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2007
Chattanooga Times-Free Press
Columns by Dana Shavin
Confessions of a Juke Joint
Jew Awakening the Nightmare of Losing a Dog
Looking for
Meaning in All the Wrong Places |
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I’ll admit it. I am not a frequent guest of juke joints, rock concerts, religious institutions, or movie theaters. It isn’t that I don’t enjoy music, a good flick, or even the well-catered bar mitzvah now and then. It’s that the alternative–time at home on the red sofa, a dog glued to each hip–is so much more in tune with who I am.
That said, I do get around some. Two weeks ago my husband, who is a photographer, returned from a trip to the Mississippi Delta. After looking at pictures of some of the rawest and most colorful blues clubs this side of the-- well--Mississippi, we started to discuss a photography- meets-essay collaboration. What came next was a surprise even to me: I called the dog sitter, bade goodbye to the red sofa, and we drove to Clarksdale so I could have a look for myself.
We left the house at 8 a.m. and took the scenic route. The landscape went from mountainous to hilly to rolling to flat. At 5:30 p.m., having discussed at length the state of the union, the state of our union, some goals for the upcoming year, how cute our dogs are, and the relative merits of Wendy’s over Arby’s, my husband took a surprise left turn down a wide gravel road. Tiny rocks pelleted off the body of my brand new Jeep. A layer of mud splattered and adhered. About a half-mile in, past two abandoned sharecropper shacks, we came to a grinding stop.
“This is it,” my husband said. “This” was Po Monkey’s, my gateway into the world of small town Mississippi juke joints. It is a sagging plywood shack with a tin roof, with two extra rooms slapped on to the sides and hanging at precarious angles. A single strand of white lights dips down from the sway of the eave. A bare bulb hangs over a door that just barely clings to its hinges, and below that is a rickety flight of steps roughly four inches deep, unnavigable after the first sip of beer, I thought. In my twenties I’d have gleefully lived in the place. Twenty years later it took all I had to walk inside.
For an Atlanta-born Jew, whose cultural traditions excluded things like juke joints, dirty dancing, pork skins, and the blues, it was a rare glimpse into a strange world. Wooden tables dot the tiny club; slashed chairs bleed foam. Benches rock and tilt, following the list of the floor. Toy monkeys of all sizes and materials hang shoulder to shoulder from the low rafters, along with tinsel streamers, beer posters, a disco ball, plastic dolls, and a list of rules governing behavior in the joint (“No Drugs. Act Respectable.”) There are photographs as well: of tractors, women, patrons, children of patrons, the club, and Po’ Monkey himself, 65- years- old and the sole owner and resident of this plywood shack juke joint for forty years. His real name is William Seaberry, and he’s actually a minor celebrity. Annie Lebovitz has been there to document the place, as have Vanity Fair and Esquire. My husband and I follow in a hallowed, if slightly unusual, tradition: people who come less to hear than to see.
“Do you even know anything about the blues?” a friend asked upon our return.
“Very little,” said my husband. We know that the Delta jukes (or “jooks” as they are sometimes called) are where musical giants Muddy Waters, Robert Johnson, Ike Turner, Sam Cooke, and Sonny Boy Williamson got their start in the blues. But, strange as it may sound, music is not why we went. Our goal is not to shed light on the blues–we leave that to historians and musicians. Our desire is simply to share, in pictures and in writing, the sense of place. We are not documenting that which we hold dearest, but bringing untrained eyes to unfamiliar ground. We were white in a black town, visual artists in a musical world. We know that sometimes our best song is sung in a discordant key. There is more. We had a $6 breakfast in the Delta Amusement Café, where the paneling’s on sideways, men drink beer for breakfast, and a standard poodle plays hostess. Lunched on barbeque down the street from the rabbit, coon and crawfish market. Spent the night in a restored sharecropper shack. And picture this: we heard some good music, too. |
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My husband calls it “chasing spring.” It is how we make our living, by following the early greening of the right-hand half of America. This year we started with an art show in Key West at the end of February and we have already begun working our way northward, revisiting the first of spring in other towns with promising art shows: from Key West we went to Tampa, and now it is on to Austin, Houston and Birmingham, then up to Chicago, Kansas City, parts of Michigan, and Wisconsin. It is a pilgrimage that puts us in touch with early spring over and over again, and reminds me that whatever despair winter draws over me, the promise of warmth peels away.
