get ice cream knew something I didn’t about the secrets the mountains were hiding. I lived in DC the next year and started driving the three hours back to the mountains on weekend day-trips in search of something I couldn’t name and armed only with a camera and warnings from Google that I probably shouldn’t be attempting the things I aimed to do. I didn’t care about the warnings. I thought a lot about time. About how these mountains were born something like 500 million years ago and they were probably as tall as the Alps. About how they’ve grown tired now and softer. Do mountains ever wear down to nothing? What will the Alps look like in 100 million years? (What does 100 million years mean, and is there a recognizable Earth within in?) Will new mountains be born? These mountains are the oldest thing I’ve ever touched, and they know too much. Autumn is always when I crave their secrets the most. 

Shenandoah

But the Rockies are a different species. I’d only ever seen them once in 9th grade when my dad and I drove to Grand Junction to pick up a motorcycle he bought on Ebay. I stared out the window of my grandpa’s tiny pick-up truck that we’d borrowed for the drive and watched the walls of rock and snow get bigger and bigger as we wove through them on the interstate. There were 18-wheelers on the runaway ramps, the life my dad once lived. I wasn’t afraid. I wasn’t afraid of much back then. On our way back, we stopped in a resort town just to ride to the top of the ski lift. We stood at the cafe at the top of the Breckenridge lift in our too-thin jackets for a few minutes taking in the view before riding back down. I remember my shallow breathe, but I don’t remember the view. I wonder where images like that go. 

The first time I saw the Rockies

I went back to Colorado last month, this time to see the mountains up close, this time for more than one view. The Rockies feel young and wild, taunting and unpredictable. Sometimes I felt like I was in something closer to a rainforest, and sometimes I felt like the wind would freeze my blood. I’d never slept in a tent before, never carried a backpack with every item I’d use for three days, never drank water I filtered by hand from a stream, never seen the stars from 11,000 feet, never known what snow feels like in August or how bright the moon really is. Maybe part of what draws some of us to mountains and horrifies us at the same time is the way they expose things we don’t know and can’t know and will never know. 

Greys and Torreys

Mirror Lake

Evacuations and Memory Hoarding

My phone has been uploading photos to Google Photos for three days now. They were uploading to iCloud for two days before that until I realized that while iCloud is synced, any picture I delete from my phone also disappears from the cloud. (Upon discovering this, I frantically recovered 30 videos from my deleted folder.) Over 9,000 items I’m uploading—400 of them videos. I’ve deleted nearly every app and all my music, but I can’t bring myself to delete even one picture (or text) until it’s safe elsewhere. I would just put them on my computer, but my computer doesn’t have storage space either, and my external hard drive is too full for me to back it up and make more room. So here we are. My phone is too full to even receive emails. Because I don’t understand how technology works, I imagine the emails waiting patiently in a traffic jam for their turn to get through the road work. 

momentos from freshman fall 

You see, I’m a hoarder. Not the kind you see on TV who has decade-old rat carcasses scattered under the floor-to-ceiling trash in my house, but the kind who absolutely still has that ticket from that theater performance you went to together during freshman year of college. It will be in one of several dozen boxes of similar paraphernalia that is certainly, indisputably, definitively NOT trash, even though neither of you could explain the plot now. It’s a matter of sentimental principle. 
I’m a hoarder of memories. 

When I was little, my friends and I played these semi-morbid mental exercise games of hypothetical truths. Who would you save first in a fire? What would you grab first if you could only grab one object? What would you pack if you only had 5 minutes to leave? 

Though I’ve lived in prime hurricane territory for two thirds of my life, I’ve only evacuated for 4 storms. First was Georges when I was 8. I remember that my family stopped for the night at some nondescript hotel in Tuscaloosa, and I was enraptured by the baby bat hanging on the side of the walkway. I don’t remember packing anything, or if it even occurred to me to consider what to pack. Then there was the storm in early high school (which Google tells me must have been Ivan). We stayed in a church shelter in Florence. I don’t remember being worried. The storms themselves were uneventful, almost hypothetical. Another mental exercise. What if this were real? What if this weren’t a precaution? 

And then there was Katrina. Packing felt different. Should I bring all my valuables, or just put them on the bed away from the windows? Should we bring Moses (our pet bird) with us or just put him in the back hallway away from any windows with enough food for a few days. We’ll be back tomorrow, after all. 

