Introduction

Sure, there's no place like home--but what if you can't really pinpoint where home is? By the time she was nine, Tracy Seeley had lived in seven towns and thirteen different houses. Her father's dreams of movie stardom, stoked by a series of affairs, kept the family on edge, and on the move, until he up and left. Thirty years later, settled in what seems like a charmed life in San Francisco, a diagnosis of cancer and the betrayal of a lover shake Seeley to her roots--roots she is suddenly determined to search out. My Ruby Slippers tells the story of that search, the tale of a woman with an impassioned if vague sense of mission: to find the meaning of home.  

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Excerpt

chapter two

The Good Land

I shiver in the backseat in the corner against the door. I hold my cheek against the cold metal until it hurts. I hold myself very still. I am five, and we are moving away. My father drives. My mother sits next to him and says nothing. I will not look at them. Instead, I stare out the window and hear the car tires slub, slub, slub on the red brick streets. My chest hurts. The narrow dark windows of my school slide by—window, window, window, window. I can’t see in. But I know that Mrs. Little’s kindergarten is going on without me. The children are using quiet voices, cutting paper and coloring, reading

and writing in the big yellow workbooks with smooth, dry pages and an elephant on the front. They are listening to stories and taking a quiet nap on cool mats with the lights turned out. I had waited a whole year for school, while my older sister fell in love with Mrs. Little and sat in a circle on the braided rug and came home singing new songs. All of that has been mine for less than half a year. I can hardly breathe. My throat aches. I do not speak or cry. We turn a corner and the brick streets end. We are moving away.

Goodland, Kansas, was not the first place we left, but it is the first I remember leaving. It is my earliest memory of any kind; but no, that’s not quite it. I remember losing my first tooth at the Dairy Queen and going to the Halloween party at the one-room school where my mother taught just down the road. But this memory of leaving comes back glistening and whole, an image in amber. A single moment trapped in the sap of a seeping wound until it has hardened in place, unchanging and burnished like a jewel.

Forty years later I was headed back.

The day before, in Pueblo, Colorado, I’d sat in the car in a parking lot, feeling worn out and confused. I’d spent days tracking down the first seven of my thirteen addresses in four different Colorado towns. I’d been to two houses in Grand Junction, two in Montrose, one in Colorado Springs, and two in Pueblo. By the end, the houses had all begun to look the same, all clapboard ranches in what had nearly always been new suburbs. Their numbing sameness seemed the only story I could put together, my parents riding the midcentury wave of upward American mobility. That story I could understand. But the profusion of houses puzzled me. Why so many in so few years? When did we live where? I tried to pencil out a timeline. I knew I’d been born in Montrose, and then we’d moved to Grand Junction. But when? And left Grand Junction when?

I pulled out my mother’s address list and, for the first time, really studied the few moving dates she had written down. They were all from our Colorado years, as if to say, “pay close attention here.” Between my birth and age three, we’d moved three times. Then my sister Shannon was born. When she was three months old, we left Grand Junction for Colorado Springs, where we stayed for two months. Whoa. Moving with a three-month-old, staying for two months, then packing up again, this time for Pueblo? There we spent seven months in each of two houses and then decamped for Kansas. Altogether, that meant seven moves in four years, the last three moves in the space of eight months, the last four in eighteen.

I felt stunned. I didn’t know what to feel. Of course I’d known about the thirteen addresses. But what had it been like, not just to live in so many places, but to move so often, to hear, just after the last box had been unpacked, or not even, that another job had failed, that another, better chance lay just over the next hill. My mother must have done nothing but pack, unpack, change diapers, tend children, house hunt, clean, launder, and feel what? Worry? Resentment? Anger? Fear?

