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.
I brought this painting with me to France. I sold it, and it’s now somewhere in Germany. It makes me smile to think of its travels. It was just a humble image of my nightstand in Hopkins, Minnesota. My cup. The latte I poured inside, purchased from the Caribou I could see from my window. The walk I could take in sunshine, rain, or snow. My clock radio that said good morning. Said just sit here for a minute and be. That guarded my books. Whispered good night. That I painted at a resting 11:11, the sign of all things open. Ever carried in my heart.
I also brought that clock radio to France. I used the adapter to plug it in. It turns out I handled the culture shock much better. It burned itself up immediately. The words have nearly worn from the cup. But you’d be wrong to say I have none of it. I pause and tell you that I have it all.
I suppose it’s the way with everything. With everyone. I painted the image after my grandma’s passing. A small empty building — “What remains, may only be in the heart.” I don’t have that painting either. But oh, I have the night. My mom was with me. My friends. We were at Toast in downtown Minneapolis. The dancer from “So You Think You Can Dance,” came to meet me. Me! Imagine that. Dancing toward the woman standing in front of that painting, my mom told her that it was her favorite. The woman had tears in her eyes, clutching her heart, and said she had to have it. “Oh, no…” my mother replied. She loved when I sold a painting, but hated to say goodbye. It was one magical evening of a lifetime. So think of all that the heart can carry.
Love never dies. It pauses in that tiny place of your heart, and fills it. And remains forever. Typing this in front of my grandfather’s portrait, I can hear him say that he’s heard this before. Not in a way that he doesn’t want to hear it again, but that he’ll be here, listening, tomorrow, and the day after that, paused in love.
Before I met my mother and her cousin, they worked at the phone company. Just out of school, they were best of friends. All giggles and lipstick. Ruffles and elbows. Every ring was filled with possibility.
Lapped and fascinated, I told my mother to tell it again. Having since met her cousin, it just didn’t seem possible. Hadn’t Janet just come from the potato pit? Hadn’t she just saved her husband Joey after being kicked by the cow? I couldn’t imagine her all dressed up under the fluorescent lights of Alexandria’s Telephone Company on Broadway.
“Oh, she was a beauty,” my mother said. “Just like you,” I said. My mother smiled. “I looked up to her,” she continued. I imagined Janet, now 10’ deep in the summer crop chilling for winter and it just seemed so unlikely. My mouth open in wonder, she told me what has remained, “People aren’t just one thing.”
The thing is, we think we know. We think because we see people for ten minutes that we understand their lives. Why they do the things we do. We have to go from potato pit to coffee break. We have to see the full picture. Even then, we can’t be entirely sure. We have to leave room for change. Room for growth. Room for the rings of possibility.
I like to think of them mid-giggle. Nothing lights a person better than joy. I have to allow myself the same grace. We all do. Good morning, my friends! Welcome to the phone company!
I remember exactly where she bought it — the faux fur jacket. It was at an event at Corazon in downtown Minneapolis. While I was signing books and selling paintings, my mom was trying on the clothes also offered. This was our environment! It was our friend Frederick who gave her the ooh-la-la in his best Minnesota accent. Of course she bought it.
I have that jacket now. For me, it’s not just fashion, but a time capsule of pure joy. A way to embrace the moment of art and books and friends. Where compliments flowed so freely. Swooping through the air like birds hopping on the wind. And didn’t it all feel like flying?! For that was the true fashion of these events. These gatherings of being yourself. These celebrations of creation and kindness.
When I first showed her some of my mom’s things, I didn’t just pass them on hangers. Of course I put them on. I am my mother’s daughter. She exclaimed that my mom was “à la mode” – so fashionable. I didn’t have her words for it — but I’ve always known.
I flutter in it still. The coat. The kindness. The compliment. The joy. The love. Ever in fashion. Ever à la mode!
If you look it up in the dictionary, it has two meanings. Opposite really. Nervy. It can mean bold, or nervous. Both are probably true. And for me, usually at the same time.