Journals from my 4 years in college--the others are in a separate box

We were heading toward Monroe in northwest Louisiana, but we never made it. The traffic was bumper to bumper until we finally stopped to sleep in the gym of a church just across the Mississppi river from Natchez. I stood with my mom in the nearest Wal-mart entertainment center for half the night watching the identical images flash across tv screens of all sizes. We watched as the Mississippi Coast was eradicated. We watched until we understood there was nothing left and the flood waters started pouring into the homes of the evacuees standing next to us. We were lucky—72 trees down in our yard, but our house was untouched (Moses was fine and singing in the dark). But there was a collective feeling that began in that Wal-mart that our lives would never be quite the same again. 

And then just a few weeks ago was Barry. No one ever knows what to do with a storm like Barry. Barry—the name of someone’s jovial uncle. Or the elderly neighbor who rescues stray dogs and bakes delicious cookies. Barry is surely harmless. But then there were the floods earlier that week, not even related to Barry, but unpredicted and ominous. I left my house for work that morning and spent the next 4 hours stuck in my car on the street car tracks trying to escape the flood waters. One of my friends drove through the flood to his apartment where he grabbed a go-bag and headed straight for the airport—all of 5 minutes thought and preparation, no hesitation. One friend left promptly the next morning, and another left that night. I hadn’t intended to leave. My landlord assured me that my house has never flooded. But the Mississippi River was so high… what if? 

Nothing would happen, I reminded myself as I bought Tupperware containers two days before the storm. This house won’t flood, I told myself as I piled all the books from my lowest two shelves on the kitchen table, and then decided to put my favorites in a laundry basket and move them onto the counter instead. The most important things should go in the Tupperware because it’s waterproof and can float. How do you decide what’s irreplaceable? I packed the paintings I made in high school art class. The art Sam made for me to hang on my walls in college. I packed the poems Elijah gave me two birthdays ago. The framed photo of my sister and I on her wedding day. Lily’s painted baby-foot prints. My great grandfather’s ring. The dried flowers from my grandpa’s grave. I moved the container from the table to the counter. Then from the counter to the top of the refrigerator. 

How do we choose the objects that deserve our sentiment? Why do we give emotional power to things that exist only as symbols? Would I rather be the person who could rush home, grab Harry and a change of clothes, and leave without thinking twice? 

During the years I did gymnastics, my parents sacrificed every cent they possessed so my sister and I could do the things we loved (to a degree that I couldn’t fully understand at the time). We didn’t have extra money for a video camera, so almost no videos (and very few photos) exist of my gymnastics years. My friends’ parents would video me at competitions with the intention of making a DVD copy to give my mom and I eventually. I don’t know of a single one of those DVDs or recordings that survived Katrina. There used to be professional sports photographers who photographed competitions and then put action shots online for families to buy. My family didn’t even have a computer for most of those years, and once we did, we didn’t have money to splurge, so we never bought them. Last year, I secretly contacted about a dozen Louisiana, Texas, Mississippi, and Tennessee sports photographers to see if any of them had photos archived from 15 years ago. No luck. And why does it matter? They were just videos, just pictures. They were worth nothing compared to the lived experience. Why over 15 years later do I still think about them?

My parents took a lot of photos of Whitney and I when we were babies. Money was tighter once I was born, so even though they took as many photos of me, they didn’t get them developed. For my entire life, we’ve made jokes about how I was the invisible child. There are albums of Whitney from before I was born, and then albums where I appear suddenly as an elementary school child. There was essentially no evidence I existed before the age of 6. A couple of years ago for Christmas, my mom gave me a framed photo that I’d never seen before—me on my first birthday. Then she gave me a bag full of pictures. She'd found almost a dozen rolls of film hidden away in storage. The film was between 25 and 30 years old, and she knew there was no hope it wasn't ruined when she snuck it to Walgreens to be developed. She cried in the store when she got them back and found nothing had been ruined—all of my baby pictures for the first time anyone had seen them in nearly 30 years. It’s one of the best gifts I’ve ever been given. 

Of course Barry was harmless. There was hardly a puddle in the road when I returned back to my house after evacuating to my parents for the weekend. Before I left for Mississippi, after I’d packed up Harry and some snacks and my cameras, I went back in to grab the laundry basket of my favorite books. I got back in my car and put it in drive, stopped, went back inside, and climbed up on a chair to get the Tupperware container, too.  

