It seemed there was always one kid in every class who believed they could fly. Never testing it out on the monkey bars or a tree branch, but going straight to the barn roof. For me, bravery has always been more of a staircase, a ladder. Something to build upon, daily. I started with books. Each a step in confidence and curiosity. Rungs of empathy and encouragement. And when the words I needed weren’t at hand, I penciled them through my heart. Writing not because I had the answers, but to find a way to them, and even more often, in all of my hopeful confusion, finding a way to simply rise above. Word by word.
That’s why I’ve always trusted people who read. Praised the teachers and librarians. Befriended those in the nook. Traded the bookmarks and the reviews. Sniffed the inside of spines for fuel. Shared the secret views of every “barn roof” and above. Knowing that we’ve always had the ability to rise up. To get beyond. To fly.
I tell you that I’ve seen her face before. Of course I have no proof because she lived in my head.
It was in the first grade when she quietly took up residency. Mrs. Bergstrom was perhaps the first to tie words and art together for me. She joyfully released us downstairs to Mr. Opsahl’s art room. Never unarmed, she sent us off with the discipline of a single file and the mission to create a puppet for a show during our next story time. I see her more clearly now, as this mixture of fairytale and educator. Because didn’t they both give us something to dream of, something to aspire to — and didn’t they both bun their hair, sleek, and tight, I imagined to cut the resistance of all the reality sent to weigh us down.
So this was my puppet. Part princess, part Mrs. Bergstrom, full-on my imagination. With an empty toilet paper roll, a mound of papier mâché, covered in acrylic paint, she came to life. She later sang and recited words from the chalk board, and she was alive.
I haven’t seen her for years, not until yesterday when she appeared in my sketchbook. Did she know she was needed? I think so. Did she arrive right on time to cut through all the weight? Yes.
She reminds me that maybe you need to hear it. Because sometimes you need to hear it from someone who has been there. That nothing is going to be easy, but everything is going to be ok. I smile and know, yes, this is why she came.
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.
It was one of the greatest mysteries to me, the perfection of the rows in the fields. I knew nothing about farming, nor even driving, when I asked my grandpa how he did it. “I just see them,” he said. “But how do you not run over it all when you turn the corner? Or get out of line when you take a sip of coffee from the thermos between your feet?” “I know where I am, and I know where I need to be. It makes it very clear.” “That’s a lot to see,” I said, still not certain that I would be able to do it. “Will I be able to do it?” “This, probably not, but you’ll see what you need to see.” “How will I know?” He got on the tractor, and showed me.
I don’t know the exact moment it happened. How I found my row. My place. But I did. It all became so clear on the page and on the canvas. People ask me all the time — How do make them so real? How do you bring them to life? The truth is, I just see them. And it is my hope, that they see what I see, and others too… then they will know they are beautiful. That’s why I paint the portraits.
I can’t tell you how it happens. So I simply hop on my daily tractor, and write and paint, and I know, somehow, we’ll all find our way.
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.
I imagine she thought she was introducing us to something new when Ms. McCarty assigned us the book Lord of the Flies. She had underestimated the previous hour we had spent with the senior boys in the gymnasium, playing (barely surviving) a game of dodge ball. Still, it was nice to be seen, to have some affirmation as I sat dazed in the front row, with the word Voigt tattooed across my forehead.
I suppose I’ve always been looking. In the books. Not only to see myself in the situation of the characters, but the authors. Right from the start, I was Beezus. I was Ramona the Pest. I was Beverly Cleary. I was the dancing of words on the page. Because if the simple arrangement of words could change the story, why couldn’t I do that in real life — simply move the words around.
Books made everything possible. All that randomness of words on the page. Of lives being lived. Anything could happen at any time, pain, happiness, confusion, even love.
Oh, I’m still often dazed, but for much better reasons. As I Hemingway the streets of Paris, or when we connect with the words beneath my fingers — when our stories gather us in, on today’s new page.
My mother took in ironing. Just being born, of course I didn’t have the words for it, or any words at all, but I think I knew. I could feel it, the warmth. Not the heat from the iron, nor the steam, but the balm of service done with grace.
