(a heart-shaped Post it! note stuck outside the shampoo bottle:)
"Dear Readers, (and hey! that includes all three, now, ya hear?)
While the titles which accompany these rambles usually don’t make much sense to anyone--never mind to the rambling author who penned them--the namesake for this installment will certainly take the door prize of seeming meaninglessness. Pardon: it's an inside title. You see, this be no ordinary wonder-wander: this is a super uber secret coded message of inspirational intent with adhesive and magnetized potential to a Fellow Traveller in Sista-Hood: Hemingway’s Half Wit Sista. All, however, all welcome to the inanity found here, as the wandering that will be afoot is a friendly wander on the ins and outs of friendship and inspiration, both of which I have been fortunate to be offered by the universe and its goodliest peeps, and both of which I stumble and fumble over as I try and intend to "pay it forward" in my too often clumsy half-wit ways.
(wait; hold on. Not much fits on a Post it! note; let's digress to the message in the bottle itself, shall we?)
So, Please enjoy the heart-felt if not hair-happy contents of the following message, Dear Readers Three, for you are all welcome to the sudsy residue of inspirational intent you might find there,
♥ WHS "
"Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born." --Anais Nin
"I no doubt deserved my enemies, but I don't believe I deserved my friends." --Brotha Walt
Friendship is a wondrous and strange vessel. It carries and holds such odds n ends along the way; like friendship, we too, are sometimes strange vessels, indeed. Our bodies seem to belong on some other girl, not us, not ours. They don’t listen, don’t work, don’t obey our (sometimes) good intentions. Or maybe it’s the other way around; I still haven’t figured it out. All I know is that when she told me about the special braces she’s using to get her body through the particular challenge of running that marathon which will finally take place tomorrow, I couldn’t help but laugh. And the laughter was less about her collection of knee braces as it was about all the things we stick and fasten on and all the things we swallow and consume in order to get across our respective finish lines. Yeah, we make a funny pair: The Bionic Woman meets the Supplement Queen. Wander Twins, activate! Form of: . . . um, a vitamin bottle and an ice pack? yeesh.
I remember visiting her on a Saturday after one of her crazy-ass "long runs" she would run weekly in preparation for tomorrow's Uber effing crazy ass long Run, and there she was, sitting on her couch, ice packs and that exercise ball thing for that planter-flah-shi-tus-thing that was going on with her foot; I don't know. I'm too often consumed by my own busted gams and inner noise to really listen to what's being said by the world or my peeps around me. What a gal, right? Yes, indeed, on this very evening I can also recall sitting on that palm tree patterned wing chair and rummaging through my purse to find and take my nightly installment of Omegas and other inflammation reducing promises encased in gelatin capsule. Between her ice packs and braces and my rainbow collection of various supplementing supplements, we'd make one perfect and completely healthy, supported chick, braced and supplemented and ready to face all the Creepies and other evils lurking in the dust and dog-hair covered corners the universe also contains. But, of course, we aren't this girl, this Uber Girl. No, instead, we are the slightly bruised and scarred, sometimes inflamed, certainly insecure and intolerably normal that all girls, seemingly uber or otherwise, must contend with in the dark of night when the mascara and the lights are off.
As I popped the last of the Omegas, I turned to watch her hobble over to the kitchen to let out Gusta-Rhymes the Uber Dog, who cared little for our busted selves; he wanted to head out and loaf in the cool, night grass. Sometimes I think we should listen to dogs more.
"Plodding wins the race." --Aesop
"All of us failed to match our dreams of perfection. So I rate us on the basis of our splendid failure to do the impossible." --William Faulkner
(We begin by sailing into the Cape of Cliche, because the reason why it's Safe Harbour Status has stuck around must be because there's something true there that sticks)
But she always listens. Funny; she always remembers to listen, even if she can't always remember what she's said or heard. In the past few years, "through it all," despite the occasional miserable wretch that I could be then and now, she has "been there." After my surgery a few years ago, she was there to help me heal my gimpy gam and listen to me wax poetic about being able to run a mile or two or wax pathetic, "I can't run! I get so swelly! I can't! " And when I started to become a potential Creepie by acting like a creepy nervous wreck after finally and truly quitting smoking and thus, embarking on the Voyage of Eating Everything in Sight, she showed up just at the right time in this heroic but comic cycle to remind me that I still looked like this cool, chic and lovely actress she swears I look like, but I will only attribute to her kind eyes and forgiving Pisces Perspective. Yeah, she’s got vision. And it’s that vision that’s helped her get through the Thorny Patches of Prerequisite "Unexpected"-Patch-O-Thorn-in-Plot that have popped up along her Way. Because even when she thinks no one knows or sees, even when she thinks she's just barely plodding along and fakin' it, in my eyes she stridin' like a
. . .
