Butter Bumpers

Hello Friends,

Almost immediately after posting about "my new life" it changed again; this time drastically. Truthfully, I had one foot in the door with the Americorp Program I "committed" to this year and was waiting on another job in Chicago, I figured it would be fine either way but I was not entirely happy with the decision I had made. Amidst all of this, I received a phone call several days before the start of school from a dear mentor and now colleague asking if, after a last minute drop out, I would be interested in an opening at The Grand Rapids Child Discovery Center in Michigan. I had visited the school in the past, and was extremely honored to be considered for the position especially because the offer was extended with blind confidence in my abilities as a teacher, which was something I had been struggling to have after failing to find work in Rhode Island. After a phone interview with my now co-teacher, and careful consideration, I felt this was the opportunity of a lifetime. My friend, and at the time team member, Andrew phrased it like this: "You can spend the next year helping out, tutoring, and wishing you were that teacher at the front of the room, or you can be her." His words sold me.

Flash forward nearly two months and I can confidently say that I am the happiest I have ever been. For starters, I live in an apartment that I pay for, all on my own, like a big girl. I have a boyfriend, who is not a cat, nor a selection of dingy canvas bags that I carry oddities around in, which is serious improvement from how I thought my move would turn out. I work with twenty-eight fourth and fifth graders at The GRCDC. My co-teacher is literally the best, we often struggle to plan in a timely fashion because we talk too much, and my students are amazing in more ways than I can count. My twenty-second birthday was spent opening construction paper cards, stuffing birthday treats from parents into my gullet, and was even special enough to include a very memorable Happy Birthday sang by the entire school at our Afternoon Meeting. If that doesn't say Welcome To Michigan, I don't know what does. Until I can fill you in more, let's leave it at my life is awesome.

These are my kiddos on a field trip, they're cuter close up.

Because that is not what this story is about.

One of the downfalls to orchestrating two major moves in a matter of months is struggling to make and maintain relationships. An even bigger obstacle is moving to your exboyfriend's hometown (did I mention that's where I'm living?) where all of your friends, happen to be his, and spending time with them means vying for rights about which days they belong to you. The situation is not dissimilar to how divorced parents work out weekly schedules, "you take them Monday, Wednesday and every other Saturday, I'll take them the rest since they were mine first." Nevertheless, I did manage to make a friend, exactly one and she's all mine and was mine first, SO THERE. And one of the activities that my one friend and I enjoy is having dinner together. At least once a week we get together and make some sort of meal, a real meal, and typically engage in a glass of wine or three with it. It is my favorite night of the week. This is where the story begins.

Last week Cassie and I decided that we would have shake and bake chicken. When you work with small children for fifty or so hours every week, and live by yourself, you start to relish things like this. We started talking about the shake and bake chicken on Monday, casually, like it was no big deal. Cassie said she was going to make it for herself and I acted nonchalant, like the chicken didn't matter to me. Tuesday came and went and she still hadn't made it, this made me hungry, I wanted it now. I was fantasizing about having a juicy, plump, shook and baked chicken (is that the past tense?) breast on my plate more often than I should have been. By mid-day Wednesday I had formulated a plan to wait out her after school program and hone in on dinner at her house. I said, "I'll bring the potatoes," as if that was some sort of consolation for this god damn shake and bake chicken that I had built up in my mind after three long days of stale cheerios and soup cans in my aforementioned "big girl apartment" that is really an empty cell of loneliness. It worked, I had a bite, Cassie agreed to host me for dinner (they have heat and a TV there, it's luxury people,) and I agreed to bring mashed potato ingredients.

You know what this is, I'm not telling you again.

That night, the plan was going off without a hitch, the chicken was shook and baking, the potatoes were on the oven, everything seemed great until I realized there was no butter. No butter, no sour cream, no nothing in her whole refrigerator to make these potatoes worthy of my company. "Fuck," I thought. Determined to be the bread winner of this scenario, I said I would go get some, five minutes tops. Cassie reluctantly agreed. I say reluctantly because for the last four months I have been perpetually lost. I have been lost on the subway, lost on my street, lost in my car, lost on the way to school, lost on the phone, lost on the highway, lost in every single state in the Midwest, and lost in a fucking paper bag if I could be. I have literally no sense of direction, sometimes I spare myself from being lost because I deliberately go the opposite way that I think is correct.

