An unexpected gift.

I had my hair cut again.

I decided beforehand that I would try to better hold up my end of the conversational give and take during this salon visit and  present more of my true self conversationally rather than just acknowledging the usual facts of yes married, no kids, and yes the weather’s been pretty nice. I brought the photo from the New York Times of my current haircut, the same photo as last time, to refresh my stylist’s memory.

She looked at the picture and said, “Oh, that’s Jamie Lee Curtis’ cut.” When she showed me her magazine photo of Curtis, I agreed that the actress’ cut was indeed similar though significantly shorter. I sat in the chair and she began cutting. And talking. Given the time of year, her first question was, “Are you ready for Christmas?” Fixing my expression into the open and honest position and looking to meet her eyes in the mirror, I replied that I didn’t really do Christmas anymore, that I didn’t shop or decorate. I recommended the same to her, saying that it was actually quite freeing.

Without so much as a pause or an acknowledgement that I had spoken, she told me she was a Christmas fanatic and went on to describe coaxing her husband to bring their five Chrismas trees out of the basement, then about her thwarted quest for a particular make-up kit for the salon’s gift exchange. She continued with the usual and customary holiday report until I experienced a brief, thrilling surge of hope when she said she had bought her grandson some books so he could know the true story of Christmas — I thought she was referring to the church’s choice of December 25 to coincide with the date of pagan celebrations to confuse the whole picture and gain more converts — but that wasn’t the story she meant. She was talking about a manger, three kings, and one god. I released my tenuous hold on the edge of the conversational cliff from which I dangled and landed in a heap like virtual  Christmas cookie dough at its bottom, where I sat listening as she waxed on about holiday preparations and shopping and gifting while scissoring through my hair. When she was finished, I didn’t have the haircut from the photo I’d brought. Jamie Lee Curtis sat atop my head, placed there by the stylist absentmindedly between statements of retail outrage and faithful fervor; her very own Christmas gift to me.

I’m good with it, though. Really. People give you gifts, and people give you gifts. Some are delicious and welcome, like that 2 pound box of chocolate creams or a mixed 6-pack of craft beer. Some are quirky and fun, like racing nun dolls or a toy catapult that can be mounted on a helmet. Some are simply useful — a gift card or a calendar.

And then, some gifts are liberating. Quietly, unexpectedly, surprisingly liberating. My experience with the stylist was just that. My hair was far too short, but it will grow back. I lost something besides my hair, though; I lost anger, frustration, and sadness.

When my stylist launched into her Christmas spiel, I wanted to counter with my own experience of the last dozen years, a saga of lost faith and Christmas traditions once held bold and confident and dear but now pulverized into rubble. I wanted her to understand and acknowledge the hijacking of seasonal celebrations by both religious and secular raiders. I wanted to relieve her of the pressure of Christmas spending and shopping so special to the Scrooge-ish hearts of every retailer while prying through her nose with hooks, ancient Egyptian-like, her adherence to the story of a god’s birth published, “hark ye, unholy multitudes,” in the world’s best selling book. I wanted her to put just one toe into the murky doldrums of Christmas once loved and  now lost and feel the crushing emptiness of being trapped there.

Instead, she quite suddenly cut all my hair very short in just a few motions while she babbled about Christmas. I saw the shearing begin to happen, and might have been able to stop her, but I didn’t try. I let go the vision I had for my haircut even as my hair hit the floor around me. I decided it didn’t matter. It just didn’t matter. The hair would grow in again. And she would have her Christmas with its five decorated trees and her mission to keep a very suspect story alive in her grandson, no matter how I might try to convince her otherwise. Why should she not have that? Why shouldn’t each of us have, or not have, our version of Christmas? She had unknowingly given me the gift of letting go of the frustration and futility of trying to justify my lost Christmas Past, and my angry desire to push back against the hype and secular vs. religious dueling of Christmas Present. She gave me the gift of being able to observe the holiday frenzy and  moral proselytizing without leaping into the fray to argue my case, and she gave me the experience of contentment being with Mike while opening little offerings from each other without thinking about the existence of a god or the holiday profit margins of a corporation. I can’t prove either of those, so who am I to try to convince someone else? I am the recipient of a very great gift this year, the gift of personal liberation and wider acceptance, and I am quite humbly grateful for it.

Weekly Photo Challenge: Mine

mine: (pronoun) that or those belonging to me

What is mine?

Nothing. No thing. No person, no advantage, no possession, no dream, no thought, no situation, no words, no relationship, no place, no purpose, no time, no life. Everything, every thing, can be gone in an instant. Nothing is mine.

When nothing is mine, everything is mine. Frightening, yet liberating.

Nothing is mine and everything is mine. They are the same.

Shedding season.

I opened the closet door this morning and the first thing I saw was a teal blouse I’ve worn for years. This sturdy staple has seen me through many a day when I was totally unprepared to get out the door for work and it was always wearable right out of the wash. Its color and style allows me to pair it with a wide selection of other clothing I own.

But when I touched it today, I noticed how worn it had become and how its rich color had faded. The styling seemed outdated. Why hadn’t I noticed this before now? Perhaps it was time to retire it. But what would take its place on my unprepared days? And, in a slightly sappy sense, the blouse had been a good and faithful servant for so long, and here I was about to discard it, as if it were the Velveteen Rabbit. I vacillated, thinking of where I’d worn it – to M.D. Anderson Cancer Center where I’d done the most meaningful work of my life – and how it framed my silver and turquoise jewelry purchased from a street vendor during a New Mexico trip.