I love spring. I love that New Year’s ushers in Valentine’s Day which opens the door to Mardi Gras which spills into Passover/Easter which leads to Mother’s Day by which time the lettuce in my raised beds is thick and lustrous like a new head of hair and I have already begun mowing the slightly unruly lawn, not often, but enough to feel like a kept promise.
I used to think that by the time I hit forty, spring would have lost its appeal. Spring, I thought, was for giddy, long-legged girls turning cartwheels. Adults were beyond all that. Adults sat slump-backed in Cracker Barrel, stirring weak coffee and ignoring the exploding forsythia outside the window and the daffodils bursting up from earth and sticking their landings. Spring, I believed, was for young people who, paradoxically, had few shackles to throw off, while adults, weighted down by the chains of maturity, bided their time for some mysterious, non-seasonal saving grace.
Not true, I know now.
It’s a funny thing, moving from one spring to the next. My husband likens it to the movie Groundhog Day, where every morning Bill Murray’s character wakes anew to the same old day, an annoyance in the beginning but his opportunity, it turns out, to finally live the day right. This year in Key West we rented scooters in our free time, something we meant to do in years past but never did. We bought oranges and ate them in the car, which I haven’t done since my own family’s ill-conceived trips to the coast when I was little. We feasted on jerk chicken and yucca and deep fried plantains. We slept in a floating room encrusted with barnacles and docked in a pier. And then we came home and put on sweaters and sat by the fire.
After which we got sick. Because the down side to visiting early spring in other places is that you keep returning to your own town’s late winter, where frosts are still common and flu season is in full swing. Upon our return from Key West, a few days before leaving for Tampa, my nighttime sniffling and sneezing woke my husband, who turned his damp, feverish face toward me.
“We’ll have to rent an ambulance to take us to Tampa,” he quipped through chattering teeth.
It could be worse. An email from my sister in Colorado includes a photograph of a birdhouse encased in snow. She’s waiting for spring too, but it’s months in the offing. Our friend Mimi calls from Chicago, where, she reports, “…the newly fallen foot of snow is light and sparkly, like in a snow globe.” Calling snow sparkly does not make me yearn to live with it, just as calling rain soothing doesn’t make me want to stand in it. But she doesn’t seem to mind. “It’s 36 degrees today,” she adds, “which feels like a heat wave compared to a few weeks ago.”
Call me crazy, but 36 degrees still seems cold to me. And while it isn’t exactly hot in our hometown, it is getting noticeably warmer. The horses next door are asleep in the sun and the dogs on my porch are panting. The pear tree is starting to bloom and the arugula is small and still sweet. I can hear birds in the morning, instead of the eerie silence of an overnight freeze.
I’m thinking of cartwheels, even though I am into my forties. |
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At some point during my reading of 78 Reasons Your Book Won’t Be Published and 14 Reasons It Just Might, I realized that I was in trouble. This is a book that details the 78 most common mistakes (meaning there are probably hundreds of other, less common but equally destructive ones) writers can make in their quest for the Holy Grail of publication. In reviewing my progress, I saw that I’d made at least half of them. My heart began a thunderous quickening.
This, I thought, slamming the book shut, is not what I should be reading in bed. I picked up The Glass Castle instead, Jeanette Walls’s memoir about being raised in abject poverty by emotionally damaged parents, and how she went on to achieve enviable success in life and love. Not the least of her achievements being, of course, the publication of a New York Times bestseller.
I slammed that book shut too. Aching for sleep, desperate for reprieve from the stress of taxes, endless requests for donations from deserving charities, and an impending Jewish holiday that required my presence in a skirt, I turned to The Joy of Cooking. Surely I could find a dessert that tasted good even though it was made with matzo. And if not, maybe, just maybe, I could fall asleep trying.
The next day, my husband’s heart began a thunderous quickening. He was staring down the barrel of four art shows in a row, his inventory was low, and the same Jewish holiday that required my presence in a skirt required his as a gentile. Without warning, he leapt from the sofa and ran outside to the porch swing.
“How quaint,” I thought. “He’s taking time to relax.”
