By Callie Feyen
@calliefeyen

I am in Michael’s on the night of Hadley’s high school orientation looking for a planner because I’ll need one in July. It is May 4. 

Michael’s is a strange place to buy a planner, I suppose. It’s a craft store, after all, but I’ve been to Target, and Office Max. I’ve looked online, but I can’t find one that I think will fit my life. I think the problem is that a planner assumes I know, a) what I want to accomplish, and b) the steps I will take to accomplish it. A planner suggests I know what I’m supposed to be doing.

I am supposed to be sitting at my desk, listening to a Zoom meeting. I’m supposed to be taking notes and learning all there is to learn about high school. I wrote this event down on my current planner. Most people who know me even a little bit know if I write it down, it’ll get done. Most people also take the word, “rigid” as an insult when used as a way to describe someone. Not me. I find it complimentary.

Tonight though, none of the links work, and I ended up late to the meeting, and all I heard was something from the Athletic Director. Of the 2,000 students at the high school that sits across the street from the largest college football field in the nation, 1,000 of them are athletes. She said in her opinion it is a fact that these athletes are the greatest athletes ever to have been created. Or something like that. There was a fact and an opinion in the same sentence, and I got confused. 

Last night, after Hadley’s soccer practice, she was upset because the coach told her to stop being sloppy. “Don’t be sloppy, don’t be sloppy,” she said when she got in the car, smelling of sweat and tossing her soccer ball in the backseat where she used to sit.

“I don’t know if he was calling you sloppy,” I attempted, thinking back to my Drill Team days of pointed toes and other points of precision. 

I would’ve done anything to be on the Drill Team. Finally I found the physical parallel for my rigid personality. I had some place for my sharpness to go. It could be put to use! Expressed! And in an appropriate manner! The Lord knows this trait wasn’t going to be honed in on through academics. 

I, for one, prefer a planner with a weekly layout, with one column on the left for one long list of things I need to do. I write everything in a black, ball point pen and then color code each item with a Flair felt tip pen according to the task. My manuscript is green, for example (green for growth). Blogging is red (red to remember that Faulkner quote about writing from the vein. Or was that Hemingway? One of them said something about writing being bloody).

These particular planners in Michaels I like because I can pop the pages out and lie them flat on my desk whilst corresponding to my monthly wall calendar (also color coordinated), and then slip them back in place, nice and neat. I can purchase this type of planner on Amazon, but while I was listening to the AD, Hadley was at a friend’s house jumping on the trampoline, Harper was rollerblading outside, Jesse was golfing, and I was sitting at my desk like a kid in detention and trust me, I’ve served enough detentions in my life to know that this is not the way to motivate one to do the thing one is supposed to do. So I left. To get a planner.

“Girl, hang in there,” sings a cheerful woman on the speakers overhead. I bet she always has a meal her family loves on the table at an appropriate hour. She’d never leave her kid’s high school orientation to shop for planners. This is because she has a growth mindset. She has frustration tolerance. I have neither of these things.

“Girl, hang in there,” she keeps singing, and it’s messing up my concentration in discerning the benefits of a pink cover with a llama on it, or a black one with gold triangles. 

“You don’t know me,” I say as I clutch the black and gold one to my chest.

I started using a planner in 8th grade. My dad brought it home from work. Technically it’s called a “Date Log,” and it’s a monthly spread. I write, “it is” in present tense because I still have it.

“TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN:” I’ve written in blue ink and in all caps (the rest is in cursive). “Please don’t go any further then this page without asking me (Callie). There are some very private things in here, and they’re none of your business. Thank you!!” 

January 1: “Only 82 days and 1968 hours left ‘til Florida!!”

On March 2, I used the square to practice my closing line for all the notes I wrote: Love always and forever, Callie.” (Thus proving I am the original Lara Jean). 

March 10, 1990 was a Saturday and I worked on my research project. We had to study a topic of choice from the song, “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” by Billy Joel. I chose, “Children of Thalidomide.” That day I also played a floor hockey game against our biggest rival: Field. (Don’t talk to me about the rivalry between Michigan and OSU—it has nothing on the Park and Recreation centers of Oak Park in the 80s and 90s). We won, 8-2, and I scored two of those goals.

That same month, on the 21st, a boy named Brian and I got into a HUGE fight. On the 22nd, we made up and also I got a perm.

