Paris beauty salon (Photo credit: adrian, acediscovery)
In the salon, Wendy, who sees me coming in and senses my mood, whipped out a particularly inviting greeting.
” What’s happening laaaaady?”
” Turning the page on another year. OMG- how did I get to be this age?” Screening my head for imperfections , she stroked my shoulder.
” You don’t need hi-lights, and you look terrific.
” That’s not enough, I haven’t planned well.
” You’re an artist, you create..
” You sure I don’t need hi-lights
” No, you look fab-u-lous.”
Two women in the salon, the conversation cuts through all of our individuality, and ends up in the center, of our tribal understanding, our sensitivities, and insecurities.
Post Office. St. Louis, Missouri, by Boehl & Koenig (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
About the post office, it’s a relic, a dying old fortress of communication, where we all stood in line at one time to send our letters, the ones that took us a few more minutes than we can afford today. I wrote a lot of letters, long five page letters written on delicate stationary, and art cards I bought in museums and boutiques.
The Post Office loses 96 million dollars a day according to a reporter on television. We have stopped buying stamps, because we don’t mail letters. We don’t even need to send packages, because we buy it online and let them ship it directly. The cards are printed by the shipper, and impersonally attached to the gift. The type is formal, and even though you know that person, had his mind on you for the minute they typed out that note, well, it’s not the same really. Progress is raping us of the personal touch. People like Zuckerberg are reinventing the way we share our thoughts, our photos, our everything.
Letters, of people that acquired prominence in the world of literature, art, and science were adapted into books. I wonder if their emails will be considered for a book.
The postman still comes to the house, he’s usually talking on his cell phone, or listening to his iPod, when he drops the mail off. There is no need to rush to see what he’s brought, it’s always the same, a stack of bills, a few discount fliers, and a real estate brokerage announcement that they can sell our house in thirty days. The postman has changed too. They used to say hello, and have a nice day. I suppose if I wanted to have a conversation with the Postman I could go to their Facebook page.
I’m going to check, and see if they have a Facebook page…. The first three Facebook post offices: one in the UK, one in St Louis, and one in Pakistan. Clicked more, and there they are. You can Facebook the Post office.
Morning comes after two cups of French Press. I sit here at the desk, peeking out the glass door to the shady side of the street. I do not know where I will be living, what I will be doing, or who I will be doing it with next month. Uncertainly, I move in and out of situations and get swept up in my ideas and fantasies. I buy and sell, make and remake, move-in, move-out, leave homes, careers, friends and relationships. I move out of comfort
art nouveau dome of light (Photo credit: e³°°°)
and into uncertainty because it feels more like home moving than staying in one place.
I have to put the words on the paper and look at it to make it real.
Raising a family, sprouting barriers and responsibilities might have changed me, but I didn’t. I’m unchanged in some ways, still running through the hallways of the hotels, gardens, and neighborhoods. Do you know what I mean?
Levon helm performing with The Band. Hamburg, May 1971. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
I have this greatest love for The Band.. brought on by a listen when I was about seventeen.
My two best friends, Lizzie and Billy. Billy played the guitar, from Tulsa, so he got it, and his sister Lizzie sang.
I sat crossed legged in her English boudoir bedroom in Bel Air, and knew they were the musical advisories. I never may have known the Band if it wasn’t for them.
How come no one has spoken about Levon? Are we too obsessed with mediocrity? How did our tastes vanish into
CNN.
Now it’s the Kardasian, whatever her name is. Who cares. Why? What happened to us?
I loved you Levon. I love you The Band. It breaks my heart.
East Palace Avenue Santa Fe (Photo credit: paigeh)
SMILEY’S DICE-ADVENTURES IN LIVINGNESS
By:Luellen Smiley
SANTA FE,NM.
I’m sitting outside in a flowerless garden because no matter how many flowers I plant, they only last one season, if that long. The garden is erupting out of its winter coat, and lime green leaves, plants, and stalks will have to do for now. The sky that seals me in is licked with revisionary hope. The kind that comes back laundered and fresh after a chosen recess from believing in the possibility of a preferred life correction.
Behind the garden, a neighbor is drumming a soft tribal beat, and on Palace Avenue the choir is singing inside the Episcopal Church on Palace Avenue. Between these distinctive tastes, there are sparrows fluttering from fan to nest to fountain. The chattering sounds like; ‘here she comes, don’t come over here, get out of my nest, watch out for that fat crow.’
It’s a mind drift, to be caught in such UN-structured beauty, away from the manuscripts, remotes, doors, and phones. It’s like being on an island out here. Everything we bring into our experience can be revised; a work of art, a way of speaking, thinking, portraying yourself, your way of loving, or lusting, and we all know about appearance, because our society shoves it down our throat.
Look at the possibilities in revising our patterns of behavior. What we accepted twenty years ago doesn’t mean it’s carved in our organs. We can transmute. The interior life needs lifting and tightening, just as our mind and muscles do. You won’t find any immediate remedy, or advertisements, or books on the subject because we’re consumers of products that change and revise only the visible tangibles. I wonder if I traded in my eleven year old Land Rover for a new one if I’d be really happy, and for how long? Or if I flew to Los Angeles and bought cartons of antiques, hats, and perfume if I would be grinning from ear to ear.
