WYSIWYG

I'm never expecting the crone I see in the selfie mode of my phone camera.  The sagging flesh, the wrinkles, the pouches, the stray eyebrow hairs, the blotches, the frizzy wild hair.  The mirror in my deliberately under-lit bathroom usually compromises while I gaze.  Make me 32.  No, but I'll make you 42, how's that.  

I don't work that hard, mind you.  I'm not applying makeup.

I did the thing where you try different angles with the phone to see if I could see something other than the dreaded crone.

I found a much younger version of myself by putting the camera over my head and aiming down, thereby reducing the visibility of my under-eye pouches while including a view that encompassed my tank top and jeans stretched out in an alluring, 32-year-old manner. 

Then I decided to linger on the ugliest views of my face too, while changing filters.  I spent maybe ten minutes doing this, ending with the crone, in chrome.  

I am what I am.  

Childlike, girlish, nubile, womanly, matronly, wizened, wise.  

Hideous, ugly, unremarkable, cute, beautiful.  



 

Free

Today I'm going to skip through puddles like way back when. 

With this hip, I won't straddle-climb door jambs barefooted to the top. But I'll remember when I was all skinny legs and buck teeth 
making that climb.  
I was every bit that girl, until I wasn't.

Today I'm going to sing about simple gifts, 
puff the magic dragon and the cat came back.  
Her songs.
  
I'll hold this aching close, as ever, but not in the song I sing.
Anyway not today.

I might even make a wish about the woman I'll be, long from now.
After the braces come off.

Now that woman can sing.



 









 

Angels

Angels come in threes for me, and by 11 am today I've encountered two.  They both said the same thing: do what you love, love what you do.  

The first was a puzzle synchronicity, the kind I'm most used to, the confirmation that working at puzzles is my prayer, my calling. 

The echo came in the form of a biracial fellow carrying a hedge-trimmer.  He's the real-life embodiment of a guy I often encounter in  dreams.  No, really.

I'm in my own little world, probably muttering to myself, when our paths intersect.  He says endearingly "Aw, you didn't bring me a coffee?"  I'm on my way back to work from the corner coffee shop, see, with a cup in my hand.  

He's little, like me.  In his too-large company cap and his red uniform shirt and his official capacity, he's kind of hard to see at first, like the guy in dreams, peripheral, then not.

"How are you today?" he smiles, and I say fine, and ask him back, in kind.

"Just maintaining sanity" he smiles, authentically. 

"And the hedges" I reply, uncharacteristically ready with my riposte.  I don't normally succeed this way, but there is a palpable magic happening.

"Those are both good things to maintain,"  I add, emboldened by my success.  Because he laughs for real, agreeing.  We're walking and talking, same direction.

"It's easy when you do what you love all day," he responds, and this stops me in my tracks.  "I really love what I do, I get to do it all day, and everything falls into place, life is good."  He's not walking now, he's just looking into my eyes, and he's being purposeful, really communicating.  He even adds a head tilt, and it's that head-tilt that gets me every time... although we've never met.  

(Right.)

Groping in my bag for my key fob, I'm thinking what the fuck is happening right now? 

In a good way.  It's just that, like old Scrooge, I'm not quite sure I want to know what the third angel will be like.  If I'm lucky, he/she will be as gentle a messenger.
 

 

Solstice

After a summer morning rainstorm subsides, I will want to take my time, walk my piece of the city toward where I work, thinking of the first morning, as in the hymn, where also blackbird has spoken (like the first bird).  These birds, in this millionth morning, are so full of themselves, full-throated, diving and arguing or singing those sublime songs god placed in them.

I can't remember whose poster it was, back in my childhood, but someone had that insipid 1970s sentiment prominently displayed, the one about letting go of that bird you love, that innately free bird, who might come back to you if yours or, alternatively, stay gone if not yours (the obvious, painful, necessary default).  As a child I liked the idea of a bird I let go coming back to me.  I felt that lovable.