“Stallion!” I answered. “A magnificent stallion, just running along the beach; that’s you! That’s your animal,” I was right. She’s a stallion. We were on her couch, the one she used to have that was set up against the main supporting wall of her pristine bungalow home (a home she swears is nothing but dog hair and dust). I don't how we started, but we wandered in to a conversation on which animal best represents us, or at least, one of our "true" selves. And I was right. She's a stallion. And she was right. But, oh, how odd to be
“The Coca Cola animated polar bear cub,” she was cracking up when she finally got the words out. Sitting on her couch, we doubled over in one of our wonderful laughing fits and I don’t know how it came about that we started wondering which animal we most resembled in personality and spirit, but like I said, it was easy: she’s a thoroughbred, a stallion: a little bit Somewhere Else wild horse, a little bit Monmouth County show horse. But I was the Coke cub, the polar bear cub: the cartoon thing. My goofy, extended-childhood-vacation nature which finds me whining, “I’m hungry!” usually in the middle of her trying to tell me something of some import that I’m not much paying attention to, among other examples, will testify to the apt if not odd selection in her polar bear cub choice. The silly but sweet, sugar-addicted cartoon cub, that is, of course. ;)
The ways in which someone can become acquainted with the ins and outs of who we are is as much of what constructs us as we who contrive to fashion in our solo mirror dances. Here's a sometime snapshot: She: outward in such an unassuming, pristine, private way; Me: inward in such a loud, slightly-showy, public way. Opposites within opposites, contradictions of layered contrasts, despite the things we call out in one another, we carry so many other corners, so many other ways of seeing and feeling. As a friend, she’ll make you feel like your noise is noise worthy, and I'll, well, try. I try! :) At least, you know, "I try." (my favorite Stand By line)
I try, but my snark is of a different kind. I am the Rare Ro-Rose of Snark, and I seem to mine a different alchemical map; I don't have the salt she finds in cinnamon. I don't have that "spunk" she locates on Mean St. in Aberdeen (I don't even know where that is). So, I tend to get lost, and navigate awry, but despite my cubby ways, I can conjure, did you know? It's a Cuban-witchy-witchy-bruja thing, that other me no animation program can quite render.
(we now digress out of time to Somewhere Else; please stand by and dial "0" for assistance)
I call up the Precious Pearl, so named as such in her Sorority Daze, by those other Sistas and from those other days, I call up that spunky-chica-gal, I call her up and say, "Hey, beeatch!"
She answers and listens to hear the Bruja Buena on the other end of the spiral corded, yellow land line telephone, that kind you had to dial; it's receiver carried the scent of my mom's sweet coffee and cigarette breath and held the echo-memory of those brief but precious late night conversations my mom would have when she could finally get a line across to her family in Cuba. I conjure this particular phone to get the message across to the other girl from one of her many past lives, The Precious Pearl of Spunk. I inhale; I speak:
"Did you ever think about how a pearl is made? Did you ever really think about how a real one--the kind you find on Town and Country necklines--is actually made? You can't have a pearl without an irritant, you know? Without that annoying grain of sand that's snuck in and stuck it out; I heard it on one of my motivational Buddhist cds. It's called the 'pearl principle': no irritation, no pearl."
I wonder if she's heard.
(We now return to the much more realistic and sane modern world of cell phone towers that are constructed to look like trees)
"Courage is grace under pressure." --Ernest Hemingway
"All my life I looked at words as if I were seeing them for the first time." --Ernest Hemingway
She is a woman who surrounds herself in the motivating and moving words of others: on bumperstickers, magnets, postcards and pictures, she is the sun and those notable quotables seem like satellites and planets, spinning a world of possibility that doesn't always seem possible outside the lines. Sign posts of promise and forgiveness, the words she collects and arranges around her point the way back to a heart sometimes too loaded with empathy and understanding, too framed by the sad state of the way we run things in that impossible world and ourselves.
But on Sunday, she will run. She will run to
On Sunday, you will run. And how it goes, or where it goes matters little compared to why. Run toward
that loud place of happy; of--what's that called?--"quiet exuberance," of whatever it is when you say you’ve had a
“good run.”
Regardless of the mileage counter or clock, what will not be measured are those moments out of time, the ones you somehow continue to find and the ones that move you to that step beyond the last no one imagined in the first place.
Tomorrow
You
will run. With a precarious body bound and braced for the unknown in each measured step, if you look with listening, you will see the stallion running there: free and unbounded,
reckless in grace that happens regardless.
So dearest Readers and dear Sista:
Try, regardless.
. . .
To: Chris, Marybeth, Shawnda, and all the runners running for all the reasons that keep us in the race: good luck, good run.
