When you land on "go back to start" in The Game of Life (I mean the actual board game), you just have to see it through. It's not uncommon to make tremendous comebacks. In fact, it can sometimes be an advantage to drive your little plastic rectangle car with your plastic stick pin spouse and your pink and blue stick pin kids back to start. Your very next spin could land you on a square bringing you the instant success and happiness that having a spouse and a car chocked full of kids couldn't bring on its own. Which means there's really no such thing as starting over. It's all just moving forward in the end. 

    I've finally come to realize that one big reason living in Duncan seems like starting over is because it looks and feels so much the same. All around me I see the sites of my upbringing. Sure, a lot of the buildings serve different purposes than they did back then. The downtown Goodners grocery store is a church, the library is an insurances office, and Otasco is now a "fully integrated multidisciplinary clinic." But the buildings still exist in the same spot they did 40 years ago sparking my imagination and taking me back to another time. 

    Last summer, I was painting for a local teen theater camp and spent some time getting to know one of the volunteers. She was a young public school teacher who grew up in Duncan, currently teaches in Lawton, and very much enjoys the diversity of her student population. I surmised she's a good teacher by the things she chose to focus on as we talked. She had what I believe are the most important qualities a teacher can possess - a genuine like for kids and learning and an awareness of her own place in the world as a life-long learner. I always believed that the person doing the most actual learning in any classroom of any sort should be the teacher. As long as a teacher is willing to learn, the teacher will be able, somehow, to get students to do the same. I told her I'd moved back to Duncan after being gone for 40 years, and she said, "Oh, it must be difficult coming back here and everything is so different." To which I replied, "No, it's the opposite. It's difficult because things are all exactly the same." She seemed to pause and shift, as if she immediately saw me in a different light, then she opened up to me a bit about some of the obstacles she faced growing up here. It felt good to have that connection with her. Of course, many of our personal struggles were different, but Duncan has more than its share of peccadillos when it comes to being the setting of one's childhood experience. A whole bunch of peccadillos over an 18-year stretch of human development can make quite an imprint. Go Demons!  

    I say all of this with a great deal of love in my heart for my hometown. Duncan, Oklahoma was a great place to grow up. I could give you a list of reasons miles long, and maybe someday I will. But not today, because today I want to talk about something else. I've revisited and redeemed one of the disasters of my youth. No, I've not fallen into another sinkhole and landed, once again, on the front page of the Duncan Banner. Have I mentioned that from the back windows of my current home I can see the 4-way-stop where that unfortunate occurrence befell 16-year-old me? Well, I can. But no, it's not that or any other of the many calamities of fun I got into with my little red car. I don't really consider any of those incidents disastrous. It was all great fun and definitely one of the major upsides of growing up in a small town like Duncan.

     I'm talking about an experience that felt truly disastrous and heartbreaking to me at the time. We all have experiences like that as teenagers. The ones we reflect on with cringe in our hearts. We do our best to cast it in a humorous light, but the disappointment we feel lives on inside us. Be that as it may, I'm happy to report that I've faced down and defeated one of my teenage Duncan demons, and I did it in very nearly the same location where it happened 44 years ago. What did I do? I became a shop girl. 

 

    For the last year and a half I've spent a couple of days each week helping out at a store on Main Street called Distinctive Decor.  I say helping out because when compared to 31 years of public school teaching, my small town shop girl tasks are much more like a day off than what I've come to consider a work day. In fact, I do a lot of the same sorts of tasks as a small town shop girl I enjoy doing at home: moving things around from one visually pleasing setting to another, lighting a few candles, making a pot of flavored coffee, dusting, and even cooking a meal since the store has a full working kitchen smack dab in the middle of it. My favorite thing of all is unboxing merchandise, and it's not just because it's fun to see what's in the boxes. I also enjoy the textures, shapes, and sizes of cardboard and paper packing materials. It all looks like creativity to me. As a kid, there were very few things that could get me more excited than a giant cardboard box. It was like getting a passport to another world. 

  I don't think, at this particular stage of life,  I'd enjoy doing the shop girl thing in a big city or crowded mall environment, but here in Mayberry RFD, being a shop girl a few days a week has been exactly what I needed to get my bearings about me and figure out where the heck I am and what the heck is going on. Not to mention the fact that I've finally redeemed the disastrous experience I had as teenager.  Distinctive Decor at the corner of 9th and Main has been the perfect place to do those things, and I'm so grateful for the opportunity I've been given there. But it's all coming to an end because the store is closing. In the words of Tom Petty, "It's time to move on, time to get going. What lies ahead I have no way of knowing. But under my feet baby, the grass is growing. Time to move on, time to get going."

    I have much more to process and say about my experiences as a shop girl on Main Street and particularly about the wonderful people I've come to be friends with while doing it, but for now, I have painting to do. I make wooden peg dolls and sell them in an Etsy Shop, and I've self-commissioned a few I'll be gifting to some of the wonderful people I've come to know and love at Distinctive Decor.

Thanks for reading. I'll hope to write more before another entire month passes.

peace and love,

grace 

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