The Painted Ladies

I don’t know if it’s the change in the weather, or the steady stream of vacation posts online that has me a little jealous that we’re investing in a lawn instead of a vacation this year, or that it’s just my turn in the universe to sit and notice an empty place.

But I’m feeling a bit sad. I see a little gap in my world, and this is my way of touching it.

I do not have a best friend.

I have, throughout my life, had best friends. Just a couple. Very dear and wonderful best friends. But moving, or growing, or changing. Shitty interpersonal skills or being overly self-involved at milestones, tragedies or trivialities, I’ve either lost touch altogether, or the best friends have shifted to friends, sometimes distant ones.

In the spirit of full disclosure, I’m a cancer in the astrological sense, and I do tend to be a bit reclusive. A tendency to withdraw into my shell, if you will. Gifted at the art of extroversion on command, but secretly most comfortable alone with my cat (or my kids) and my computer, a book, or a garden that needs some work. Those are my tendencies, but I’ve overcome lots of tendencies to arrive here, fill this privileged and fortunate seat I sit in and type from tonight. Why not that seat there though? Why is that one still empty?

Some of the women in my life seem to just be able to do it all. Climb mountains, excel in their careers, have hot steamy relationships with their significant other of many years, raise happy and healthy children of unusual and exceptional talents, draw from deep religious or spiritual convictions. Walk their dogs and teach their cat to potty in the Kohler. Make beer and knit scarves and do yoga and look like a million bucks in a bikini. Nourish a wide circle of friends, a posse, a mommy mafia. Have a suburban wingman. That number you call unfailingly, daily, just because.

I stare at my phone. Who would I call?

I believe very firmly we are the product of our choices. We have great personal power and the ability to create the reality we envision. So, if I follow my own belief system to the logical end, I must conclude that I have no best friend because I have chosen, consistently, not to have one.

I’m not sure if that makes me more or less sad to realize.

Oftentimes I’ve had this conversation with friends that I think we’re at this pivotal point, us women. First we were told we could do nothing, then we were told we could and should do everything. And now we realize that, as I think Oprah put it quite well, we can do everything, of course, just not at the same time. Like childbearing, or marriage, or a career, I’m thinking that a best friend is something that you have to commit to in a very broad sense, and sometimes you have to commit to it in the order of priorities you decide upon consciously or by default. The career fairy doesn’t give you your dream job, no? A best friend doesn’t just fall on your head and drop off a quiche. Dream job or best friend carrying quiche. Cue the unsettling gameshow music. Hard decision in motion.

Of course, it’s part chemistry, right? Not just all planning and plotting and laying a trap of espresso and Scrabble and a book club invitation to snag a good one. My best friend can’t just be anyone that can rock a pair of comfortable khakis. We have to click. She has to be hysterically funny, equal parts fancy pants and rugged adventure girl. She needs to like talking about wine at least a little bit, and roll with the punches of our crazy lives, crazier families, and a harsh reality of already overextended everything.

I used to describe my strange combination of serial monogamy and rabid commitment phobia with this analogy. For me, life was like an episode of “Let’s Make a Deal.” There I was standing elbow to elbow with a neatly coiffed Monty Hall, and the box lifts and there’s my color tv.

I don’t have a color tv, and that’s a nice one. Yay. All mine.

And then I’m offered curtain number two. Wow, there’s a color tv, but there could be a car behind that curtain number two. I don’t have a car either, and boy would it be nice to win one, for free, on national tv.

But it could be a goat. I don’t want a goat. What if I give up my color tv, and I get a goat?

So there I’d stand, color tv in hand, kind of. And so the waiting would continue until the crew turned the lights off, or Monty Hall passed out from low blood sugar, or the audience got tired of waiting for me to make my decision and they hauled me off stage.

Have I been like that with my friends? Overanalyzing them and sorting them in mental piles and not ever really digging in because of my commitment “issue”? Maybe. Probably. I’m not even sure that it matters that I figure all the reasons that I’ve fucked it all up. Because there are probably many. Perhaps it’s simply never been the right time. That could be it too, right? Maybe both me and my best friend have needed extra time to bake before we’re ready to skip off into a happily ever after of complimenting each other on our boldly colored shoes.

A couple of days ago the kids and I woke up to a flower bed full of mayhem. It seems our neighborhood deer have a taste for tulips. When I saw the pile of naked, plucked bulbs in the soil, cleared neatly of their greenery along with the promise of their blooms, I just about cried. The kids and I planted those bulbs in the fall, and we were so excited to see the color choices we agonized over dance in the spring rains.

But those cute little kid eyes were watching me, and I didn’t want to teach them to weep over plants that nourished a deer. So I said

“Let’s set the painted ladies free.”