Months ago, in the middle of a situation in Marseille, feeling both, I decided to Wordle for distraction. I know there are certain starter words, almost mathematical, to give yourself the best chance, but I don’t play that way. I usually insert a word that says something about my current state of affairs, a way to insert myself in the game. It’s just more fun for me that way. So I chose the word with two meanings. Bold and nervous, because wouldn’t you have to be, I mean, are you really being bold if you’re not nervous? Is there any bravery without being afraid? I typed it in. N-E-R-V-Y. The letters turned over green. One by one. I beat Wordle. I chose the word in a single guess. It was about me.
I three and four my way through most days. Sometimes two. Not playing the odds, but always playing myself.
Last night, reading a new book, Apples Never Fall, there it was on the page, twice. Nervy. Had I not taken the big chance, the big swing, with my Wordle word, I would have just passed this page without great meaning. But I had taken the chance. I had bolded and nerved my way in, and found myself again, here in the words.
I don’t want to live timidly. I want to be bold in the attempt. When I love, when I live. So when my reflection is offered back to me, I can say proudly, I was nervy.
Just outside my dorm room, I came across a red balloon. Nearly deflated after its apparent celebration, it merely hopped in front of me, seemingly hoping for one last hurrah. Who was I to turn away? I gave it a little tap with my foot. Did it blush deeper red as it popped up to my hand? I waved it on ahead. And we danced. It didn’t occur to me that my normal three minute walk to class had now taken upwards of nine. I took on the same blush of red as I walked in late. The professor looked at me and asked why I was late. “Because I grew up on a gravel road,” I said. Always a proponent of the specific, he smiled and let me sit down.
It was true what I had said. I had consumed hours kicking a single rock down the gravel of Van Dyke Road. It’s something, I suppose, to kick a rock on the paved streets of town, but it took special attention to traverse your specific rock in a sea of them. It started out simply, just a little tap by Weiss’s house. Then a quick passing of Alf’s. Once between Muzik’s and Dynda’s, I really gathered steam. Passing Norton’s I was ready to make it all the way to the North End, where all gravel went to rest in giant cliffed piles. Simply acquaintances at the edge of my driveway, we had now become friends. So certainly, as with any friend, I was ready to take it back home with me. Back up the hill. Maybe it was a foretaste of the feast to come, but I was unwilling to settle for any abandoning.
You get over being left, but one has to decide if you are going to be a part of the leaving. I wasn’t. So I kicked that red balloon all the way to my creative writing class, in a story that began on Van Dyke Road.
It wasn’t long after I realized that everyone didn’t have them, these Tech-ers in the basement, that they were gone. It’s clear now that we needed the money more than the space. We went through at least three cycles of young men from the law enforcement class. I only remember one’s name – Terry Eilers. Maybe because he was also our bus driver, but mostly I think because he was nice to me. And wasn’t that everything? —when there was just one unlocked door at the bottom of the stairs that separated them from our laundry.
Before lessons were learned, I race from upstairs to downstairs without a glance. It was one of the men from the first group of three. (Everyone over 17 seems like a man when you are six.) He was building a canoe in the driveway to our basement. Fascinated by anything being built, I was probably annoying. Watchful. Eager to know the bend of wood. And what was that green stuff? What was he putting on the shell? Certainly he must have my best interests at heart, I thought, he lived with us after all. He was going to enforce the law. He told me to touch the canoe. I poked one hesitant finger out of my sleeve and touched it as if it were a hot pan on the stove. No, really get in there, he said. Rub your arm across it. I don’t why I did. Just like the heat from a hot pan, it took a minute for the tiny shards of glass, the insulation, to reach my brain. And it took longer, I suppose, wondering not why the pain, but more, why did he want to inflict it?
I wasn’t going to let him see me cry. I ran up the browning hill of fall grass. Through the garage door. Down the stairs to the laundry room in the basement. Took off the painful sweater and placed it in a basket. It was the first time I noticed there was no lock on that door. It was the first time I needed one.
I stayed upstairs for the rest of their time. The next group came. They called one “Buzz” I think because of his hair, but I remained at a distance.
When Terry Eilers came the next year, slightly overweight in his tan shirt and brown pants, the new uniform of the students, he smiled at me from behind the big bus wheel. I don’t know how many rides it took before I trusted him, but I did.