That mirror tho

I'm reconsidering Suzanne's holding of the mirror, and my interpretation of that line since childhood.  The song says that Suzanne shows the enchanted poet where to look among the garbage and the flowers.  I now wonder if she holds the mirror toward him and/or where she's indicated he should look, so that the protagonist sees himself among the heroes in the seaweed and the children in the morning who are leaning out for love forever.  She's like "look at yourself, how beautiful you are, how heroic, this is how I see you."  Anything's possible.

"Everlong" has been in my head ever since I heard the unplugged version the other day.  Funny how a rock song can become so tender when done as a vulnerable ballad.  These lyrics just want to be savored that way: 

Hello, I've waited here for you

Everlong

And I wonder when I sing along with you

If everything could ever feel this real forever
If anything could ever be this good again
 

The only thing I'll ever ask of you
You've got to promise not to stop when I say when

Breathe out, so I can breathe you in


I mean, when you sing "Everlong" gently with just an acoustic guitar and let the language speak in a way that's not drowned out by crashing cymbals and driving rhythms, it becomes everso what it wants to be.  In my opinion.

 

Cycles

Two cycles started turning in my life when I was 13 years old.  

First, I became fertile.  How grown-up I felt, how scared.  I still occasionally played with my Barbie dolls, but only half-heartedly.  I started wearing block-heel sandals with short shorts and floppy hats, plucking my eyebrows, and I bought my first pair of nylons. Boys ignored me but grown men were looking twice.

Second, I became daydreamily fixated on my middle school math teacher.   This second cycle has a wider arc, one that has continued throughout my fertile life.  Three years after the math teacher, I developed an unwieldy desire to be loved by my photography teacher, and filled two diaries with admiration of him.  I had the normal, ephemeral crushes on classmates and random movie stars at that age, fancies that I'd describe as romantic, even at times dramatic, but ... the teacher thing had a dense gravity that tended to become (downright) cathectic.  In the presence of the beloved teacher, I was mute and muted, could only ask for guidance, hope to be seen, giggle slightly and bat my eyelashes.  I never did master fractions or f-stops.

At some point (college) I discovered monogamy, service and work, along with the difficult, negotiated, competitive, but also productive and deep relationships that have formed my adult life. 

So... back to the first cycle.  I once hated that predictable bloody recurrence; now I miss it, though it's but half a year gone.  It brought with it vivid dreams, sullen rages, torrid passions and sometimes even murderous intent.  Good poetry fuel.  Now I see my body solidifying, my hair whitening, my disposition mellowing.  Rage has subsided into dull, manageable heartache.  Joy is in the little things, though I still (secretly) want all the big things I've always wanted.        

Mashup

My Indie 500 puzzle was a mashup.  Thematically, it was a musical mashup.  The construction process itself was an evolving mashup.  I'd have never arrived at the final concept without working through a sequence of alternative ideas, trying grids that wouldn't work with those other ideas, and then, weeks into this process, coming to an aha moment about what the puzzle was trying to be.  So it was many weeks in the making, if you count all the false starts and unyielding territories explored. 

At the same time, it wasn't everything it wanted to be in the end, just close enough to call done, like most organic creations involving real labor.  Eventually you must deliver because of the "deadline," just as every infant must be birthed or not.  There is no keeping your living, this-close-to-breathing baby in the birth canal when you've gotten that far, though you may find yourself delivering a beautiful monster or an ugly angel.

Life has a deadline.  Comes a time when you've got to publish (who and what you are) and/or perish.  This is more obvious to me at age 52 than it was at 25. 

As synchronicity would have it, I was tirelessly pacing on the elliptical machine Saturday, feeling mashed up, when Renee Marie's sublime "Suzanne/Bolero" mashup started playing on my iPod.

There was this part:

... and just when you mean to tell her

that you have no love to give her

she puts you on her wavelength

and lets the river answer

that you've always been her lover...

I'd like to have that power in selective cases, but I don't like or want to be Suzanne.  I mean, as Leonard Cohen would have it, there are heroes in the seaweed and children in the morning leaning out for love, and this seductive woman can't put down her mirror?  That's one man-made archetype there, the vain enchantress with no maternal instinct.  A woman would not write this song, though the poetry is excellent.

I learned the song when I was ten and still know it by heart.