As soon as I saw her shoulders drop just the tiniest amount and her eyes begin to search the periphery for an alternate solution I knew that Melanie, our intern of two years, had been changed at her core. What was the problem she was looking to solve? We needed something from Target. Target was probably a maximum 12 minute drive each way from our driveway (where we were hosting a crawfish boil) to the sliding glass doors beyond those giant red sidewalk spheres. We needed something from Target (a 35 minute task) hours before our event.
“I told you this would happen” I said, smiling and pointing at her. Misunderstanding my accusation, she responded, “Did we talk about needing these before?”
Her confusion was reasonable. But, it was not the plastic tablecloths (or whatever we needed from Target) that I was referring to, it was a conversation from two years prior, that I was picking up again.
Melanie had come to work with my wife and me for a college campus ministry at the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg. When we were assigned interns we alway worked hard to find them apartments near to campus or “Midtown”. When she first moved she lived with a host family for several weeks while we waited for something closer to come up. The family that she lived with was in Oak Grove and she loved it. “Maybe I should just keep living here,” she said, “I can usually get to campus in less than 20 minutes if I leave early.”
Melanie had done her undergrad in Orlando, and was therefore conditioned to a totally different spatial existence. Having only known her for a few months at the time, I remember trying to sound understanding with a touch of lighthearted condescension. This poor girl thinks that 20 minutes is next door. I remember hoping that one day, after she had gotten to know us and my sense of humor, I would be able to give her grief about having changed from being a self assured “you-guyser” to a y’all-sayin’ small towner.
“I think that one day over the next two years, you are going to realize that what you just said - ‘its just 20 minutes’ will feel very different.”
She moved into an apartment less than a mile from the campus of Southern Miss. Over the course of 24 months, the convenience of this orbital existence gradually affected her, but she was still a fish out of her waters living in new smaller water. She liked the convenience and scheduled her life accordingly, but I think that it was still just that for her. Convenient. She liked that she lived close to the places she needed to be, she could admit that. But the circle that was defined by “close” was slowly tightening and the thought of driving her car out Highway 98 to places like Sam’s Club or Target began to take a darker shade in her mind. They became those places ‘out’ in Lamar County (which actually seems indistinguishable from Forrest County). The places that you tried to go when you had at least 2 reasons, preferably more.
Those places could feel like an adventure or “getting away” out where the other Mexican restaurant(s) are. But when you had to go, it felt different. There must be some other way.
“I told you!” I said.
…I told you that before you left that there will be a moment when I would remind you what you said about living in Oak Grove. That you wouldn’t just see it as better to be this close, but that it would seem bizarre to have ever thought of that commute as anything but daunting.” (Her host family home had been way past Target)
We all laughed and she admitted it, and then I sent her to Target for plastic tablecloths or storage containers (or whatever we needed for The Crawfish Boil).
Because, why have interns if you can’t send them to Target instead of you?
