Passports and hikes and horizons

In my last Substack, I mentioned that I’m participating in the Inktober challenge for the month of October. Inktober supplies a one-word prompt for each day. The traditional way to participate in Inktober is to make an ink drawing for each prompt. Influenced by my friend, Jonathan Rogers, I’m using my ink to write stories instead— very short stories, short enough to fit in an Instagram caption. I’ll be sharing them on Instagram on my writing account: @elizabethharwellwrites

This morning I’m sharing a few of my favorites from the last couple of weeks.

---

For the word #horizon:

Up until my senior year of high school, I thought that I might pursue a career path in marine biology. I thought this because: A) Dolphins are cute animals and B) I enjoy beach life. I think I imagined it to be something like Ken’s job of “Beach” in the Barbie movie, and so I guess I set out to break that glass ceiling. Anyway, AP Chemistry ruined all of that for me, because that is where I discovered I was a terrible scientist.

But I was doing okay in AP Literature. Our English teacher, Mr. Davis, was a rare transplant in Murray, who grew up in an Italian family in northern Chicago. He was probably sixty years old when I had him as a teacher, and he was still talking about his mother’s lasagna. He wasn’t afraid to tell us that he didn’t care for Frost or Hemingway. That felt a lot like showing his hand, and I loved him for it. He loved Dickens, and Dostoevsky, and he shook his fist in the air and yelled “The horror!” when we read “Heart of Darkness.”

Mr. Davis graded us on class participation, which meant that if I wanted an A in his class (which I desperately needed after chemistry), then I had to talk. This was torture for me, as I hated talking in class. But gradually I realized that I might have important things to say after all. In fact, as it turned out, I had a whole lot of things to say about themes, and alliteration, and imagery, and characterization. I was also wildly surprised to find out I had my own opinions, and even strong ones.

Once, I found myself walking down the hall with Mr. Davis in between classes. “Have you ever thought about being an English teacher?” He asked me. “No.” I said. I didn’t say I was considering Beach. “Well, you should. You would be good at it.” It’s amazing that a couple of sentences could shepherd someone into the next season of their life, but it happens all the time, doesn’t it? I enrolled as an English Education major the next year. Sometimes, the #horizon is hazy, and I’m not sure what to do next. That’s when I need a friend to name the things in me that I can’t see. A friend to say, “You are good at this thing. You should keep doing it.” I hope to be that kind of friend. I hope you have a friend like that too.

---

For the word: #hike

The Sig Eps of Murray State University lived near campus in an old house, which was haunted by the ghost of Ma Crawford. When I was a student at MSU, and a friend of the Sig Eps, I heard conflicting origin stories of Ma Crawford. But in all the stories, the important fact was that she died in the house and now she haunted it.

The guys loved to us tell stories of lights turning on and off when no one was around, or of a door slamming behind them, or of footsteps going up and down the stairs in the middle of the night. We girls all thought this was hilarious fun, and one night my roommate Jenny and I decided it would be funny to give the boys a scare. We found a grey wig, and decided that, of the two of us, I would make the most believable old woman. I put on some pearls and a blouse and pulled the wig over my hair. The wig turned out looking more like the top of a coonskin hat rather than pinned-back hair, but if you squinted and tilted your head you could sort of imagine that I had aged sixty years and then died.

When we got to the Sig Ep house, the window to our friend Clayton’s room was lit up on the second floor. We could see that he was at his computer. We snuck into the house, and Jenny helped me onto the roof by a window in the stairwell. I made slow strides to Clayton’s room and then tapped rapidly on his window, immediately realizing I had no further plans. Clayton turned toward me as calmly as though I were a friend showing up at his door, and not at all as if I were a dead woman showing up at his second-floor window. “Oooooh” I said in my best ghost voice. I wiggled my fingers in the air, as ghosts do. He opened the window and let me inside. “Weren’t you scared at all?” I asked. He shook his head. “You kind of look like Davey Crockett.”

Clayton walked Jenny and me out the front door. We were standing on the front porch talking, when the solid double doors behind us slammed shut with a terrifying crash. We all took off running. It was as if Ma Crawford said, “Take a #hike, would you? I would never in a hundred years wear that blouse.”

---

For the word: #passport

When Andrew and I first moved from the hospitality state of Mississippi to suburban Atlanta, we found it difficult to connect with neighbors, and I was lonely. One day on a walk through our neighborhood, I met Jean—a young mom who grew up in Taiwan. English was her third language. And although Andrew and I had been to China on a #passport a couple of times, I wasn’t much help in the way of her second language, Mandarin. We struggled through this first conversation and every conversation after, but we both worked hard because we both dearly wanted a friend.

It wasn’t long before Jean was at our house nearly every day. We went on Costco trips together and split bulk items. We baked together, and went on walks, and before trick-or-treating we ate chili and Chinese dumplings at our house. Andrew said he always knew when Jean’s family was over, because there would be a pile of shoes and a stroller by our front door. I slowly also made friends with American-born neighbors, but mine and Jean’s friendship was hard-won and special.

After three years of being neighbors, our family moved down the road to another neighborhood, and six months after that, Jean’s husband accepted a job in Austin, Texas. I drove to Jean’s house the night before she left to give her a framed picture of our families together in our old backyard. When I pulled out of her driveway, Jean followed the car to the road. And then she chased the car down the middle of the street, like lovers do in the movies, still clutching the frame. I always wondered if it were just theatrics, but as it turns out, someone chasing your car makes you feel like the most wanted person in the whole world. I’ve been blessed with a lot of amazing friends, but only one of them has ever asked me to repeat a sentence ten times until she understood every word. Only one of them has ever ran after me as I drove away.

And what about you, Reader? Do you have any tales of passports, or hikes, or horizons? I would love to hear them in the comment section.