Jasmine and Tango Lessons

For weeks, all I smelled was jasmine. It was everywhere—lining every sidewalk and drifting to my windshield where I’d find it stuck after the rain. It feels distant now, even though it was just a couple of months ago. But I suspect already that Jasmine will always be New Orleans for me, no matter where I find myself next. It will always remind me of those last weeks of my grandfather’s life, and poring over photo albums in my grandparents’ house after he was gone, looking for happier memories to hold onto. Of those weeks drifting between feeling hopeful and defeated and numb. But it will also remind me of the Big Dipper and thunderstorms. Of jazz and hibiscus tea and bike rides and blackberries. Of dancing in my kitchen and finding moments of brightness in places I never expected to find them.

A friend asked me if I ever recognize that I’m happy when I’m happy. I thought about it for a while. We notice the absence of happiness, but we sometimes don’t notice its presence. Sometimes happiness feels misplaced, and it’s hard to make sense of why it feels present in spite of the grief that surrounds it. I like that these things can co-exist. 

The jasmine is gone, and the temperatures have turned suffocating now. The roaches and termites are back. A flying cockroach landed on my arm yesterday. I brushed it off and forgot to feel afraid.

I started tango dancing a month ago. It’s not the obvious choice for someone whose last dance experience was when my mom tried to make me take dancing lessons against my will when I was three. (I’d sit in her lap and refuse to participate.) Tango is danced in what feels essentially like a loose hug. I am not used to being so close to strangers, but it’s remarkable what we can get used to. There is still a version of me not too far below the surface who felt nervous at the thought of holding hands with my classmates during obligatory prayer circles at youth group. I would like to pass her a discreet note letting her know that one day she’ll willingly dance with six-and-a-half feet tall men who are twice her age, and it will be just fine when they step on each other’s feet.

And all of a sudden, I’ve become a person who looks for social dancing events online each week. The tango community is another of these communities New Orleans keeps revealing to me of characters who make no sense together and who make perfect sense together. (There’s me, who you couldn’t have paid $10,000 to take a dance class a year ago, but who read a book on tango in the fall and couldn’t stop thinking about it. There’s the retired carriage driver and former boat maker. The metaphor painter. The electrician. The glamorous 70-year-old woman who flirts with the younger men. The middle-aged mom and her daughter. The avid rock climber who bikes 20 miles a day. How did we find ourselves in the same room?) We look like stiff stilt walkers as we stagger around in circles. But it’s one of those rare things that lives up to the fascination I imagined myself having for it when it was still an abstract. There are tango videos in my phone search history and heels in my closet.

Last week I got a dog that’s almost mine but not quite. Technically I’m fostering him, but I know in my heart I have no intention of giving him back. He’s elderly and mostly deaf and his tongue droops out of the side of his overbite, and you can see two of his four teeth like little tusks, but he has the happiest smile, and no one is more thrilled to see me every day. There is no part of his spirit that is old. 

I brought a peace lily home after my grandfather’s funeral. I come home from work a few days a week to find it drooping, exhausted and defeated. Those days, I pour so much water in that it seeps out on the floor and rolls toward my stove. (It turns out my floor is tilted.) The next morning, the peace lily stands back up, meek and grateful. When I brought Harry home, I googled my plants and found out this one is poisonous to dogs. Now the peace lily navigates around my house from chair to table top, drooping because it knows it’s no longer the priority. 

Harry has this dry cough. Last night his coughing and gagging woke me up, and I realized that I didn’t know what to do in the case of a middle-of-the-night dog emergency. There are emergency vet clinics, right? But why on Earth had I not looked up the location of the nearest one in the safety of daylight and before an elderly dog was sleeping in my bed? (I spoke with the rescue group on the phone today. They think it’s just kennel cough.) I list the beings that count on me the most. And then I make a separate list of the beings I most care about to see if they are the same. I think about the two months Harry spent in the kill shelter and then the rescue before I saw him, learned he was 15 years old, and decided that I needed to get him out of that cage. Is he happy now because he has people who adore him and pet him for hours and because he has free reign of a couch and a bed? Or has he spent his entire life happy regardless of his circumstances? Harry’s spirit and prance is inspiring. Sometimes lately words have felt far away. I climb ropes and dance with strangers and hold Harry instead.

