Old Mary Rose

And so concludes my lonesome year of study: a tunnel of etchings, observations and readings. Riding the track in a rickety cart made of this little white couch and my confidence, I held pencils to steer me from lists to type written pages of research. Lecture listening translated into cursive script by warm pens held by my sweaty hand of last summer. Assistant teaching in a classroom from September until the end of May and mountains of flat whitened trees, written on and slid into plastic sleeves. I have done it. 

I weep at the end of it all in a somewhat ceremonial celebration of self. I prop an imaginary frame around my face to present my soul as it seeps from my disheveled shell. Goodbye old Mary Rose. With your big bright blue eyes and kind smile, you are a devoted mentor. I am sad to leave you. You are my living Maria Montessori, my conversational textbook, my directress. You hug me and hold my arm with your hand, while your words drag my pushy, brash tears out and onto my cheeks for your wisdom to witness. As the salty mist escapes, the heart plays its pattern, no longer clogged by a fettering fog. I hand you your rope.         

"Thank you for everything. I really loved this program." I manage to say, fanning my flushed face with my long, floppy fingers.  

I have been day-dreaming about this moment for months. When I would have my seemingly unending list of school work complete. And now it is just so. Here I am. ....But I am not free to roam, run and ramble. This is not an end nor a place to stay and rest. This is just the start line, the train station, the dock. After one year of packing, skirt shopping, list drawing, and self-study, I am prepared to embark on my odyssey into education. 

It is from here now that I plan our life.

I lay on your side of the bed while you dance at your cousin's wedding in Florida. Tomorrow night, your family will celebrate 90 years of life for your grandfather. I'll be here in Chicago eating bananas and grapefruit, doing school work and applying for a job far from here. It snowed more today. I walked the dog in timid, apologetic snowflakes as they fell into the lumps of my knit scarf. I didn't curse the clouds, but kept my head down as I trudged over hidden ice, slush and dog shit.      

I found a house online to buy, a little yellow one. Remember that other tiny house I wanted years ago? The one with the slanting floor? Remember how we drove there and stood on squishy grass to look into the windows? I signed up for real-estate email updates. I tell you over the phone. This house was sent to me today because there was a reduction in the price this week, the same week as I'm applying for this job. Coincidence? 

You sit barefoot by the hotel swimming pool listening to my babble.  

Here in our generic urban apartment I have, like a prisoner in a cement cell, taped paper pictures from magazines, poetry pages, postcards, photographs and wedding invitations onto the white walls as if to transplant us while simultaneously cradling us in color and encouragement. It is from here now that I plan our life. I hope you don't mind. I dream of have a compost bin, a vegetable garden and a driveway. I wrote a long letter to my dream job. Then I calculated a mortgage and downpayment. I'm getting ahead of myself. I have the tendency to do that. Hope and I have a lot of fun. You're quiet. I pause. I'm embarrassed, but say how I believe everything happens for a reason. I don't know, I just believe that we're all connected with these divine moments that lead us through our lives. I don't know.   

Stop saying, I don't know. You tell me. Then you define divinity.  You say how you believe all humans are connected, but you wouldn't call it divine because divine is about something separate from humanity. It's specifically not human. 

Oh. Well, I believe that's God. That that's divine.   

On the table beside the bed, your comic books are stacked with colors like candy wrappers. My plastic glasses, flip phone and current issue of The Sun Magazine sit there too like an old man in a gray fuzzy sweater beside a teenage skateboarder on the bus. You won't read my magazines about social injustices, blue collar hardships or obscure catastrophes, just as I won't read about Spiderman scaling city walls to save a stack of pizza. And that's ok. Diversity is good. 

I no longer want to try and convert anyone to my church of fruit and vegetables. This is my culture after all and Lord knows we don't need another crusade. For you, I'll try not to speak of dead baby cows whenever you mention having cheese with your supper. I promise.  

I fear if I get this job far from here, you and your local friends will talk trash about me behind my back, which is treacherous to say because you love me entirely, my ideas included. Still I'm afraid someone might think that I am the ruiner of your life. That I'm selfish and blinded by my greed for green leaved trees, mountain dirt and farm stands. 

Were my friends mad at you when we left Boston? You ask. 

No. I don't think so. 

