I like that the word story in French is histoire. Because it is my story, my history. I am a part of it all. And it’s not about going back, but building on it, daily.
You wouldn’t know it to see my home today, but I came to France with almost nothing. The walls are now filled with paintings of my family, both American and French. I am surrounded by new books that I’ve read. New books that I’ve written. The small suitcase of clothes with which I arrived now fills three closets. My story, mon histoire, continues.
When I feel sad, it’s often because I think I’m in an ending. That’s when I have to tell myself that I’m simply in my story. I look at the painting of my grandfather and know those fields get replanted every year. I still feel the breeze of my mother’s twirling dress. The bursting of youth from the children at sea’s shore. And from my story, my history, I keep beginning. We all do. Planting. Twirling. Dreaming. Loving, still and again, the story continues.
Maybe nature knows, how the gifts are only borrowed. From nest to song, how it’s all impermanent. We’re given everything we need between sky and tree, but it has always been for the sharing. We were meant to live in the birdsong.
I think all creative ideas (and I’m including love here, perhaps topping the list) are like dandelion seeds floating on a summer breeze, with the bravest of barefoot children chasing them, stretching to pluck them from the blue, knowing if they don’t, there are countless chubby legs running behind and beside, willing to make the journey. And just as the summer child borrows the fleeting day, I gather the words and the paint, into the shape of love, and hope and try and pray it makes it to the next season.
Painting in a new room yesterday, brush in hand, I sang along with each stroke, the Christmas songs so generously lent to me, to us, each year. Within the music, somewhere on the canvas, I am suspended in time, in the gift of the moment. No doors of advent are opening. No rushing toward the next. I’m catch myself in the song of the bird, in a moment of happiness, and I find myself in the most wonderous gift of all. I know I won’t keep the painting. It must be shared. Chubby summer legs will be waiting.
In the “Age of Innocence,” (if there were ever a time), they used to say, “I didn’t think they’d try it on,” meaning, I didn’t think they’d have the guts to do it. Some may have said that about my mother, but not me.
I’m not sure she ever really knew how brave she was. I know she wanted to be. I guess I knew first, because my grandfather told me. Standing in the kitchen, opposite the sink – grandma in elbow deep – in front of the window that framed the stripped and hanging cow from the tree, he told me I could turn in, or turn out. That I could armored like my Aunt Kay, or be open like my mother. He didn’t mark either as good or bad, both would be difficult, it was just a choice. My mother returned from the other room. Broken, she had the guts to still be ruffled in white. I had already made my choice. To be wounded, but still believe in love, I would ever be “trying it on.”
It was years later, I relayed his message to her. She hadn’t known that he saw her. It wasn’t the way. I suppose it was thought, “Well, it goes without saying…” but mostly I think that means it simply goes unsaid. I can’t let it be one of those times. Ever ruffled in ruffles, I come to the page, to the canvas, to you, wide open, daily. And on those days when you think you don’t have the strength, the courage, the will, you will think of these words, these images, see my mother’s face and heart, and you will find yourself “trying it on.”
II don’t get them often, but I found a cure that works for me when I have the hiccups. It is simply to relax every part of my body. Exhaling from head to toe. Whatever it is that’s causing the jolt seems to disappear in the softening.
It makes sense though. For me. Most of my worries, my so-called hiccups in life, are released the same way. Not with the violence of breath holding, or other extravagant scare tactics, but simply releasing. Letting go. It always takes me a minute to get there. Oh, I can let myself be jolted around like everyone else. But I find my way. Softly. Relaxing my face, I feel it fall, the fear, tumbling down my shoulders, stumbling over elbows and knees and finally wiggled from toes. Free.
Then there is room to just be. It’s the calm, I suppose, that welcomes in the comfort. Even comfort doesn’t want to enter a house a chaos. It comes in the softening.
I painted her as a reminder. I see her and I drop my cheeks, my shoulders, exhale from head to toe. And begin again. Softly.
I began writing poems at age six. Inside Big Chief notepads. Coloring book pages. Discarded Olson’s Supermarket brown paper bags. I just had to get the words out. I didn’t worry about saving them. Where would I have put that mountain? Somehow I knew the feelings would remain. And the words, well I still possessed all the letters of the alphabet, and am able to form any imaginable sentence on the page, so didn’t I, don’t I, indeed, still have all the poems? Just in different order.
I like to think of them running around inside of me. Like recess on the playground of Washington Elementary. Giggling and twirling from monkey bars to swings. From squared off bases to rubber balls. I don’t remember every game, every score, but oh, I remember the play. That’s how the poems, the dancing words, live inside of me.
Some ask, How do you write every day? I think, Would you ask a six year old if they ran out of things to play? I guess I just wake up and hear the bell ring, releasing me to the playground. The words fumble and tumble beside me. And I play.
It’s so easy to tell when I’m painting — when it’s time for help. I know when my brushes have given all they can. When the tiny hairs wander, grasping for anything. It doesn’t take long to notice. And I don’t make them or myself struggle. I get the assistance of new brushes.
I welcome them with a brush across my face, the palm of my opposite hand. And it certainly doesn’t make me feel weak. Quite the opposite. Empowered. With their assistance, who knows what I, we, can accomplish! What I, we, can become!
Oh, that I would be so open to this help in my daily life. I’m trying to get better. To ask for help when I need it. Asking for help isn’t giving up, it’s refusing to give up. I wouldn’t abandon my canvas. Neither will I abandon my heart or body.
Brush in hand and grace in heart, please let me be open to it all.
If you dip the cookie in the frosting, pick it up slowly, turn it over, sway it a little side to side and front to back, the frosting will level itself out. I don’t know how it knows, but it does. It’s the gift before the giving.