I begin with revising the way I experience Santa Fe. I’ve lived on the outskirts, like a storm that blew in and is waiting to blow out. It seems my storm is here for now, and so I let go of the criticism and intolerances. Beginning with my favorite activity, dancing, I returned to El Farol, my chosen dance hall hullabaloo, then to La Posada across the street and mingled with an assorted group of locals, guests, and actors, (who were real as pippin apples)spent a day cruzing the ghostly town of Madrid to experience the cinematic sparseness, and walked up and down Canyon Road one morning before the shops opened, and was greeted half a dozen times by strangers out walking, uniquely different in attire, disposition and stride. I love that about Santa Fe. You don’t conform, it’s a religion here!
My homework for the next few weeks is revising the interior doors of emotion, and the exterior doors of expression. I’ve set aside the memoir, (did I mention I started that again) after a publisher suggested major rewrites and editing. I mean you have to know when to give up because you’re not going to make the team. I’m a six page essayist. If you get me into one hundred and fifty pages, I march all over the globe and lose the reader.
You guys are smart. You know all of this; I’m just learning. I am a case of insufferable arrested development. If I felt my age, which most of you know, I’d be looking at retirement brochures. Instead I’m planning on breaking into new territory. Its a joke between my dreamer self and my inner critic, but I’m not listening to the critic.
Today I swiveled in my desk chair trying to write the column I thought I was going to write. In between gazing out the window at sky scenery, I made oatmeal cookies, watched the birds, took care of business, had a hair cut, plucked at paragraphs from Anais Nin, and danced on the treadmill. The column didn’t come out of a conscious thought wave; it just rose up, after I typed the words, the throw of the dice. The odds were I’d find my way from there.
My dad the gambler, who laid a bet on everything from sports, horses, gaming, to the Academy Awards and elections, taught me many valuable lessons. He actually told me once, ‘Take a chance for heavens sake! Go out and get arrested.’ He knew the odds of that, which is why he dared me. Life corrections begin with edits, then revisions, and then you have a new story!
Our nest, is something we build on our own to give us permission to explore, and then question, and we go back to our little nest, and add a bit more certainty because the dinner was great, and the party lasted longer than we thought, and someone smiled at you in a special way, and then you saw a rainbow.
Some things happened last week; that liquefied into a mirage, of an opinion I inhabited. I directed this opinion with outdated information, and second hand narratives by writers in print. I believed what I’d always believed; that actors aren’t like you and me. I was wrong! Some actors are like you and me. They have open hearts, and inquisitive minds, they drink beer, and dress without designer labels, they like to hang out, and not talk about the movie business, they have interests beyond their Imdb star rating, and they answer questions, if you ask them. Unless we infiltrate what we criticize, we’re adding to the hypocrisy of the human condition.
WHERE TO BEGIN THIS STORY OF A FATHER THAT I ONLY CAME TO UNDERSTAND BY READING HIS FBI FILES, BOOKS ABOUT MOB HISTORY WRITTEN BY LAW ENFORCEMENT AND COLLEGE PROFESSORS, AND DOCUMENTARIES PRODUCED BY FOES OF MY FATHER.
My last year with Dad was 1981. Naive, and unconcerned with where I was headed, or how I’d get there if I figured it out, I was spinning around in an executive chair; waiting for the big hand on the black and white office clock to set me free. Time didn’t pass; I hauled it over my head, in my bland windowless office, under florescent glare. I was trouble shooting for an ambitious group of USC guys as they gobbled up all of Los Angeles real estate. Without any real sense of survival or independence, my life was in the hands of my father.
“Meyer’s coming to see me; haven’t seen the little guy in twenty-five years.” Dad said during a commercial break.
“Meyer Lansky?” I asked as casually as he’d spoken.
“Who else?”
“Why did you two wait so long?”
“It’s no concern of yours; he’s my friend, not yours.” I was twenty-nine years old and still verbally handcuffed.
The three of us went out to dinner, and while the two of them spoke in clipped short wave syndicate code, I
noticed that neither one of them looked at all happy. It was rare to catch my father in public with a friend, without raucous laughter, and storytelling. My attempt to revive the dinner conversation with my own humor,returned two sets of silent eyeball commands to resist speaking.
Several months later I received a call from Dad asking me to come over to his apartment, he had collapsed on the bathroom floor. When I arrived, he pleaded for me to stay close by. “I’ll be all right in a few minutes; I just need to catch my breath. ” I sat outside the bathroom door biting my nails, and waited, like our dog Spice, for my orders. For the first time in my life, he was weaker than I, and my turmoil centered on that unfamiliar reversal of roles.
The banner in front of Trader Joes read, Menopause Revival, and White Zen recognized Johnny Depp in Whole Foods, ” because they were skinny Hollywood types, and the cashier at Sunflower Market, piles up a dozen items, and then asks, if I want a bag? The DJ on Santa Fe Blue recites the weekly line-up, but he doesn’t know who the guest musicians are. It’s part of the quirky, puzzling, undefined tonality of Santa Fe.
If undeniable love only happens once, and then it’s gone, what do you do? Shop, count your money, travel, remodel your kitchen, volunteer, protest, have babies, read, or disappear into your illusions, and your art. Be enlightened, shine in your art, in what you loved always, in the froth of life.
ADVENTURERS IN LIVINGNESS 