how I discovered the life of the mind through cowboy boots
There are moments in each of our histories that are, by all appearances, unremarkable. Inexplicably, we remember them for decades with the same perfect clarity we usually reserve for births, deaths, and epiphanies. These are the stories that I start to tell at parties—they must be funny or profound; why else would I have remembered them all these years?—and realize, as my narrative approaches the gaping hole where the climax ought to be, that the stories are, in fact, pointless. I leave a confused and awkwardly pitying audience in my wake as I head to the liquor cabinet to regroup.
These memories make lousy anecdotes. Their value lies beneath the surface, deeper than a punchline. We are right to have kept stored them so carefully in our memory; they are profound. Our work is to unlock them, to excavate them. The story of my first day of school in Colorado is one of these memories. It stays with me, but in the telling, offers only an underwhelming window into a typical, if slightly pathetic, 7-year-old world. Hidden in its shallows, though, are the seeds of much of what I have since come to value. I was wearing cowboy boots on the day that the possibility of a rich inner life was revealed to me.
Coming from New England, and being seven, I envisioned Colorado as The Wild West. I felt that I would need to ride a horse and learn to walk with my feet far apart, hands at my hips. Perhaps I would get to wear a holster on weekends; probably not to school. Those details would be worked out eventually. In the meantime, I needed to make some wardrobe adjustments. The Docksiders and fair isle sweaters would need to be replaced before the move if I were to fit in among the cowpokes of Colorado. My grandmother took me to the store and I picked out plaid western shirts with mother-of-pearl snaps and big collars. I endured two weeks of blistered toes to break in my Dingo-brand cowboy boots, and I traded my Garanimals for Wranglers. Mercifully, my grandmother refused to shell out for a ten-gallon hat or—god forbid—chaps.
“Class, let’s welcome our new student, Laurie. She just moved here from Rhode Island, the smallest state.” While Mrs. Beatty pointed to Rhode Island on the map with one hand and made the universal gesture for “teeny” with the other, I stood next to her in my finest western apparel. I surveyed the sea of my new, decidedly non-wild-west-looking classmates: rugby shirts, popped collars, Velcro sneakers; not the cowpoke couture I had anticipated. My miscalculation earned me the dreaded NERD label, one which, in the unforgiving social strata of suburban education, had remarkable staying power. I was to be a Nerd, in the eyes of my classmates, for eternity.
It was painful, yes, to move from a world of birthday parties, bike rides in large posses, and daily kickball on the playground into one of social ostracism. It forced me to find entertainment, affirmation, and even conversation in solitude. This was when the books that had languished on a shelf at home suddenly seemed worth my attention. It wasn’t like I had sleepovers to gussy up for; I might as well look inside one of them. I didn’t have anyone to whisper to in class, or to write notes with, so I paid attention by default. Lacking a confidante, I embarked upon horrendous poetry and embarrassing diary entries—stumbling, in time, on the possibility of word play and purposeful writing.
By the time I did manage to scrape together a few friends to ride bikes with, I had lost my fear of solitude, and had formed new habits. I had plunged into the life of the mind and had grown used to learning, to reading, to writing—things that have dominated my life ever since. I stopped wearing the cowboy boots, though my inner life turned out to be a wilder frontier than Colorado ever was.
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