They ran up the stairs, and we grabbed the butterfly garden. A month of tiny little caterpillars, then growing caterpillars and weird color-changing chrysalises had produced three perfect little butterflies.  Oh the hours we spent watching and waiting and worrying.

It was a warm day, and we were about to let them go.

For the next half an hour we moved them from flower to bush and back again, squealing and cheering and getting misty-eyed as each took flight and went off to play their part in the circle of life. And we forgot about the bulbs for a bit. The kids got on their bikes, and I begin to survey that which could be done. I pick up a plant that had been pulled but not eaten. Rejected for some reason. Or spared by the barking of the dogs.

Whatever the circumstances for the eaten plants and the nearly eaten ones, it is what it is. It was what it was. I reach down and I place the lucky little tulip in a waiting hole. I cover it with soil, and I whisper

“Grow.”

She Gave Me Oreos

by Juli

My grandmother lived in a red and white house that looked for all the world like a barn. Actually, she only lived in the top half, at least for a while. My aunt and cousin lived on the first floor. At some point I think she moved downstairs as well, but it all gets sort of muddy for me, the moves up and down, so we’ll stick to upstairs. The apartment she rented was only two or so blocks down the street from ours, so my Grandma used to watch us while my mother worked at the bakery. Probably when my mother worked other places too, but I mostly remember the bakery. Our street was Bensch Street, and yes, that’s with an “s.” It’s a wonder any of us can spell, when your very own street misinforms you daily that there’s an “s” in bench.

When I look back, the walk from our house to Grandma’s included a pretty good hill just past our block. I always got tired at the top, although I can’t remember seeing that hill last time I went back. Is that what happens when you get older? Does your experience flatten your perception of everything, or does it make looking back more topsy turvy?

Hill or no, there were always a couple of pop cans to be gathered from here to there, and even back then, that was ten cents return for each can in Michigan. That’s how my brother and I got candy money, so we were always prowling for them, heads swaying back and forth on the look out for discards. I think people littered more back then, because I never see soda cans on the street anymore. But to this day I notice my brother walks with his head a little down, scanning the sidewalk. Me, I barely look where I’m going now. But back then, the stakes were higher, and I was closer to the ground, so we both looked sharp.

Through a small entryway, the steps to my Grandmother’s apartment drew up and twisted sharply and steeply to the left. Narrow, as I remember, even as a small child. They were covered with something that looks in my memory as though it must have been an early variation of green astroturf. But that could be the sweet Technicolor whisperings of the way-back-when machine. The carpet may have easily been a sculpted brown or tufted mustard yellow. It was the seventies after all. But I remember them bright green, worn in the center of each step, grossly florescent around the edges, so those are the stairs I’m climbing now.

I used to wonder how Grandma made it up and down that narrow little staircase, although I saw her do it plenty. I could barely get up them, granted I was only three or four when these memories were made and those stairs were scaled. My Grandma was a mighty large woman, I couldn’t even guess what she might have weighed. Three hundred? Four hundred? Now I look back and know she was obese, and realize that’s probably the main reason she died so young (in her mid fifties), but then I didn’t even think of her as fat. She was Grandma. She was wonderful. She was perfect. She had a big loud laugh, a mischievous smile, and the most distinctive warm smell I’ve ever smelled in my life. Even to this day I’ll catch a wave of something that smells faintly like Grandma, and it just about brings me to my knees with longing and grief.

Hope Ruth Cross had salty hair with a little pepper, slightly wavy and above her shoulders. Hope wore big house dresses and no shoes and no socks. She liked onion and mustard sandwiches on Wonder Bread, Pabst Blue Ribbon beer, and Kool cigarettes. I remember sitting on her lap, watching her flick ashes in a big square ashtray the color of burnt umber. She’d let me take a sip or two of her beer and taught my brother, my cousin, and me naughty songs that made us laugh so hard tears would fall down our cheeks.

Popeye the sailor man

Toot! Toot!

Lived in a garbage can

Toot! Toot!

He liked to go swimmin’

with bare naked women,

He’s Popeye the sailor man!

Toot! Toot!

My cousin and I must have been only about four then, and my brother six. The same ages my kids are now. Maybe that’s why I’ve been missing her so much lately. The genetic imprinting of my children echoing back that harmony in time when a great woman loved three children who needed loving very much. I swear I hear her laughing in my children’s laughs.