From the living room window, I watched him bob lazily back and forth in the swing. Within a few minutes the lazy back and forth had turned into a noisy creak and groan, and when I looked up again the swing was making a furious arc. My husband legs were a pumping blur, and I worried that in his backward quest for altitude his head would hit the porch ceiling. I threw down The Joy of Cooking and ran for the door, but it was too late. The swing, true to the inadequate physics training of the man who designed it, had flipped over backwards. By the time I got outside, my husband was lying on his back, ten feet from where the swing bobbed lazily back and forth, this time upside down. The good news, he said, was that the pain took his mind off his stress.
We went back inside and I picked up my cookbook.
“I’m making a meringue for Passover,” I said. “Only 4 ingredients and not one of them requires sifting. How hard could it be?”
Three hours, 12 wasted egg whites, and a crying jag later, I abandoned the meringue project and called the dogs. Only a walk to the creek could save me now. As we made our way down the freshly mown path, I could feel the stress begin to lift at last. Whatever is happening in my life that knocks me off balance, a walk through my own pasture and a glimpse of the mountains sets me back on my feet.
It was then that I heard the whimpering. As we made our way toward the creek bed, the puppyish sounds of distress got louder. Just as we got to the water’s edge, a little dog emerged, muddy, wide-eyed, and overjoyed. I scooped her up in my arms and buried my face in her neck. For no particular reason I named her Bella, and within fifteen minutes, I’d found the house in the neighborhood where she belonged. She was 7 weeks old, I learned, and had spent the previous stormy night lost and wandering. That night as my husband iced his neck, I tried to sleep, and my heart began its thunderous quickening, it occurred to me that stress is inevitable, relaxation can be elusive, but mistakes, once we’re past them, are often what allow us to laugh. I picked up 78 Reasons again and thought about my grim odds. Then I thought about the puppy and the joyful reunion with her owner. And it soothed me to think that while there might be a hundred obstacles to your own dreams, every now and then you can make someone else’s come true. And THAT is when I fell asleep. |
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It’s amazing what you learn when you get up early. This past Mother’s Day I got up before the sun–the CBS Sunday Morning sun, that is. With my husband out of town and a few minutes to spare before heading to Atlanta to see my mother, I turned on the TV. A certain evangelist was making his case against sin, and before I could hit the mute button, something he said got my attention. He was talking about what God wants from women, the primary thing being motherhood. Only according to this evangelist, motherhood is not a mere suggestion. The childless-by-choice woman is, I learned, “selfish and loveless,” her marriage, “a poisonous stream.”
I called my husband. “I have bad news,” I said. He was somewhere in the central time zone, which meant I reached him shortly before dawn. I could hear the bedclothes rustle as he sat up in a panicked hurry. “Are you OK?” “No,” I said. More rustling sounds. “What is it?!” “Our marriage is a poisonous stream.” “Oh that,” he said. “There’s more. I’m also selfish and loveless because I didn’t have children.” “TV evangelist?” he said. “What if he’s right?” “Too late now,” he said, and I could hear the sheets do a reverse rustle, falling into place over his body as he laid back down.
This is not the first time I’ve failed to measure up religiously. Years before I would swim in the poisonous stream of childlessness, I flopped around in the living- together pond of marriage-lessness. I have been known to covet my neighbors’ okra garden, eat peanut butter and jelly on a late Yom Kippur afternoon when I should have been fasting, and drive on the Sabbath. Once, when I was ten, I ate a hamburger bun at school on Passover.
“It was an accident!” I wailed to my mother that afternoon. “That was no accident!” leveled my brother, who was five years my senior and a moral untouchable, which he would remain for 10 more years before throwing himself overboard into an ocean of cohabitation and Friday night motoring. I was mortified by his accusation, but the darkness of doubt crept in. DID I eat the bun on purpose? Is it possible that this seemingly minor carbohydrate transgression contributed to my overall moral undoing?
I decided to run it by my mother that Mother’s Day afternoon at Goldberg’s Deli, where, when I was a teenager, the menu board read, “Ham is a no-no.” There was a time when, for me, being at Goldberg’s was like being at synagogue, only without the hunger and the sleepiness.
“I found out this morning my marriage is a poisonous stream. I am afraid it may have everything to do with the hamburger bun incident,” I said.
“I don’t remember that,” my mother said, nibbling a poppyseed bagel as her male companion sipped soup from a spoon.