I thought, too, about the field coat for which I’d longed so many years while living in a hot climate. Catalog spreads featured long haired, Wellington-booted women with silky-coated hunting dogs at their sides tramping through autumn fields; strong, independent, cosmopolitan yet country women wearing field coats. On eBay, I found a mulberry-colored field coat trimmed in brown corduroy and lined in plaid that I wore triumphantly after my winning bid. For about six months, that is, until I realized I wasn’t a long-haired, boot-wearing, country-dwelling catalog model with a purebred dog. I was a citified, job-hopping, purpose-seeking former dog owner, wearing a coat that didn’t fit me.  I folded it into the Goodwill bag. Fortunately, I hadn’t spent much money on the coat. But I had paid a significant price learning the lesson that I could only be who and what I was, not what I saw someone else be in a magazine. As the years had passed, I had changed and grown, and outgrown the field coat before I even got it. But I couldn’t see that I had to let go of the person I was trying to create who could fit the image in that coat.

And now I’ve worn out as well as outgrown the teal blouse. I think I noticed before today that it was past its prime and didn’t want to admit it. But I don’t want another field coat lesson, either. Sometimes what worked yesterday, in both clothes and dreams, doesn’t meet today’s needs, and it’s time to accept the fact and move on. I’ll be sad to see my teal blouse go, but I know I’ll find another favorite.

I’m thinking it will be something in a bright, in-your-face color. Something that a free-thinking, survivor-sort of woman would wear.

 

Virtually awesome.

I have a persistent furball in my throat. My mornings are spent hacking and “aheming” until I can settle it into an acceptable place. This mucous meatball significantly crimps any singing I might want to do.

During a Very Low & Lonely Time last year, I discovered Eric Whitacre’s Virtual Choir performing ”Sleep.” http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/eric_whitacre_a_virtual_choir_2_000_voices_strong.html. Here was this cool composer guy talking about souls on virtual desert islands, going to any length to find and connect with each other. The individual singers, connected in the video by nebulous bands, showed me that distance and isolation could be overcome. The music itself was painfully gentle, and healing. Through my ocean of tears, Scarlett O’Hara-like I vowed to take part if another virtual choir assembled. I wanted desperately to be part of something that mattered. 

“Water Night” came out over the 2011 holidays, and I did participate. And I am unashamedly freaking proud.

Even in my long-ago, pre-furball days, I never sang solo. I was an alto who could sing well within my section. The alto line of “Water Night” is too difficult for my current voice, so I chose the tenor line. Then I procrastinated ordering print music. We went out of town over the holidays. I waited weeks for practice videos that turned out to not meet my hand-holding neediness. My voice could support only a limited amount of practice before disintegrating. I had to relocate my aging laptop with its very noisy fan closer to the router so the conductor video wouldn’t hang. My laptop had no webcam. Mike’s newer laptop did but wouldn’t play the official recording video without downloading a new browser.  The submission deadline was galloping toward me.

Virtual Choir 3.0 (VC), as the “Water Night” project is named, had an active Facebook page with people posting their accomplishments, encouragement, and tips. I saw a suggestion there to use a camera and upload to YouTube rather than record at the VC website. I had never used a web cam, filmed a video on a camera, or uploaded to YouTube. I didn’t know if the camera microphone would capture my voice or the noisy computer fan, or record the entire song. But I figured if all those people all over the world were doing it, I could too.

The music studio.

On the day before the deadline, I set up shop in our recording studio (Mike’s office), beside the wireless for best reception. Lights meant to illuminate my face gave me a Blair Witch Project appearance. I ditched them and turned on the recessed ceiling lights with their broken dimmer switch, leaving me with an orb on my head in the video. I stacked jewelry boxes beside the laptop to raise the camera so the video would not be solely of the inside of my nose. After falling off a couple times, the camera found its own niche and stayed in place. I then discovered it had developed a lingering lens motor noise after being turned on. But I was now a train not to be stopped. I clasped a wedding-gift necklace from Mike around my throat, donned headphones,  and started singing.

I recorded four videos. They were all equally bad, or rather, I’m equally bad in all of them. One filmed me walking into the room in my underwear. I’m rolling my eyes at being out of tune on another. All of them have a beer bottle and antique insecticide containers in the background, as well as drywall patches and bursting book cases. Every one has off-tune notes, and I’ve discovered that, like Homer Simpson, my upper lip is far too long for my face. After the third attempt, my voice began rasping significantly. There was no way I was going to improve my performance, despite alternately sipping water and swallowing honey. In the final video, I am literally gasping at times and lip-syncing at others. But I’m smiling at the end.

The YouTube upload took a relatively unattended hour while I watched “Being Human.” The audio portion came out surprisingly clear at the website — and the visual was flipped on its side. No amount of button pushing could get me upright. I posed my dilemma to the Facebook support page, and had the instant answer that the VC techies could get me to sit up straight at their end.

I surrendered control.  I let go, and my video went into the Virtual Choir cue.

My pinpoint on the VC map.

And the hammer on my happiness meter came down so hard it nearly blew out the top.

I don’t care if they don’t use my video. If they sent it back with a form letter that says it doesn’t meet the lowest available standard, I would understand and accept that. I climbed over my self-consciousness hurdle and ignored the embarrassment trap. I had done the best I was capable of; I hadn’t given up because of or been intimidated by the thousands of much better singers. And I was now a part of something that had lifted my spirit in the past, something that mattered. My breath, my determination, my triumph are now a tiny bit of the universe.

I am awesome.

Oops.

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I used to sew, a lot. There was always something coming off my sewing table and I was known for creating unusual and flamboyant clothing, such as when I used upholstery fabric to make a fitted suit. It was pretty … Continue reading →