Whose Address Was It, Anyway

The following was written in late September 27 to share with my spiritual writing group, where we have a written check-in as our warmup ritual.

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If I can’t make a parallel between, I can at least talk about, my Freudian slip with my return address and a newly recognized dimension of my online shoe ordering. Prisoners can’t receive stickers or stamps, and while a return address label might be allowed it might not, so rather than have a sad rejection for my sister in the mailroom (too long a story to go into here, about other rejected items she’s written about in fine voice), I have been hand-writing my return address. It feels burdensome every time, and I write her a lot. I also grit my teeth when copying her jail address because the zip code is somewhat similar to my dad’s and jangles my mental gears. Several letters ago Rachel enclosed the torn cover of one of my envelopes – she had written, "I saw this when I copied your address," smiley face. I had my Garland street address but Tomball, TX and the Tomball zip. When I have time – I keep reprioritizing the things I want to write to her about, and try to first address [oops, overuse of the same word - I mean "discuss"] what she most needs to hear – I will make a joke like, "Can’t take the Tomball out of the girl." Not only do I verge into Rachel’s world, maybe too much, but interacting with Rachel, both the fact of getting close to a never-close sister and the subjects we write about, often childhood and Daddy, drags me back to Tomball…not always in a bad way, but – it hardly needs to be said – usually in a wearing way. On to Chucks, my only fresh air topic lately (if an addiction can be related to fresh air)… This morning as I AGAIN combed through the 3 pages of Zappos size 7 Chucks and the 2 pages of Converse outlet store Chucks, I forced myself to consider styles I had previously (many times, probably dozens of times, I look at these sites a lot) dismissed. It feels good to push my boundaries of comfort and taste. Am I sure I hate black toes and only like white toes? Am I sure I don’t want to spend the extra $ for this designer leather pair?, surely they wouldn’t be much less appropriate than all the other Chucks I’ve been guiltily/boldly (yes, in combination) wearing to my office…they are inappropriate but I haven’t been sent home to change yet. I have ordered shoes that were not my usual taste because I so much want to get shoes delivered to my door, but it’s a wonderful bonus that my taste has expanded at the same time. If I had more time I would stretch a point here about broadening my Sarah world close to Rachel’s and finding it an interesting, even valuable place.

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