There she is, surrounded by plumes of cigarette smoke and smelling faintly sour-sweet like beer. She’s propped up against an old steel and formica table that rocks a bit and is sprinked by cinnamon-colored rust. She’s smiling at us now and waving us over as she bends and pokes around for something we can put our pop cans in. A couple of bright orange trash bags are in the corner, spotted by neighborhood flies, buzzing and spinning, whirling and twirling, my earliest universe. She gives us big hugs, wet kisses, and there they are, on the table I can see them now, three glasses of milk and a box of Oreo cookies.

Thank you Grandma. You never had enough money to take care of yourself, but you always treated us. I just wanted to let you know I still remember.

And I love you.

Tan Lines, Monster Trucks, and Ta-ta Triage

by Juli

So, flesh. I have never seen such vast expanses of dark, white people in all my life. Vitamin D deficient? It’s listed as a chronic issue on the cover of my Runner’s World this month, but it’s certainly not a problem here. Those poor saps hocking spf 70 down in the village are not getting rich off the regulars in Carova. By the looks of things, anyway. And, I’ll be honest, I’ve spent a lot of time shamelessly spying from behind my cheap Target sunglasses and pink freckled nose this vacation.

Based on one week’s highly unscientific observation, our coinhabitants seven miles up from where the paved road ends in Corolla, seem to thrive in full blazing, bloody hot sun. All day, 10am to 6pm. Photosynthetic hybrids, I suspect. From them, I have learned that all necessary bodily functions and activities can be accomplished during high burn-index hours, in public, and while holding a Corona. That, and when you leave the beach in a caravan at the end of the day, you should honk your horns repeatedly, blare your radio, and hoot wildly all the way back home. People will think you’re so cool.

Pickups unload little villages in the morning. Sun tents, coolers, chairs, beach games, little tables, American flags, your favorite Jolly Roger flag (ahoy there matey!), and, I shit you not, the people to the left of us for the last three days put up a collapsible port-a-potty. I guess Captain Morgan must give you the trots, because making it 500 yards back to the house to use the crapper is just too damn far.

Close your eyes and you could be here too. There’s you, your significant other, Little Jimmy, Little Sarah, your dog Spot, and your other dog Spot all out for a day in the sun. Your neighbors are pirates on one side and a nervous looking family from Long Island with a beagle named Baxter on the other. Add occasional wild herds of horses (for which it is illegal to be within a hundred feet of) forcing unplanned familial migration and unceremonious abandonment of castles mid-construction. If you’ve never had a huge wild horse take a proper long pee or a healthy crap near you on the beach, then you might not realize the obvious – you pick up and move. (I am, truth in writing, adlibbing a bit here, since we didn’t get chased by wild horses this year, but I have the pictures to prove that it did, indeed, happen last year, as well as compelling photo-evidence of the epic pisses well-endowed male horses can take.)

I’m meandering here. And I’m sure I’ll get you to my point if my drink lasts that long. So, there you are. You’ve driven down to the beach, because it’s safer to have a car near you to stake out your territory. There is no paved road to get you in any civilized fashion to the many multi-family vacation homes that sprinkle the beach. But there’s the beach, and cars can drive on the hard pack closest to the ocean on the east or closest to the dunes on the west. The strip of beach in the middle is safe. Mostly. At low tide anyway. (My advice is to pick the two surliest looking bunches and get a spot there in the middle of them. Someone tries to run you all over, at least you’ve picked a roving band of leather-skinned hoodlums that can chase down the bugger and kick some ass.)

Anyway, so remember this is the ocean, and the surf is loud. You can’t hear cars. You must teach little Jimmy and Sarah to ask you to cross the “road” to the water. And not to go back behind the car in that tempting soft sand. It’s the highway kids. Spot and Spot? Let’s hope when you say “Wait” they’re not lured instead by the siren song of the drunk Frisbee toss two encampments over. Or that they haven’t filled their bellies with salt water and suddenly get the dookies in the middle of the thoroughfare while a beach cowboy is bearing down on them in an all terrain vehicle embellished with custom flamework.

Speaking of. There are no “cars” out here. Some AWD vehicles make it out, but lots get stuck at some point. You really need a proper 4x4 to be safe, and even then you require some basic beach driving know-how, properly deflated tires, and a high tolerance for a bumpy ride. Not to mention ninja-like reflexes to dodge those damn beachgoers in the middle of right where you need to be. If you do get stuck, tows are 150 bucks, and that’s just to get you unstuck. God help you if you get 200 yards up the beach and eat another ditch. The tow trucks circle like vultures, and I don’t blame them. People are morons. Your Subaru is not going to make it there buddy. Go get a ground clearance clue.

