I am genetically predisposed to be one of the idle rich.

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Yes, that’s me as rendered by AI. I’m still against AI, and I didn’t ask for this picture, but I can’t resist.

Until exactly five years ago this month, I had always been able to say that every problem plaguing me could be quickly solved with a large influx of cold, hard cash.  And I said that with reverence as I knew how fortunate that made me.  My health was good, I loved where I lived, my relationships and friendships were rewarding, and I loved where I worked, even if the nuts and bolts of what I did weren’t rewarding. When I let my Inner Writer free, life really got good.

Except for money.  I am not good with money.  I have never been good with money.  And I’ve never had enough money for this weakness to be that big of a factor. 

But after the almost five-year bout of COVID and Long COVID and back problems, I have a new appreciation for health.  For a while, the situation seemed dire, and I mourned everything I wasn’t going to be able to do if physically disabled by these problems.  The good stuff would still be there – my relationships, my writing. But I might lose the financial security of my job, and I would be plunged into abject poverty without the means to ease it.

Oh, how I mourned the life I had envisioned for these closing years. 

Well.  The Long COVID seems to be gone (hallelujah!), and we are handling the back problems. I am physically and mentally much better and still able to work. Hope ruled my psyche once again. But I am still hamstrung by financial matters.

I’ve read countless accounts and statistics about big lottery winners. It’s almost a universal experience that they end up broke and miserable.  I always read this with interest, trying to glean the why.  It always boiled down to greed combined with philanthropy.  They invested in risky projects, spent uncontrollably, and bailed friends and family out of their financial hells. 

I developed a plan.  Never mind that you have to actually buy a lottery ticket to win the lottery; I had a plan in place.  I had chosen the investment advisor I would use.  I had chosen the person I would hire to handle mundane matters like paying the bills, hiring the housecleaning staff, and dealing with pleas for money.

Me?  I was going to live a blissful life of the arts and travel.  I was going to see it all.  They say if you go to Paris, you need a month to see all the Louvre has to offer. Rome requires even more time.

My life of poverty has left me always short of time.  A lottery win’s gift of time would be the greatest blessing. Time to write, time to travel, time to garden, time to cook, and time to nurture my loved ones. 

Oh, I have it all planned. All of it. 

At a very young age, I first quipped: I was genetically predisposed to be one of the idle rich. I’ve repeated that line like a mantra my whole life in tandem with more time, more time, more time.

I’m in the last twenty years of my life.  To be given every minute to do as I choose would be a luxury I can barely even process.  And to spend that time with family and friends with lots of travel, art, and fine food thrown in would be so so so… something. I’m at a loss for superlatives. 

So, the trick now is to figure out how to do most of this in tandem with the daily problems and responsibilities of my normal life.  I’m working on it.

Hillbilly Diva: The Reincarnation of Florence Foster Jenkins

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I have longed for decades to have the ability to sing on key.  I don’t mean an excess of talent or star power.  I don’t want to be Taylor Swift or Barbra Streisand.  I just want to be able to join in on sing-alongs.  I’d like to throw in some song to my spoken-word stuff. 

I would like to not be embarrassed by my voice.

My 7th-grade chorus teacher pulled me aside on the last day of school to tell me not to sign up for 8th-grade chorus.  I knew I didn’t have a great voice, but I hadn’t realized until then that I was hopeless. Did you see Meryl Streep in the movie Florence Foster Jenkins?

That would be me. 

Really. I once sang Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star to my son when he was a toddler.  He put his tiny hand over my lips and said, “Mama, no.”

I’ve always said you can tell life is not a performance because no one breaks into song at the grocery store.  Well.  If I could carry a tune, I would dance and sing my way through the Kroger and everywhere else.  Every once in a great while, I will break into Onward Christian Soldiers at the office on a particularly frenzied day, but I’ve worked there for 20 years.  They’ve seen me vomit into my wastebasket.  There, I have no shame, though perhaps I should. 

My last best friend, the one who suddenly died exactly six months after my dad, attended Ohio University on a voice scholarship.  She very seldom sang – she said she had ruined her voice with cigarettes and nonpractice. I wanted to throttle her. 

Susan maintained that everyone could be taught to sing on key.  And I told her, “No, you don’t understand.”  But she insisted. 

So, we sat on the steps of her wonderful porch one beautiful day – I think it was about this time of year – and Susan tried.  She’d sing a note and tell me to listen and then match it.

I laughed. “Susan, if I could do that, we wouldn’t be here.”

But she insisted.

After about 20 minutes, she shook her head and lit a cigarette.  I could tell she was trying to find the right words.  Finally, she said, “The problem is you hear everything.”

I said, “Well, yeah.  What is your point?”

She said, “You can’t seem to separate the notes.  You use them all at once with a few extras thrown in.  I’ve never seen this before.”

I just laughed. I felt vindicated. But I also felt like a freak of nature.  

But I do hear everything. I am not a visual learner.  I am auditory.  Give me a good speech or lecture.  Forget the PowerPoint.  I can listen to you, or I can read the PowerPoint slides, but I cannot do both at the same time.

I do not use music as background noise. I may not be able to carry a tune, but I have a good ear, and that just adds insult to injury. When I listen to music, I sit and I listen fully lost in the sound.  I do not listen to music in the car unless it’s a long road trip with little traffic; otherwise, I would be a menace on the road.  Well, even more so than I am. 

