Charles returned on his first break from university. He showed us pictures of his campus and classrooms. The problems written across the blackboards were nothing short of Good Will Hunting. My eyes rolled at my brain, which was challenged enough from translating English to French. These scribbles and tweeks and solve-fors seemed beyond language. Had this Matt Damon always sat so loosely on our sofa? What a smarty pants, I thought. And then I thought, people who are actually that smart wouldn’t say smarty pants, nor probably know the outline of this film playing in my head. And then I thought, stop thinking and pay attention, not unlike what I said to myself while taking my own classes long ago.
We all have our own currency. It’s foolish to measure against anyone else. It’s foolish not to use everything you have.
I stared at the photos he clicked through on the television. These giant tableaus were no longer “problems”, but works of art. Because this was his art. I could see how excited he was. To show them — these Pollacked masterpieces hanging in his museum of learning. Seeing his passion to solve, I understood. I relaxed into my chair, and finished the tour.
He was never going to stay this size. He was never meant to. But there was a moment, a joyful moment, in this living room, we all sat loosely.
I have spent my life daring the blue dress, long before I was ready to dance. I’m not sure I’ve ever really been ready for anything. (Can anyone be?) Mostly I think I’ve just started.
Uncertain, I have eased my head through. Let it drop over nervous shoulders. I have turned on the record player. Let the music travel from ears to fingers, as I slipped into the black hose. And I have braced my nervous heart with arms over ribs that simply couldn’t be trusted. And without my knowledge or permission, the blue begins to blur, and there is no more getting ready — I AM a dancer.
If we waited for the perfect time, we’d never do anything. There is no sure that gets us over the edge. No certainty. And if there were, would there be any reason to continue? This is what I tell myself in the jitters of it all. The nervousness is simply a dance.
And so I begin. I wiggle my shoulders. My toes. And I am move a little easier through the blue.
In the beginning, I had so few, I could remember everyone’s favorite. She liked the heart, my mom’s friend, Carol. It read, “Sometimes, someone says something really small and it fits into that tiny space in your heart, and fills it.”
She came to the studio yesterday to pick up her painting. Seeing the new ones, she said, “Oh, I like this woman, but I love her,” pointing to the one that I wonder, perhaps, looked most like her. I hope so.
Turning to looking at the large canvas, she asked if this was Margaux. I smiled because it was the second time that day, with two different images, that people wondered if the painting was of Margaux. I smiled because I could hear my mother’s voice when people would say, “Oh, that’s so me,” and my mother would reply, “Well, actually…it’s about me.” I smiled because people could see themselves. I smiled because Margaux was coming to life everywhere. I smiled because, holding her painting, her father, she said, “It’s so special.” Those tiny little words fit directly into the space of my heart that needed to be filled, the space that my brain still thinks, oh, that’s Carol’s space — which will always make me smile.
Heart full, I was, I am, a part of it all, and I am home.
Some days it took as little as wearing an LBD to feel like a superhero. While some may write this off as shallow, I say it is the brilliant understanding of your own power. Finding it wherever you can.
It’s no mistake that my mother found it in her lipstick. I continued her evangelism in a book and on my face. Going to the Sephora here in France yesterday, I asked for assistance, and while she helped me in French, we both knew we were speaking the same language — The mother tongue. And it being one of those days, many applications were required.
In full make-up and my apron (a nod, I suppose, to both my mother and grandmother), I went to the studio to paint. Completing this study in oils, the last thing was to give her clothing. I had already supplied her with the rouge, but just to be sure, I painted a little black dress. And in saving her, I more than saved myself.
Being young, blonde and brand new, I navigated my girlhood through the summers and winters of Minnesota, veering between the colors of January’s lavender to July’s rose red. Now the colors varied, depending on the intensity of the season, but there was a real certainty to my pink underpainting.
I never saw it as a weakness. Nor a less than. This, no doubt, thanks to the strong women around me. Grandma Elsie was round and soft. Cheeks ever pink over a pot. Sticky hands pulled on her apron strings and clung to sensibly shoed ankles. And I was certain that nothing could tip her over, and nothing ever did. My mother, in her opposite of long and lean, even on her hardest days, got herself to work, with courage plumped from the Clinique counter. She offered the same message — I will be pushed, prodded, but never tipped over.
I see friends here, too many, bravely ribboned in the color. Fighting breast cancer. I offer up this painting in the recognition of their strength. Though we are not defined by our underpainting, we choose daily how we wear it. I see these women and I see beauty. The beautiful gift and strength of being, of living.
