writing crap to get better

because let's just call it what it is.

In 2024 I flew back and forth from Minneapolis to Dallas, TX over four weekends to sit and meet myself (along 40 others) over and over again by learning the enneagram from a very wise southern woman. Suzanne Stabile is everything you’d want in a teacher: kind, firm, direct but sweet with stories that you wish you could just sit and listen to forever. I went because I felt that maybe in this mystical wisdom of the enneagram taught by this sage woman who was also the same number as I was that I would encounter myself, my true self, and I’d find a way back to myself, pie, and joy.

Me and Suzanne, photo by Anna Bundy Hagler

One of the exercises we were asked to do was a writing / poetry prompt called “Where I’m From.” The poet and her original poem can be found here. This take on the poem was the first time I would spend time writing again after closing the shop. It’s not awesome, but I keep coming back to it. I love it in all of its crappy-ness, like me.

And that’s what I found in Texas: self-love. I am the pie lady, but not just the pie lady. I used to be the Pizzeria Lola lady, and before that, I was all sorts of things. I am love, no matter what I make or sell. I am good because I keep trying. I am not my mistakes or past. Neither are you. But I am from somewhere, and that somewhere needs to have some light shed on it. So here, indulge me.

Where I’m From: the Swan Chaffee stump

I am from big spoons, from Creamette and Country Crock. I am from the unswimmable lake, and the dock of disrepair. I am from the lily pads and the murky, algae, leech-laden waters. I am from long wooded walks and tick checks and a meal wasn’t finished without something sweet, from Luella Arndt and Phillip R (are) and other paradoxes, puzzles of which I am a piece.

I am from hushed conversations, the ones no one spoke of before Oprah and a doctor whose name, like my fathers, was Phil. I am from the TV tuned in to channel 4 at 6:30 for the wheel. From do as I say, not as I do and good touch / bad touch, stranger danger. I am from the closet floor, battery candle light, mom’s old wooden box with feathers, birch bark, a rusty bottle cap, an impossibly shiny rock.

I’m from everywhere but the place that feels like home: rock walled, quilted green fields built over generations that somehow aren’t mine. I am an Englishman in New York but a woman, and Midwestern, born to a place where people have their cake, and eat it too. I am from hamburger helper and wiener water soup. From the backwoods of Wisconsin, far enough away from the campus that held my grandfather in such high esteem that you couldn't hear the cries of his family, his kids, my mom. But from close enough that the local bartenders and his genius PhD colleagues would have done something, said something, right? Oh and the clergy, the ones who did hear the cries inside their boxes, they offered “comfort” in places they weren’t supposed to.

I am from the upstairs hallway, to the left, then turn towards the bright yellow walls with a mural of a big oak tree with a swing dangling from her branches. Come, sit under her with me. Let me hold up the plastic strips of memory, letting the light shine through each frame.

___

p.s. Do you know your number? Are you interested in learning about the enneagram? Let me know. I’d love to connect you.