An edge of unease pervaded the childhood I do remember, as though the dread and anxiety of those Colorado years had trailed us into Kansas. By the time my moment of leaving Goodland became enshrined in its golden ark of loss, I’d already lived through uprootings

that, while unremembered, have seeped into my bones. Even now whenever I move, their ghosts rise like a vapor. I may be moving

for a great new job or into nicer digs, but on my fi rst evening in the new place, I know I’ll end up sitting on the floor amid the boxes, sobbing.

No wonder Kansas had never felt like home. The place wasn’t ours by birthright or desire or attachment to the soil, but by accident.

The same reckless wind that had blown us about the Rockies hurled us across the High Plains into Goodland and would fl ing us farther east into Hays. Until finally, its energy spent, it dumped us hard in Wichita. A feeling suffused my childhood that my parents, my two sisters, and I belonged elsewhere, that we had never meant to come. That we might not be here long. In Kansas we were out of place. Unrooted and uneasy.

This hardly makes us unique. Frontier chasers, alert to the main chance, Americans move. Everywhere, I meet people like me, some with more addresses than mine. When she lived with her parents, one of my students had moved every six months since she was born. Now every six months, she feels compelled to rearrange her dorm room and repaint the walls. Like me, she has learned not to get too attached. We migrants aren’t “placed persons,” in Wallace Stegner’s terms, “lovers of known earth, known weather, and known neighbors

both human and nonhuman.” Instead, we “drag [our] exposed roots and have trouble putting them down in new places.”

Stegner didn’t seem to mind his tumbleweed childhood too much, blown from one frontier to another—Salt Lake, Saskatchewan—by a father who was a dreamer like mine. But once the frontiers have all been mapped, American restlessness can turn inward until it becomes an anxiety of spirit. It did in our family. We knew nothing

about place but the drive to stay aloof or to keep on moving through. As the family myth developed over time: it was all my father’s fault.

He grew up in California—San Francisco, Sacramento, but mostly L.A.—the third and youngest son. During his toddlerhood, the Dust Bowl years were on, and Midwest farmers, desperate and starving, were streaming toward the orange groves out west. Ralph Seeley already lived at the end of the rainbow, that great place of contradictions

where America sent its dreams and dysfunctions. His own parents had migrated from Detroit, and their on-and-off marriage bred its own atmosphere of insecurity. During the off-again times, he lived with his mother, while his older brothers stayed with their father. He didn’t even know he had brothers until he was three or four. Both households seem to have moved like nomads. My uncle Carl reports seventeen addresses in L.A. alone before he finished high school.

California during my father’s childhood had been no more settled than his family. In his grade school years, the state was rent by conflict

between workers’ unions and their state-sanctioned, violent suppression; between migrants and anti-immigrant crusaders, the “Okies” only the most recently reviled; between minority hopes and a Jim Crow culture; between the dream and obstacles to the dream. The year he turned eleven, The Grapes of Wrath, The Big Sleep, and The Day of the Locust all showed the land of promise in thrall to big money, big muscle, and big lies.

War marked my father’s adolescence. I can only imagine him as a twelve-year-old the winter Pearl Harbor galvanized the West Coast, or guess how he felt, or even what he knew, as California unleashed its good and evil energies. Douglas, Lockheed, and the California shipyards started churning out planes and ships; troops mobilized; and the state became the staging ground for action in the Pacific Rim. Anti-Japanese sentiment, long simmering in California, turned fearful and virulent. New laws labeled Japanese-born citizens and their descendants dangerous aliens, stripped them of their businesses

and homes, and shipped them off to internment camps for the duration of the war.

Surely my father felt the exhilarated purpose of Californians preparing

for war, his neighbors pouring into shipyards and factories, boys and brothers turning soldier. But what did he feel watching Japanese American neighbors being taken away in trucks and trains? Outrage? Relief? Did he even think much about it?