On the Megabus between San Antonio and Austin a couple of weeks ago, the driver casually announced over the speaker, “It’s really windy, so if you feel the bus moving around a lot, it’s not my fault!” I looked out the window, waiting for a wind gust to tip us over into the bridge railings. I got bored of waiting before the Austin skyline came into sight. It’s amazing the things we can get used to.

I had a long conversation with Elijah a few weeks ago about the capacity for awe and why people lose it and why it is that the people I’m drawn to the most never do. There are things worth hanging onto as hard as you can. There are people worth hanging onto as hard as you can.

A person I care about recently revealed in a roundabout way that they aren’t sure if they find writing to be a great or worthwhile ambition. I thought for a long time about whether I’d ever made someone feel that their dreams were insignificant to me. What is the difference between challenging someone’s values and diminishing them? Do you define yourself by what you are in this moment or by what you want most? Where does awe come from, and how selective is awe for those of us who never lost it? Do our questions matter more than our answers? 

Another New Year Post

It’s time again for the annual New Year Blog Post—the sixth one I’ve written so that the four of you who read this can be assured of the creepy degree to which I document and hoard memories (as if you ever had doubts). I wrote the first two in New York City, then one in Tennessee, one in DC, one in Mississippi, and now here in New Orleans. The locations are the only way I can keep the years from blurring together. 

2018 started so differently than it ended. A year ago I’d been living in my childhood bedroom at my parents’ house for six months. I was exhausted from incessantly applying to jobs and trying to pay my student loans while not letting myself compromise and give up on waiting for the type of job I knew I wanted. Every day I looked at the websites of a dozen or more universities for new openings, and in January I sent an application to Tulane and promptly forgot about it (I’d long given up on trying to keep track of them all). I started that job at the end of April. Those first 4 months of the year were full of uncertainty and forced patience, and then there were the next 4 months of summer that I spent trying to live between places. I rotated between 6 different houses plant sitting, cat sitting, house sitting, subletting, commuting from Mississippi, and couch surfing (mostly couch surfing), all while looking at over 60 apartments in hopes of finding one that wasn't disgusting (if you haven’t had the pleasure of apartment hunting on a tight budget in New Orleans, it’s sort of like touring the set of horror films every day. You think I exaggerate.) and that I could afford. I will be forever grateful for the friends who let me sleep in their spare bedrooms and on their couches and air mattresses for way too long. I moved into my new apartment in September, and then there were the 4 months of the fall semester when I finally felt like I was doing my job for the first time and learning what advising and living in this city is all about. This was the first time in a decade that I moved to a city that was already familiar and where not every person is a stranger. I’m still not used to it. 

In 2018 I was able to reunite with some of my oldest and best friends. I felt lucky every day for the people I got to work with. I spent a night at my 10 year high school reunion. I published 5 pieces (after three years of publishing nothing). I feasted at Sophie’s dinner parties, toured dead fish collections in swamp bunkers, visited haunted houses, attended Voodoo ceremonies, and watched second line parades from my front porch. Lily turned a year old and also learned how to say my name. I made a pilgrimage to Tennessee and reunited with the first students I ever taught. I interviewed about 35 college applicants and advised over 300 Tulane students and tutored 8 students from 4th grade to PhD programs. I voted in the mid-terms, which felt very different than the last election day. I traveled less than I have in a decade, but I still squeezed in visits to Atlanta, Nashville, and Waco. I stayed for free in a haunted hotel in the French Quarter and pretended to be a tourist. I took my first Spanish class in 12 years and taught my first college class. I ate a lot of tacos and a lot of meatballs and a lot of snowballs and got used to never drinking tap water (which is not an actual rule in New Orleans but maybe should be). I read 81 books and listened to 31 audiobooks. I started taking aerial circus classes and, without really noticing, got stronger than I’ve been since I was 14. I did my first circus performance, and I’m so lucky to have stumbled upon this quirky and delightful circus community that I had no idea existed and feels to me like the real embodiment of this city. 

I turned 29, which feels no closer than 30 than 23 did, really. Sometimes my friends say they’ve started feeling old. To them I suggest joining the circus and performing for an audience in a leotard for the first time since 8th grade—it’s a guaranteed way to cure aging. 

This will be the first spring in 9 years that I haven’t been job searching (whether for a summer job or a full-time one). This will be the first year I work year-round without a summer break. Mostly I hope 2019 is full of feasts and circus tricks and books and publications and new places. Twelfth Night was over the weekend, which I’ve never once thought about before this year. But this time there were king cakes everywhere and the first Mardi Gras parades and people getting excited already, and I went to my silks class and flew around some and felt more like a true New Orleans resident than I maybe ever have. 

