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This was extraordinary because of two things: first, I never scribble in my journal. I made it, painting each page carefully with pastel watercolors. I stitched the leaves together, embroidered the cover, and bound it all carefully. I love it more than any journal I’ve ever had because it’s so beautiful, and I love beautiful books. I love seeing row upon row of my cursive on the cream and rose-colored pages. I do not scribble in it. Second, the content. I have always disliked orange. I have never wanted to see Mississippi. I have always thought of the West as something sort of vulgar, something inferior to the East coast. I went to New York City once and was miserable. I have a beautiful journal, I wear blue and white, and I write in cursive. This all started last month when my Spanish class watched the movie Tortilla Soup. It’s set in California, a story about a Mexican-American family. The father is a chef who loves to cook. His three adult daughters are still living at home, but over the course of the movie they get their own lives and move out. The film is full of long cooking shots: Martín’s hands dicing tomatoes, roasting peppers, rolling tortillas, and stirring mango sauce. All these scenes are permeated by salsa music in both Spanish and English. That night was a Friday, and when I came home I felt like cooking. I found an online radio station that played salsa, cranked it up so I could hear it in the kitchen, and made tortilla soup. As I tried in vain to make my dough paper-thin, I decided that I wanted to do this when I grow up. My mother makes dinner in loafers. She listens to NPR when she cooks. Her “Mexican,” which she makes because my father likes it, consists of burritos made with refried beans, tomatoes, sour cream, and cheddar. It’s so boring. When I grow up, I decided, I’m going to wear red shoes when I make Mexican. I’m going to listen to salsa and I’m going to dance. I’m going to be like the woman in Chocolat, who has a nine-year old and still manages to be really cool. My Mexican is going to be cuisine, not canned beans in storebought tortillas. I’m going to speak fluent Spanish. The next day, my mother took my sister and me to the shoe store. I was looking for sandals, but didn’t find any I liked. To entertain myself while my sister finished trying on sneakers, I went to the bargain racks in the back of the store. DSL shoe warehouse is an enormous building set up almost like a hardware store, and there is a huge expanse of bargain racks. As I was looking, I ran into a neighbor. I had a pair of little pink heels in my hand that I wasn’t really even considering. “Oh, those are cute,” said Mrs. Vick. And that’s when I realized that I had never owned a pair of cute shoes in my life. I hadn’t even had jelly shoes as a little girl. I had been wearing the same two pairs of clogs all winter and the same pair of sandals in summer for the past two years. I had bought a pair of heels to wear to Homecoming last fall, but they were black. Black is versatile and polished, but not cute. (Wow, this is turning into another shoe entry. I’m sorry. I didn’t realize I had so many shoe stories that related to coming of age. And I didn’t even get into the black heel episode. Or the purple shoe episode.) So I went back and had another look at some red slides I had been eying. They were noisy and sort of hurt, but they looked so cool. They looked so very cool. And when my mother pointed out that there was a half off sale of a half off sale, I got a pair of pink sandals, too. The third thing that led up to the journal entry was the search for colleges. Last summer my dad and I went to several schools in Virginia, and I had my heart set on William and Mary. It was a nice town where I could work doing living history. It had pretty buildings and a linguistics major. As time passed, though, I started edging towards bigger schools. UVA had mountains, better shopping, and a Russian major. I still didn’t want to go out of state, though, as it meant having to drive a long way to get home on vacations. As still more time passed, I began looking at some colleges my friend Ellen had recommended for “eccentric people.” Now my highest ambition was to make it to Bryn Mawr. I knew it would make weekend visits home tricky, but Philadelphia sounded so much more interesting than Charlottesville or Williamsburg. I absolutely drew the line at going farther north than that, though. But for some reason, sitting there in art class looking at a book of Degas monoprints, something snapped. Why on earth wasn’t I looking at Boston? Here were four years of my life I could spend in any place I could get into, and I was limiting myself because it was a long drive and was too cold? I had wanted to try living in New England for years, and here I was avoiding it because I was afraid of the weather and the distance! I decided that I wouldn’t rule out any place just because I’d never thought of it being a “me” place before. I could look at Arizona if I wanted to. I could go to Louisiana if I wanted to. I could go places where there are rainforests, places where the earth is twisted into strange shapes they don’t have at home. This pretty planet is my home as much as anyone’s, and there’s no reason I shouldn’t love every corner of it.
So when I read this essay in the March issue of Cicada, I thought the author and I had the same problem. I still like cursive and beautiful journals and the color blue, but I want to learn passion, too. I want to be able to find something exciting in every part of life, even if I stay in Virginia. I want to wear red shoes, sing in Spanish, and dance flamenco. And, of course, make really good tortilla soup.
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