“You don’t remember?” I said, incredulous that what might have been the defining moment of my life was nothing but chaff to the woman who birthed me. “In the 5th grade I ate a bun on Passover and now I am loveless and selfish, and childless by choice. Also, later on, I cohabitated and drove.” (I decided she might as well know the whole truth.)
My mother studied her sliced tomatoes. “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe your moral downturn followed the bacon eating incident when you were six.”
“But Mom! I didn’t know what kosher was then! I was at a friend’s house! It smelled delicious!”
I suppose a sin is a sin, whether you know it at the time you commit it or not. Which seems terribly unfair. Ignorance seems like such a useful scapegoat for those times when you can’t be bothered to tiptoe around moral turpitude like ballet dancer on pointe.
Which reminded me of something I’d been meaning to ask my mother. I glanced at her male companion, with whom she has gleefully cohabitated for nearly ten years without the benefit of marriage.”
“So Mom, what’s YOUR excuse for illicit cohabitation and blatant disregard for convention?” . “Children,” she said. |
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I’m not a big celebrity watcher, but every now and then some trumped up drama catches my attention. In recent weeks, it was the fact that Paris Hilton was sentenced to jail for the amount of time it takes to marinate a steak, and it nearly did her in. I was not sympathetic to her plight. But my lack of sympathy had less to do with Paris’s questionable coping skills than it did with her missed opportunity. I couldn’t help but think about how much I could get done with a couple of uninterrupted weeks in jail.
To begin with, I would read. I would catch up on all the old classics that all the new classics quote so that I could finally understand the references. Once I was through with the classics I might stroll through a few of the Harry Potter books, just to see what all the fuss is about.
When I got tired of reading I would finally write down a few of the stories that have been rolling around inside my head. When I was finished with that, I would learn Pilates, and when stretching and breathing got old, I would sit down on my cot and call every out-of-town friend I’ve been meaning to call for the past two years, plus everyone I need to call but don’t want to, everyone who has called me lately but I haven’t called back, and my mother.
Next, I would hire a CPA, a lawyer, a math tutor, a computer technician, a physician, and a therapist. I would have them each come to my jail cell at staggered interludes, and explain to me, in terms I could finally understand, my investment statements, my Verizon bill, my Tennessee Department of Revenue forms, my homeowners insurance, my new digital camera, my old MP3 player, my last sonogram, and my family.
I would devote several days to researching a new health insurance carrier. I’d study my Capital One contract and finally figure out how many thousands of dollars I needed to charge to earn enough miles to fly round trip from Chattanooga to Dalton. I would organize all of my photo albums by year and subject, and throw out all pictures of me wearing anything approaching pink. I would finally make an appointment with the photo lab to have what’s left of my wedding tape burned to a DVD. I would learn, on an intellectual level, how to make bread. Ditto the perfect risotto, pizza crust, and cobbler. I would go through all of my back issues of Cooking Light and tear out every recipe that looks interesting, and I would put them into a 3-ring notebook organized by Meals, Snacks, Desserts, and This is Pretty But It’ll Never Happen in My Kitchen.
I would rent a video on how to clip your own cocker spaniel and weep copiously because all the dogs on the tape were so cute. Then I would watch it several more times, so that, when I was released, I could do my own grooming. I would skim Karen MacNeil’s wine bible and memorize three words pertaining to wine that I could actually say in a restaurant. I would learn the rudimentaries of typing and sewing just in case the 1950’s decided to make a surprise re-appearance. I would prepay several parking tickets to save time later in the year. I would watch one episode each of Dancing with the Stars, American Idol, and Survivor so that I could converse intelligently about reality.
Then I would make a list. The list would consist of everything I needed to get done that I couldn’t accomplish behind bars. This would include things like going through my closet and ridding it of every black jacket I haven’t worn in ten years, cleaning out the hutch drawers and throwing away everything I don’t recognize (ditto the refrigerator), and removing prehistoric spiders from the corners of windows before they evolve into something too large to transport in a mayonnaise jar. In summary, unlike Paris Hilton, I would use my precious time in lock-up wisely. Then, when they came to unshackle me, I’d clamor for 21 days in rehab so I could get some rest. |
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I have issues with sleep. The problem is that, at some random point in my dream activity, I realize suddenly and with outsized terror that I am dreaming, and I freak out. I whimper, thrash, or yell until I am thrown from sleep like a pirate from a ship. I once had a therapist tell me I had a gift: that this “wakeful dreaming” was a state of mixed consciousness many vied for but few ever attained. That, with practice, I’d be able to steer my ship of dreams anywhere I wanted to go in the vast ocean of my conscious desires. Simply put, if I wanted to fly in my dreams, marry a movie star, or be one, I could make it happen.