"Dear Readers, (and hey! that includes all three, now, ya hear?)
While the titles which accompany these rambles usually don’t make much sense to anyone--never mind to the rambling author who penned them--the namesake for this installment will certainly take the door prize of seeming meaninglessness. Pardon: it's an inside title. You see, this be no ordinary wonder-wander: this is a super uber secret coded message of inspirational intent with adhesive and magnetized potential to a Fellow Traveller in Sista-Hood: Hemingway’s Half Wit Sista. All, however, all welcome to the inanity found here, as the wandering that will be afoot is a friendly wander on the ins and outs of friendship and inspiration, both of which I have been fortunate to be offered by the universe and its goodliest peeps, and both of which I stumble and fumble over as I try and intend to "pay it forward" in my too often clumsy half-wit ways.
(wait; hold on. Not much fits on a Post it! note; let's digress to the message in the bottle itself, shall we?)
So, Please enjoy the heart-felt if not hair-happy contents of the following message, Dear Readers Three, for you are all welcome to the sudsy residue of inspirational intent you might find there,
♥ WHS "
"Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born." --Anais Nin
"I no doubt deserved my enemies, but I don't believe I deserved my friends." --Brotha Walt
Friendship is a wondrous and strange vessel. It carries and holds such odds n ends along the way; like friendship, we too, are sometimes strange vessels, indeed. Our bodies seem to belong on some other girl, not us, not ours. They don’t listen, don’t work, don’t obey our (sometimes) good intentions. Or maybe it’s the other way around; I still haven’t figured it out. All I know is that when she told me about the special braces she’s using to get her body through the particular challenge of running that marathon which will finally take place tomorrow, I couldn’t help but laugh. And the laughter was less about her collection of knee braces as it was about all the things we stick and fasten on and all the things we swallow and consume in order to get across our respective finish lines. Yeah, we make a funny pair: The Bionic Woman meets the Supplement Queen. Wander Twins, activate! Form of: . . . um, a vitamin bottle and an ice pack? yeesh.
I remember visiting her on a Saturday after one of her crazy-ass "long runs" she would run weekly in preparation for tomorrow's Uber effing crazy ass long Run, and there she was, sitting on her couch, ice packs and that exercise ball thing for that planter-flah-shi-tus-thing that was going on with her foot; I don't know. I'm too often consumed by my own busted gams and inner noise to really listen to what's being said by the world or my peeps around me. What a gal, right? Yes, indeed, on this very evening I can also recall sitting on that palm tree patterned wing chair and rummaging through my purse to find and take my nightly installment of Omegas and other inflammation reducing promises encased in gelatin capsule. Between her ice packs and braces and my rainbow collection of various supplementing supplements, we'd make one perfect and completely healthy, supported chick, braced and supplemented and ready to face all the Creepies and other evils lurking in the dust and dog-hair covered corners the universe also contains. But, of course, we aren't this girl, this Uber Girl. No, instead, we are the slightly bruised and scarred, sometimes inflamed, certainly insecure and intolerably normal that all girls, seemingly uber or otherwise, must contend with in the dark of night when the mascara and the lights are off.
As I popped the last of the Omegas, I turned to watch her hobble over to the kitchen to let out Gusta-Rhymes the Uber Dog, who cared little for our busted selves; he wanted to head out and loaf in the cool, night grass. Sometimes I think we should listen to dogs more.
"Plodding wins the race." --Aesop
"All of us failed to match our dreams of perfection. So I rate us on the basis of our splendid failure to do the impossible." --William Faulkner
(We begin by sailing into the Cape of Cliche, because the reason why it's Safe Harbour Status has stuck around must be because there's something true there that sticks)
But she always listens. Funny; she always remembers to listen, even if she can't always remember what she's said or heard. In the past few years, "through it all," despite the occasional miserable wretch that I could be then and now, she has "been there." After my surgery a few years ago, she was there to help me heal my gimpy gam and listen to me wax poetic about being able to run a mile or two or wax pathetic, "I can't run! I get so swelly! I can't! " And when I started to become a potential Creepie by acting like a creepy nervous wreck after finally and truly quitting smoking and thus, embarking on the Voyage of Eating Everything in Sight, she showed up just at the right time in this heroic but comic cycle to remind me that I still looked like this cool, chic and lovely actress she swears I look like, but I will only attribute to her kind eyes and forgiving Pisces Perspective. Yeah, she’s got vision. And it’s that vision that’s helped her get through the Thorny Patches of Prerequisite "Unexpected"-Patch-O-Thorn-in-Plot that have popped up along her Way. Because even when she thinks no one knows or sees, even when she thinks she's just barely plodding along and fakin' it, in my eyes she stridin' like a
. . .