I knew him so little. I imagine his Los Angeles streets fi lling with soldiers and sailors on leave between boot camp and battle, the city alive with the high spirits of young, fit, amped-up men. I envision him, a teenager, bounding up the front steps of Hollywood High, just down the street from the Hollywood Canteen. Three million troops would pass through the Canteen by war’s end, drinking, eating,

and dancing with the likes of Rita Hayworth and Hedy Lamarr. My father would have seen the soldiers milling outside, heard the music spilling into the street. But he would have been too young to join in.

What must it have been like to stand on the sidelines looking on? To be fi fteen in 1943 when so many young men, only slightly older, had joined the action? To be fifteen when carloads of newly crewcut,

uniformed soldiers drove through the city looking for prey—the slick, duck-tailed Mexican American teenagers in zoot suits whom they taunted, harassed, and brutalized? The so-called Zoot Suit Riots had to have fascinated, even riled, an adolescent boy. But did my father root for the soldiers or the zoot-suited teens?

This memory comes to me: We are driving somewhere in California;

it is dark and we’re on vacation; I am eight; my father’s mother, Vivian, is in the car. Suddenly, out of the dark, frighteningly, because it makes us swerve and slam on the brakes, a man darts from the other side of the road and flags us down. We roll to a stop; and my father, angry, cranks the window open and asks what the man wants. My grandmother’s fear fills the car. view abbreviated excerpt only...

Discussion Questions

From the author:

1. The title My Ruby Slippers refers to Dorothy’s journey in The Wizard of Oz. How is Seeley’s journey both like and unlike Dorothy’s? What does she discover or learn?
2. At the beginning of the book, Seeley writes that after she left her home state at 17, she “shucked Kansas off like the skin of a cicada.” What motivated her to disown Kansas? What eventually changed her feelings about it? What ideas did you have about Kansas before you read the book?
3. How do cancer and her lover’s abandonment change the nature of Seeley’s journey? Why do you think these are not the most central stories of the book?
4. During her cancer treatment, Seeley learns and practices meditation. What does it teach her? What role does it play in her experience on the road?
5. Early in her journey, Seeley hears a Ute elder say, “When you live in a place for a long time, you think that way.” What do you think this means? Does it ring true in your own experience?
6. In the course of telling about her trip back to Kansas, Seeley recalls early memories of her childhood there. What were some of the most compelling or interesting memories for you? Which ones helped you understand her character and concerns?
7. When Seeley finally reaches house #13, the one she lived in for nine years, she decides not to knock on the door. Why? Does this make sense to you?
8. Seeley suggests that our sense of place deepens when we know its stories, especially the stories of those who lived there before. What stories did you find most interesting? What did they add (or not) to the story?
9. What does Seeley celebrate about Kansas? What does she criticize? Did you learn anything new about Kansas? How is it different from the place you live? (And if you live in Kansas, did it seem the same place you know?)
10. Seeley writes that when she first began writing her book, she intended to keep her father out of it. Why do you think this didn’t happen? What do you think about her relationship with her father? Why does he become a more prominent character than her mother?
11. In Chapter 8 (“What the Prairie Teaches”), Seeley tours the Land Institute and learns about agricultural research into prairie ecosystems. How do the things she learns add to her understanding of a sense of place? How important is this episode in her journey?
12. What is the significance of the ten days Seeley spends in Matfield Green? What has she learned from being there? What does it offer?
13. In the Coda, Seeley has moved to yet another new address, this time in Los Angeles. How does she react to this? How has that response been shaped by the journey she took back to Kansas?
14. At the end of the book, Seeley also reveals that her cancer has metastasized to her bones. What do you think of her response to this?
15. Did you relate to Seeley in any way? Is her experience universal?
16. How would you characterize Seeley’s writing? Is there a specific passage that you found especially interesting/compelling/moving/insightful?
17. Did you gain (or not) from reading my My Ruby Slippers? What will you take away?
18. Has reading My Ruby Slippers made you want to know more about the place you live? If yes, where would you want to begin?

Weblinks

»	Publisher's Book Info
»	Author Tracy Seeley's web site

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