Go up, thou bald head

Day Forty-Six: I love everything about this pencil sharpener. It’s a black-metal cylinder, and when you dissassemble it to empty out the shavings it feels like you’re cleaning a firearm. You feel like John Wick when all the metal parts snap back into place. After that, it’s tempting to stab the pencil into the hole with a little unnecessary aggression and sharpen it into a shank. Then you go to write and the pencil crumbles down to the eraser.

The only issue with the sharpener is that if you drop it it will roll into oblivion. Particularly if the floor is uncarpeted and slightly sloped. I had to run down the aisle, about four rows of pews away from where I’m sitting, to get it back, and if it hadn’t rolled up against a woman’s foot, my shank-maker probably would’ve gone all the way down to the altar.

Tomorrow begins a new week and how can it not be automatically better? The splinter is pulled. Now it’s all healing. I confessed my problems and all the harrowing details to a gracious friend and it did me good. And then another friend sent such words of encouragement in response to last week’s Substack that as I drove and wept I at first didn’t realize I had a flat tire. I just snorted and sniffled and wrenched the steering wheel in whatever direction I needed to go. Thanked God for the Body and drove on the bad wheel longer than was good for the car.

Day Forty-Seven: I’m sitting near two girls in their twenties who are talking about the shallow dating pool. Part of me wants to be the prophetic hag that points a crooked finger at them and says something like, “Ye is in for a long road, me dears!” Then—poof—I disappear.

But of course that’s silly. Everyone’s outcome is different. And if it’s a similar long haul, it’s best to not know that. If someone came to me in my mid twenties and told me I’d be single at forty-one, I would’ve probably responded rudely, something akin to the boys who insulted the prophet Elisha. You might recall how that played out.

Hope is returning to me. I’m seeing now more clearly some of what God has delivered me from, and I thought it’d never happen. I don’t know if I ever even asked Him directly for this particular kind of deliverance. He just simply stepped in and claimed what was His.

Yesterday I cooked food, something I haven’t done in a long time. I read. I visited with my roommate. Things I haven’t wanted to do but have wanted to want. I begin to glimpse the actual, real life God has made. I’m doing a better job of embracing it—all forty-one years—with more gratitude than I’ve had before.

I think I can move through the day now without the little mind games and check boxes that, in the thick of my acedia, I at one time needed in order to feel like I had accomplished anything. The day doesn’t loom intimidating. Even doing nothing feels different.

Day Forty-Eight: I went to school yesterday to pick up my new laptop. A student called out, “Hey, Ms. Bannerman! See you in about three weeks!” This is where I’m supposed to grieve over the break that is almost over, but I’ll have to admit I’m ready. I love structure and schedules and being in the thick of it with other teachers. That might be something I like best about working in a school. The brothers-in-arms feeling that I thrive on.

When Downton Abbey was at its height of popularity, I thought that “going into service” and having a particular role in maintaining a grand old mansion and eating breakfast at the long servants’ table with a wise scion at either end was adjacent to heaven. When I sit at the big round table with other teachers at lunch, it feels like that. The teacher that’s been teaching over fifty years doesn’t sit at one “end” for obvious reasons—geometry, and all—but the whole circumference seems to start and end at her seat. The cafeteria is loud, but she doesn’t have to yell for us to hear her. We all lean in at the first hint that she has something to say, even if it turns out she’s just clearing her throat of a spinach leaf.

Day Forty-Nine: “Wow 14lbs!” is a text I just received from my dad. After some debate I sent Mom an email yesterday telling her I’ve dropped some weight over the last few weeks. I knew she’d be glad to hear that, but I wasn’t sure I was glad to tell it. The topic of weight has always been a sensitive one, as I imagine it is for many mothers and daughters. It’s taken my whole existence to convince Mom to keep comments regarding my weight gain to herself, while at the same time realizing I’m a bit of a hypocrite.

My parents are of the opinion that “sugar free” means “feel free to eat with wild abandon.” For the sake of their worn-down joints, I regularly excoriate them. “Wha? It’s sugar free!” they say. They have special soup mugs that they set their pints of Halo Top into, giving their ice cream a handle, which makes it even easier to inhale the entire thing in one sitting. In these sort of absurd moments I feel it necessary to actually point out their rounder stomachs and tightening pants, an act that, were it done to me, would probably send me off the nearest cliff.¹

But still. Ten minutes after I sent that email, Mom called me. She wanted to celebrate with me like I had won the Pulitzer.

“What’s your secret?” she asked.

“Eating less,” I said.

“WOW,” she said.

Then came Dad’s congratulatory text.

I should be a little more appreciative. Both parents have always been a bit stingy when it comes to doling out praise. In Dad’s case it’s because he somehow made it clear to me in my infancy that he would always be proud of me, no matter what. Every decision I’ve made from my earliest recollections has been met with the attitude of, “Well sure you did! What else could you have done, really.” In Mom’s case, she dislikes the untempered ego. Fishing for compliments strikes her as prideful. One of the first “big words” out of my mouth when I was little was “braggadocios” (followed by “diatomaceous earth,” which I learned from my dad.)

When I consider how my grandmother approached my mom’s own struggle with weight, I have to acknowledge the strides my mother has taken away from such hurtfulness. For Mom to ask me, “So…been to the gym lately?” in contrast to the legitimate name calling I witnessed first hand from my grandmother is a marked ascension. A miracle, actually.

But once again I’m the hypocrite in all this. I called my own child (my lab/shepherd mix) “Fatty McFatterson” all thirteen years of his life. I regularly grabbed the folds of skin around his face and steered his head like a steering wheel and said in between kisses such horrible things like, “Oh him so faaaat. Fat baby boyyyy. Fat dawgy dawg.”

And that’s a weight that I’ll always have to carry with me.

1. Mississippi is remarkably flat. The nearest cliff is about thirty feet and it drops into a very friendly, deep pool of water.