I didn’t practice. Instead I continued to whimper, thrash and yell anytime I found myself suspended between conscious and unconscious realms. As such, I remain wholly incapable of charting the course of my dream travels.
Case in point: two weeks ago I dreamed my beloved dog, Annie, was sick. This was not unusual, as I have recurring dreams about animals in peril. In one dream, I have forgotten to feed my horse for years on end; in another, both of my dogs are lost in a strange town. This last one always leads to frantic searching for countless dream hours, wailing all the while.
But the dream about Annie was so utterly real it unnerved me. In the dream I was at the vet’s office, but instead of listening to her heart and lungs, the doctor took pictures of them, then hung them up like disturbing artwork of poor resolution. Instead of the shiny new tags I always leave with in real life, in the dream I left with vials of pills, mountains of instruction, and the encroaching terror that accompanies the realization that I am not in control of my dream craft. I started to whimper.
Before I could get to the thrashing or yelling part, I plunked my pocketbook on the roof of the car, which made no sense because that’s not where I would ever put my pocketbook in real life. I drove away from the vet’s office in that familiar dream-fog where everything you see is covered in haze and moves too slowly. And then I started to wail.
More bizarre things happened: a strange man ran up to me at a red light to tell me my pocketbook had flown off the roof of my car 5 miles earlier. I turned around the wrong way in a bank drive-through and raced 5 miles back to find it, only in the dream, every glinting object on the side of the road looked like the pocketbook: a plastic water bottle, a Coke can, a bright white McDonald’s bag. As I slowed down to inspect each of the things that were and were not my pocketbook, I actually had the thought that the glinting things were figments of my subconscious--metaphorical bright spots I was desperate to find in the wake of Annie’s diagnosis of cancer.
After driving the same stretch of road for what seemed like hours, I gave up looking for the pocketbook and started back home. Then, in the dream, the same strange man flew up behind me, honking and holding my pocketbook out the window of his truck. I stopped and took it from him. The pocketbook, my metaphorical bright spot, was crushed and broken.
What seemed like days later in dream time, my husband came home from somewhere far away. I told him about the vet and his poor resolution photographs, and about the tiny amount of time we had left. We held each other and Annie in disbelief and with the kind of sorrow that can only be sustained in a nightmare. For nine more hazy, agonizingly slow dream days, we did little more than wander the house. I barely ate, and couldn’t paint or read. We slept through rented movies and weekday afternoons, Annie curled between us, against our chests, our bellies, in our arms. My stomach grew a hard, sharp knot. At the end of the dream, we said goodbye to our beloved girl. Now I’m stranded in this airless space between utterly real and utterly unreal, waiting for something to wake me.
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The other day I picked up a book someone had recommended I read. The title of it is A Three Dog Life. I read the blurbs on the back, then turned to a random page inside. The chapter started like this: “Lately, all I think about is dogs.” I put the book back down. It was like the movie Stranger than Fiction where Will Ferrell begins to hear his own life narrated as he’s living it, and suddenly realizes he’s the character in a novel someone else is writing. I left the bookstore quickly. I was afraid that if I had the sudden urge to use the restroom, it might be announced.
It’s true that lately all I think about is dogs. And not only because we put our precious cocker spaniel Annie to sleep last month, though that is the snowball that started this avalanche of canine-themed rumination.
“I feel like we’ve lost our leader,” my husband said on our first full day without her.
But the other reason all I think about is dogs is: other dogs. Because what happened after we lost Annie was that we put the energy left over after crying into searching for another dog to rescue. The as-yet-unknown dog needed it, we needed it, and, we believed, our little dog Shark needed it.
At Petfinder.com, which bills itself, rightly and sadly, as the “temporary home of 258,993 adoptable pets from 11,068 adoption groups,” I found a huge number of cocker spaniels in need of adoption. We called about one that had been abandoned in a Wal-Mart parking lot in El Paso. We’d have to go there to get her, and there was no guarantee she’d still be available when we arrived. I emailed a rescue group in Ohio but they never wrote back. I inquired about “Janine,” a small, healthy cocker at a Georgia rescue group, and waited anxiously to hear about availability.
