Hey Friends! If you’re new, here’s the scoop: We’re taking a walk through the book of Proverbs along with a girl named Eleanor. In Eleanor’s imaginative life, she is heir to an island chain. In real life, she is a high school freshman at an arts school—a seeming dream come true that will turn into her worst nightmare if she isn’t careful.
“(Proverbs) to receive instruction in wise dealing, in righteousness, justice, and equity;” – Proverbs 1:3
Isle of the Rising Star
Sunlight streamed into the grotto, illuminating the golden rocks that dripped with ocean spray. Eleanor stopped scrubbing the black, metal benches for a moment to enjoy the awe of the moment.
“This time tomorrow should be the second hour of entertaining,” Eleanor said aloud, though she was alone. “In the first hour, the guests will be delighted with the cool and the darkness and then, ta-da! The sunlight and the gold. Oh! I could be singing them a beautiful song in a minor key and then, bam!, just as light streams into the grotto, I transition into a major key and . . . magic, just like that.”
Eleanor giggled aloud. An even better plan had come to mind.
“What are you doing, Princess?” came a voice from outside the grotto.
“Planting lilacs, Your Highness,” she responded. Planting lilacs was a code between the father and daughter that meant “cultivating friendship” and Eleanor had just found the Miracle Grow.
Wichita, KS
Eleanor opened her eyes as her grandmother turned onto Rochester. Large elm trees towered over them, their leaves the deep green of summer. A groundskeeper in a white polo raked mulch up around a flower bed of cannas.
The busts of Native American men in war apparel scowled from their high places above the school’s entryways, seemingly scouting for signs of danger. Students and parents walked on the sidewalks, heading toward the doors. Eleanor took a deep breath and sighed. They’re friends, not competition, she told herself.
“Nervous?” her grandmother asked.
“ ‘. . . a piece breaks off, declares itself,’” Eleanor quoted.
Her grandmother smiled and nodded. “‘Inside, something dances.*'”
Eleanor smiled widely. The first night that she stayed with her grandparents, after phone calls to Uncle Abe and Aunt Sapphire and her far-away mother, Eleanor had been amazed and warmed to find a poem tucked in the slit between the brass frame and mirror of the medicine cabinet. A week later, Eleanor mustered up the courage to tuck a poem on the opposite side of the mirror. Over the few months she lived there, it became a language between them. Grandpa teased that he couldn’t see to shave his face anymore, but he also started hanging up poems. He used green sticky notes and quoted Shel Silverstein.
As she and her grandmother walked toward the doors of the school, Eleanor had a moment of feeling just like any other teenage kid walking in. But as they passed the flower bed, the groundskeeper put down his rake, walked over, and opened the door for them, bowing. When he looked up, his dark brown eyes locked with hers for a moment. Was he trying to tell her something, or was he trying to read something in her eyes? Was he Native American? Was it okay for her to wonder if he was Native American?
Eleanor looked at her grandmother, but her grandmother was looking over at the wooden doors to the auditorium. “It’s like a dream, Eleanor. I never would have guessed that you would one day perform on the same stage where your grandfather and I fell in love.”
“The same stage where my father set fire to the curtains during ‘Cinderella.’”
Her grandmother laughed. “Please don’t repeat your father’s expensive mistake.”
Eleanor and her grandmother walked on, and she was an average teen again, waiting in a long line of phone-checking, unsmiling people, to get her room assignment. Had the groundskeeper even been real? She hoped he was not.
*From ”I Love Uncertain Gestures”
by Valerio Magrelli
I love uncertain gestures:
someone stumbles, someone else
bangs his glass,
can’t remember,
gets distracted or the sentinel
can’t stop the slight
flicker of his lashes—
they matter to me
because in them I see the wobbling,
the familiar rattle
of the broken mechanism.
The whole object makes no sound,
has no voice; it only moves.
But here the apparatus,
the play of parts, has given way,
a piece breaks off,
declares itself.
Inside, something dances.
Country Girl Drive 