1990 + 2021

Callie Rebekah Lewis 14yrs old:

Song: Elton John’s “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road”

Movie: “Say Anything,” Overboard,” “To Kill A Mockingbird”

Book: No reading unless it is a note from my friends.

Food: Pizza – no cheese

Sport: Floor hockey, gymnastics, dance

Team: College – University of Illinois, because that’s where my mom went to school. Professional: Bulls, Bears, Cubs

Grow up Goals + Dreams: Be a Luv-a-Bull, be a mom, be an interior decorator.

Subject: Language Arts

Color: Yellow

Place to Shop: The Gap

Season: Fall

Drink: Grape Juice – PURPLE.

Ice-Cream Flavor: vanilla and chocolate swirl dipped in rainbow sprinkles

Animal: Stay away from me at all times.

Hadley Grace Feyen 14yrs old:

Song: “Happier,” Olivia Rodrigo

Movie: Ocean’s 8, 11, 12, and 13.

Book: The Inheritance Games

Food: Smoothie Bowls

Sport: Soccer

Team: College: Notre Dame Professional: USA Women’s Soccer

Grow Up Goals + Dreams: Go to university, make high school varsity soccer, have a job I enjoy.

Subject: Spanish

Color: Blue

Place to shop: PacSun

Season: Summer

Drink: Lemonade

Ice-Cream Flavor: Mint chocolate chip

Animal: DAWG

When I first began writing seriously, my two biggest criticisms were to: 1) stay consistent with verb tense, and 2) write the conflict (one of my mentors told me to stop putting a “Jesus bow” on everything).

I’ve recently learned that the Hopi Indians communicate in such a way that, “everything that ever happened still is,” and in turn have “less anxiety than most of us do and led more measured lives.” (Grammar For A Full Life: How the Ways We Shape a Sentence Can Limit or Enlarge Us, Lawrence Weinstein.) I’m wondering now if verb tense and conflict have something to do with each other.

But what does that do to believe I am still 14, still holding those butterflies that I understand is nostalgia for what I believe I’ll now have to let go of? What does it matter that I can still remember my Drill Team tryout routine? That I can still feel the divots as I walked onto the football field for half-time performances? Or that I still blush with shame remembering when I walked in late to Freshman English, purple grape juice splattered all over my blue sweater because I’d gotten into a fight with a boy and also forgot a pen and the teacher said, “Huh. Sounds like a problem,” and then kept on teaching Romeo and Juliet. It was the meanest, most aggressive, most inappropriate boy I knew who ended up subtly and kindly handing me a pen. (Think Chuck Bass. Think Mercutio. Think Johnny from “Karate Kid.” This was the moment that taught me we always have the choice to never be finished.)

When the 8th graders I used to teach were nearing graduation, I would read Suzy Lee’s Wave – a wordless story about a mother who takes her girl to the beach, and the girl has quite an adventure with a wave.

We would use the story to study metaphor. The wave is high school. It will knock you down. It will bring you treasure, but you have to dig for it. You will have to decide what to do when you fall. And when you do find treasure, you get to decide whether to share it, or keep it to yourself.

I would point out to my students that the mom is hardly in the story – she presented her child the world, but it is the child’s gift to decide what she’ll do in it – how she’ll walk, how she’ll love, and stretch and fail and grow.

I’m wondering more and more about that mother now. Was she watching her daughter? Did she walk alongside the shore and look for shells, or even swim the waves? Was she with a friend, her best friend? Do women get to have best friends at this age? Did she sit on a beach towel and read or write?

Was this the moment of homecoming where she realized with a joyful longing that “everything happened still is,” while her girl battled with the water? And did she lift pieces of broken shell from the sand that glittered in the sunlight, place them on her open palm, and consider what it is she can do with the fragments?