Dear Stansbury Hall, Thanks for the Lessons

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 Morgantown ghosts are pieces of my past. Like my boys’ impending 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 last week on our way to my eight-year-old’s swim lesson: As we came upon the hulking, shiny and new WVU Reynolds Hall, I told my boys that it was formerly Stansbury Hall, where during college Mamma committed a tiny, baby sin that resulted in getting a passing grade in a required gym course. (Not that kind of sin. Come on.)

Demolished a few years ago to make way for the new, Stansbury is now a ghost of WVU’s history and mine. 

It was Stansbury Hall, 2000, where the title of a professor’s newly published book 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 college, 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. 

Last week, as I drove my boys past the ghost of Stansbury Hall, we had time to kill in traffic, as usual. I’m convinced that whoever designed the layout of Morgantown is the same one who forgets to include one essential bolt in every box of DIY furniture. As we sat idling in the long line inching toward the intersection at Beechurst and University, my mind traveled back in time to the early aughts. 

I spent a lot of time at Stansbury Hall, then-home of WVU’s English Department (as well as a weathered gymnasium and an annex that was 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 38.3 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, which is often since it’s on a main thoroughfare, I see the ghost of Stansbury. I recall the formative relationships I made in those years. I see the girl I was then—with fewer responsibilities and more energy but the same white-hot fire for curiosity and connection. I hear better judgement reminding me that neither love nor listening will flourish outside the sacred space of trust. 

Ghosts are apt teachers, if we’re willing to look back on old things with new eyes.