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.
If my mother resembled my grandfather, it was mostly in the length of their strides. My first memories were three to one, counting mine as I raced behind them. I marveled at their strength and purposeful speed. But it wasn’t an angry pace, I could tell by the loose swinging of arms, feeling that same joy as my own danced around my waist.
It’s a blur of how I went from three to two, to matching their strides completely. I can still feel the thrill of reaching out to that hand that swung back. Did it rest a little longer? Did I reach a littler farther? Didn’t all time stop as I clasped my sweaty palm into the certainty of love followed? Somehow I knew, it was also mine to carry. A joyful duty of continuing love’s long stride.
It’s funny how I had focused so on their feet, when it was their hands all along. The reaching out, the reaching back, the reaching out again. The sun is coming up. My heart tells my arms to swing.
I have been typesetting for most of my adult life, but I just learned this recently — When a paragraph begins on the last line of the page, the isolated first sentence is called an orphan. It has no past, but it does have a future. When the paragraph’s final sentence carries onto the next page, it is called a widow. It has a past, but no future.
I’ve always known that paper has a memory. If you fold it, the fold remains. Dog-eared books don’t forget. Each page is alive.
I won’t be able to unsee it now, the orphans and the widows. And that makes me happy. When we know better, we do better. And if we can do this for pages in a book, certainly we can do this for each other. We must never forget to keep humanizing. When you take this away from people, take away their stories, they lose everything, and so do you.
We all want to be seen. To be dog-eared in hearts and minds. It matters, this setting of type. It decides if we have a future.
I remember watching America’s Next Top Model (Yes, I did. Don’t judge me.) There was one specific moment that stuck with me all of these years. The host Tyra Banks, became frustrated with this certain model. Of course she was a beautiful woman, but she was coming off “dead” in the photographs. Tyra pleaded with her, “Think of something! Anything!”
While it makes me laugh, there is so much truth behind it. We are at our most beautiful when we show who we are.
The paintings I love the most, that I consider the most successful, are those that evoke a feeling. The story that comes to life when you view it. The story that you then share back to me. This exchange brings life to the painting, but most importantly, to all of us.
I don’t know what the day will bring. It could be something! It could be anything! Isn’t that beautiful?
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.
I said, “I know.” But I didn’t know. I wonder why I thought that knowing would dull the information given. As if this claiming to almost be in on it, would make it hurt less.
“The house sold,” my mom said. Not “we sold the house,” like we were a part of the decision making. Like we wanted to leave the comfort of Van Dyke Road and move to a small apartment in town. “I know,” I said, after nearly falling from my bike when I saw the real estate sign in the yard. That cold metal sign with the big “sold” sticker placed across, almost like a smile, like it was laughing at us…so I said I know, not because I did, but simply not to give that smiling vacate notice any more power than it already had.
With the last boxes packed, she said, “It’s going to be ok…good…you can decorate your room.” “I know,” I said. (Neither of us did.)
But the defense of this “I know” gradually turned into reality. A certainty of trusting in each other’s heart. It was no longer for the metal sign, but for us. And with each other, there were so many things that we did know, mostly love, some tears shared, but soon laughter, and the joy of really being anywhere together.
I walk by her picture now. Photographs. Paintings. I can hear her say, “I’m still here.” I smile and whisper, “I know.” (And I do.)
She wrote to me, in French, that this portrait reminded her of her older sister who was no longer with them. She said she could see the sadness that she carried, (tristesse), but it also gave her hope (l’espoir).
One thing does not disappear the other. We live in between. And maybe that’s where all the beauty lies, if we choose to see it, in the transitions. In the state of becoming. I often have to remind myself, as I’m hurrying to “get through.” As if the furious speed held the answers.
There is no finishing. The woman wrote of her sister as “no longer with them,”…but yet, here we are, talking about her, in two languages. So isn’t she here, hovering between the sadness and hope, with just the slightest turn of head, turn of lip, her message ready to wing on, and on…
I found it next to the trash bins on my walk yesterday. A small shelf made out of wooden slats — perfect for making a framing brace behind a painted panel. I walked it home. Took out the screws.. Pulled out the nails. Sanded each piece. And made my first frame for an existing panel.
Maybe it’s silly, but I feel like the wood is alive. Even after being cut. Even after supporting shoes in a French closet. Even after being discarded. Even after sitting by the bins, thinking there was still a chance to be of use. Didn’t it say, just take me home. Knowing that wasn’t back to the closet, or even the forest, but just somewhere to be valued. To be loved.
There has been a world of places where I’ve felt it. A variety of hands and hearts that have reached out, and taken me to places that I’ve never been, but walked me home all the same, with the gift of purpose, the familiar of heart.
We can do this for each other. Let go the forest, and be the pathway home.
She didn’t want to hear it any more than I did years ago, as she was saying, but you have the time to…
Years ago, still in youth’s comparison, I was complaining about not having the time to do what I wanted, and more so, that other people did, and he said that every person is given the same amount of time each day. 24 hours. Do with them what you will. I imagine I threw in several “yeah, but…”s, to which he simply raised his eyebrows. I let it set in, and got up earlier the next morning.
This advice has served me well for decades. I suppose it was no different from the “eyes on your own paper” that we heard in grade school. I guess I was just ready to receive it.
As they say, comparison is the thief of joy. What someone else owns, gets, or does, is really none of your business, and has no effect on you. What determines your day, is simply set before you.
So I ask myself, what are you going to do with your own paper? I paint the eyes that smile back at me. No thieves in sight.
Unlike her delicious pastries, most of my grandma’s ideas outside the kitchen were, as one might say, half-baked.
Even the successes that she served were a little hard to understand. They were given names that I didn’t realize were made up until in later years trying to Google a recipe. And if there were in fact recipes, they were never followed. When asked, she would laugh and puff the flour from hand to aproned belly and say, “Oh, I started in the middle.”
Not really understanding, I still found it unconventionally delightful. As were the chinchillas in the basement. The Publisher’s Clearing house magazines spread across the table. The various plots of land underwater or undeveloped purchased from a roadside gas station. The grab bags from Ben Franklin. The constant thrill of simply playing, neither winning nor losing, just in the game.
In front of my newest sketchbook, I understand. I never start at the first page. I always begin somewhere in the middle — where the pressure is off, only the joy of being in it. I’m trying to allow myself more of that freedom in my day to day. Not worrying about what was or what will be, just allowing, just being… aproning up and dancing in the kitchen.
