Maybe if they were too big, we wouldn’t be able to fly at all. That’s what I tell myself as I celebrate the small magic moments of each day.
On my phone, I replaced my friend’s icon that was simply her initials, with a picture of my first bird woman. I can’t say why exactly. It just felt right. I’ve had it that way for months, but I only told her yesterday. When I showed her the picture, she beamed. “You have no way of knowing this,” she said, “but ever since I was a little girl I imagined that I had bird friends that would follow me around and speak to me.”
This is the magic I cling to. It weighs nothing, and even more, lifts me higher.
I never noticed how much it looked like a little nest, the tuft of hair on top of a cow’s head. I guess the bird knew before I did, and it showed me how to find its way home.
I’ve never lived on a farm, nor even in the country. Yet, I’m trying to count, this morning, the amount of times I have been connected to another human, simply by a cow. Of course, my grandparents. Uncles and overalls and electric fences. I’ve sold four original paintings of cows. Three in Minneapolis and one in France. After finishing this cow yesterday, I sent it to my friend in Minnesota. She told me how her father, the week before his passing, wanted to simply watch and listen to the cows on his farm. He was showing her, how to find his way home.
If a cow can do all that, certainly we could do that for each other, be the nest, or at least the direction of home.
I don’t know how many times I got lost in the North End of Van Dyke Road. It was my Grandma Elsie who told me not to count things like that. Returning from ice skating at Noonan’s Park with my two cousins, she asked how it went. “I fell six times,” I said. “Why would you count that?” She shook her head with tight lips, handed me a variety pack size of Kellogg’s cereal, and I knew not to do it again.
Wandering once again down the hill into the untamed North End, I found myself disoriented. When it happened, the only thing to do was to look up. Up was familiar. Up carried the sound of garage doors opening, bicycles popping wheels in the gravel. Up was familiar. Comforting. Home.
I suppose we always have a need to get to higher ground. I hope we do anyway. And we can’t get there by counting our failures, but striving to do better. It’s always up. “Things are looking up. Get your hopes up. Spirits are running high.”
It took a couple of hours to finish her — the woman in the sketchbook. Two hours of her looking up, telling me to keep looking up. I count on my sketchbook, my hands, my heart, for such things. I’m pretty sure Grandma Elsie would be ok with that.
“Women in pain become birds.” I just read that. I often find myself looking around for the cameras that are surely filming me in this episode. And as I flutter through the inexplicable planned randomness of the page, I think, yes, but not in the way the author meant — small. No, I think women do become birds, but there is beautiful strength in that. A grandness of sky. Adapting in mid flight. Hovering. Not avoiding the breeze, but feeling it. Using it. All while dressed and feathered.
I say this, not in praise of my own wings, but marveling at those before me. I have been nested and pushed by the best. Elsied and Ivyed into the blue. Words like small were replaced with capable, and I learned to fly.
It’s not to say that days won’t be fragile. That we won’t be fragile. But we have been given everything we need. Mostly love.
I wrote it long ago. The truth of it still lifts me. “She believed in the pure randomness of it all. It could happen to anyone at any time, pain, happiness, confusion, even love.”
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.
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.
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.
There wasn’t a hard edge on her. Not fingers, nor elbows, nor knees. She was built to make a lap, cup the small of a back, wipe a tear, widen a smile. She held. She gave. She touched. This was my grandma Elsie.
Sometimes I have to apologize to her, and myself, for carrying my shoulders just a little too high. What am I braced for that couldn’t more easily roll off and on by, if I only relaxed them down. It feels so good when I do. My neck wanders freely, softening my face, releasing my cheeks that smile and say, “what a relief!”
As I work in my sketchbook, I remind myself. The blending of rouge and flesh. Whites, yellows and greens. No hard edges. Wondering to myself, “Does that man appearing know that I am Elsie-ing his face?” I lay the brush down, along with my shoulders, and know, she is gently and ever teaching me. Thank you, Grandma.
I heard of them long before I ever heard of “sea legs.” I could see them at eye level. I put my hands up like a director holding the camera to keep my mother’s legs in constant sight as she danced and weaved through the hangered racks.
I was near her eye level once we graduated from Herberger’s basement to Dayton’s in Minneapolis — getting into the rhythm of my own “shopping legs.” And never were we more tested than on Black Fridays. Some said the crowds were too much, but not my mother. She saw it as the dance floor being full. Perhaps it was from practicing each weekend in her heels of youth at the Glenwood Lakeside Ballroom. I didn’t always know who was playing in her head. Was it Glen Miller? Tommy Dorsey? But it was something to see. The pulling of the ruffled blouse off the rack. Holding out at arms’ length. The wink of admiration, when yes, it was decided, they were going to dance.
It’s not just today. There are constant crowds of opposition and misinformation. And some choose to plant their feet. But I was taught to listen. To watch. To sway. To see not the crowd, but the dance.
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!
