![]() ![]() I saw her in the back of a car with the top down. Carol’s entire life open up at that moment: a sudden, violent bloom. “I think I like the saints that started out bad.” Carol’s mouth, and I was proud that I’d amused her. “Do you have a favorite saint? I like Joan of Arc because she has armor and a sword.”Ī smile tugged at the corner of Ms. ![]() “Oh, I think it’s cool,” I said, trying to seem tough. It was as if she’d suddenly come into focus as a person, her typical lofty way of speaking put aside so that she might ask me this important question, human to human. Carol said in a jarring moment of genuine communication. She was offering them on a fancy silver dinner plate to the sky, to God. On the cover was a woman with her breasts cut off. It was the chaos we liked, fanning out and plopping ourselves down on the floor wherever we wished. Twice a month or so, we’d dedicate an entire afternoon to reading anything we wanted from the bins of books in the classroom. She spoke to us with airy detachment and was more relaxed than Sister Tiolinda in all things except handwriting, which she took very seriously. Carol had big, watery eyes that made her seem like she was always on the very precipice of weeping, but she never cried or even showed us much emotion in general. This and her old fashioned hairstyle made her look like she’d stepped right out of the 50s. She wore a navy headband and a neat plaid skirt. ![]() Our substitute was a young woman (though she must have looked old to me at the time) named Ms. Speaking of Catholic school, my fourth grade class often had a substitute teacher because Sister Tiolinda was very old and God alone can’t fix everything. While writing this, I asked my dad who that man was. Any time we catch each other deigning to look down our noses at something, one of us will spit, “Good ‘nuff for you.” These words were so intense that my dad, sister, and I continue to use them as an inside joke into the present. He must have thought that we thought we were too good. My dad was a successful salesman, and I could see what this man thought of all that. “It was good ‘nuff for you,” the man all but spat, and even as a child I picked up on the profound bitterness, the poison in it that made it almost comical. “Naw,” my dad said in the country accent he sometimes dipped into when around, let’s call them, “the folk.” “They ain’t going to Cache?” the man said. He and my dad had both gone to school in Cache in rural Oklahoma, which is where we should have been going but weren’t. “They go to school up here?” he asked, perplexed. He asked my dad what we were up to, and my dad said he was taking us to school. He’d gone to school with my dad, which seemed impossible to me because my dad looked young and this man looked like redneck Methuselah. Some addiction had done it, but I don’t know what. His face had been ravaged by something that couldn’t have been age alone. It was at this gas station on one such morning that my dad bumped into an old acquaintance. It was great when he drove us because on the way from the country into town he would pull into a gas station and let us eat all sorts of junk for breakfast-Zingers, mini-muffins, Hostess cupcakes. My dad used to drive my sister and me to Catholic school sometimes. “… At least something will be behind you.” Here are six of mine, along with why I believe they have stuck around over the years while everything else has gone down the tube or been flattened out. They paint a compelling portrait about your life where you’ve been, the people you’ve spoken to in your brief time on earth, and what you thought of those people. We all have our own, and I think the ones that choose you (you don’t choose them) say a lot about you. ![]() Once you understand what I’m talking about, these sentences are easily recognizable. Their inexplicable survival is proof of their importance, their holiness. They illustrate private worlds, bring us into exhilarating contact with another person’s depths. These are sentences that accidentally reveal too much-about the person who spoke them, or about the person who heard them, or about the relationship they share. These are more like milestones, and they are hard to forget. One probably wouldn’t forget, for example, the first time a romantic partner said “I love you,” or the first time they were called a slur. I have a certain criteria for these words. If all of life is a song, these are the lyrics that stick with us and rattle around in our heads long after they’re said. ![]()
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