[An aside, I do not confuse the sounds I dance to with the music I listen to.]

I would also like to play an instrument or two or three.  But that desire pales in comparison to the singing thing. 

Yes. I would be a one-woman show everywhere I went if only I could carry a tune. 

What happened next?

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Marina continued although a little distracted.  The show must go on reverberated in her head.  She forced herself to pay attention to the person sitting across from her.. She had to work very hard to stay in the present as her heart was visiting the past and her soul was questioning the future. When she was done, even more spent than usual, she went to her hotel room. Normally after a performance, she would shower and anoint herself in almond oil. Massaging each foot, each limb, each hand. She would end by caressing her face and then wiping her hands on her long wet hair. Her people had oiled their hair for centuries. 

But after this one, after she sluiced off the intimacy of strangers, she sat on the edge of the bed and stared at herself in the mirror – trying to read her own eyes, trying to make sense of 30 years collapsing in one minute. 

Did she want to try and find him.  Would he contact her?  She stared at herself. 

Did she want to see him? 

Once again, he paralyzed her.  When with him, she was a slave to the oxytocin and dopamine coursing through her body, addicted to his touch on her skin, helpless in his examination of her eyes.  She had been in danger of losing herself –of being consumed by a passion so intense it would incinerate her will.

The phone on the nightstand rang.  It took her a moment to place the sound.  She answered with a soft “Hello.”

“Ms. Abramovic, there is a gentleman here to see you.”

“Is he wearing a shirt with a red collar?  With kind eyes?”

“Well, I don’t know about that last part, but yes. That is what he is wearing.”

Please tell him I can meet him in the bar in about 20 minutes.

Marina continued to sit staring at her whole self in the mirror. Sitting here naked she did not feel as exposed as she did when looking into strangers’ eyes.  Far more exposed when she looked into his eyes.   

She stood and pulled on her old, very faded and threadbare Levis.  She wore these back when they were together.  The denim was an old friend grounding her to her past but allowing her to venture into her future. 

She rummaged around in her suitcase looking for something besides a t-shirt but she wasn’t coming up with anything she felt appropriate to the occasion or the place. Finally, she decided on a white silk camisole over which she threw on the cardigan she’d bought in Nepal shortly after they had parted. 

With no makeup, no perfume, wet hair and barefoot, she quietly closed her hotel room and padded down the corridor to the elevator. 

She didn’t know what she would say. 

She didn’t know what she wanted to say. 

Thirty years had fallen away in a minute.

What would time do this evening?

*****

NOTE: I was shown this video as a writing prompt and told to write what happened next.

Fractured Ekphrastic: The Conversation

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Alice R. Henderson is believed to have painted the piece attributed to Matisse titled The Conversation.  The image is that of a dark-haired woman in a black robe sitting in a chair.  Standing opposite her is a red-headed man.  He is wearing pajamas.  The expressions on their faces are familiar but hard to put to words, although it is clear the woman is not happy.

Persephone wants to leave early, and Hades won’t let her. For six months of every year, for centuries now, she has gone to the underworld and hidden herself away.  The earth transitions to winter during her confinement, and the people long for a return to warmth and growth. But Persephone is forced to stay in her chambers and slumber. She is weary of sleep.  Weary of stillness.  Weary of the silence.  

The look Alice R. Henderson painted on their faces is one of yearning and discontent.  The people who line up to view this painting, all of them, instantly vibrate.  They know that look.  They know the feeling is uncomfortable, but they don’t have the words.  They can’t have The Conversation.

They want to.  Oh, how they want to.   Everyone views the painting and regards it as a Zen koan.  They don’t know what that look is, but when they leave, they are transformed.  They make changes.  They leave jobs, they leave marriages, they leave countries.  When asked to explain, they say nothing, or they say, “I don’t have the words” or they say “Go see the painting.” 

They know the feeling is uncomfortable, but they don’t have the words. They know the feeling provokes change.  They have had the conversation and expressed their discontent and expressed what it is they yearned to experience. The conversation between their heart and their brain was silent, but the silence reverberated. It is revealed in the lives they go on to live.

Persephone wants to wake.  She wants to return to warmth and growth.

Note: Alice R. Henderson was Matisse’s scullery maid. 
He noticed her artistic promise when he saw her drawing rather than eating during her meal break.
It has been alleged that Matisse’s departure from the open, spontaneous brushwork of his Fauve period in favor of a flatter, more decorative style coincides with Henderson’s employment at the Matisse residence.
No one is sure how much of what is attributed to Matisse is actually Henderson’s work.

*****

[An aside: As are many of my stories, essays, and poems, this one began as my response to a writing prompt.

For this one, we were given an image of an older woman holding a candle (I think-we were only given a moment or so to view the painting.]

The image was accompanied by this text: What story did she recreate as art?

There is no Alice R. Henderson. Matisse did indeed paint The Conversation, and it is a self-portrait of the artist and his wife. Matisse is an interesting guy, but so too was his wife. It has been postulated that many of Matisse’s shenanigans were orchestrated to draw attention away from his wife while she was working with the French Underground during the Nazi occupation of France.

This enigmatic piece has haunted me for years.]