Best Story

My family moved from state to state thirty-two times before I was thirteen years old. Roadside rest stops and state parks served as our temporary homes along the way. Stale day-old tuna fish sandwiches, dry on the outside, mushy in the middle, would “do us” for days.

When I was around five years old, at one of the state parks, I was admiring the sparkle of the sun-drenched sidewalk, feeling its warmth on my bare feet when the glint of a rhinestone collar on a small white dog caught my attention. The flash of its collar twinkled up the matching leash to the manicured hand of a woman holding a perfectly good half-eaten apple. She stared down at me before throwing the fruit into a nearby garbage container. It had been a while since I had eaten a meal. All I could think of was how delicious that apple would feel in my insides. I was working on a plan to rescue it from the dumpster and still find a way to climb back out when I felt the woman looking me up and down. Her nose crinkled as if I had just offered her a day-old unrefrigerated tuna fish sandwich. Her eyes narrowed.
“Where are your shoes, girl?” she asked.
I stood as tall as I could. “I’m toughening my feet,” I said.

This stranger didn’t need to know we were “in between” homes, and that I had the unfortunate habit of wearing my shoes out on the sides, or that even though my mom shaved down the heels to level them, my latest pair were beyond rescue. Where were my shoes? I hadn’t left them behind in the car or scattered on a patch of gravel—I had no shoes.

It was as if I suddenly stood in front of a mirror and saw myself reflected through the woman’s eyes. When she looked at my bare feet and clothes much too small for my undersized frame, she saw a little girl, unkempt and unworthy. I looked down at my dirty feet. For just a moment, I saw myself the way she did and I felt small, poor, and ashamed.

A sudden warm assurance came over me; I was more than what she saw. I wanted to tell her as much: “I am not from here. I am not what you see!” But when I looked up, she was gone.

That moment scratched at me for years. I used to think of that woman as Cruella de Vil, the villain from one of the few movies I watched as a child. It wasn’t until recently that I finally saw the woman’s momentous part in my life as a gift. At that young age, I was shown a truth: we get to decide who we are. Was I simply a poor girl living wherever we landed? Or was I more?

That still, small assurance sustained and guided me. I was not my clothes. I was not my hunger. I was not my physical appearance. And I would later go on to learn I am neither my abundance, positions, nor intellect. For better or worse, none of us are. We are not our economic circumstances; we are not our possessions; we are not our trauma. It is not our circumstances, but our responses, that shape and define who we are. I somehow knew then—and I know even better today—that each one of us is far greater than we can possibly comprehend; each one of us has something to contribute. We all matter.

There are many unusual remnants of those years on the road. To this day, I can’t eat tuna sandwiches. I eat apples through the core so that only the stem remains. I am uncomfortable eating in front of people unless everyone has food—which can be very inconvenient, especially while traveling. Those same experiences likewise left me interested in people and places in a way that leaves no desire to stand in judgment of them.