Needless to say, it’s great transportation watching here; we’ve seen all kinds of vehicles traversing the beach that the gods of asphalt probably never envisioned. Huge yellow school buses exalted on high monster truck tires. Golf carts souped up to look like ATVs. Suburbans driven by 10 year-olds. Long parades of Jeeps in rainbow colors bringing the tourists up to gawk at pooping horses. Impossibly huge flatbeds taking fiberglass pools to new construction somewhere north. It’s the Wild West of big nobbies and low pressure. If that sounds dirty, you are now in the right frame of mind to talk about the swimsuits.

Today I decided how I feel about pregnant women in bikinis. I admit, I can be a fan under the right conditions. Here’s the deal. I’ll take a nice round pregnant belly in a bikini any day to some of the specimens that see fit to strut their flesh out here in tiny patches of quick-dry fabric. I mean, good LORD, there are children around. Back boobies and muffin tops should be considered when selecting beach attire. Why hasn’t “What Not to Wear” done an OBX special? Hello, low lying fruit. Which brings to mind the melon issue. Underwires, girls. That’s all I’m saying. Man, there is some ta-ta triage to be done in the world. I’m going to give a quick nod to the men, though. You’ve made progress on the coverage front. Thank you for the generous swim shorts that are now in style. Just remember to give them a yank up in the back every now and then to cover your crack, and I’m happy.

Oh, where was I? Yes. Right here. On the beach in North Carolina. Are you getting the impression it’s not been a good time? Au contraire! I have a satisfying tan any dermatologist would be horrified of. I’ve regularly had a beer before noon, laughed myself silly with my husband, spent gratifying time debating “stay or go” over piles of seashells with my kids, and have no doubt we’re never getting all the sand out of that truck of ours. I haven’t taken my running clothes out even once, and I don’t feel guilty about it. For the most part.

Which brings me to my point. I used to think that vacations were supposed to be “perfect.” You gather up your jealousy-inducing pictures and “oh what a great time we had stories” and take them back to spread around like confetti back on home turf. I guess I’m learning that’s not the way it works for us. I am not about trying to construct the perfect Travel & Leisure vacation anymore. Our 2010 summer vacation has been equal parts hysterically funny and just plain hysterical. Our version of visiting Wally World. And did we love it anyway? Hell yes.

Wild, Wild Horses

by Juli

I have a birthday galloping into view, and while it’s not a decade roll, it will serve quite efficiently as my transit to the mid-life crisis ranch.

38. Whoa, Nellie.

Ten, twenty, thirty. Thirty-eight. 40 minus 2. Thirty-five plus three.

So cliché. I don’t feel thir-tee-ate. I don’t even feel 24. Well, maybe 24. A mature 24.

This is my problem. (One of them, let’s not pretend, my friends.) Birthdays were never a big deal growing up. Money was scarce, and, if we’re keeping it real here, a lack or desire to properly plan a goal even more scarce, so they seemed to surprise our parents every year. It was almost an awkward occasion, with the last minute scurrying for the cake mix et al. Anyway, not to obsess, but there it was. At the time, before I realized I wouldn’t be forever scarred not to get a sweet sixteen, I’m sure I was upset at the speedbump that was July 11. Now, to be honest, I’m just annoyed that those years were so lightly punctuated as to have a rather irritating side effect. My life has been one big run on sentence devoid of age punctuation.

Gather round. . .Ritual serves a powerful purpose, and those balloons and candle blowing exercises and mad unwrapping binges are the spoonfuls of sugar that help the aging medicine go down. By skipping the soothing ceremony along with its diabolical underbelly of advancing years (notched in little trick blow out candles on various flavors of icing every summer) I’m thinking the decades haven’t made the proper dent in my self-awareness. My mental age is probably in reverse cat years or something. (Appropriately matched to my maturity level. There, I made the joke for you.) Those birthdays rolled by too lightly to leave an impression, and now I'm having to scramble. Like trying to fake-age a fine wine in a microwave or something. You just know it’s going to be ugly. Now, just a few days clinging to the vapors of 37, and I am, in all seriousness, kind of losing my shit. 38 is officially closer to 40 than 35. And well, 40 is 40. It’s boob sag old. I don’t want to be boob sag old. That depresses the hell out of me.

But there it is. The cumulative Happy Birthday to Yous of years past, all done up like some scary Great Auntie with lipstick on her cheek and smelling faintly of Depends. It’s waving to me with a bloated yellow talon with too many baubles. Slipping the Mardi Gras beads of old age on my neck, one at a time, bestowing me with all the indignities of “Well, you’re not in your twenties anymore.” This one is a lovely shade of Florida peach and stands for “You’re wrinkles around the eye old.” This is a blueish purple to represent “worried about veiny hands old.” You are now “ma’am” old. Teenage boys don’t look at you twice old. Save that tinfoil old. Wishing those young tarts would cover up a little more old. God have mercy on your soul, here is the nearly unbearable weight of finding bargains at The Christmas Tree Shop old.

