Working as a shop girl at the store on Main Street has helped round out my view of things here in Duncan-confirming much of what I remember as an accurate representation of my childhood including the religious indoctrination I got at home. Gosh. I just reread that last sentence and it sounds a bit cold and clinical. Basically, now that I've been back here for a while, I've found that my memories still seem pretty accurate. I'm feeling a lot better about myself, the mistakes I've made, and the ways I've gone about trying to figure out how to function in this life. I'm learning to forgive myself for being such a fuck up. And...there it is. 

    I'm NOT a fuck up. I know that. What I meant to say is that I'm finally able to forgive myself for the choices and decisions I made that didn't fit in with or result in the more traditional path toward wholeness. There I go sounding all clinical again. I guess it's the unrealized diagnostician in me. I always loved meetings with the diagnostician when I was teaching. I attribute that to a diagnostician named Freddy. 

    Freddy always wore a brightly colored dress suit, but my memory sees her in yellow, with reading glasses hanging from a pretty chain, pens and pencils at her ears, and always a giant lapel pin of what may have been a bee or a dragonfly-I just know it was a flying insect. She was exactly the sort of professional Texas woman I enjoyed observing during my early years of teaching in Granbury. I loved going to the meetings that everyone else hated simply for the experience of watching Freddy in action. She was gregarious and had an infectious spirit. She'd describe a student's "little IQ" using those exact words, and somehow no one was ever offended or "triggered." It was a term of endearment and had nothing to do with the kid's intelligence. Sure. It's reprehensible, NOW. I do think it was eventually brought to her attention and she stopped. I don't know. It was a different time. Back then, Granbury was just a little lake town south of Fort Worth with one hanging stop light across a two-lane highway. You know, the good ole days in the mid 80s when you could still refer to a child's "little IQ" and get away with it. Freddy wasn't perfect. No one is. But she was learning just like we all are. Learning brings new awareness, and we go forward in that knowledge. I'm so thankful that she was one of the many wonderfully unique and intelligent women I was lucky enough to work with during those Granbury years.

    I guess I say all that as a way of saying that I think the most important thing is to keep learning from whatever place you find yourself. Living here has reminded me of where I was at the beginning. The prehistoric years of my life. When I reflect on my decisions with a full knowledge of my upbringing, I'm reminded of the words of Dr. Phil (who I don't think I'm supposed to like anymore), "I don't ask why, I ask why not?" I moved forward with the intel I was given. And here we are. It could always be worse. 

    I do sense that a higher power has guided me along. I've not become such a heretic as to let go of my belief in some form of eternity. Being a heretic, like everything else, is on a spectrum, and I willingly embrace the fact that I am one. And that's why it feels uneasy to live in a town like Duncan. This is the place where the indoctrination happened, and from what I've observed, the plague of fundamentalist religious thinking has only gotten stronger in the 40 years I was away. They're everywhere. I'm talking about people who see the world ending,-and it could happen at any moment- with Jesus showing up on that horse my daddy's taking care of and obliterating anyone not covered in the blood of the lamb. They take that literally.

    But, it's all in their head, and I can function quite nicely thinking and believing whatever I want. Right? I mean, isn't that what our country is all about? Let's hope so. I guess we'll see. Like I've said before, I keep my head down and go about my business, and I've very much enjoyed working as a shop girl on Main Street for the last year and a half. It was a great way to exorcise a personal demon, I made great friends, and I've confirmed that, in many ways, things are pretty much the same as they always were in Duncan, Oklahoma. 

Thanks for reading!

Peace and Love,

grace

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    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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