And then one morning my internet search turned up a cocker at the Chattanooga Humane Society. We went to meet her. A week later we brought home not one new cocker, but two, as “Bella,” we discovered, had been relinquished along with her sister, “Brie,” and we couldn’t see separating them. What we also couldn’t see was that Brie had cancer and both had heartworms. When we brought them home that first night and they stood in the middle of our kitchen coughing sickening, rib-cracking coughs that led to sickening, body-wracking dry-retching—we cried. Oh how we cried.
Sometime in the days that followed, as we tackled first one health problem and then the next, it occurred to me that we had taken in two dogs whose sickness paralleled the magnitude of our grief, as if it were somehow our mission to feel great pain, the nature of which could shape shift. As if it were important, above all, not to go to that deliciously numb place we so desperately wanted to go, where grief was a narrative whose unwelcome voice could be quieted by the leap of a little dog like Janine into our laps. So, yes, lately all I think about is dogs. Brie had her tumor removed and is happy and active. Both started heartworm treatments and hardly ever cough anymore. They are affectionate, beautiful and eager to please. Shark seems to like the new women in his life, and the other day I happened into the living room to see the three of them lined up like dominoes on the sofa, with no room left over for humans. We still grieve Annie, of course, but this simple sighting was a magnificent gift, upon whose receipt I burst, unexpectedly, into laughter. |
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There’s an interesting conversation going on at our house, although if you ask my husband about it, he might choose another adjective. The conversation centers around what some might call job performance but what I call a “philosophical search for relevance.” It’s a topic that comes up with discomforting regularity, always makes me look bad, and is a by-product, as I see it, of the creative lifestyle.
It all began with network TV.
A while back, I watched a special devoted almost entirely to the humanitarian efforts of Bono, the lead singer of the rock group U2. It aired on the heels of a special about musician Jon Bon Jovi, which mentioned none of his humanitarian efforts, but was devoted almost entirely to the boyishly attractive, tunefully appealing allure of the man with the thousand-watt smile.
Bono has won the fan base of almost every human under the age of 60 and has obtained the backing of everyone from left-leaning radicals to right wing ultra-conservatives, who support his call for humanitarian aid to countries in crisis.
Bon Jovi, meanwhile, is in a love fest with his own celebrity-hood, and has obtained the backing of the entire dental community, which supports the vigor with which he brushes his extraordinary teeth.
Which brings me to the conversation between my husband and me. Five years ago, he sold his internet bookstore and became a photographer. I was already a painter making a living doing outdoor art shows. At the same time I had started the process of trying to get a literary agent for a book I’d written.
“This will be fun!” my husband said. “We’ll travel together and do all the same shows!”
What follows is a summary of what happened next: he juried into a show I didn’t jury into, and the very same day, I got a form letter rejection from an agent. Two months later, he juried into a show I didn’t jury into, and the very same day, I got a form letter rejection from an agent. A few months later, he left for the shows I did not jury into, while I stayed home and involved myself in more agent research and submissions. The next day, he called to say he received an award accompanied by an astounding amount of money, and I received a form letter rejection from an agent.
Repeat scenario 10 times per year, multiply by 5 years.
Now, at some point, unrelenting rejection makes you rethink things, and not necessarily with clarity. As time went on, my husband’s success at art shows began to take on a certain Bono-like glow, while my own quest for recognition began to feel like so much tooth-polishing. Periodically, my husband would remind me—gently, kindly, but firmly—that I was still jurying into a number of competitive art venues. And while he was right—my schedule was busy, and my bank account was sound—lurking in the shadows was the brainchild of too much rejection: I came to believe that it wasn’t the shows I was after, or the awards, or the money. It was deeper than that. It was a philosophical quest for relevance. The way I see it, it takes a particular kind of success to make you relevant to the world. Never one to buy into quaint ideas about how love, family, or service to a higher power impart meaning to life, I am forced into a strange and unsacred kind of prayerfulness at the altar of small things: art shows, awards, and attention from literary agents—thus making for a misguided and deeply flawed trip up the rocky path to the Holy Grail of Mattering.
