i carry shark teeth

in my pocket

i found them in the sand

of a beach far away

and shoved them into my

pocket

and took them home with

me

those few shark teeth

have travelled hundreds

and hundreds

of miles

and so have i

miles and miles and miles

and-

i carry shark teeth

in my pocket

as a prayer

for someone with no god

to give them to

i carry shark teeth

in my pocket

and some days they

carry me too

—by Taylor Lammert

This is a poem my daughter wrote when she was in high school. She got the idea from a story that I shared with her. Because I’m the one who carries shark teeth in my pocket. I don’t carry them all the time, only when I am afraid and need a little extra oomph in my step. It’s a habit I started completely by accident, and I know to most people it sounds incredibly weird, if not perhaps even a little bit morose. But I do it, just the same.

I distinctly remember the day I found my first shark tooth. I was completely unaware that shark teeth washing up on beaches in northeastern Florida was even a phenomenon, much less one that people all over the world know about. I was at the beach on a sunny afternoon with my daughter Taylor, my sister Emily, and her son Ben. My sister and her family had recently moved to Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida, and they quickly learned about the shark teeth. As it turns out, that area of the coast is home to a giant fossil shelf, and I don’t pretend to know how or why, but it means that shark teeth wash up in abundance on the beaches in the area. So there we were, walking along at the edge of the surf when my sister, who was six months pregnant at the time, stopped, stooped down, and picked up something small and black and shiny. “Look,” she said, as she extended her hand to me.

“What is it?” I asked.

“It’s a shark tooth. The beaches here are known for them. If you keep an eye out, you’ll learn to spot them pretty easily,” she added.

My sister knew that I, as an avid lover of all things fossilized, would be totally smitten with these shark teeth. I was the one who had spent hours of each day during the summers of our childhood diving for rocks and interesting fossils in the lake where we grew up. I could tell you about my fossils in painstaking detail, no matter how uninterested you were. I still have a small collection of my favorite rocks tucked away in a storage unit somewhere. And Emily knew that, not only would I be good at spotting them, but I would love the practice of walking the beach and meditatively searching for them, which I began doing and which I have done every time I have visited the beaches of northeastern Florida in the years since.

But the story that gave occasion for my daughter to eventually pen a poem about it came from that first trip. Over the course of that week, I visited the beach every day, at least for an hour or two. And every day, I found several shark teeth, tucked them into a small plastic bag I had designated for my growing supply, and continued on my walk. By the end of the week, I had quite a collection. I spent a lot of time on the beach that week, just walking, looking for shark teeth, watching the waves, and thinking. The truth was that my husband and I were at one of those points in our marriage in which we were struggling. As people who come from very different families of origin, what we discovered upon getting married was that reconciling some of these lifelong differences was hard and that neither one of us was very good at communicating.

Intellectually, of course, we understood that marriage could be challenging and difficult. In the time leading up to our wedding, we made a point to find couples who had what we wanted in a marriage, and we asked questions and learned what they did in order to have those kinds of marriages. We also made a conscious vow to ourselves and to one another that our marriage would be uniquely ours, that we didn’t need to worry about what was and was not happening in our friends’ marriages, or about what other people thought about some of the choices we would make. Our marriage was going to be ours to do with what we wanted and saw fit--the two of us, in it together, as a team, OUR team. This is something we have stuck to over the past ten years of our relationship—we are uniquely us. We communicate much better than we used to, but it’s taken work and hours of marriage counseling (which I highly recommend to all married people, struggling or not).

But at this time, as couples sometimes do, we were struggling. I knew that when I got home, we were going to have to have one of the hard talks, the how do we get on the same page, how do we move through this discomfort and walk forward, how, how, how, talks. And those talks have always terrified me, because no matter how many times we have gotten through these stronger and wiser and still in love, I have spent a lifetime carrying around an inexplicable and crippling fear of abandonment, so that no matter how reassuring he is or how many times we have the hard talks and say the hard things and slowly make our way back to one another in our marriage, my initial reaction is to believe I am about to be abandoned, if not physically, certainly emotionally. And that’s where I was on the beach that week, quietly stewing, worrying, stressing, walking, and looking for shark teeth in a meditative way to pass the time. And on my last evening there, I sat down in the sand with my day’s shark teeth loot, and I prayed. I decided that when I got home, and we had to have that hard talk, I would take a shark tooth with me because it would sort of be like taking part of the ocean with me.