“Stallion!” I answered. “A magnificent stallion, just running along the beach; that’s you! That’s your animal,” I was right. She’s a stallion. We were on her couch, the one she used to have that was set up against the main supporting wall of her pristine bungalow home (a home she swears is nothing but dog hair and dust). I don't how we started, but we wandered in to a conversation on which animal best represents us, or at least, one of our "true" selves. And I was right. She's a stallion. And she was right. But, oh, how odd to be
“The Coca Cola animated polar bear cub,” she was cracking up when she finally got the words out. Sitting on her couch, we doubled over in one of our wonderful laughing fits and I don’t know how it came about that we started wondering which animal we most resembled in personality and spirit, but like I said, it was easy: she’s a thoroughbred, a stallion: a little bit Somewhere Else wild horse, a little bit Monmouth County show horse. But I was the Coke cub, the polar bear cub: the cartoon thing. My goofy, extended-childhood-vacation nature which finds me whining, “I’m hungry!” usually in the middle of her trying to tell me something of some import that I’m not much paying attention to, among other examples, will testify to the apt if not odd selection in her polar bear cub choice. The silly but sweet, sugar-addicted cartoon cub, that is, of course. ;)
The ways in which someone can become acquainted with the ins and outs of who we are is as much of what constructs us as we who contrive to fashion in our solo mirror dances. Here's a sometime snapshot: She: outward in such an unassuming, pristine, private way; Me: inward in such a loud, slightly-showy, public way. Opposites within opposites, contradictions of layered contrasts, despite the things we call out in one another, we carry so many other corners, so many other ways of seeing and feeling. As a friend, she’ll make you feel like your noise is noise worthy, and I'll, well, try. I try! :) At least, you know, "I try." (my favorite Stand By line)
I try, but my snark is of a different kind. I am the Rare Ro-Rose of Snark, and I seem to mine a different alchemical map; I don't have the salt she finds in cinnamon. I don't have that "spunk" she locates on Mean St. in Aberdeen (I don't even know where that is). So, I tend to get lost, and navigate awry, but despite my cubby ways, I can conjure, did you know? It's a Cuban-witchy-witchy-bruja thing, that other me no animation program can quite render.
(we now digress out of time to Somewhere Else; please stand by and dial "0" for assistance)
I call up the Precious Pearl, so named as such in her Sorority Daze, by those other Sistas and from those other days, I call up that spunky-chica-gal, I call her up and say, "Hey, beeatch!"
She answers and listens to hear the Bruja Buena on the other end of the spiral corded, yellow land line telephone, that kind you had to dial; it's receiver carried the scent of my mom's sweet coffee and cigarette breath and held the echo-memory of those brief but precious late night conversations my mom would have when she could finally get a line across to her family in Cuba. I conjure this particular phone to get the message across to the other girl from one of her many past lives, The Precious Pearl of Spunk. I inhale; I speak:
"Did you ever think about how a pearl is made? Did you ever really think about how a real one--the kind you find on Town and Country necklines--is actually made? You can't have a pearl without an irritant, you know? Without that annoying grain of sand that's snuck in and stuck it out; I heard it on one of my motivational Buddhist cds. It's called the 'pearl principle': no irritation, no pearl."
I wonder if she's heard.
(We now return to the much more realistic and sane modern world of cell phone towers that are constructed to look like trees)
"Courage is grace under pressure." --Ernest Hemingway
"All my life I looked at words as if I were seeing them for the first time." --Ernest Hemingway
She is a woman who surrounds herself in the motivating and moving words of others: on bumperstickers, magnets, postcards and pictures, she is the sun and those notable quotables seem like satellites and planets, spinning a world of possibility that doesn't always seem possible outside the lines. Sign posts of promise and forgiveness, the words she collects and arranges around her point the way back to a heart sometimes too loaded with empathy and understanding, too framed by the sad state of the way we run things in that impossible world and ourselves.
But on Sunday, she will run. She will run to
On Sunday, you will run. And how it goes, or where it goes matters little compared to why. Run toward
that loud place of happy; of--what's that called?--"quiet exuberance," of whatever it is when you say you’ve had a
“good run.”
Regardless of the mileage counter or clock, what will not be measured are those moments out of time, the ones you somehow continue to find and the ones that move you to that step beyond the last no one imagined in the first place.
Tomorrow
You
will run. With a precarious body bound and braced for the unknown in each measured step, if you look with listening, you will see the stallion running there: free and unbounded,
reckless in grace that happens regardless.
So dearest Readers and dear Sista:
Try, regardless.
. . .
To: Chris, Marybeth, Shawnda, and all the runners running for all the reasons that keep us in the race: good luck, good run.
1 comment:
Hemingway's Half Wit Sista, who knows the power of the abbreviated, the enormity of the minimal, simply says, "Thank you."
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