It wasn’t humility. She wasn’t lowering herself. She loved clothes. She needed the money. She tested the quality of the fabric between thumb and forefinger. She knew how it would behave. How to make the collar and cuffs respond, not with rigidity, but a wantful desire to frame a face, release a hand. When finished, she didn’t just exchange it for cash, she showed them how to wear it — not as a mannequin, but a woman with style unpurchased. And they knew it. That’s why they came back. They could have gone to the local dry cleaner on Broadway, but they returned to my mother, in the white house, near the end of Van Dyke Road.
I watched her years later, doing it for herself, and I could still feel the hands that cupped the back of my head, marveling at the warmth against my resting spine. My mother took in ironing, and ever returned it with grace.
Knowing that the number one rule in improv (perhaps the only) is to always continue the conversation with “yes, and…” — and thinking that life is really one big improvisation — I try to do the same in my daily practices.
I got up early this morning to make the baguettes. The sticky dough questions my every move, and yes, I continue. My tiny spatula is barely a match for the fluidity. It’s like trying to herd cats or gather water in the palm of your hand. But the scent of bread baking is priceless. The impossible cut straight from the oven melts the butter, and beds the lavender honey, and there really is no better way to begin the day.
It feels good to begin in all that agreement. I will ride it to my sketchbook — the current sketchbook whose only rule is “Bird, and…” Every page must contain a bird. It started from the need to lighten the moment. To feel barely more than air. To fly. Thus, the birds, and… whatever I wanted to paint with them. Be it ukulele, purse, or human, it always continues with the bird, and…
The two most recent humans in the book, although pages apart, seem to belong together. And how telling of our world, I suppose. This “pages apart.” But I’m encouraged by the ease of paper turning…the smell of fresh bread, the taste of lavender honey… So as the sun questions, “Will we rise to the moment?” — I can only answer, YES!
She said she wanted to make a gallery wall of birds. As someone who’s been building nests since I could waddle to my mother’s bedside, I completely understand.
I called it my bean, my favorite blanket. I don’t know if I misunderstood the word, or simply couldn’t say it, but I knew in order to exist I had to have it. My bean. Because to exist was exhausting. Balancing on those chubby and wobbly feet, always trying to keep up with the long legged woman that called herself mom. When chase weary, I needed that bean between heart and face, coddled in the security of a springtime bird forever carrying a stick.
And when the sun went down, I snuck between the nightstand and the overflow of my mother’s bedspread. I rubbed my bean between thumb and forefinger in one hand and the edge of her bedspread in the other. And I was saved.
It’s no surprise to me that my grandmother’s portrait, the first landscape I remember, and the nesting bird, all come from the same palette. All sticks in the nest I continue to build. Beans.
I may not wobble any more, but certainly I fumble along, still blanketed in all of love’s comfort. Love’s gallery. And I am home.
I have almost no photographs of my grandparents, yet thousands of images live in my brain. To picture my grandpa in the living room, is to first hear the creak of overalls against the lounger. Then the crack of the foot rest locked in place by the side lever, making just enough room for me to crawl beneath. The trust had to have been palpable, as I arched between the space that could have cut me in half were he to pull the lever again. He emptied a pinch of tobacco and tamped it into his pipe. I played with the rice filled cushion that rest beneath the ash tray, and waved my hand through the cartoon waft of smoke that danced above me. Mixed with just a hint of sugar from grandma’s kitchen, the scent was warm and welcoming, and I tried to catch it on the tip of my tongue, like the first snowflake of the year.
He never rested long. A farm is impatient like that. He only had to give me the nod to signal his return to the field. I slipped between cushion and metal and he let down the foot rest. I ran off to nature’s imagination and he back to work.
I don’t know the name of his tobacco. I wasn’t yet confined by words. Nor was I caught in the pursuit of photography. It would be a handful of years before I ordered my plastic camera from Bazooka Joe gum wrappers and run over it with my own bicycle in three day’s time.
I mention it because I recently read something by the photographer Sally Mann in her memoir, Hold Still. “It is because of the many pictures I have of my father that he eludes me completely,” she writes. “In my outrageously disloyal memory he does not exist in three dimensions, or with associated smells or timbre of voice. He exists as a series of pictures…. It isn’t death that stole my father from me; it’s the photographs.”
I smile, knowing my images will never be torn, lost, yellowed, or stolen. They hold still, tucked safely in the ever of my heart.
