Write Around the Block

The year is 2012. I can remember when, in my 20’s, I used a calculator to figure how old I would be when the millennium ended and a new one began. The answer: 46. Both the new millennium and that age bracket seemed like science fiction to me then. Now I view them with nostalgia.

I have done all right at aging. My hair remains healthy—so healthy I need to have it thinned every six months—and has only just begun to grey. Through flurries of exercise (walking, yoga, and swimming, if I’m really serious), I’ve maintained what my primary physician deems a healthy body weight, though I’d like to be 15-20 pounds lighter. On behalf of honesty, I admit I took a peek at what another doctor, an orthopedic specialist treating a blown-out shoulder, wrote about me in his file: “Patient is a well-nourished, white female…” This read like a euphemistic personals ad, and tainted my attitude toward the otherwise gifted physician who cured the shoulder without surgery. I treat my healed shoulder with deference because I don’t want to go to his office anytime soon and revisit that file.

I’m vain, I can’t help it, and vanity keeps me from aging gracefully. As a young writer, I took an extension course from an LA Times journalist who, I thought, would teach the craft of human interest stories, but who rather used the class as a venue to perform, with guitar, her “Songs of Age and Rage.” Imagine the Lili Taylor of Say Anything only in her late 60’s, hair chopped off in a strangely-cowlicked pixie, shouting tuneless vitriol at age instead of her ex-boyfriend Joe. I thought the Times writer needed to get over herself. The presumption I’d care about her woes over the wreckage of time rankled me, and I quit the weekend seminar at lunch on Saturday without asking for my money back.

I invoke her memory whenever I look at my hands and see liver spots too numerous to bother counting, and when I’m soaping up in the shower and my hand passes over a raised, rough patch of skin the dermatologist calls a “barnacle.” Barnacle? What am I, an atoll? A humpback whale? I ask the doc to remove said barnacles, and he replies, “Why? They just come back again.” I hear furious guitar strumming when I ready myself for work and see jowls as I apply makeup, and am forced to gingerly zip my pants because of the dreaded belly fat. How did this happen to me? I never had a perfect body even at its optimal weight, but always a flat stomach. I’ve even given up a decades-long addiction to diet soda yet still sport my own personal adipose pouch, navel included, no extra charge.

I know I am supposed to love my aging body, that each wrinkle and scar and bulge and imperfection signifies a life fully lived. I know women of a certain, um, level of experience should be above taking inventory of superficial human flaws, their own and those belonging to others. I know these wise and worldly things, but vanity prevents me from accepting them.

And every time I think of that old raging broad with the bad haircut, I get my money’s worth of empathy.

“Get out of your own way,” my sister says and my collage teacher, Fran says repeatedly “Keep your hands moving and shut down your over-thinking brain for a while. Then step back and look at what you have. Then reenter.”

“We need to get out of our own ways and do something else.  Skip the cover,” my sister Pam says.  For Chanukah she bought us each an “art journal” and we pledged to work on collaging our covers, but then both of us, trying too hard to make too much of a statement, froze up. “Let’s just do a random page.”

Somewhere I read “Cerebration is the enemy of art” but before I spend the next hour berating myself for not remembering where I read that, or scrambling to see if I can find the citation, I’m going to head back to my mess of a studio table where a new stack of cheap chalk pastels in delicious shades of green, blues and umber wait for me to start smearing and blending and exploring the way I did in kindergarten. I begin 2012 with a promise to myself–more gift than “resolution” –to remember to play my way into art.

When we were in grade school, earlier even, Pam and I liked to go in our shared room and “make stuff.” We played with clay, drew pictures, cut out paper dolls  from catalogs. In the summer we made sand crab circuses, capturing sand crabs and putting them in buckets of sand and watching the patterns they made as they burrowed. Our parents’ friend, “Aunt” Charlotte Stoddard taught us to make puppets from socks. Pam got good at sewing for a while, we both learned to knit scarves and didn’t worry over the big fat holes we left when we made mistakes. I liked to tell stories with and to the dolls and stuffed animals. Eventually, I started to write these down and even send them out. Eventually, Pam started to paint with real oils on canvas and to show her work.

I love writing– poems, stories, even snippets of memoir.  But some days I go to enter the world of words with a pen and notebook in hand, or sitting at a computer, and the words stutter; the door in feels heavy or even locked.  Now that I am a professional writer, some days I burden the “writer” with a heavy dose of expectation of “professional.” 

I was nearing 60, about to be adding “Gramma” to my list of titles and had, a while since, buried my parents when I found myself looking for a window— another way into the room where my poet/writer brain would be warm and ready–and discovered a not-too-threatening collage class at my local community art school.   I’ve spent many glorious Monday evenings since then surfacing papers, ripping, assembling, playing with glue and colored pencils, chalk and crayon.

There are amazing metaphors which inform the work of a poet in the making of a collage. Collage artists combine images, compose a whole of fragments, attend to the rhythm, balance, and hope for some sense of focus and some sense of surprise to emerge.  Each week I listen as Fran reminds me–  “Put it down and see how you like it. You can always rip it off or cover it over with another piece.”  I put something down.  I step back.  I watch a composition emerge.

Last summer, when we held our annual “Around the Block in Chautauqua County” week of writing workshops, we also cross-trained our creativity when we joined together drumming, moving our physical energy, and, with Kathleen Tenpas, painting gorgeous fabric swaths, printed with leaves and flowers and stems that left their shadows on the bright hued cloths.  

This has been a busy autumn around here, a winter so full of teaching, visiting and traveling.  For weeks my words felt stuck stuck stuck.  Over the winter break, I pulled out my many very amateur collage “experiments” and began to chop and rearrange pieces, glue over, pull out, add a word here and there.   I found an art store near home and took myself on “artist dates” as Julia Cameron prescribed in The Artist’s Way, coming home with a colored pencil here, a few sticks of chalk there–nothing expensive or ambitious.  Kindergarten materials.  

After a while of playing with these, images begin to form in my mind– in my ear– as words. A poem here.  A beginning there. Afterall, I am a writer and ultimately, writing is the door I enter to  understand and describe my world.  But bless those other art-filled windows; they let in air, and light.

Jekyll Island is part small town and part wildlife reserve.  People here know each other, if not by name than at least by sight.  Even visitors to this Georgia State Park seem more familiar than not.  Here the deer and raccoon are so accustomed to sharing their island, they stroll through yards and flower beds unperturbed.  Alligators bask on the golf courses.  The most skittish creatures are likely the feral cats, which are fed and tended to by the locals.

Of course there are exceptions.

When I ask the waitress at the Sand Bar about her holidays, she says they were good.  ”I had raccoon for the first time,” she adds.

“Raccoon?”

“My friend made it.”  She pauses with her tray on her hip and nods.  ”It wasn’t bad, but I couldn’t get past the fact it was raccoon.”

“Raccoon?”

“She boils it first and then bakes it in a sauce.”

“Like spaghetti sauce?”

“Brown sauce.  It was real tender, but I kept thinking of furry animals and couldn’t eat more than a bite.”  She moves away to retrieve our order from the kitchen.