An Ode to Letter Writing

It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything here, but the good news is, I HAVE been writing. There was a two and a half year period after graduate school during which I hardly wrote a word. In part this was because teaching high school consumed every spare minute of nearly every day, but also because I think I just felt defeated. I had a partly finished manuscript that I didn’t know what to do with (This is still true.), and I missed being in graduate school where I was surrounded by people who valued writing the way I did, and I felt unmotivated and incapable of producing anything worth looking at. It was a year ago that I started really writing again. It began with some letters. 

If you know me, you know how much I love letters. The first letters I ever received were in kindergarten. I was a socially anxious kid, miserable at school because, though I loved learning, I was afraid of talking to strangers. My parents tried to help by leaving tiny letters in my lunch box wishing me a happy day at school. My dad called them Happy Day Notes. Each of them featured one of his increasingly elaborate stick figure drawings of me, or the two of us, doing something fun and decidedly unrelated to school—us riding his motorcycle or flying in a fighter jet or, after I started gymnastics, me mid-flight above a balance beam or standing atop a podium with a medal around my neck. My stick figure’s hair was always a long wavy line sprouting from the top of my head, and his stick figure always wore a baseball cap (presumably to make his gender apparent because I don’t think I’ve ever seen him wear a baseball cap). The Happy Day Notes continued throughout elementary school. I cannot say with certainty that they succeeded in making me particularly joyful about being at school as I read them under the lunch table amidst the high pitched chatter of my fellow 6-year-olds and the unmistakable smell of elementary school cafeteria. But they did make me smile. And 23 years later, I recognize that they also taught me a lesson that I did not know I was learning and that my parents did not realize they were teaching—the lesson that sometimes written words have greater meaning than spoken ones. 

By 4th and 5th grade, everyone wrote letters. The bold kids threw paper airplane notes to their crushes when the teacher looked away. The rest of us scratched notes to pass under the table to our friends. Notes elicited giggles and blushes and were full of code names in case they were confiscated. Creative note-folding was a sought-after skill that the popular students learned from older friends and the precocious students learned from library books. (In retrospect, I’m impressed by our late-90s selves for our ingenuity in the days before Youtube tutorials.) Groups of eager students sat in circles at recess to teach each other the intricate origami that would make their letters, and therefore themselves, cooler than a boring folded square. 

Though talking to people was hard for me, writing only ever felt exciting. This is how I became a letter-writing enthusiast. One friend and I wouldn’t settle for our classmates’ punctuation-free scribbles about crushes, and a mere piece of paper wasn’t enough to contain all we wanted to say, so we started writing our letters in a notebook and traded that back and forth instead. We wrote more in those notebooks than I think we ever wrote for our classes, and we filled several of them by the end of the year. When it was my friend’s turn with the notebook, I wrote letters to other classmates and letters that I delivered after school in my gymnastics teammates’ lockers. After finding a way to share the things I was too shy to speak aloud, I never ran out of words to write or people to write them to. 

The volume of notes passed decreased in middle school, and the content of many that were still circulating turned into R-rated confessions and cruel rumors. Gradually everyone started getting cell phones, and by halfway through high school, texts had taken the place of letters and handwritten correspondence became nearly obsolete. My handful of recipients changed and then narrowed, but a small group of us never stopped writing. Our letters were full of novel quotes, song lyrics, dramatic stories, and inside jokes. They were longer than our research papers and more passionate than work we did for any class. We started blogs where we wrote posts in second-person to anonymous “you”s—the letters we couldn’t bring ourselves to give to their recipients because they said things that felt too honest. We transcribed them from scribbled pages and let strangers on the internet read them instead. My written words communicated something far closer to what I wanted to say than I felt my spoken words ever could. 

My best friend, Sam, and I left Mississippi for college—her for Chicago, me for Providence. Though we spoke on the phone every day, we never stopped writing letters. During freshman year, the letters felt like a lifeline to our “real” lives, and we sent them every week or two. After that, our college lives became our real, and busy, lives, and we tried to send letters every month or so instead. Hers often including drawings (she’s an artist), and mine were usually longer. Our letters were essentially journal entries in which we tried to untangle our thoughts and emotions by putting them on paper. I kept a journal as well, and many letters I sent to Sam were lifted straight from my journal pages. I was majoring in fiction writing and spending hours each week working on short stories, but the letters I sent to Sam felt more honest than anything I tried to convey in my fiction. And then halfway through college, I took a creative nonfiction class and realized what should have been obvious but felt shocking instead—that the type of writing in my letters was a legitimate form of creative writing, too, and that it could be more than just a hobby. 

