I have fond memories of being a little girl (with long hair) and curling up on my dad while he read. I’d lay my head on his chest and try to trace the tiny letters with my eyes, inevitably falling asleep, completely exhausted from the effort. Reading was his escape, and it became ours. Books were/are adventures, and escapes; answers and provokers of bigger questions. They were our allies, accomplices and teachers.

Next weekend I’m treating myself to three days in the hills of north Georgia. People here like to call them mountains, I call them grassy boobs of earth. Semantics aside, I’ll be staying in a 16 room farmhouse (with presumably 15 other guests) on 72 acres with a lot of fresh air and zero commitments that aren’t to my mind, body or spirit.

In preparation for the voyage and on the advice of my therapist, I visited a bookstore yesterday at lunch that I didn’t even know existed though I’ve surely driven by a it a dozen times: Charis. I picked up four books and put them in a stack with the one I received on Sunday from Mary Jac, standing in a parking lot in the drizzle of after rain. I traded her a copy of Lamb for her copy of the first book in the list.

So really, I won’t be alone on my little trip, I’ll have these friends with me:

Driving home from dinner and ritas with Kel, the windows are cranked down, I’m listening to some funky wannabe bluegrass-ish music, and as I turn down one (of the many. effing. roads.) to home, the bugs were screaming so loud I could hear them over the audio distraction and feel them over the hummmmm of the subwoofer buried under the console of my right elbow.

I was suddenly seventeen again.

I was sneaking out of my house with Tony and Jason in the middle of the night to meet up with Julie. For what? Who knows. We were seventeen. Mailbox baseball? A night chatting in the graveyard? A trip to Gravity Hill?

She never showed up at her window, and we spent the rest of the night on a spontaneous scavenger hunt, trolling around Anchorage in the spring/summer twilight plucking pink flamingos and sunflower windmills from front yards. We even managed to find an unsupervised toilet in the yard of a house under construction - and since we were oblivious then as to the impact on homeowners - shimmied that somehow into the trunk of Tony’s orange mobile.

We subsequently left the assortment decoratively organized on Julie’s lawn.

That was the night I came home and found the window I’d crawled out of had been closed and locked.

That was the night I climbed the porch stairs and found my father waiting.

That was the night I went back to live with my mother.

At Abbott Loop Elementary in Anchorage, my brother was two grades ahead of me. He and his friend Jeff were the first class of students to go all the way through (1st through 6th grade) the recently formed and somewhat controversial “optional program”. Our classrooms were in a lollipop shaped off-shoot, separated from the main body of the school, and joined/separated by the library at the base and a breezeway on either end. “The Pod”, as it was called, was six classrooms that were really three classrooms. They could be joined or separated by moving walls and in practice, we were coupled into three classes with two teachers for each: 1st & 2nd grades, 3rd & 4th and 5th & 6th.

Our classrooms didn’t have doors, the students had cubby holes where our pencils and papers lived in “tote trays” with our names taped to the fronts. There were couches, tables and chairs in the rooms - but no desks. We weren’t given grades, instead we were passed or failed - we got smiley face stamps on our papers when we’d done well, or red marks when we didn’t. We called our teachers by their first names.

In third grade, one of my teachers was Kathy McCord. She wore silk blouses and pressed slacks, fashionable kitten heels with peep toes, and always had on a necklace with a leaf pendant that very much looked like and probably was, an actual leaf that had been dipped in gold. I think I asked her about it once and she said she got in Hawaii, but I could be making that up. She had beautiful jet black hair with specks of gray, it came to the middle of her neck in perfectly formed just-came-from-the-salon 70’s curls. She had dark skin and perfect bright white teeth we got to see a lot, because Kathy was always smiling.

Third grade was a hard one for me, mom was sick and I was a mess of a child. I talked with my hands flailing, told inappropriate jokes during Show and Tell, and was really generally an obnoxious little troll starved for attention. Kathy was patient and kind and tolerated my misguided energy like a saint. I wouldn’t have the same luck in fourth grade…but I digress.

One afternoon after Kathy had handed our tests or homework back to us, I found marks on mine indicating wrong answers. I walked to her and prepared for debate, standing next to her as she sat, holding my paper. I attempted to justify my answers and convince her that my logic would wondrously make a wrong answer into a right one.

She’s sitting in her chair listening patiently and trying to explain what I didn’t want to hear, and I’m standing on her left side. I was about as tall standing up as she was sitting down…and I loved that about her. She wanted to be on the same level we were.

I was getting more and more animated and flailing my hands about as if they could communicate better than my mouth when *THUNK*. The pencil I’d been holding in my right hand was now firmly planted in her left eye.

She let out a yelp, pulled the pencil out and headed for the hospital. Janet someone-or-another who lived in my neighborhood and was in the class above mine said something horrible to me about it. I don’t remember what it was exactly, only that she missed the fact that it was an accident and made me hate her.

Kathy was fine - the pencil hit the white part of her eye and didn’t cause any long term damage. She always had a spot there, though, where I got her.

A few years later when mom became more ill, Kathy took me to dinner and shopping. She took me to Harry’s and we sat at a quiet table where I ate a burger and she talked to me like a grown up. I bought a dress, a hat and hose that afternoon. My first pair of hose.

There were a few other outings with Kathy, but I started growing up - finding independence/rebellion, and she had her own life - a divorce and two grown boys that had issues of their own.

Many years later on a visit back home I tried to catch her at the school to say hello, but she’d transferred to another program across town. A few years past that, I got a letter in the mail from one of my childhood girlfriends mother.

“I thought you’d want to know” the note said. I unfolded the slip of paper enclosed, ashy colored and clearly cut from the local newspaper. It was Kathy’s obituary.

I regret never having told her how her energy made a mark on me, how the interest she showed just may have been the little bit I needed to keep me on the crooked and narrow. How the chunk of love she gave made a difference and ensured my survival.

I still think about her regularly - she’s always in a maroon blouse with a scooped neckline and black trousers. She’s slipping a finger in the shoulder of her shirt to adjust her strap (she did this regularly but it wasn’t until years later that I understood it). She’s wearing that wonderful necklace, smiling, and glowing like an angel.

Me? I’m still the kid who stabbed her teacher in the eye with a pencil.