Creepsake #29

A memento growing along a wall like a vine

I was recently headed west through Nebraska, on my way to Hastings ten years after I drove to Hastings for the first time. That was in spring 2016; the election hadn’t happened yet. At the time, I was taking a class called Narrative Nonfiction which required me to interview people. I was deeply uncomfortable with the thought of interviewing anyone, since I am most comfortable observing rather than interacting. I didn’t want to talk to anyone.

I brought that attitude with me when I arrived at my selected place of immersion, which was a rural gun show. I chose to travel all the way out to Hastings for a gun show because we were asked to immerse ourselves somewhere unfamiliar, and I was deeply unfamiliar with both guns and rural Nebraska. I had tried contacting two shooting ranges in Omaha, where I live. One was a shooting range just about twenty blocks down the road from my house; I passed it all the time, and while I did get an initial response after emailing, when I said I wanted to interview someone who worked there, the shooting range stopped responding. I know I could’ve gone in and observed anyway, but somehow I thought they would remember my name. I was very suspicious.

So I prepared for the rural gun show. That was ten years ago, which meant I was ten years less confident in myself than I am now. I was in the second year of my graduate program, and I was deciding to get a masters degree after all instead of stopping with a graduate certificate. I felt empowered to do this because my professors liked what I was writing, and I was also getting published in literary journals, both of which were forms of validation I found myself needing very badly. In my program, I was older than my graduate school classmates by about ten years. It’s funny to think that, now, they are the age I was then.

I left my young children with my spouse and I came out to Hastings on a Saturday. The sky was gray and I was scared. I was scared partly because of how little time I had spent in rural Nebraska. In 2016, I had only passed through Nebraska, and not very often. I wonder now how many times I had even driven beyond Lincoln back then, because I have spent so much more time in rural Nebraska since. When I think about how much I’ve grown since 2016—in terms of my ownership over my own life—it staggers me. When I think about how much hasn’t changed when it comes to my fear of guns, it also staggers me. I did eventually go to that shooting range twenty blocks from my house. My brother-in-law, an ex-Navy Seal and ex-Marine officer, took me there once when he was visiting during the holidays. He taught me how to aim my gun a little bit lower than where I wanted to hit because the gun would kick upward after firing. I remember when we checked out the gun from the front desk, the man at the front desk warned me that if he saw me turning around with the gun pointed up, that he would take it as a sign that he needed to shoot me. He said something about how he has a gun too, and he’ll use it if necessary. That was a terrifying thing to hear because I had never even held a gun before. I kept my hand off the trigger most of the time, it scared me to even be holding it.

At the gun show, my instruction came through a man named Rich, who I wrote about in the essay that resulted from my trip to Hastings. I called the essay “Kristine At the Gun Show” in homage to the Greg Bottoms essay in Brevity, because I was scared to death just like the author had been.

Ten years later, I was headed to Hastings once again, but this time to give a lecture at the college and then a reading at a bookstore. Ten years ago, I wouldn’t have believed that I would be promoting my third book, that I would have enough knowledge to be paid a stipend to talk to university students. I only had a bachelor’s back then and a handful of published essays. Ten years ago I wouldn’t have thought I would be returning to Hastings at all, ever.

As I drove into Hastings, there was a lot of newer franchises and shopping closer to the north side of town, and so the entrance to Hastings wasn’t how I’d remembered it. It very well could be not what I’d remembered; the newer construction looked less than ten years old. But maybe I just excised the new builds from my memory at the time, all I could remember, when I thought about it, was downtown Hastings—which I realized later I was eliding with Aurora, another rural Nebraska town which I’ve visited infrequently.

I drove downtown to a tea shop called What the Dickens, run by a relocated British woman and a local woman, who have put together an impressively British experience. There were two women and two girls having a full afternoon tea when I arrived, the kids must’ve been under six years old. They were all so familiar with each other I thought perhaps the moms were sisters. I ordered a pot of Lady Grey and the server asked if I wanted milk or sugar. I said no, lemon, please, a little surprised because I expected they would know you do not take milk with Lady Grey tea. She brought my pot, and I ordered a cream tea, which meant that I got two freshly baked scones served with strawberry jam and clotted cream. When the scones arrived, the server apologized to me that they were out of clotted cream. She said that their importers in England were having a difficult time getting it to them, gestured around to indicate with everything happening in our country right now, and informed me that, instead, they were making Chantilly cream in-house, so of course the flavor would be different. I didn’t mind, I told her so, and honestly, I loved the Chantilly cream because it was so sweet. The biscuits were fantastic. I would break off a piece, slather it with Chantilly cream, and then top it with strawberry jam. It always amazes me how intensely sweet the Brits like their treats. I put the tiny, thinly sliced lemon triangles in my very delicate china teacup, and drank my whole pot of Lady Grey. It did seem kind of funny to me that the tea was not loose leaf but Twinings packets; I could get those at home.

