A Tourist in Mayberry

Part 1/1) Notes from my Diary Journal: Words - Pretentious and Otherwise

Narrative exposition: insertion of relevant background information within a story.

To tell you my story, I am relying on notes taken from the diary journal I started the summer before the 9th grade. It was the same summer this story began.

Miss Livengood told me keeping a diary journal was a good place for a writer to begin. It's a place to practice your craft without being judged or worrying about being judged. In a diary journal you can tell your deepest secrets because the words are yours and yours alone. No one is going to read those words but you.

Miss Livengood was an early influence in my formative years. I met her in the 3rd grade when I first moved to North Carolina. We met at the Mount Airy Public Library where we both spent a lot of time. She was the first adult, outside my family, I ever connected with, and she would turn out to be integral to the story I am going to tell you. She is integral because a story needs a damsel in distress, and though there are many distressed damsels in my story, she is the most compelling because her part of the story includes an improbable love story.

Here is an entry from my diary journal that summer:

I love being a writer. Just the language alone is enough for me. Alliteration. Assonance. Antagonist. Onomatopoeia. Oxymoron. Epigraph. Idiom. Metaphor. And, vocabulary, oh my. Here's the opening line from my award winning short story recently published in Young Writers:

"My best friend, Magdalena, was inconsolable when she lost the race for her team."

Inconsolable. A vocabulary word from WordsRight, a book Miss Livengood gave me to use in my honors English class next year. Honors class, humpf. Seems like just more work to me. Miss Livengood, my eighth grade English teacher, is the one who can be blamed for recommending me for a "smarty farty" class as my Nana Gail calls it.

All I know is - I am a going to to be a writer. Specifically, a reporter who travels all over the world facing danger and mystique and bringing the truth to the ignorant masses. I will do this with panache and a flair and style beyond my young years. The ignorant masses are going to be astounded. To practice my craft, I have used my WordsRight book until the glue on the binding abandoned all hope and split the book into twin halves.

In this handwritten diary journal (I am too poor for a computer), I write the vocabulary words in a delicate, elegant script to set them off, but mainly to show how smart and sophisticated I am - now that I am a writer. I suspect sophistication is like style. It is something difficult to develop. You either have it or you don't.

Miss Livengood told me to use this book and learn these words and use them in my writing."Mastering vocabulary will help make you a better writer," Miss Livengood told me.

And though I think these "fancy" words can be a bit pretentious, I use them in honor of Miss Livengood who believes I am a writer.

As you can see, I am pompous and quite confident, even at this age, that I am to be the next great American writer. It will only take practice and studying my craft like Miss Livengood says. Miss Livengood believes in me and because she believes, so do I. I believe I am a natural.

I met Aunt Bea, a hero in my story, because of Miss Livengood. This is how I introduced Aunt Bea in my diary journal:

If Miss Livengood's great-aunt Beatrice (who by the way she reveres, another vocab word) did not slip on a patch of black ice and break her hip on her way to the Belk Department Store with her bargain hunting friends, Miss Livengood may not have ever found love at all. Aunt Bea (an ironic name for reasons you will know later) did fall and to her dismay ended up in the nursing center part of the retirement home where my mom, Candi, works most days in ten to twelve hour shifts.

Aunt Bea is an old maid with a bachelor brother, Charles. Her only other close living relative is her niece, my Miss Livengood, Bernice, called Bernie by all. Miss Bernie Livengood is a cousin's daughter (cousins are prevalent in a small town in the south), but because Aunt Bea has no children of her own and she raised her, Aunt Bea considers Bernie her baby. My Miss Livengood considers Aunt Bea her center too, she loves her like a mother.

Miss Livengood and Uncle Charles visit as much as they can, but Auntie Bea's friends feel the nursing center is beneath them or worse. Visits there can doom them to a future there themselves, so they visit infrequently. Auntie Bea is lonesome. That is where I come in.

Unfathomable at it may seem to all of you who lament the state of the typical MTV watching, sex-fixated, idiot teenagers, I love older people. I want to say right here, I have nothing against MTV, and I was hooked for awhile on The Real World. My Nana Gail used to say: "That is no real world those teenager and twenty somethings are living in. Try dropping a baby or two in that house, and maybe some bills you can't pay. Now that's the real world."

I am a little older now. I seldom watch MTV and my favorite TV show is Antiques Roadshow. I don't know why. I guess I like vintage stuff, which is why I like the elderly at the retirement center where my mom works. Sure, some of them have some pretty funky smells emitting from their pilled sweaters, but most of the elderly have lived intriguing, interesting lives. They can tell you about crazy stuff like the first time they saw a plane fly overhead or the time they went down with the sinking ship in shark-infested waters.

The elderly are different in the way they act too, which makes them interesting to be around. Most of them, who are not completely bonkers, have nice manners.They will offer you a seat or a piece of cake if you come to visit. They understand that company is company, no matter who you are or why you are here.

The elderly reuse a plastic fork and fish it out of the trash because it is, "Just too good to throw away." Frugal is what old people are. Frugality is not a trait exclusive to the elderly. My mom will shake a bottle of lotion within an inch of its life to get the last drop out. I've even seen her add water.

I guess getting the last drop or reusing a plastic fork is more about being poor and going without and knowing what that's like, than an age thing, but it still doesn't mean old people are not interesting.

Ok, so cheapness is not so interesting, but you don't know something I do. Sometimes old people were not just former farmers, bankers, neighbors, mill workers, doctors, or lawyers. Sometimes they worked for the CIA and were spies. Sometimes they loved a boy so deeply they disobeyed their mama and snuck away and shared adventures you only see in a pirate movie. Sometimes, they were stone-cold killers.

As you can see, I had a flair for the melodramatic at age fourteen. Even though I graduate from college soon, little has changed:

Though typically only widows seeking second husbands fell hard (pun intended) at the nursing home, my teacher and mentor, Miss Bernie Livengood, fell hard and found true love that summer at Riverview Retirement Center. The summer Miss Livengood found true love (though she did not know it right away) was the same summer I wrote my award-winning story where Magdalena was inconsolable after she lost the race. It was the same summer I discovered that killing a person, a really despicable person, was not such a bad thing after all and, if done correctly, left you with a sense of accomplishment and exhilaration akin to winning the race after all.

Author's Note/ Inspirations for details: I once worked in a nursing facility where I listened closely. Some of the stories told in this book were told to me by the people who lived them. I won't tell you all the stories that are real, but the story about the airplane flying over is true. The person who told me said that they had heard of airplanes, but never seen one, When one flew over low and loud, they all hit the dirt because they thought it was going to fall out of the sky.

Also, I'm sure some of you have seen your grandma picking plastic forks out of the trash. My great grandmother would explain that if you grew up during the depression, you saved or reused everything.