Little Lu and Her Damn Relentless Hopin'

The playground of my elementary school butted up against the backside of a neighborhood. Half of the playground looked into the backyards of the houses and the other half looked down a quiet street lined with shrubs and parked cars. While my mental and social state ebbed and flowed throughout the six years of elementary school, there were times when I would spend my recess period sitting in front of the playground fence, looking off into the neighborhood.

I pretended I was free to roam out and away from the structure and order behind me in the school building. I didn’t have to calculate minutes left in the science lesson before moving on the math lesson nor did I have to listen to school children slowly work their way through their own thoughts. I pretended each of the front yards were mine and that I spent my time there every morning and didn’t have to go to school.

Sometimes this was a sad ritual, a longing for freedom. In reality, I just didn’t like school and felt I had better, less redundant ways to use my time. Sometimes a woman would come out and sweep her back porch and I would sit and watch her dust pollen off of her deck chairs and straighten up knick-knacks before going back inside. I pretended she was Mom and that I was home with her, helping her tidy up and laughing and not being anxious or lonely.

To answer your next question, yes, my behavior concerned the teachers. While all the other kids played kickball and swung from the Monkey Bars and shrieked for no apparent reason, I sat alone, thirty yards away from the other kids, and I stared off into the world. To me it was painfully obvious that I was a deep thinker. To adults I was a red flag; antisocial, imaginative, and abundantly hairy.

They would occasionally walk over and ask me why I didn’t want to partake in the various forms of societal fun. I only really told them I didn’t want to and that I liked sitting in the sun and watching the cats walk by and sometimes I would let them walk me back to the other kids to help diminish their cause for worry, writing me off only as shy and not a Future Shooter of America.

When I was really little, dreaming of freedom in the neighborhood nearly made my cry and I would hide my despair from the kids who only wandered towards me when a rogue sports ball careened off in my direction. By my fifth grade graduation I had a group of friends I loved and I spent my recess period sitting with them, discussing important things like fuzzy gel pens and anything you could purchase from Bath and Body Works. I would sit on top of the picnic tables with them and glance at the houses while they were talking. It was a sight I knew as well as my own neighborhood but I’d never been on the other side of the fence. I’d watch fondly as the woman brought out plants when the weather warmed up and set them around her back porch. 

“Laura!” my friends would interrupt, “What’s yours called?” and I’d look back at them, staring up at me with their streaks of blue hair and hot pink hair bands. 

“Arabian Red.” I’d reply, wiggling my freshly painted fingernails and accepting their acceptance of me with pride.

Last week at work I was waiting on an elevator on the top floor of the hotel. While I waited, I looked out the window at the edge of Downtown and across the water into Mt. Pleasant. I was watching all the little cars make their way over the bridge and I was instantly seven years old again, staring out at the world from behind my societal shackles. In the moment, I made myself sad that I wasn’t someone out free for the day, running errands in Mt. Pleasant or going Downtown to look at the gardens and walk along the water.

And then I laughed at me, the pathetic kind of laugh you push out through your nose when some jerk does something so jerky you can’t believe it but you’re also not surprised either, like Donald Trump’s entire existence. I laughed at the inescapable longing for freedom I seem to have and I laughed that I won’t give up hating where I am and hoping for something more. It’s exhausting.

And then I thought of The Shawshank Redemption. Now stay with me here. Ole Andy Dufresne and his holding on to hope. Red says hope is a dangerous thing. “Hope can drive a man insane.” he says, and I'd say few things in my life have hurt as much as having hope.

But Andy says no. Andy says hope just might be the best thing and “no good thing ever dies.” Andy tells Red about music, memories, and hope that no one can take away from him and I'd say few things in my life would have happened without having had hope. At the end of the movie, Andy Dufresne shimmies out of Shawshank Prison with his dirty clothes and nubby hammer and his damn, relentless hopin’. 

“I find I'm so excited, I can barely sit still or hold a thought in my head. I think it's the excitement only a free man can feel, a free man at the start of a long journey whose conclusion is uncertain. I hope I can make it across the border. I hope to see my friend and shake his hand. I hope the Pacific is as blue as it has been in my dreams. I hope.” -Red

Since I was little I've hoped for the time in the future where I don’t spend my days doing things other people told me to do and boy I get so excited thinking about what that will be like. I bet it feels like dipping into a warm bath or that involuntary euphoria you get on the first warm day after winter. I bet it feels like that every day. 

It’s a shame I’ll be sixty-five by then. Really seems like a waste of youth.

As a side note, I've spent approximately ten minutes wondering if this post will crack me up twenty years from now. How naive and dramatic I must seem.