with Hailo.
I love America, Because I love Kansas
An American childhood
I grew up playing in the street, occasionally veering off to run down this one ditch. I once let a mouse into it, after my father caught it in the garage. We gave it a piece of American cheese and released it into the big, wild world.
My father had a wooden creeper to slide under cars, given to him by his father. Nevermind he traded his first car for a computer.
I used to sit on the couch and read Doctor Seuss books. Or in my bedroom and read Disney stories, doodling in the margins, not yet calling them annotations.
At five, we moved. The first occasion in the new house was my 6th birthday party. Everyone dressed as a Princess and my parents announced them at the door. I was Belle, with facepaint and a scrunched up smile.
Every summer, I’d go to Medicine Lodge, Kansas.
Home of my Grandfather who drag raced and Grandmother who reads and reads and reads. I would stay in the guest room across the hall, reading scraps of paper around the room.
One sticks with me after all these years. The story about the man who’s walking with God and sees two footsteps, until he only sees one.
“Why have you forsaken me?” he asks. Different voice, age old question.
Once I got a pink Dell Laptop, I stopped looking around the room. Instead I’d stay up late watching movies. Like the original Great Gatsby. The new American Childhood in a bedroom of your own with the world at your fingertips.
Medicine Lodge, Kansas
I was back in this room around Christmas, looking at old cookbooks with Gma.
“I feel bad for people who don’t read,” said Gma, “You can go anywhere in a book.”
I take after her. Right down to the amount of coffee we drink. My first cup was from her hands in a white styrofoam cup, after Sunday service at their Presbyterian church. I added lots of sugar, naturally, at eight years old.
But I asked for my own cup henceforth, even at her home. Served on the island in the kitchen my grandfather built with his own two hands, in a little mug she eventually got me that says “Princess.” They are Foldgers loyalists, my grandparents. And I still use that cup, each time I’m back.
Wichita, Kansas
The Spice Merchant
I get my coffee in Wichita, Kansas at a place called The Spice Merchant. I started going religiously at 16, when I started drinking a cup every morning. I’d decided to go to Princeton and began pulling all nighters, pursuing a perfect GPA after hours at the ballet studio after school. I came to New York for the first time at 14 to study with Dance Theater of Harlem, and I loved it, I loved New York, I loved and still love Harlem, but I realized that I didn’t love ballet enough to do it for the rest of my life.
But I did love writing that much. I knew it young, but was always afraid to admit it, having been feed the narrative that
1) you can’t make a living doing what you love and
2) writers don’t get paid.
I looked up “best schools for writing” and Princeton was number one. I saw Michelle Obama and F. Scott Fitzgerald on the roster of alumni, and was sold.
I didn’t sleep much that year. I didn’t take care of myself, or my body, but I did get the grades, and I did get into one of America’s oldest academic institutions and I still get my coffee at The Spice Merchant in Wichita, Kansas. My favorite flavors are Carmel Rum Crunch (which I’m drinking now, as I edit this), and Almond Amaretto.
Last time I got Eggnog-flavored coffee on a recommendation from the same man who ground my beans the time before. That was the first time they ever called me “Ma’am.”
Sedgwick County Museum
My Grandparents came to Wichita, as well. We went to the Sedgwick Country Historical Musuem–the oldest building in Wichita, with gorgeous turrets and a clock that still clangs every hour on the hour. My grandmother reminisced through the fashion exhibit, remembering styles she once wore. We passed the aviation section, documenting how my home town launched an entire industry, becoming the “Air Capital of the World.” There were jazz clubs and Sunflower fields, and the first successful sit-in in the United States.
My favorite section is the replica of a late 19th century home. With dark, rich wood making up a study, a dining room, and a parlor. When I imagine myself married, I see a home like this. With two children and a husband, before the age of 30. The type of family that goes to church on Sunday and has dinner together, most nights, making restaurants occasions, as they should be.
On a Monday, I went to the office with my father in Aquatalia boots and a little suit. I don’t enjoy remote work. I want my home to remain a home. Writing is the only exception for me, in this, but only because I’ve never considered writing “work.” Around lunchtime, we met my Mother at…
A.V.I. Seabar & Chophouse
Wichita’s premiere restaurant for businesses lunches. “Business,” that magical word. Taking my father to Texas, Colorado, Arizona, with knick knacks for my brother and I. I learned that young–that business takes you places. Lunches with Coworkers. Offsite meetings. Business trips, because real business, the type that truly matters, can only be done face to face.
Around 3pm, when I take an espresso shot or a second Americano of the day, my father and I went to GROW–a new concept in Downtown Wichita.
Grow Plantbar
“Have you been here before?” I asked him. He had not. We sat at the bar and the possibilities were endless. Cocktails or two dollar cookies or a little cactus to put on one’s desk. He ordered a cappuccino and I, an Americano.
We tumbled into conversation with the bartender/barista, as you do in the Midwest. If you can chat, you do. She moved to Wichita from Texas, but she’d been everywhere.
“I love it here,” she said, explaining that people seemed to care.
“When they ask how your day is, they actually wait and listen to the answer.”
Sometimes I fear that New York will change me. Will pump a narrative of possibility into my brain that makes it impossible to sit still and be content exactly where I am at any given moment. But through this woman’s eyes, I fell in love with Wichita, again, all at once, or rather remembered why it’s so charming to begin with.
