The best part about being the master of your own blog is you can get away with things, like not posting for four solid months, and then come back to it like it was your plan all along (ahem dramatic effect?), and summarize your life in a few pithy sentences and move on! Woo! So, here goes! The life of Peyton Lynn, July 19th 2013 to Now, November, T-minus 8 days til Thanksgiving:
I moved from the farm to a week in Washington D.C., a change in pace that was as claustrophobic as it was inspiring. After so much time with the same smelly, sweaty people at Future Pointe (love you guys), it was good to check in with the world, with all the war memorials and monuments and museums, and with my mother, and sisters. Talk about an awesome summer. In August I moved Johnny Boy into School of Mines in Golden, Colorado; it's weird thinking that baby brother is all grown up, but great that he's so close. We see each other occasionally, like when he wants to use me, for a ride, food, or climbing gear. #family!
School began the end of August, and if my lack of blogging isn't a hint, let me spell out my schedule for you: BUSY. All the time. Between classes and work and Romero House and volunteering and thesis writing and maintaining something of a social life and every now and then, sleeping, I barely have time to drink the coffee in the morning that is often my only source of fuel. Highlights this semester include: a class on Jane Austen, and an in-depth study of the translation from real person and real life to writer and published works; living in Romero House, an intentional community held up by five pillars (community, simplicity, social justice, spirituality, and service...not real columns); the weeks I wake up at 6am to write thesis every morning because there's a looming deadline, or because I need something to break the writer's block, or because I'm a little crazy; and the beautiful and terrible and wonderful realization that graduation is getting closer and closer, that I'm going to have to leave this school that has been my home for so many years, that I've grown and changed and will probably, hopefully, grow and change even more, and that I have no idea what's coming.
That's not true. I have some vision of a future, a vague perhaps not yet invented position as Writer Pig Farmer Teacher Ice Cream Shoppe Owner. The last part might be the fragment of an old childhood dream; but if we aren't spending our days chasing those most outlandish dreams, what are we doing?
Finally, a writing sample, since that's all I ever seem to do. The prompt, from my Magis and the Search for Meaning final Honors seminar: What do you value? What is at the very core of your identity? What is the thing that, if taken away, you no longer are who you are and you lose your integrity? I should dedicate this to Dr. Bowie in the Honors Program, whose service to myself and my peers these past four years has been life-changing.
Teach A Girl To Read
I can honestly say I’ve only been
proud once in my life, and it’s the time I took my eight-year-old neighbor to
the movies. I’d been Chloe’s nanny for over five years. I’d started watching
her after school and during the summer two months after I’d moved to her
street. I was there her first day of kindergarten; I took her to the docks to
learn to swim; and when she was four, I taught her to read.
I had learned to read when I was
Chloe’s age. My own mother was a ferocious reader. One of my earliest memories must
be Cathy Lunzer, curled in the forest green armchair in the den’s golden
lamplight, with a book. It is in observation I learned the value of words.
In observation I learned, and in
demonstration I taught Chloe. Chloe has eyes browner than mine and curly, dirty
blond hair with ringlets to put Goldilocks to shame. She loves her younger
brother Luke like I love my own: passionately, and with compassion, sometimes
violent, sometimes soft. But her most endearing quality, at least in my
opinion, is her insatiable curiosity. There is no rabbit hole too small to
escape Chloe’s notice, nor any scary enough or simple enough to frighten her
away. It shouldn’t have been surprising, then, when I told her one day that I
loved books, and she said Why? and I
said You have to read them to find out, and she said Okay, and started to read.
Chloe fell in love with reading
as I had fallen in love with her. She read everything I put in front of her and
more: Isabel Allende, Nancy Drew, T.A. Barron, Lord of the Rings, and my childhood
favorite, Harry Potter.
This is the day that made me
proud: I took Chloe to see Harry Potter
and the Deathly Hallows, Part II, in July 2011, two days after the movie’s
release. I remember it was raining, which made her curly hair curlier so she
looked even more like Hermione Granger, the bookish and brave heroine whom
Chloe idolized and that rainy afternoon, copied in dress and manner and hair.
Chloe had finished reading the series the third time just two days before, and
was squirming and excited beyond words to see the final film installment of the
series. We bought popcorn, found our seats, and started to watch.
It was near the end of the film.
One of the central characters—mine and Chloe’s favorite, played by Alan
Rickman—was dying. We knew it was coming. His film fate had been written in the
pages of the book. But it was a touching scene nonetheless. He drew a rattled
breath. Chloe’s hand grabbed mine, and I heard her whisper:
“No.”
I looked over. Tears were
streaming down her face. She squeezed my hand, harder, harder, and like she
stared intently at the screen I could not take my eyes of her, off this girl
who was crying for someone she’d read in a book once, off this girl I loved
like my own who I’d taught to swim, taught to read, and I realized in that dark
theater, taught to love. For if she felt empathy for a character on a screen, a
character in a book, how could she not love people in real life?
In that moment, I realized: this
is what we are about. Reading and crying in theaters and holding hands. Learning
what to value, and what to believe. For twenty years I have poured my hours and
days and nights into stories, into reading and writing, and after all this time
and after so many stories and after one handhold with Chloe one rainy, summer
day, I think I can say what it all means.
We have nothing to give one
another but ourselves, our stories, and our lives. We must exist passionately,
violently, softly, and love this way too. Because the greatest story we will
ever encounter is our own, our own first days of school and swimming, our own tears
and sorrows, our own moments of empathy, and pride, and love. These stories are
what we’re made of – who we are – and what we must share.
This is how I believe we must live.
Read a book. Take a friend to a movie. Hold a hand. Live and love and share with
others, share tears and share values and spend days with people.
Decide what you value. Chase a
good story. Embrace your own.
Teach a girl to read.
