Wonder
When I drove to my small Baptist University to register for my very first set of collegiate classes, I was eager, energetic, and malleable. You are quite small when you leave home, trusting that God and everyone else will guide and protect you as you learn to traverse the wide, wondrous world around you.
I was the first in my family to get the opportunity for higher education and I could not believe that I, Kerri Fisher, was really going to be leaving home to learn from the most brilliant minds in their fields. At the time, I assumed that anyone hired by a university had a brilliant mind because I was very young and romantic and because I underestimated the number of colleges in the world. There are only so many leading physicists.
Pulling up to campus for the first time, I was goosebumped and giggly. All around me were the realized versions of what had only ever been daydreams before. I was going to be researching at this exact library, making friends in this particular cafeteria, and after a few years (almost certainly) I’d be getting engaged under the three ivory bell towers which stood in the middle of the campus towering above all of us. They were father, son, and holy ghost according to some—each ever-present to our little bodies and big souls as day by day we found our way criss-crossing beneath them for the next four years.
One of the biggest moments for me early on was registering for that first set of fall classes. This was in a time and context that meant that I was sitting down with an advisor in an office. She was smiley and had good news. I was getting to decide which courses I could take and when? What were they going to tell me next, that I would be moving in with all of my soon-to-be best friends for what amounted to an all-time slumber party? Yes! That was it exactly. That’s college, folks!
I would have liked to register for any and every English class, but it turned out I was bringing in too many credits from my high school’s dual credit program. I deeply regret doing so much concurrent enrollment now. I got excellent English instruction in my hometown, but high school and college classrooms are just not the same in my experience. So, with English off the table, I opted for
Old Testament,
College Algebra,
an advanced psychology class,
an intro level sociology,
and the requisite freshman seminar—
this was a retention class to ensure that stand-offish types get plugged in from the get-go but I can’t imagine any of them found it more enticing than I did. Our professor played a guitar and sang praise songs each week, just like every boy would do for at us for the remainder of our college days, though I had my fill five- or six-weeks in.
The thing I remember most from registration day though—the thing that has wound and whirled around through my mind over the last two decades was my attempt to sign up for Intro to Philosophy with Dr. Wallace Roark. Dr. Roark was, that professor on campus. The professor that divides the masses into people who had hopes of being challenged by the holy task of education and those who wished only to be given credit for sinking tardily into a chair and sleeping in the back of the classroom. Whispers of Roark’s rigor worked their way through dorms, around the student center, and into moldable minds spooking them into lesser educator’s classrooms. I, of course, didn’t know all this as I sat in the advising office. If I had, I’d have found such a challenge arousing. All I knew, and all I could know in a time before googling and “rate-my-professor” was what this woman chose to share with me.
“Dr. Roark is pretty hard,” she said when I told her I wanted to take philosophy. She scrunched up her face the way that pretty women do when they disapprove of frumpier gals’ wardrobe selections. “I mean, honey, you can take him if you want to buuuut, I just think, maybe not your first semester, right? You wanna have fun, get used to the place. Let’s put you in Dr. B’s section of Marriage and Family, she’s a real sweetheart.”
“Ok.” I agreed, assuming as so many people do that, she knew better than me,
about me.
The thing that makes me most uncomfortable about this interaction is that this woman had my entire transcript at her disposal. I was an honor student who was bringing in 30 hours of completed credit, and I graduated cum laude from a 5A high school while also managing the responsibilities of Thespian Troupe 3491, cheer captain, and volunteering with my local Communities in Schools. I was in National Honor Society, Teen Involvement, and though it’s not all that relevant to this particular point, I’ll just mention that I was queen of the whole entire prom too. It seems strange then that she hesitated to put me in an Intro to Philosophy class at a minimally rigorous denominational school.
It
makes
me
wonder.
I wonder if she made this same suggestion to everyone, or was it just to all the young girls interested in the study of thought. Or, I wonder, was there something more precisely about me—something she couldn’t quite put her finger on that made her question my fit for philosophizing?
And I mean it, when I say “I wonder.” It isn’t a turn of phrase.
I wonder
I wonder
Then, I wonder more,
for good measure.
This is what it’s like to be Black (or brown, or queer, or old, or female, or disabled)—to spend a chunk of one’s existence in far off worlds, replaying scenes, connecting dots, trying to make sense of what is often senseless.
Why was I treated that way?
What did they mean by that?
Should I have done something differently?
And, these wonderings are not benign. They take up more and more space in a person, after a while, space that might otherwise be used for working or resting or delighting in the majestic and the mundane. I call this phenomenon— the mandatory curiosity for those of us asked to understand the people in power before we understand ourselves—the weight of wonder.
On the one hand, I was a first-generation student who seemed bubbly and social, and maybe this advisor-lady was afraid that my confidence might not survive an entire semester of an older white man trying to shift my mind.
On the other hand, she could have asked.
On the one hand, maybe I wouldn’t have been ready for Philosophy that first semester.
On the other hand, maybe I would have loved it, made my home in it, and committed to it happily ever after.
On the one hand, maybe I was her first ever advisee, she didn’t know any better, it was a different time, and so on and so forth.
On the other hand, none of that is my problem.
It was Dr. Roark who eventually taught me to find all the possibilities—to seek multiple answers when I finally took him in my last semester of college. “The truth,” he taught us, “so often lies in the tension between two extremes.” This then, is why we must be brave enough and bold enough to wonder.
So, I do.
I wonder about race, and space and my place in the world, sure. But also, I wonder about deer and teardrops, the moth on my door, DNA, dinosaurs, Nessie, and Pluto, yes, of course, Pluto, way out there on her own, not what she once was, so they say. I wonder about God and sex, sexuality, and religion, mysticism and sin within me and without. I wonder about toxins and merpeople, I wonder about death, about Kyrgyzstan, about calories and creatures finding respite in my attic. I wonder about fog, and what the Obamas are up to, and words, words, words; and I don’t just wonder one thing about each, I wonder all the things about all the things. I wonder “at” too. I wonder at lightning and thunder, moss in the creek, bubbles, babies and most especially the Marfa Lights.
And when I allow myself to wonder expansively enough, then wonder becomes more light than weight, and when that happens, I can float along once more in a second naïveté. Then, I remain always and forever a young girl, eager and energetic, on this, my perpetual first day of school.