It’s patient and calm and midwestern. It can be anything because it beckons you with open arms as if asking, “well what do you want to do here?”
One morning, I went on a winding run to take a yoga class at Hot Asana where I once stretched tall next to Ron Baker, having pride in our team even though I couldn’t have named a single Basketball position. I started going around when I won Miss Kansas Teen USA.
Back then, I would drive. This time, I ran.
Crossing a park, I chuckled at the children with bike helmets and little bodies, thinking about parks my brother practiced football in as I made up dance routines with the other little sisters. I ran off of the path finding myself between two rows of backyards in a ditch.
Three children ran parallel to me. They waved. I waved back.
“Hi,” the little girl called out. I smiled. “Are you a child or an adult?” she asked.
I laughed.
“I’m an adult” I said.
“Keep going!” she called after me, “You got this!”
I almost wanted to change my answer, because I did feel like a child. Running parallel, minutes later, to a wheat field, watching ears of grain kiss the sun, thinking of my first concert. I was probably her age, at the Kansas State Fair. Aly and AJ. We sat on hay bales. I only go to concerts now if I know the performer, usually because I’m too short to see. But that’s the thing about Kansas. It’s flat. The land. The accents. The egos. It’s like being at a concert God created just for you, to make sure you can see all the best parts, if you’ll only look for them.
At the yoga studio, I didn’t have my wallet, and for someone with a media company and such a footprint in digital media, I’m often a luddite by choice. I’d reserved a class, but didn’t have a way to pay for a mat rental.
She let me take the class anyways and I promised I’d be back to pay for the mat, and we moved onto more important matters of chat, like the fact that her nephew was my first ballet partner in a performance of the Nutcracker years ago.
After the class, my father and I went to…
Aroma Coffeehouse
Where I had my first Americano of the day and we split a pumpkin loaf with an icing crust. Sweet, older couples sat across from one another at tables. A pair studied their bibles on a high top.
And before I left, to come back to New York, I went to Helzberg.
Helzberg Diamonds
It’s become a bit of a tradition–going to Helzberg before going to the airport. Helzberg is a Kansas born and raised jewelry store. I take all my jewelry here to get cleaned, because they are patient and take their time with it while you’re right there in the store. They smile and welcome you in. They ask why you’re there, and they listen.
I can’t remember my first time in Helzberg. Maybe to pick out an anniversary gift with my father. Only for myself in the past few years, perhaps in the time I became a “Ma’am.” This time, I looked at the diamonds. I asked Kat, a licensed DOAIGOI, how to spot earth cut versus lab grown by eye.
“Let’s go to the diamond room,” she said.
How can you say no to that.
So Kat and I went through the entire evaluation process for diamonds, and she held up two different rings, showing the perfect Lab grown diamond versus the cloudier Earth cut.
“Which would you rather have?” she asked.
Next, they let me try on a $16k diamond. At Tiffany’s, the $21k ring lingered in my mind and on my left hand, but I know a dollar stretches much, much further in the midwest, and I wanted to see the conversion in diamonds. Absolutely stunning. I want to fall in love with an American man and be proposed to with a ring in his family, but I drowned that day in Princess-cut this and square shaped-that, thinking of the bedazzled USA sash I wore across my chest and the pearl and diamond crown that sat on my head and came back with me, to Kansas, after the Miss Teen USA pageant in Shreveport. Who said luxury didn’t like to visit the “fly over” places.
The hardest part of going to Kansas is leaving. Hugging relatives one, two, three times. New York glitters, but Kansas is my earth cut gem. One who I can spot the beauty in with a familiarity you only get by belonging to a place. There are a lot of lab grown cities in the world, but there are no clouds like the clouds in Kansas.
So I went to the airport in the Air Capital. Where TSA gets you through in 20 minutes max. As the plane took off, racing the sunrise,
In Sum,
Kansas made me who I am. Each return is an exercise in releasing ego and appreciating the little things. The memories. The shared agreements of a culture.
I love America because I love Kansas. Kansas held me in its arms at 5, at 16, and now at 24, and let me decide who I wanted to be. It let me dream. I wanted to go Princeton, like F. Scott Fitzgerald. But where he had midwestern guilt, I have an abundance of Midwestern pride. The midwest is the reason I say hello and good morning to my neighbors. It’s the reason I went back to yoga studio and paid for two mats at my second class. It’s the reason why I ask how people are and I care about the answer.
Traveling made me brasher. A little less afraid of the unknown, like a child who has fallen enough to know that life without training wheels is scary, but it’s more fulfilling. America is like that, I think. Young enough to be brash. To try on different narratives for size, taking them off with the whim of a child playing dress up.
Now, more than ever, it’s time to look at the parts of America that are oft looked over, to ask them who they are, where their beauty lies, and to dream about what a collective American ideal is. American culture is earnest. It moves fast and breaks things and talks a little too loud. But, as Anderson II once said, in the ruptures is where relationships are strengthened. Even the best bridges sway a little in the wind.
That story, in my Grandmother’s guest room, about the man and the footsteps and the God who’s forsaken him. It ends with him realizing that the point in his journey where the two footprints become one, it the point at which God started carrying him.
I ask you, to come with me this year, on a journey of discovering America. Who its made up of. What is has meant in the past. And what in can mean in the future.
I love America, because I love you.
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