Brian would take up a lot of space in my Date Log, especially in May-July of 1990. Hadley’s high school principal needs me to understand how many periods there are in a day, and I need Hadley to understand heartache is messy and glorious and it can happen at any time—between Science and English, at the bus stop, on the soccer field, late at night with your friends on the football field that you’ve snuck onto.

I need her to know there is no organization to heartache. It is mixed in with song lyrics: May 4th, 1990—“Alright, stop what you’re doin’, cuz I’m about to ruin, the image and the style that you’re used to”—BEST NIGHT EVER! Celena and I stayed out until 11, then sat on her front steps and talked and talked. I love (heart) her!” They’ll trap you at the movies: May 15th, 1990: “Best movie line ever: ‘Those who tell, don’t know. Those who know, don’t tell.’ Spike Lee’s ‘Do The Right Thing.’ Also, Brian asked me to the dance!! I am so happy!!!!!!

I need Hadley to know that there will be so many mistakes. They will be awkward and painful, and just like the heartaches, they will be hers. Sometime around Valentine’s Day, you could get into a fight with your best friend, and the two of you will start crying and nothing in the world matters except that you hurt your best friend’s feelings, and she hurt yours so the two of you decide to skip class and go to the Dean’s Office because that seems to make the most sense, until you are sitting next to each other sniffling, and one of you says, “What are we doing here, anyway? What were we fighting about?” You will both crumple in laughter and the secretary will ask you to leave. She will not write you a pass.

Your principal needs you to understand there will be Advisory, but I need you to know in the spring you might get restless and bold—growth and also monotony do that—and so you’ll ditch Advisory and go to breakfast at one of those cafes on Liberty. You’ll go with a boy. Make him take you to Literati. Find Joy in the Morning by Betty Smith, about a girl who follows a boy to Ann Arbor, Michigan, and who also loves words more than anything in the world. 

I finished that book on a park bench on April 6th, 1994, the morning after Kurt Cobain died, and also after I watched a boy who I loved walk into a party with another girl. I didn’t understand Kurt Cobain’s songs. He always sounded like he was screaming and really angry. The night we found out he died, I can remember my friends saying he was a misunderstood genius. I felt bad that I didn’t understand him. It is a lonely feeling to be misunderstood, and to not understand yourself, like when you’re watching a boy you broke up with hold hands with another girl and you feel the sting of jealousy, which makes no sense. How can you be jealous of something you let go of?

I need Hadley to know that day I finished Joy in the Morning, I had no plans to do such a thing. I hated reading unless it was a note from a boy or Celena. But that morning, maybe it was because of Kurt Cobain, or maybe it was because of the boy, or maybe it was because I was a Senior in high school, months away from graduation and never again being on the beloved Drill Team again, but I told my parents I was not going to college. I was done with school. I wanted to be a Luv-a-Bull. This turned into what my parents would say was an essential conversation and I wanted no part of it, so I grabbed Joy in the Morning and left the house.

The bench I sat on faced the park that my parents took me to almost every day when I was a kid. I knew every inch of its slides, the swings, the monkey bars, the sandbox. I faced my past and read about Annie McGairy, who loved words and stories. She loved them so much she sat outside of lecture halls just to listen. She loved them so much she hand copied books to get close to them, understand them, and to make them a part of her. She didn’t just know a word’s definition, she felt it in her bones; like when she heard a group of young men sing their Alma Mater, their voices—sweet and sad—mixed in with the air on a spring evening that didn’t quite feel like spring, but nevermind how the weather felt, things were growing, it was the eve of commencement, and Annie felt that word’s meaning when she heard those boys sing: to begin.

I finished the book and looked at the park. I turned around and looked at the Chicago skyline. “It is time to grow,” I said. Maybe I would grow up to be like Annie.

Maybe I did. Or maybe I’m nothing like her. I need Hadley to know I hope she will forever be figuring herself out. She will know both exactly what it is she’ll want to be while at the same time have no clue what it is she is capable of. May she experience the heartache of Science and English, football and high school dances. May she feel the words more than she knows them. 

Get lost. Make mistakes. Tell her she’s your best friend. Tell him how you feel. Figure out the plan, then forget it. 

Forever commence. 

Words and photo by Callie Feyen.