So I decided  to go to graduate school for creative nonfiction writing. My roommate there, Sophie, was a letter writing enthusiast, as well. We would sit opposite each other at the kitchen table, writing memoir chapters for our workshops or editing our classmates essays. Perhaps this was the mid-20-year-old’s version of our teenage blogs—another effort to organize untidy thoughts into relatable experience. Every few weeks, we’d find ourselves together at the table without our computers, writing letters to faraway friends instead. 

And then came the lull after graduate school. There were a couple of full-time jobs and lengthy job searches, both of which drained my time and mental energy. Longterm writing projects lay neglected on my bookshelves. This past fall, I realized I’d written hardly any letters in the past year. So on a whim, I embarked upon a letter writing project. 

Last Halloween, I decided that I would write a letter to a different person for every day of November, mostly as a challenge just to see if I could do it. I made a list of rules for myself—I couldn’t write to the same person twice. I couldn’t write to family members (though I made an exception for distant relatives I have not met in person). I could mail a package instead of a letter, but it had to include at least a small written component. The letters had to be handwritten and mailed (except for one letter I delivered in person). When I came up with the idea, I could not name 30 plausible recipients—people who would not be confused or creeped out upon receiving a letter from me. I realized that it is nearly impossible for a 28-year-old female to ask old friends for their addresses without them assuming they are about to receive a wedding announcement. My mom kindly supplied, “Won’t the guys think you’re flirting with them?” (Would they?) It felt awkward and a little too weird, and I considered giving up on the idea. I made myself send the first letter instead. 

I sent letters to Sam and Sophie and my other closest friends first, which felt easy and familiar. I sent letters to other letter-writing friends who I’ve exchanged letters with before. I mailed brownies and brief letters to friends with birthdays in November. I mailed letters to old friends I haven’t spoken to in a decade, to people I’ve only met once (or in a couple of cases, that I’ve never met in person), to the elementary school friend I shared the notebook with, to the high school friends whose “secret” blogs I used to read, to my former roommates, to the teacher of my first-ever writing workshop, to my writer friends from college and graduate school. I guessed a couple of addresses and sent a couple of extra letters to make up for it. I’d worried that after running out of obvious recipients, the letters may start to feel forced and obligatory to write. None of them did. I sent letters to 25 different cities in 14 different states. 

When I finished the project, I expected to be burnt out and unable to write anything else for a while. Instead I couldn’t stop writing. I started essays that have been in the back of my mind for a while. I started submitting essays I’d been too self-conscious to try publishing. I’ve been more productive with my writing than I have been since completing my MFA program. Most people were thrilled to receive their letters, and (as far as I know) no one was too creeped out. I reconnected with several old friends and have stayed in touch with a few of them. I’ve received a handful of response letters that I did not expect and was irrationally excited by each of them. I wrote them because I wanted to write them, not because I wanted responses. Maybe I instinctively knew that returning to letters, the original source of my writing, would give me the motivation I needed to write anything else. 

If it’s been a while (or, say, a decade) since you wrote a letter, I have a new address I’d be happy to give you. 

The Best Coach I Ever Knew

I found out on Saturday morning that my old gymnastics coach died late on Friday. I was devastated. I hadn’t seen him in probably 8 years, and he hasn’t been my coach in a decade and a half. But my sadness felt urgent and all consuming instead of distant. I didn’t talk about it to anyone except my family (who knew him, too) because I couldn’t talk about it without crying, and because it felt somehow too personal, and mostly because I felt like I had no right to that level of sadness. I spent most of the day alone, just remembering, and when I sat down to write a little commemorative post, I realized I had a lot more I wanted to say. 