The grocery store is a straight shot from Cassie's house. It was 6:30 when I left. There are five gas stations before that and one Rite Aid. I stopped at all of them looking for butter. Not a single one had it, not butter substitute, not sticks of butter, not margarine, not nothing. All they had was unfriendly Indian cashiers who shared a unique hatred for small women asking for butter. Rite Aid had sour cream. It had been forty minutes by the time I went insane and spent three dollars on sour cream, which I hate, for my stupid mashed potatoes, which I also now hate. I was starving, and sad, and short tempered. I am sure you can guess what happened next, but while on the phone, in a town I'm unfamiliar with, I found myself lost. Surly I went the right way? All I had to do was go straight? I don't remember passing this? Then it was dark, it had been an hour and a half, and I had managed to be on a dirt road that passes between two farms in Hudsonville, Michigan. I was totally fucked. I used the GPS, it read: destination 35 minutes away, and I realized I had driven god knows how far into Dutch Country where there is absolutely nothing but grass, corn stalks, and barns. I thought about screaming, or crying, but mostly I thought about eating. I would have given anything to be in my cell with a soup can in that moment.

Slowly, I made my way back following the bastard blue dot of doom on my GPS, turning left, right, left, left, one mile, two, three. It was torture. Suddenly, I realized I'd gone too far, I missed my turn, I MISSED MY TURN. WHAT THE, DAMN IT, NO NONO Noooo, WHYYYYYYY WHYW HWY WUlsajdf. The preceding sentence is almost an exact replica of what the inside of my brain looked at the time. Mush. Defeat. I thought to myself: "fuck this, I'm turning around."

This is a candid of the blue dot in New Zealand, ruining someone else's life.

This is the moment in any story, where the reader knows that this is a bad idea; it's like that scene in every horror film where the girl goes up the dark stairwell alone. I was the girl.

About three quarters of the way into the turn I found the car at an unnatural angle. I looked around to see that the left side of the car was vertically aligned with the right side. I was airborne. It occurred to me that I was going to die, hungry, alone and with nothing to show for it but a large tub of sour cream. Slowly, I crept forward. Upon doing this I realized this was the dumbest thing I could have done because now the car was stuck, at less of an incline, but at least partially elevated in a half ditch dyke hybrid designed to fuck up my day, or maybe drain water, its purpose was unclear to me at the time. I tried to reverse, nothing. I tried to move forward again, nothing. At this point I resolved to call Cassie and admit defeat, it had been close to two hours, and I clearly was no longer coming over for dinner. I also resolved to call AAA, they know me there, this is not the first time they've fished my car out of a ditch as I watch, shivering, ego wounded.

This is a close up of my bumper being crushed into the ground.

As I waited for the tow truck, no fewer than twenty locals stopped by to ask if I was alright. This would have been charming if I had not been thinking about dipping their limbs in sour cream eating them for survival. These locals included the county sheriff, one religious man, his bible studying son, and a strange stocky man who essentially repeated everything the other three said. These people stayed until the tow truck arrived. As a result, I know about their families, moving history, sports team preferences, and former colleges. And I know that if they had a truck, by golly, they woulda pulled me out by now.

This is the improved angle, which is clearly still terrible.

Finally, the tow truck company arrived. They rescued the car and no damage was done. I was ten minutes late picking Frannie up from dance, which ended at 9, and I went home to the comfort of my cell, which is located at the intersection of two busy streets, far, far away from corn stalks and hay barrels. I had eggs and toast that night, the finest luxury my refrigerator could afford.


The sour cream is still in my car.







Stay tuned for an upcoming post detailing my first experience with yoga! And thanks, for allowing me a two month hiatus to adjust, I needed it.