The ocean makes me feel brave, whole, full, like I can do anything. It is my heart’s home in ways I have never known how to put into words. My mom will tell you it’s because when she was pregnant with me, and we lived in California, she would go float in the ocean to relieve her pregnancy aches and pains. But I feel a spiritual connection to the sea, like I have known it and it has known me since before I was born. It calls to me. It sings to me. It speaks to my whole heart.

When I got home from Florida, my husband said, “Let’s go for a drive,” which is our general place to talk about things--in the car. We trap ourselves and talk. And it works. And we get somewhere. And it sucks. And it’s uncomfortable. And we fumble. And we clam up. And I usually cry. And he usually gets angry. And slowly but surely, we wade through those initial fearful feelings, and we find our way to one another, to understanding, to acceptance, even if we can’t find our way to agreement. So when he said those words, “Let’s go for a drive,” I ran up the stairs to our bedroom, opened my jewelry box, prepared to choose a shark tooth, then decided I was so nervous that I needed to take the whole bag. And that’s what I did. I got in the car and left to talk with my husband, with my fingers tucked in my pocket clutching my secret bag of shark teeth. And it worked. I was brave. I felt them there. I recalled the ocean in my heart. And I moved forward, despite my fear.

And I’m not saying that if you have ever seen me in public on any given day, I have had a shark tooth in my pocket, but I am saying that if you have seen me in public on certain days of my life, it’s possible that I had a shark tooth in my pocket. I can tell you that I have taken shark teeth on some of my life’s most challenging and scary adventures—public speaking, job interviews, doctor’s appointments, house shopping, and countless hard conversations with the people I love. And it works every time. That little piece of the sea, a connection to my favorite place’s fiercest and most misunderstood creatures. And maybe that’s a little bit of the draw, too. Maybe when I’m afraid I need to imagine I can be shark-like--quick, with excellent vision, ready to do what needs to be done, willing to fight for what I love.

One thing I know to be completely true about my lucky shark teeth, of which I have hundreds today and of which I can now identify some of the different kinds of sharks from which the teeth originated, is that symbolically (and superstitiously) carrying these shark teeth with me has helped teach me that I can be afraid and keep going. I can feel excruciating vulnerability, let people REALLY see me, be who I REALLY am, allow my life to REALLY tell my heart’s whole story, in words, actions, or new adventures, and I can wade my way through, knee deep in the kind of muddy, swampy fear that used to immobilize me and trap me.

With a shark tooth in my pocket, I have learned that my husband and I can come together by falling apart in front of each other. I have learned that I am worthy and smart and deserving of life’s greatest joys. I have learned that I can find and walk through doors in front of me when the ones behind me slam shut without warning. With a shark tooth in my pocket, I have learned that I don’t have to wait until I am perfect or right or courageous to do the scary things, because that wait would take forever. I have learned to lean into discomfort, not because I feel brave, but because today I know that the best of my life happens as a result of being forced outside of my comfort zone.

Last week, my husband and I decided that we wanted to avoid the snowstorm headed towards Indiana, so we hopped in the car in the middle of the night and drove with our two dogs to a little apartment in Saint Augustine Beach, Florida. I walked the beach and found a handful of shark teeth over the course of the trip. Unexpectedly, I was invited for a job interview during the trip. The interview went well, and when I got back to the apartment and told my husband that it went well, how I was so nervous, but I managed to appear cool, calm, and collected. I said, “Guess what I had in my pocket.” He gave a gentle roll of his eyes.

“Did you have a shark tooth in your pocket?” he asked, knowingly.

“YES!” I said, grinning. He doesn’t get it. It seems silly to him. And that’s okay. He has his own methods. And I have mine. And together, we have created some methods to use together over the years. But for me, when it’s my chin that I need to lift and walk forward through fear, I choose shark teeth.

With a shark tooth in my pocket, I keep learning to go boldly into my unknown, the birthplace of faith, of love, of beauty, of life, of myself.