Currently I am teaching a prose unit to my 9th graders and to kickstart the unit I thought a fun 10 minute stream of conscience writing activity would get them in the proper headspace for prose. However, as we began, and the timer was pressed, these 9th graders sat paralyzed. Their eyes where whiter than their computer screens. And so, in a blinded effort to show them that they could do it, I shared my screen with the projector, and wrote one alongside them. Now the only real rule of the assignment was that they couldn’t concretely write about anything personal. If they did choose to write about themselves, or something that they did, they had to write in the abstract (which secretly is what I was hoping for them to do). I chose to write about picking up my sister from Birmingham this past weekend. It is not my best or most refined work but it was so much fun. Like any writing I do I got something out of it. Especially writing it in front of the kids. The piece is written below. Enjoy.

Birmingham

Gas station, guava juice and a ton of phone calls. I believe about 3, maybe 4. Apple maps took me off the beaten path. I went through the dark ages of northern Alabama. Where an F350 almost tore me off the road. I had to ask forgiveness many times and many many more times. I guess my truck is like the runt to all other trucks. It’s like a bug. I felt like a bug flying down the neck of Alabama. Birmingham is a place beyond its glory days. You can sense the kind of lights they use underneath their highways. Red, yellow and blue. Those are three primary colors that want to stand on their own. A city with three wives. A land that wants to stand on its own. Three kings. Three dreams. Three people. That’s America isn’t it? Three Kings. Three dreams. Three people. There is nothing equal about the south. You can tell by the way most southern cities are laid out-especially those that sit in anywhere near the ridges of the Appalachians. There is a hierarchy that begins in the clouds that trickle way down into the mud that sits in the valleys. Samford is a pretty college. They have the red bricks and the white gleaming columns. They have the old Baptist Church towers and the cobblestone streets. But there is a darkness and sickness that hangs in the trees. And there is a love for a God that likes things a certain way. Americana is a weird place. Highways fly in and out. From one bedridden city to another. There is freedom in the in between. God lives in the inbetween. Families live in the in-between. The very nucleus of trust lives in the inbetween. Faith is the inbetween.