It's so late and my hands are dry and stiff from typing and folding laundry. I'm hungry but I don't want to eat. Slightly thirsty, but I don't want to drink. All I want is sleep. Is this why I go to bed so late when you aren't here? So that I want sleep even more than I want you beside me? So that I don't stay awake feeling alone and small in our queen size bed? Perhaps. 

Good night my dear. 

Conversation

You tell me you never want to make a lot of money. It changes people. You say. Makes them look at the world differently. I agree but mention the stress of not paying rent on time and the dreamy thought of buying a little house somewhere in the woods. You've got something though. Well, don't worry, I tell you, that's probably what you'll get. I don't think school teachers make very much. And if you're still working in a restaurant, we probably won't be climbing any social ladders. But compared to now, we will be able to go to the farmers market every Saturday and fill the trunk with lettuce, tomatoes, berries and zucchini. We've never been big spenders. Rent, gas for the car and produce, that's where our money goes. And to your pizza slices and bean burritos. It's true, researchers say --like we heard on the radio-- that those with less money are more likely to give to others in need. We are more compassionate, they say. Able to relate and connect with others.  The rich folk might think they've worked very hard to be where they are, to have what they have and that those who have not are lazy.  Well, I just want a little house and a job. Nothing much. School work has kept me from writing the story about cutting off the tip of my finger with a mandolin slicer. Kept me from writing about how it wouldn't stop bleeding and so you looked up what to do. Cayenne Pepper is what you found and so we poured some into a glass bowl and I pressed my wound deep into the soft red grains. The pepper stuck to the sore like sand on wet feet. I stopped bleeding, but oh how I cried and cringed, swearing to keep myself from screaming. You didn't tell me it would hurt like hell. You didn't know and I didn't think to ask. I just wanted the blood to stop and pressure hadn't prevented those bluish red drops from dripping. I didn't want to go to the hospital. In the morning you bought me bandages and yourself chocolate and a lint roller from the pharmacy, while Penny and I waited outside in the wicked wind. Then we walked to the cafe and you bought a $3. cup of black coffee. I don't drink coffee. I consider myself a recovered addict in a world of junkies. At least you don't use very heavily. After the start of this year, I returned to my diet of eating only raw fruit and vegetables. I had slipped into porcelain casserole dishes of roasted squash, baked potatoes and chunky tomato soup. I feel happy again. And happy that I'm an artist. Not embarrassed anymore. I wish everyone was an artist. Not the starving kind. The artist who is also a (fill-in-the-blank) job. Because the arts are emotion and emotion is life and life is what we all have. It is what connects us to one another and to this ailing planet we call home. So yeah, we won't have much money, honey, and that's fine with me.       

The Loom

It is too pretty for plain prose. 

So sweet that smiles below my nose 
curve and spread like an awakened rose.  
Oh how my weak cheeks ache! 
My molecular cells move in the wake 
Of a storm-bound salty lake
pummeling the shores of my boots,
threatening to flood the dirt chutes
of our childhood of unripened fruit
where screamed songs from all of our might,
Whined gripes, slaps and silly fights
For baby doll rights   
Obstructed the room 
---with infantile gloom---
where love thread itself on an ancient loom. 

Now, my sister, our harlequin cloth, 
far thicker than any dirty brown moth,
warms me like spicy vegetable broth.
To look at you, a woman, more now than me
(as you cultivate a child in the bowl of your belly) 
warms this winter where I am far from you and lonely.  

Oh how I love this man.

The country isn't going anywhere, he reminds me. The trees are stuck to their roots. The river too vast to dry up. Your friends too busy living to be leaving. For now anyway. There is no real hurry besides the voice in your head screaming for you to escape the city. He's right. Besides, I don't completely hate it here. If I had more time I'd be beside the lake listening to the wind, but night falls so early now, interrupting afternoon, and the weekends have been so wet with rain. After work, I never want to leave the apartment, collapsing onto the couch, warming the coffee table with my dinner plate. There we talk and watch television and movies on our computer. So typical. So American. But that's who we are. After we eat, our lengthy legs twist into braids, my head on his chest, my lips puckering, pressing the prickly brown beard he's grown and groomed. That long face, those deep set eyes. Oh how I love this man. 

