Repost: Hanging with the Big Girls in My Traveling Shoes by Patricia Spears Jones
This is a repost from award winning poet and author Patricia Spears Jones ! Check out her blog published at The Poetry Foundation! Patricia Spears Jones Hanging with the Big Girls in My Traveling Shoes by Patricia Spears Jones Last year when I was invited to receive an award from the Black Students Association at Rhodes College as part of my 40th College Reunion, I was freaked out. I had a few weeks earlier been to Arkansas to bury my mother and what little money I had was gone. But to be honored as a Distinguished Alumni for a group I helped to organize decades before was an important opportunity I could not say no to. A very good friend, a wonderful novelist and elder heard about my honor and knew my predicament. She took me to a shoe store on Broadway and let me choose a pair of beautiful, well made dress shoes. I would not look like a poor poet at such a gathering. They are in a way my “traveling shoes,” the ones for readings and special events: memorials,