It was such a contrast. My grandma’s kitchen table had legs that stuck out beyond the range of feet passing. Having only one other kitchen table so far in my short life, it’s funny how quickly I adapted to the thought that all would be the same — an easy pass. Clinging to the assumption, I repeatedly tripped on her table.
It didn’t seem to bother her, nor my grandpa. I had yet to learn of “the grand scheme” of things, as they often said, explaining away how simple table legs didn’t really matter. At first I scowled. Then I marveled. And I wanted to do the same. I wanted to get past the table legs to the joys of the kitchen. To the Kellogg’s cereal variety packs. To the Lazy Susan filled with Sugar Babies, Daddies and Black Cows. Did I still trip? Sometimes. Sometimes not. I suppose I began to let it go. And as I let it go, I imagined the struggle releasing as puffs of cartoon smoke, floating above my head, and finally disappearing into what I could only explain as the grand scheme.
To display one of my newer paintings, I had to put up an old easel. Not my favorite. Its spindly legs need to extend out quite far in order to balance. (Some days I resemble that more than others.) Tripping on it, as I often do, I simply adjust the painting that has been slightly rattled, smile, and release my “cartoon puff” and go back to painting.
What will they write about if it’s only Google? If there are no stairs to climb to get to the public library? Stairs that are just a little too big for five year knees to bend. Stairs that must be climbed with a mother’s hand not simply held, but used as a pulley. Stairs, that if said mother spent too much time checking her lipstick in the rear view mirror and locking the car door, could be traversed on all fours, like one of the lions cemented and perched next to the entry door.
And if they only use AI, how will they know the smell of the card catalog? Stumble through the Dewey Decimal system? Feel the victory of when your thumb lands on the searched-for book on the shelf? For there was nothing “artificial” about claiming the knowledge, owning the responsibility. Name proudly written on the check out card. Book clutched to heart before putting in homemade book bag.
How do we keep it all tangible? These actions of brain and heart and study? What will be the stairs to climb?
I begin a new small canvas. Not for sale or recognition, but simply to learn. Improve my craft. Pass along as a hand reaching down. A pulley to reach the lions.
My mother and grandmother knew the difference. What most considered as shy they understood as being quiet. When the teachers would report, “She’s very shy, my mother would say, “She’s just not loud.”
Maybe it was because there were so many of us at my grandma’s house. It didn’t seem possible to get on top of the noise, so I went under. With a whisper. And my grandmother responded, not with a voice, but a gentle thumb that slid across my rouge cheeks, and I was saved.
It was the same in my mother’s apartment. Worry was not met with a bang. A poem rang volumes over the din of trouble. And quietly we moved, tip-toed gently, into heart’s joyful noise.
In our current world, where we exchange volume for truth, can we still hear the difference between right and wrong? Between hurt and kindness? I wonder what would happen if we just took the time to listen…
There was a time when “hold still” meant something unpleasant was going to happen. A shot from the doctor. A peering dentist. The brushing of tangled hair. Even the application of unwanted socks.
I can’t say the moment it changed. It could have been gradual. But as with most things that turn with time, it felt sudden. And without my knowledge or permission, I often begin sentences with “Wasn’t I just…”
And as I struggle to hold still the squirming memories of loves passed, I have to laugh and acknowledge, that I was never one to do it. And in the recognition, I think, maybe we are never meant to stop any of it, but simply keep dancing through. All of it. Partnering with the comfort and the uncomfortable — the warmth of sitting in mother’s lap as she wrestles through the nest of your hair.
Time continues to change meaning and tempo, but love remains, not still, but strong. So I keep dancing…
At 7:25, I knew she would already be at her desk. Skirt smoothed. Lipstick on. Purse neatly tucked. And I awaited the call. I started each day with my mother.
We went through the usual checklist. What we were wearing. If we slept. Shoes. How we felt. Accessories. Unseen compliments and laughter. There was certainty at 7:25. There was love.
Through her working years, I knew 11:30 was lunch. 4:30, home. I didn’t watch the clock, but sometimes the second hand would wrap itself around my shoulder, because I knew where she was.
Traveling to New York or California, I stayed in the knowledge of her time zone. 7:30 no longer meant the desk, but she was up, “putting on her face.” When I moved to France, her 7:30 awakening became more like 8:00, which was 3pm for me. At 4:00 I would call. The check list varied, but the love never did.
Someone else has her phone number now. But I will always know what time it is in Minnesota.