It’s no longer a technical school, but a college. They have their own housing now, I guess. Call it whatever you want, I hope we’ve all learned along the way. Kindness is memorable.
Some will try to take it away. Innocence. Curiosity. Joy. Others still will pick you up when you need it most. It only takes one Terry.
Of course I loved the taste of candy. What kid doesn’t love sugar? But it was more than just delicious. I’m laughing because the word that comes to mind is gateway, and I don’t mean as in drug, but for me, it actually opened gates.
My mother wasn’t one to rush to the doctor for sore throats or colds. When straddling the line between under the weather and getting over it, she offered up the candy test. If I could eat the piece of chocolate without feeling ill, throwing up, or gagging, well, then I must be fine — and the gates were opened to school, to play, to whatever the day would bring.
Unconventional as it may seem, it worked. (I’m not promoting taking chances with one’s health, and neither was she.) It was more for, I suppose, the imagined tummy ache that felt so very real before a test. Or the clinging to a bit of sympathy, when really all was fine. A reminder that, no matter what, all was actually, for lack of better term, sweet.
Standing outside the candy store in Stillwater, I could feel the fling of picket.
I think it’s what the best of us do, remind us of the good. Not the gatekeepers, but those who swing them open and wave us through. Reminding us daily that life is good. My mother did that for me. Maybe we could all do that for each other.
The thing about store-bought puzzles is they give you the right amount of pieces to make a whole. The thing about being human is, those pieces keep changing. I suppose I used to think this was the flaw, now I tend to see it as the gift.
He asked me what I wanted to do. I said I didn’t know, because I didn’t. Sometimes uncertain can feel like unhappy. When the image to your puzzle just isn’t clear. So I washed. Creamed. Make-upped. Was it a voice? Outside? Inside? Something told me to put on some bigger earrings. Today needs a hoop. So I did. I even filled my usually empty second holes with a smaller pair. And a bracelet, I thought. All the pieces were coming together. I put on the ruffled blouse. The jeans. Lined my lips. Perfumed the back of my neck, and we were off. Coffee and conversation. Books and beloved. I was whole.
We think we need to know everything. Sometimes it’s uncertainty itself that leads the way. I don’t know what today will bring, but I do know that I have everything I need, and just enough to wish for. I am an ever changing puzzle, but I am whole.
I had heard it often times around my grandma’s kitchen table, beneath the wrappings of an aunt’s or neighbor’s birthday. And it seemed to me the ones who said it — “Well, it’s the thought that counts,” — were the ones who sat empty handed. And I suppose it’s ironic, the thoughts of what it actually meant to be thoughtful cluttered my mind. Because I was thoughtful, meaning, I thought, always full of thoughts — I frequently paid too much attention to the situation at hand.
Take library day at Washington Elementary. When asked if I loved to read, (perhaps by one of those aunts or neighbors who didn’t lie next to me each night clinging to the last words of the most recently checked out book like my mother did), I would roll my eyes like Beezus did when Ramona (the pest) asked her silly questions. And I would laugh to myself because my literary reference was the answer in itself. This, I suppose, could describe a person with an abundance (often too many) of thoughts.
As abundances often do, the night before library day, those thoughts turned to worry. Would I find another book? Would it have meaning? Would I love it? Would someone else check out the one I wanted? Oh so many thoughts. My mother gave me a system. A solution in my pocket. I could browse, but I would always have a series to go to, Beverly Cleary, for example, the writer of all those Henry Huggins, Ramona the Pest, Beezus, Ribsy books that I loved so well. I didn’t have to think. I could give my mind the rest. Simply go to the shelf and pull out the next one in the series. Brilliant.
I suppose it’s what I do now, in my daily sketch book. I have dedicated this current book to birds. I can sketch anything, as long as it has a bird in it. I don’t have to think. I just do. For these moments each day, I am not burdened by excess of anything. The birds weigh nothing, not on my head, not on my heart, nor in my hands. The joy that this liberty brings each day is priceless. Ever.
It’s just something for your pocket. To slip beside the dream I hope you carry (my mother taught me that as well).
