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, weddings, high teas. They are the shoes I wore to A Celebration of Dr. Maya Angelou at Riverside Church on September 12.  Continue reading the rest of Patricia Spears Jones' blog here at The Poetry Foundation!