writing

She Had Good Reason

/ wvfurandroot / Leave a comment

Were I to die and were I to be notorious enough to have a newspaper article that attempted to sum up my life, I would want the headline to read: She had good reason.

I quickly lose patience with people who think I don’t make decisions with care.  Or don’t research things. Or any manner of failings on my part to explain the utter weirdness and chaos of my life.  I do not invite chaos.  It crashes the party and is obnoxious until the cops or the ambulance comes, whichever is first.  I might be slow to call 9-1-1, but I didn’t invite or provoke the insanity of my life’s course.

I overthink everything and decisions are hard for me.  I make a Ben Franklin list with the pros and cons of any one situation.  If I notice myself trying to find reasons to pad one column or another, I know that either my intuition is kicking in or my inner child.  I then have to tease out which one.  My intuition I trust.  My inner child is a spoiled brat, and I try not to indulge her too much although many would say the confetti has already been tossed.

So, rest assured if I have made a decision, it was done with care and research.  For the most part, I don’t care if you agree or disagree with it unless you can demonstrate that you are in possession of knowledge that I am not.  But don’t assume I’m operating on whims.  It might look that way, but no.  No. no and no.

My best friend in high school’s mother was named Peggy.  Peggy loved me and I her.  It was her fondest hope that her son and I would marry but alas my best friend was gay.  After I moved back here after a seven-year sojourn in the Midwest, I was having problems with the school system. My friend, his mother, and I were sitting around talking when I mentioned I was resisting the urge to blow up the board of education.  Peggy started to ask me something that began with “Have you” and then she stopped.  Looked at me and said, “I forgot.  You only look incompetent.” 

I howled with laughter.  And I still do.  And I must still look incompetent given the number of people who question my choices. 

Maybe that makes for a better headline.  She only looked incompetent.  Yes.  I think so. Yes.  That’s it. Words

Text Box: If your life were summed up in a newspaper headline, what would that headline be or what would you want it to be?Office items on a tableShe Had Good Reason

Were I to die and were I to be notorious enough to have a newspaper article that attempted to sum up my life, I would want the headline to read: She had good reason.

I quickly lose patience with people who think I don’t make decisions with care.  Or don’t research things. Or any manner of failings on my part to explain the utter weirdness and chaos of my life.  I do not invite chaos.  It crashes the party and is obnoxious until the cops or the ambulance comes, whichever is first.  I might be slow to call 9-1-1, but I didn’t invite or provoke the insanity of my life’s course.

I overthink everything and decisions are hard for me.  I make a Ben Franklin list with the pros and cons of any one situation.  If I notice myself trying to find reasons to pad one column or another, I know that either my intuition is kicking in or my inner child.  I then have to tease out which one.  My intuition I trust.  My inner child is a spoiled brat, and I try not to indulge her too much although many would say the confetti has already been tossed.

So, rest assured if I have made a decision, it was done with care and research.  For the most part, I don’t care if you agree or disagree with it unless you can demonstrate that you are in possession of knowledge that I am not.  But don’t assume I’m operating on whims.  It might look that way, but no.  No. no and no.

My best friend in high school’s mother was named Peggy.  Peggy loved me and I her.  It was her fondest hope that her son and I would marry but alas my best friend was gay.  After I moved back here after a seven-year sojourn in the Midwest, I was having problems with the school system. My friend, his mother, and I were sitting around talking when I mentioned I was resisting the urge to blow up the board of education.  Peggy started to ask me something that began with “Have you” and then she stopped.  Looked at me and said, “I forgot.  You only look incompetent.” 

I howled with laughter.  And I still do.  And I must still look incompetent given the number of people who question my choices. 

Maybe that makes for a better headline.  She only looked incompetent.  Yes.  I think so. Yes.  That’s it. 

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

/ wvfurandroot / 2 Comments
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

/ wvfurandroot / 1 Comment

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. 

Fractured Ekphrastic: The Conversation

/ wvfurandroot / Leave a comment

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.]