As anyone will tell you, within every skewed system of thought is the kernel of clarity you started with. Living a creative lifestyle was going to transport me beyond the banal reaches of what, for me, had been mind-numbing office work. Which it did! The problem is that office work, unlike painting and writing, never tricked me into thinking it could make me a more worthy, more enlightened human being. There was never the promise, buried amidst paperwork and pantyhose, of self-actualized Bono-ness if I could just rid myself of my baser Bon Jovi-ness. Thanks to network TV, a patient husband, and the wisdom of friends, I am beginning to grasp the real issue here. Attempting to solve for the equation of relevance without factoring in the contents of your soul is injudicious, if not impossible, work. It’s time, I suppose, to change that channel. |
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It’s funny to me how, when you confess a new plan to the universe, the universe sits up and takes notice. It’s as if, prior to the hatching of your new plan, the universe had defaulted to slumber mode, like a giant computer that without your input could not keep itself awake.
Recently I started thinking about moving my art studio. I’ve been in my studio for ten years, and have enjoyed a kind of love-hate relationship with it. I love the giant south-facing windows that guarantee my studio is roasting hot all winter long. I hate that the bathroom is unheated and freezing year round. I hate that for affordable parking I have to walk 5 blocks, cross 4 streets, dodge cars in an ugly parking lot, and traipse past a stinky bar. I love that I can count this as a significant portion of my exercise routine every day.
Overall, I love more than hate my studio, and ever since I learned I may have to vacate, moving has weighed heavily upon me. As if in response to this heaviness, my desk, which hasn’t creaked or swayed in ten years, collapsed last week. Not only collapsed, but couldn’t be rebuilt. I finally discarded the unsupporting legs and set the working surface atop a filing cabinet. It’s stable now, but there’s an unsightly gap in the room where the filing cabinet used to be.
Which is where this really gets interesting. Lying in the unsightly gap that was left by the filing cabinet that went to support the desk that the universe felled because the weight of moving bore down too heavily upon it, was an envelope. Inside was a two-paragraph note from my mother, accompanied by a monstrously long letter from my sister. Both were dated 1985. I have no idea how they came to be in the same envelope, but it hardly matters. What amazed me was the content.
Believe it or not, my mother’s two paragraph note said—and I am quoting here so no one thinks I’m rearranging the truth: “Choosing to move is a brazen step and seems like an enormous project, but maybe it’s because I’m so low in energy.” Reaching back into my dim memories of 1985, I pieced together that the move was from an odd little house in North Augusta, South Carolina to a loft apartment over a horse barn in Appling, Georgia. “Well,” she said, “You seem to be decisive and make things happen.” I couldn’t believe that this little vote of confidence, about my move from one situation to another, had worked its way forward from 1985 to 2007.
A note here about my mother’s compromised energy and the universe waking to your plans: the reason she was tired was because she had been hit by a car two weeks earlier. It seems that she had hatched a plan to cross a street to buy a pack of cigarettes, and was doing just that when the universe, newly awakened and appalled by her plan, roared (presumably to itself), “Cigarettes?! Cigarettes are BAD for you!” and, to keep my mother safe from tobacco, sent a Nissan Sentra careening into her pelvis.
I put down my mother’s note and turned to the letter from my sister, which was actually a 14 page philosophical discourse on the meaning of “better.” It was instigated by her then- recent move to the rural countryside in search of a balance between “nature” and “the demands of real life,” and her realization that in both nature and in real life, dogs are hit by cars, people aren’t always charming, and nothing shields you from the pain of living no matter where you make your home. In the course of her letter she asked, rhetorically and with ever-increasing fervor, “IS better BETTER???” until at last she ended, on page 14, by concluding that this was not a rhetorical question but a purely idiotic one, and that of course better is better. It’s better! What all of this has to do with the universe waking to your plans is that while I may think I am balancing the demands of one aspect of my life with the ardent wishes of the other aspects of my life, I can’t really know if what looks like a better situation truly is better until I’m in it. A new studio may bring with it new life, new ideas, closer parking, and a warm toilet seat, but the pesky universe just might inject the unexpected as well. So it is with this in mind that I travel the path to the new year with caution, wishing for myself–and everyone else out there facing a change-- a happy, healthy, and BETTER New Year. |