Time's Precious Coliseum

I press the soles of my boots into my bicycle's black plastic pedals. Long legs churning, cheeks burning, I cycle through the city to the wide blue lake where the wind whips clouds into fast flight and grins from strangers greet my eyes for fleeting meetings. Above my willed wheels, my cotton grey skirt flutters with a false frantic jealousy for the wings of distant gulls. My denim jacket holds me tight with its locked brass buttons, while leggings preserve the integrity of my goose pimpled knees. Violet yarn--stitched and braided with buttons--cradles my cranium where a nest of wispy hair and pins surround a floppy bun ready to birth out of its elastic shell. 

Nine miles pass beneath me before I arrive at the Art Institute of Chicago where moss colored lions guard the magnificent Michigan Avenue entrance. I lock my bicycle beside a garden of trees where a woman takes pictures and, in the distance, a waterless fountain of bowls and ladies stands still in statue motion. I climb the cement steps. Down below, beside a streetlight on the sidewalk, a saxophone is blown by a bending body in a coat and cap.

"Is there a birthday discount?" I ask the young lady at the ticket counter. 

"Aw, no. I wish we did! This is a great way to spend your birthday."

I give her my paper money, saying something about how I don't mind paying and that I just thought I'd ask. I take my ticket and museum map and walk through the ropes. I press buds into my ears, layering the chatter of strangers with song. To celebrate my thirty years, I am giving my mind, eyes and heart a little color and culture. A little uninterrupted attention for the eyes that always open, the thoughts that never slow and the heart that tirelessly beats and swells.   

Eventually, after much strolling and staring, I find Monet, Cezanne and Renoir's pieces. Inside perfectly tarnished gold and rustic, wavy wooden frames, I find rich blots of crimson, lined swipes of royal blues and delicate olive vines. These impressionist paintings are like the ripe fruit often found within them: saturated with sweet vibrant life. They make me hunger for ripe plums, tomatoes and the humidity that sweats my clothes, pinks my skin and curls my hair. For fields of flowers and garden parties, lace collared dresses and a bare lake with the reflection of tall trees and sky. For haystacks and cornfields, rock rimmed mountains and curved rivers.  

I drift along the parquet floors for three and half hours, inhaling the ghost of time. In her precious coliseum, time keeps her souvenirs safe for spectators to see. Come one, come all. Witness the proof of my travels. She says. But don't stretch past the ropes, you must keep your distance, do not touch and please, no flash photography. 

"What is happening right now?"

Scott holds his bronze bicycle as he exits our building's back door to the sidewalk. Penny tries to get outside at the same time as him, but when he lowers his bicycle, the back tire bumps her on the head, frightening her to backpedal toward me where I stand on the last blue stair. In my left hand, I hold the stretched orange handle of a garbage bag, sunken with sodden food scraps. In my right hand, I hold the leash. Outside on the sidewalk, I almost comment on how warm it still is out when I notice strange activity happening where we are about to walk. A dark car has just pulled into our alley, engine running, doors opening. Two men get out. The driver draws something, a gun. No, not a gun. I'm just imagining that because I have the tendency to worry the worst. No, wait, it is a gun. It's a gun! A metal murdering machine is pointed at a person in our alley. The alley I walk past daily. "What is happening right now?" I ask Scott who is turning right and telling me to follow. "But I can't--I have the trash." As if whoever is in the alley will be offended if they see I am avoiding them. I look back as we walk. The man with the gun is now patting down the guy he stopped. They say something to him and let him walk away. "What is happening right now?" I ask again, my heart stretching from beneath my ribs like a caged bird in a factory farm, overgrown and crippled from fear. We pause at the end of our block. The man who was just stopped by the undercover police officers is now walking toward us. His headphones are back on his ears. I fear him, though I know that isn't fair. He must be more frightened than me. Penny is growling and trying to get at him. I fumble. The dog leash and trash bag in hands, pulling me down, tangling my legs. We are walking toward the alley now. The officers are gone. We walk to our dumpster. Penny is on the prowl, pulling me. We stand together in our neighborhood recently rendered rancid, smelly from the stench of our exhausted adrenal glands. 

Scott leaves on his bicycle once he sees I'm inside safe behind the bricks and door bolts of our building.