Seahorse Goes To Seminary

I recently spent a month in Wilmore, Kentucky at Asbury Theological Seminary on a writing fellowship.

Wilmore is a sacred place to me for many reasons, chiefly familial – my grandfather was the third president of the seminary. I myself went to school there, as did my dad. I often joke that I live any time I spend in Wilmore on at least two or three planes of time at once. I could be six, or sixteen, or twenty-six. I could be a child or a student or a professor. The memories are so thick I push them aside like ghosts to walk through them. People who have been gone for decades could suddenly walk around the corner. I visited the seminary’s new alumni center and pushed a button to play a hymn recording from chapel services past and MY DAD came out of the speakers. (His voice, anyway.)

And all that was before my daughter visited me for a night and left her seahorse.

Seahorse, who was presented to my daughter when she was only a few weeks old, is her favorite stuffed animal. We discovered that he had not made the trip back home (I was going home, a one-way trip of an hour, each weekend) only after we had made the trip back home – and she needed to leave for camp the next day, spending six days away an hour’s drive in the exact opposite direction.

With vague memories of the Flat Wesley project in my head, I said “Well, I could keep him next week and take pictures of him.”

And so I did, making an album that she would only see when she got home from camp, as phones were verboten there. And I began posting a few on Facebook. And then a few more. I even took Seahorse across the street to Hughes Auditorium at Asbury University, which if you’ll remember was the site of just a tiny bit of hullaballoo in February 2023. And before I knew it, I had people all over the world on my friends list eagerly awaiting the further adventures of Seahorse. When my daughter got home, she said Seahorse had become a “lifestyle influencer.”

I’ll leave you to decide whether these pictures have their own charm. I will say that taking Seahorse to these spots hallowed them anew for me. And that may be enough.