City of Ghosts

I live in a city of ghosts.

I don’t mean the kind who pay the bills of paranormal pros. If there is such a thing as real ghosts, they don’t bother the likes of me. Being supernatural and all, they know I’m already far too busy with self-made apparitions. When you create your own terrors, outsiders can’t get in. The anxious mind is generous that way.

My ghosts are pieces of my past. Like my boys’ Halloween-haul dreams, they are a mixed bag stuffed to the brim with sweet and sour, keepers and throwaways, and the occasional super-sized surprise. I offered the latter in conversation with my boys as traffic stopped us on Beechurst Ave. next to WVU Reynolds Hall, a hulking feat of fast-tracked construction, erected upon the demolition of Stansbury Hall, home of the WVU English Department. While gesturing bittersweetly at Reynold’s impersonal form, I revealed to my kids that during college, their do the right thing especially when it hurts mom committed a tiny, baby sin in Stansbury that resulted in getting a passing grade in a required gym course. (Not that kind of sin. Think less gutter, more cronyism.)

When OG Word Nerd Headquarters fell, it became a ghost of WVU’s history and mine.

It was Stansbury Hall circa 2000 where Professor Ethel Morgan Smith introduced her newly published book, which invoked the latter part of Psalm 121:

I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help.

I didn’t read the book, but that verse became a portent.

A few years after graduation, I moved to Memphis, where I found myself in perpetual need of things that don’t come easily: money, a support system, a safe place (sometimes literally, due to a new-to-me weather phenomenon called “straight-line winds,” the conservative cousin of a tornado). In typical fashion, I easily made friends, some I considered family — from whence would cometh my help, or so I thought. After years of mourning the painful truth of those relationships, wisdom coaxed me toward forgiving (which is divine) without forgetting (which is insurance).

After reaching my zenith in the Mid-South, I finally lifted my eyes unto the hills. Country roads took me home.

My boys and I frequently sit in a long line of traffic next to the ghost of Stansbury Hall. I’m convinced that whoever engineered the city of Morgantown is the same one who forgets to include one essential bolt in every box of DIY furniture. As we idle and inch toward the intersection at Beechurst and University, I can’t help but time travel back to the halcyon era of the early aughts.

As did every English major, I spent a lot of time at Stansbury, which housed not only the English department but also a weathered gymnasium and an annex that was only ever freezing or sweltering depending on the season. It’s where my non-advisors didn’t advise me to seek tuition waivers for my high GPA, hence a student loan bill that expanded to Goodyear Blimp proportions. It’s where I critiqued Seamus Heaney poems under the tutelage of an enthusiastic, stereotypically Irish-looking professor whose voice was a sponge soaking up all the air in his throat, a sound still fresh in my mind nearly 24 years after the fact.

At Stansbury, I wrote corny heartbreak poems after parting ways with my understated singer boyfriend and then, two-ish years later, my overstated artist boyfriend. They both broke my heart and tried my (high-to-a-fault) tolerance until their respective moments of epiphany, at which point my trust was like Stansbury Hall: long-suffering and gone.

In an east-facing classroom on Stansbury’s third floor, I honed my senior thesis, a collection of poems and nonfiction essays inspired both by my maturity as a writer and my discovery of Cane, a beautiful book of verse and vignettes by Harlem Renaissance writer Jean Toomer.

In a graduate literary theory course at Stansbury, I devoured conversation about racism and sexism, my beliefs about which had grown wild and free despite my childhood in a small town 60 miles south, where minds tend to be held down and smothered by the hard, leathery hands of Fear and Judgement. In that same class, affinity blossomed with a woman who would come to exemplify from whence cometh my help when I became a first-time mom on my own. While others passed judgment about my choice to continue on my path as a writer, she offered real talk and real listening, eventually confiding in me a tragedy that only a mother can know, in doing so encouraging what I already knew: I was doing the right thing.

Each time I pass Reynolds Hall, I pay respect to Stansbury, a touchpoint of intensely formative years of my life. College takes a lot of heat in contemporary discourse, both rightfully and not, but if we’re talking personal enrichment, I’m forever in debt (if we’re talking federal loans, same.) From intellectual enrichment and creative awakening to animal welfare activism and lifelong sisterhood, my experience in higher education is worth far more than that immortal student loan bill.

This bears admission: I hate driving. Who wants to pay mind to stop signs and stop lights, turn signals and speed limits when there’s a whole world of wonders to wonder about? Driving is for people who don’t daydream and do have attention spans. Unfair as it feels to be caged behind the wheel, a timely traffic jam can flip the script. Stansbury’s ghost rises from the earth’s crust under 83 Beechurst Ave., grabbing me by the shoulders to whisper its command: Never let her go. She is the girl I was back then, burning white-hot with curiosity and hope. When anxious thoughts and relentless stress bear down on the mother she became, an old ghost returns with tales of youthful abandon. Like that time Mamma passed Beginning Basketball without making a pass.

Thanks for the lessons, Stansbury Hall.