My friend Andrew Starr read my online, typed chortle about a T-shirt advertised as a “limited offering”.  He ordered one for me; it arrived today, left on my doorstep like a signal from the Post office the importance of which I did not mistake.  Like the message from Shelley of condolence; like the card in the mail from a client;  like the Angel from my friend Cindy; the shirt told me:  someone thought of you.

The shirt tells everyone that I  hale from Jennings, Missouri.  Below a drawing of my state appear these words:  IT’S WHERE MY STORY BEGAN.  I’m willing to bet that everyone in this nation and possibly overseas can get a shirt like it for any town they want.  But this shirt has my home town’s name on it.  Jennings is where my story began.

In Jennings, at the age of three, I got lost in my parents’ basement.  I emerged from the dark depths of our home to appear in the living room, where a tight, tense group of police officers, Boy Scouts and my parents gathered to discuss the impending neighborhood search for me.  In Jennings, too, I joined Camp Fire Girls, though a year late, because my mother could not afford the dues.  I never quite matched pace with those who had begun as Blue Birds but I did try.

In Jennings, I crouched in our driveway with my sister Joyce to view what she called “Shiny Rock”, a black rock embedded in the concrete, which we speculated would be worth a fortune if we could pry it loose.  We thought it was a rare diamond.  At the top of that same driveway, I sat on my rump and used a toy Singer Sewing machine to punch holes in paper to be pretend postage stamps.  I stuck them on envelopes with gobs of hot tar and sent letters to my Nana.  Come get me, I wrote.  I earnestly put them in the mailbox.  I assume my mother threw them away.

On dark frozen streets in Jennings, I played football at midnight with my brothers, and walked, hand in hand, with my siblings while my father raged and rampaged and we prayed for him to fall asleep.  On those same streets, or nearby, I marched in school parades and trudged home from school, weary, confused, sometimes crying.  Down the street which formed a T with ours, I barreled at break-neck speed, on a tricycle with no rubber left on its wheels, legs splayed, hair streaming, terrified but exhilarated.  I built up velocity as I headed across McLaran and down our driveway, through the gate, onto our curved sidewalk at the end of which I grabbed the young maple’s trunk and let the trike fly forward to crash three feet down in the neighbor’s backyard.

In Jennings, my past solidified; my future unfolded; my present swirled around me in glorious peaks and horrifying valleys.

I hold a thousand stories of Jennings life within me.  The farms which lingered there, even in my childhood.  The schools that gave us merry-go-rounds and softball diamonds.  The long sad whistle of the evening train in the hot summer air and the cool wind of winter.  In Jennings, I learned to laugh; and fear; and yearn; and bargain.  I knelt in churches and lifted my eyes to the Blessed Virgin Mary, who gazed down on me with sightless eyes.

What I experienced in Jennings started my story; and all that I have seen and done since I left Jennings in 1973 has spewed chapter after chapter on the yellowing pages of my life to middle-age.  This t-shirt seems a silly, small extravagance now that I have it; but nevertheless, I’m wearing it, beneath my crooked smile and my wild gypsy-girl hair pulled into a Sneetch hair style.  It reminds me of where my story began, and of the potential places my story might go.

And the sending of it to me, by Andrew, mirrors the message on the back of my pocket angel from Cindy Cieplik, which sits beside me on the table, reminding me that despite my terrible fears, and my buried secrets, I am valued.