I think we’re all given the tools. Right from the start. Oh, sure, it takes a little turning. A little swaying. But when you know. You know.
I used to go into my room at five years old and color my emotions. I didn’t have the words for what I was feeling, but I had 24 Crayolas that could relay the message. At six, — as Mrs. Bergstrom gave us the spelling, the words — I began to write poems. Thus began this cookie’s life of self leveling. And the real gift is, I now have something to give.
I’m not special. We’re all given the tools. Maybe you garden. Maybe you bake. Or build. Or teach.
Yesterday, after painting in the studio, feeling the magic of this new portrait beginning, I wanted to call my mom. Oh, how she loved magic!! And perhaps frosting even more. So I returned to the kitchen, dipped the cookies that I had made earlier that day, and turned and swayed and leveled myself in all that love, and somehow I knew she knew.
Perhaps if you were to call it an eggplant, you wouldn’t give it such a frame. But l’aubergine, yes, an aubergine could hold its own, and perhaps even more, be the one not supported by, but wearing the frame.
Hearing my name called now, it comes with a French accent, an English one, even German…so isn’t it funny that I always hear my mother’s voice. The familiar long o, so long it sometimes didn’t even have room for the i at the end, it simply wrapped itself around and ended with the d. Framing my heart, not just with love, but with a responsibility. In that drawn out o, I knew I was to keep becoming.
I try every day. Offering up the words and the art. Would she find it worthy of how she framed me? The light in which she wanted me to be seen. My mother. I hope so. I think so. I keep trying. Because didn’t she bat away the ordinary? Try to clear the path? Shrug off and roll her eyes at purple? Yes, yes, yes…Joyfully, I was led to believe that I was aubergine.
People polished shoes then, back when my mom bought my first pair. I thought they were so beautiful. The white against the black. Crisp and clean. I looked up at the salesman from Iverson’s Shoes. He could see that I wanted them to stay that way. Scared even to take my right foot down from the angled bench to touch the floor. Worried that his hands were clean as he checked the space for my big toe. Did I want to know how to keep them just like this, he asked. Yes, yes, of course, I shook my head. He stood from his bench and walked to the stand by the register. He pulled out a black polish and a white polish. I knew the shoes were already over our budget, but oh how I wanted that polish. I looked up at my mother, she waved the polish in. I let out a sigh of relief. What care I would take of these beautiful shoes!
I stepped gingerly onto the bus that next day of school. Raised my knees so only the tips of my toes touched that tainted bus floor. I crossed my legs in each classroom. Watching the white and black dangle, almost dance beneath my knee. I placed them gently in my locker for gym class. Kept two steps behind anyone in the halls. Three days they lasted. Three glorious days of the certainty of black and white. It was on the busride home when I got distracted. Sitting behind me, she asked if I had the homework from social studies. I did. I turned in my seat to hand it to her. Leaving my left foot exposed, when Steve Brolin trampled down the aisle onto my whitest of white, leaving a brown skid mark from toe to saddle.
I don’t remember breathing on the rest of that bus ride home. All I wanted was my mom. I wanted to apologize. I should have paid attention. I wanted her to fix it. Couldn’t she fix it? We could fix it. I sat by the back door of the house. Pleading for her to come home from work. Pleading for time to pass. Inching closer to the door, as if to make it happen.
I had never polished shoes before. I held the Iverson’s bag in one hand and the shoe in my other. My “Please mom…” had changed to just “please…” The second hand of the kitchen clock finally cooperated and I heard the garage door rise.
Somehow she deciphered through the tears and hiccups what needed to be done. She put newspaper on the kitchen table. Wiped my face with a tissue. Together we read the instructions. The first swipe didn’t cover it. I breathed in worry. Swiped again. I don’t know how many times we polished that shoe during the evening, she during the night. But I do know that when I woke up, her left hand was in my shoe, her right hand buffing with a brush. She smiled as she held them out. Brand new, she said. Brand new, I agreed.
I haven’t thought of them in years. Then I saw them on the cover of the Paris Review. It sits on my desk as a reminder. Just beside the picture of my mom. Scuffed and weary from yesterday’s challenge, I smile and greet the day, I’m brand new! I’m brand new.
We never meant it as a compliment, shouting “bird brain” to someone across the playground. I suppose we thought small meant insignificant. Without worth. It was far from the only thing we got wrong.
I have been filling this sketchbook daily now for sixth months. As with anything, that first blank page seemed insurmountable. “Just start…” I would tell myself. Experience has taught me that beginning is always the hardest. Once you’re doing it, you’re doing it, and don’t have time to think of all the what ifs. Almost touching the page, I would pull back. Then forward. Wait. Questioning. “Oh, stop fluttering,” I told myself. And there it was – the answer – right in front of me, where it typically waits. I sketched out the first little bird. Simple. Cute. “Nothing here I can’t rise above,” it seemed to say, so I painted another. And another.
Each day they became more elaborate. People with birds. Birds on books. Almost “Scarlet Letter”-like, I took the problem and made it my art. My creations. My joy.
I remember sitting in the overflow tiny houses behind Jefferson Senior High. Barely insulated from the cold of winter, reading the book for the first time. All that “A” stood for beyond the book. Alexandria, the town I was born, the one I knew I would have to flee to become the Artist that lived in my soul. Had I mentioned it then, aloud, I could have been that “bird brain”…and I have to admit I was afraid of the label. Now I wear it proudly. Now I wear it proudly. I am that bird brain. Fluttering to create with all the fear and joy that still holds. Daily.
The thing is, I, we, get to decide. I pick up my pencil, And I rise.
