The night Crittenden County High School won the girls basketball regional championship, I had just arrived home for spring break. I walked through the back door to find my parents sitting at the kitchen table, intently listening to the announcer. His fervor was magnetic, and though I hadn’t been home but for a few minutes, I was already rapt in the game. A last second shot, and then—“Rockets win! Rockets win!” His voice was breaking, the crowd's roar from the gym sounded through the fuzzy AM radio, and my parents and I looked to each other in silence, smiling and eyes welling with tears of pride for our tiny county school.
It was the first time my alma mater had ever sent any basketball team to the state tournament, and the excitement ignited the community like wildfire. The next morning, unadorned white banners with plain blue letters hung on the lampposts along Main Street. Despite their crude aesthetic, the banners spelled out a hopeful message: “The Little Town that Could.” Every business along Main Street embellished its windows with similar well-wishes: “Good Luck Lady Rockets!”; “All the Way to State!”; “The Triple Crown: All-A, District, and Region 2011!” Blue balloons, blue streamers, even blue flowers tossed in the March wind of Marion, Kentucky.
Though I live in Chicago now, one year out of college, I cannot ignore the Crittenden County part of myself. It is as if time stops while I’m away from my hometown, for anytime I return, things pick up right where I left them:
there are still just two stoplights;
there are still just three fast food restaurants;
the county newspaper is still published once a week;
the high school still graduates about 100 students each year;
the muddy pick-up trucks still dominate the roads;
the Amish still park their buggies in the grocery store parking lot;
the teens still hang out “up town” in the evenings and go “backroading” for fun;
and the adults still ask me how I’m doing away from home, no matter how many times they’ve asked before.
Crittenden County is a place where the people are “kin” to each other, where you’re “fixin’” to go to the store, and where pulling down someone's pants by surprise is called “shucking,” like shucking corn. And, of course, the typical Crittenden Countian is connected to most other citizens by three or less degrees of separation: I went to prom with my dentist’s nephew; my best friend’s aunt was my swim team coach, her uncle my algebra teacher; and my older brother, Neil Guess, went to homecoming with a girl named Lisa, who ended up marrying Terry Guess (no relation) and subsequently became the stepmother of one of my classmates, T.K. Guess (wait—what?).
Perhaps these quaint simplicities of rural life seem irrelevant to foreigners, but they inevitably constitute my personal mantra as both a student and (future) teacher of writing: from simplicity comes inspiration.
In Shakespeare’s tragedy King Lear, Lear famously threatens his daughter Cordelia that “nothing will come of nothing”—she will receive nothing from him if she does nothing to win his love through flattery. Many may think this ideology applies to the simple “nothings” of Marion, Kentucky, but in the case of my hometown and, more importantly, writing overall, there always is something, no matter how seemingly insignificant. The most successful creative pieces I’ve ever written focus on the most ordinary subjects, namely a personal essay entitled “Teeth: A Journey” and “Ole Blue Guess,” the narrative of the 1976 blue Chevrolet I drove during my teenage years: neither grand nor emotionally riveting, these stories simply bring to life common slices of the past that with earn recognition with lively storytelling.
Likewise, academic writing functions in a similar simple-to-inspired manner. When writing a research paper, I read all the material first without having any clue where it will lead, noting every regular moment, every tiny detail, every nothing that could be something. How does it all relate? How do these puzzle pieces connect? What trends, ideas, arguments can I make from these clues? These questions, help me find the inspiration among the simplicities and lead me to my thesis.
This very philosophy manifested itself that day at the Kentucky Sweet Sixteen basketball tournament as I cheered on the Lady Rockets. Throughout the wide sea of blue I spotted moments of my past—old classmates and teachers, family friends and foes, and citizens with whom I simply had that three-degree connection. Just as the subtleties of life inspire creative writing, just as the most minor details enlighten scholarly theses, these individual threads of Crittenden County had joined as a woven tapestry of community pride, reaffirming my mantra: from the simplicities of a rural community came the motivation to support Our Little Town that Could to the very end—and the inspiration to tell the tale another day.
Even well into adulthood, I used to have the hardest time (embarrassingly enough) remembering which direction I had to turn to loosen or tighten things like screws or knobs. This culminated one day when I was trying to get some screws off the license plate of my car and it took me way too long to finish the task. After I complained to a friend, she taught me “Righty tight-y, lefty loose-y” as a way to remember this which worked like a charm! All the years of struggling to keep this straight in my head boiled down to a couple of simple lines and it’s something I won’t ever forget.