I was a kind of impossible kid. I was so painfully shy that I practically couldn’t function around anyone who wasn’t immediate family, and my poor mom had no idea what to do to help. My sister did dance and softball — the regular things all the kids did in my hometown. My mom tried to put me in softball when I was 5 or 6. I spent a miserable season hiding from the ball in the outfield and running in the opposite direction if it flew my way. Then she tried dance class, and then acrobatics, both of which entailed me sitting in her lap for most of each class and refusing to participate in the recitals. Interacting with an instructor I didn’t know was scary, and the thought of an audience watching me was petrifying. And then when I was 6 years old, I watched the 1996 women’s gymnastics team win Olympic gold in Atlanta, and I told my mom that’s it. That’s what I want to do. 

Desperate to prevent me from being a mute hermit, she enrolled me at the only gym in my town, which was a great place for cheerleading and tumbling, but also had gymnastics equipment from the 70s and hadn’t had a competitive gymnastics team in over a decade. I wanted to compete, but we didn’t know of any alternatives, so I was content to be there and learn as many new tricks as possible (without talking to anyone). Months later I was with my mom in Slidell and saw the silhouettes of gymnasts painted in the windows of a strip-mall storefront. I knew there was probably no way I could go to that gym—it was at least an hour from my house, and even then I knew it would be far more expensive than the gym in my town—but I begged her to at least let us go look inside. 

A week later we were back for my first class. I don’t know if I’d ever been so excited for anything. Because of a mix-up by a substitute manager who was filling in for the day, I was accidentally placed in the team class instead of the recreational class—something that probably wasn’t supposed to happen for months. There were two male coaches in the gym—a man named Alex who coached the lower levels and an older man named Victor who coached the older girls (who all looked like Olympians to me). I was both terrified by and in awe of Victor (and his wife, Tamila). I sensed he was legendary before I even knew the details —that he and Tamila were the Soviet coaches of the ’92 Olympic all-around champion, that her medal ceremony was the first time the Ukrainian flag had ever flown at an Olympic Games (the Soviet Union had just fallen), and that they’d immigrated to America just a few years before I walked in that gym (I’m not sure I’d ever heard a foreign accent in person before I heard theirs). To my 7-year-old self, he was superhuman, the embodiment of all my unattainable dreams. 

He and Alex watched me during that first practice. They took me aside and asked me to show them the skills I knew. They spoke quietly in Russian to each other. And by the end of that practice, Victor introduced himself to my mom and said they wanted to invite me to join the team. My mom knew there was no chance she could refuse because for the first time in my life, I wasn't hiding in a corner afraid for anyone to watch me. There haven’t been many single moments in my life I can point to as life-changing. But that was one. 

Victor and Tamila became my coaches after my first competition season, and they remained my coaches for the next 5 years. That meant that I spent more time with them and my teammates than I did with anyone outside of my immediate family. We moved into a smaller, old gym after the lease was up on the original one. None of us minded what it looked like. Their daughter, Tetyana, immigrated soon after and became our choreographer and coach, as well (completing the best team of coaches I ever had). Then came  Tetyana’s husband and daughter, who became my childhood friend. What started as two practices a week quickly became 4 and 5 practices a week for 3 or 4 hours a day, and 8 hour days 5 days a week during the summer. It’s sounds cliche when athletes say their coaches and teammates are like second families. But it’s also true. 

In the gym, the shyness that was so debilitating in every other area of my life melted away. I was hungry for as much as I could get and, to the shock of everyone who’d ever known me, I was thrilled at any opportunity to perform in front of people. (And let me be clear—I was not the best. I was nowhere close to the best. I just loved it that much.) In the gym, Victor was my number one supporter. He saw something in me that I couldn’t see in myself, and he never let me forget it.

Bars was the bane of my existence. I hated the event. I spent agonizing hours in practice and in private lessons trying to get my bar skills up to speed. I was too horrified to try a giant, but Victor told me 400 times that my form was perfect so that I still felt confident enough to keep trying. 

When I got my first rip on my hand from bars, he cut the bloody flap of skin off my palm with nail scissors, placed it in the middle of my palm and closed both of his hands over it. Be proud of this, he said. 

I remember how secretly proud I always felt when we found out the competition order he and Tamila had chosen. Coaches generally strategize when choosing the order their team members compete. The expected high score goes last, and then essentially you work backward from there. But your first competitor should be your steadiest one, the one who you can trust to handle the competition nerves, the one who will set the standard for everyone else. I would never have chosen to go first myself. But there was no better feeling than when they chose me to go first on 2 or 3 events every competition. (Except for maybe the feeling when sometimes I was picked to go last.) There is perhaps no better way to build someone’s self-confidence than to show, for an audience to see, that you have confidence in them. 