I knew Hastings College was a small liberal arts college—around a thousand students total, smaller than my daughter’s high school by about half—but I had no idea how small the college’s layout was: a smattering of buildings on a square three blocks wide, five blocks deep. While I grew up in smaller university towns (the directional + state schools), I’ve spent very little time at liberal arts colleges.

I finally understood what my host meant when she said I could park anywhere. There are no reserved lots, there is more parking that you could need, it feels very much like a commuter campus except for how easy to find the parking is. I parked directly in front of the building I wanted to go to. There was a basketball court across from me in the park area, and it was a gorgeous day, 70° and sunny and a light wind, the sort of March day you rarely see, but I didn’t see a single student outside. Even if it was between classes, I thought it was still a little odd that nobody was lingering outside to enjoy the weather. Maybe that’s my bias after attending the University of Iowa? Maybe it’s just this generation. They don’t want to hang out on the lawn, reading the first edition of The Virgin Suicides they’d picked up from the library, content to sit on their coat or their backpack in the shade, not scrolling a phone, not talking to a friend.

Anyway, I went into the building after confirming the room I would be in several times—120—but when I entered, there were only two rooms it could have even been. 120 and 130 were right across from each other, seemingly the only two classrooms in the building. I sat on a chair and flipped through Scholastic Writing Award catalogs from 2025, which amused me because that meant it had been 25 years since I received my Scholastic award. My host came out and I think I was easy to identify: a woman in her 40s sitting alone, but moreso not someone she recognized. It’s not the sort of place where you can blend in.

She led me to the classroom, and we briefly talked about erasure. My host had a British accent, so I mentioned offhandedly that I had been to What the Dickens. She said it was so nice to have somewhere that does a proper British tea here in Nebraska, and I thought about how odd it was that in the middle of Nebraska, there was not only a professor with a British accent, but there was an entire tea shop dedicated to British cuisine, and I didn’t know either existed before today.

I gave my erasure presentation and it went well; I think they were engaged enough, though one of the students yawned a couple of times. It was leaning on 5 o’clock, that’s what I told myself.

I had about a half hour to kill before I felt like I could arrive at the bookstore—only two minutes away by car—so I drove through Hastings. Just west of the college, the neighborhood was beautiful, houses with exactly the sort of lots that I dream about—houses set an entire half-lot back, expensive front yards that weren’t treated like driveways but left as that space between a house and the road, the private and the public. They didn’t fill the front yards with bushes or flowers or gardens or trees, they let the size of the lot speak for itself. Big old pretty 1910s and 1920s Foursquares and Craftsman-style houses; they made me homesick for places I never lived but wanted to.

I turned north and found a beautiful split boulevard that reminded me of Ohio Boulevard in Terre Haute, only on steroids—more gigantic lots with the houses a whole half-lot back from the road, but I had no idea how deep the lots really were until I looked up, later, the one house for sale. The lot, I swear to God, must have stretched an entire block; I couldn’t believe how deep that backyard went. A gorgeous house, four bedrooms and a completely renovated wine cellar basement, original woodwork throughout the house, light and airy with a beautiful kitchen, and the house was $399,000. So cheap! It made me want to move to Hastings just to have that house.

I drove through the west side of Hastings afterward, looking for the fairgrounds where I had gone to the gun show, but I didn’t find it. I did find their gigantic city park with the huge waterpark, and I thought about taking my kids there this summer, and then I realized that they have all grown up. My youngest is the only one who might even be interested, but she would be too sad to go without her sisters because she doesn’t like being without them; I think she misses out on a good amount of her childhood because they have grown past it. I drove downtown again and it was still too early to go into the bookstore, so I parked in a completely full lot one block off the main street. I have no idea why that lot was as full as it was, because there was as much parking as you could possibly want in the main downtown. There was nothing that that lot was needed for, except for the fact that I think it served a VFW, and people must’ve been there at 5 o’clock drinking.

I waited until 5:45, drove my car around and parked right in front of the bookstore, and got out. I saw a closed sign on the bookstore and I thought uh-oh. But I approached anyway, tried the door, and it was locked. So I took out my phone and snapped a picture in front of it as a girl approached down the sidewalk and asked if I was there for the reading. I told her yes, I was there for the reading. I was supposed to be reading there! We stood outside for a minute, unsure what to do, and then somebody unlocked the front door. The bookstore employee asked why we were there, and we said for the reading. He said that there was no reading on the schedule, but that he would call the owner. He did, and she got on the phone, and he handed it to me, and she was so sorry, but she didn’t have it on the schedule at all. She said that maybe it was on the schedule for April? I said no, it was today, I did my workshop at Hastings just an hour ago. We talked about rescheduling for some date in the future, she said she would take me out to dinner, she was very apologetic, and I told her that these things happen to everyone, authors and bookstore owners alike. So I gave my prospective reader a copy of my zine, and I told her to come back when I came back. On my way out of town, I passed a sign for the upcoming gun show.