When I picture Victor during those years, I remember so clearly how youthful he was. He must have been in his 60s at the time, but everything about him seemed young. I remember how he would catch us in mid-air when we practiced bar dismounts. (Was there anyone else in my life I would have trusted to do that?) He was a small man, but spotting anyone seemed effortless for him. He had the body of a man half his age. He used to swim for miles each morning in the pool at his apartment complex (where he’d bring us to swim twice a week in the summers). It was so important to him that we balance the hard work we did with fun. During our lunch break in the summers, he’d bring everyone to the floor for dodge ball games. (My years running from softballs paid off.) He was soft-spoken and loved to laugh. I don’t recall ever hearing him raise his voice. 

One of my favorite memories is when I did a kip for the first time on the low bar. (If you were never a gymnast and you look this skill up on Youtube, you will not be impressed. But if you were ever a gymnast, perhaps you understand the agony of trying and failing for actual years to get that stupid skill.) It was the Louisiana State Meet at LSU, the last competition of the year. For every competition that year leading up to state, I’d tried the kip, failed, and done it again with him helping me (yes, a huge deduction, but I had to compete the skill, and my score was going to be a disaster no matter what). Except that time, I did it. I could hear my gym’s section of the audience cheering as if I’d just won Olympic gold, and I remember seeing out of the corner of my eye from the high bar that Victor was jumping and running in circles, arms raised, dancing like a maniac. For the entire rest of the routine he danced with the whole crowd watching. He apologized to the judges afterward, then bear-hugged me with tears in his eyes and told me that he hadn’t been this excited when Tatiana Gutsu won the Olympic gold. “I didn’t cry then,” he told me, “but I cry now.” Of course I wasn’t sure that I believe him. But then again…

I was 12 when Victor and Tamila moved away for a coaching job in California. It was one of the saddest goodbyes I’d ever had to say, and I still remember crying as I walked out of that gym with my teammates for the last time that night in December. I went to two more gyms after Victor left. I never stopped loving gymnastics. (I still haven’t stopped loving gymnastics.) But no other coach ever made me feel as confident  or sure as he made me feel. 14 years later, it’s still hard to talk about why I walked away from competitive gymnastics. The simplest thing to say is that I felt like I’d come to the point of picking a route forward. The gymnastics route where there was a single goal (full-paid college scholarship to a college with a good gymnastics program) and no room for error, or the academic one where options felt endless. I couldn’t do both. And I guess something else Victor taught me was that sometimes you have to leave something you love to pursue a different dream. 

In college, I found out that Victor and Tamila had moved back the area and were coaching at one of my former gyms in Mandeville. I remember how hard my heart was beating when I went to visit during a holiday break. I hadn’t contacted them beforehand, and they hadn’t seen me in nearly a decade. Would they even recognize me? When they saw me, they stopped class and pulled me onto the floor to introduce me to the girls’ team—all of them the age I was when they were my coaches. Victor convinced me to warm up with the class, and then he came with me when I tried to make my body remember how to tumble on the tumble track. It was the best gift I could have asked for. They retired not long after that and then moved away with the rest of their family. I’m so grateful for seeing him that last time. 

The actual skills Victor taught me were secondary to the ways he changed me as a person. Victor was one of the most accepting people I’ve ever known. Everyone, no matter their background, skill level, age, or size, was welcome in his gym. He taught me quiet confidence and pride and how the things we work hardest for should always be things we love. He taught me about perseverance, discipline, and most everything that has helped me have any degree of success in anything I’ve done since. 

There’s been so, so much in the news for the past couple of years about USA Gymnastics. Child abuse and molestation and eating disorders and permanent emotional damage. It’s hard to watch as more and more people are sharing more and more of these stories, and it’s heartbreaking to see the world learning to affiliate the sport with abuse like this. It’s hard to know that parents have not allowed their little girls to start or continue gymnastics because they associate it with these cases. I wish I could tell them that there’s an awful lot wrong with elite gymnastics and the national team setup, and that there are a lot of terrible people affiliated with this sport, and those are rightful things to be wary of. But I also want to tell them that’s not all the sport is. Let me tell you about my childhood gym and my coach. This is what gymnastics is supposed to be. This is what a coach is supposed to be. 

I’m thinking of Tamila, Tetyana, Lana, and their family tonight, and I’m so grateful for these memories of Victor. I’m lucky to have known him.