So, I’m sitting here, well, old. And, I’m having a hard time with the number. I admit. But here’s the flip side, so you realize I’m not wallowing too deep in self-pity. (Although, I do have a pretty stiff drink at my side.) I’m on a deck overlooking the ocean. Right now. Listening to the surf and soaking in the positive ions as the day’s heat fades and the breeze is kicking up and serving the smells and sounds of happy stranded people seven miles up a beach with no road. My kids are dangling in a hammock flipping through paperbacks and sucking on tootsie pops. Six wild horses are grazing in the short stubby grasses below. They are gorgeous to tears. I am getting misty eyed. And I am happy beyond the wildest dreams or wishes I could have summoned in those fleeting seconds each year when you’re allowed to dream and wish in front of others.

I have not had everything along the way, but I have everything I could hope for now. That is my birthday realization this year. And a gift I would wait another 38 years to get if I had to.

It’s a big wave to come crashing down at all once. But I wouldn’t give them back, any of them, for anything. Here I (almost) am 38.

So, take it any way you’d like, the bad karma of birthdays past, you can kiss my fat old ass. Happy birthday to me.

Going Jane

By Juli

I think one of the main reasons I’m not batshit crazy, despite the sometimes Maury Povich inspired screenplay that periodically takes over my life and the lives of those around me, is an autopilot feature of my psyche that allows me to switch into Jane Goodall mode. Yes, if you snuck into the cockpit of my subconscious, you’d see the lever there, left of center, with the label “Going Jane.” It’s sort of like going native, but on the flip side. It’s the ability to watch the world go raw and uncensored, and just take it in and trust it’s part of the greater reality-weaving process. I take a deep breath, observe and take notes, and try not to get my panties all in a bunch. The little threads working themselves over under, under over are maddeningly monotonous real time, but they’ll make sense in a few weeks or months or years when I can step back and see the picture in its entirety.

Right?

In religious terms, this state might be spun as detachment, a kind of higher state of being where you transcend your need for worldly connections and achieve an enlightened perspective. I’m not that full of shit to say that’s me and where I go. In psychological terms, emotional detachment can be good or bad, depending. It’s either an inability to connect (bad) or an intentional assertiveness to ignore the trolls (very good). Since I'm calling the shots here on the stage, and I like to avoid embracing too many unflattering labels at any one time (and right now, I'm full up, thanks), I’m going with the “this is a healthy thing I do” behind curtain number two.

So now I emerge from the reverse-chrysalis, not feeling changed much myself, but very much in that eye-goober stupor after a Rumplestilzken-like sleep. The world around me has undergone a great change. Maybe I’ve been working toward the evolution while hunkered in the hole. Maybe I’ve just been with my back to it all. Each time this happens, I come out blinking, realizing I’m light years away from the gravitational pull of that first hole my inner child gets sucked into from time to time. It’s strange and beautiful, the leap, but boy is it often a mess. Smoldering campfires litter the landscape. The retreating calls of familiar mammals echo in the distance. Beer cans, crumpled to-do lists, unpacked boxes, streamers, someone’s boxers hanging from a flagpole, you name it. A big metamorphosis party, and no one bothered to pick up a damn thing.

So here I am again. Thankful to be here having avoided most of the minutia along the way. But a little overwhelmed at getting it all tidied up before the next big trip. Because you know what see when we get that rare look at what’s really going on? Not “the answer” on the broadloom. It’s always a directional sign of some sort. Get going on this-a-way little lady. Life is not a fact-finding mission, for sure. It’s a journey, they say. Boy the hell is it. Happy travels my friends. Pick up some trash on the way out.

Bed Sheets in Limbo

By Juli

There's a load of laundry in our dryer that has been there for two days. I haven’t even checked to see if the towels and washcloths got wound up in the king sized sheets, so it’s quite possible it’s Code Rewash waiting to be discovered. Two days of wet cannon balls in the bed sheets can really smell just awful.

It’s a small thing, I admit. One task left partially undone. Wah, wah, cue the angels. There are others tasks forgotten and neglected though, scattered all over the house. Breadcrumbs of chaos leading to a familiar place where it all comes together and falls apart at the same time. It has me frozen. Where on Earth do I start?

A little background first. I’m cut out for a factory job. I can handle exactly one thing at one time, and it consumes me. Tightening widgets would have been just my thing had I not been catalyzed into unnatural productivity, spurred by memories of poverty and the realities of overwhelming college debt. But a duck still wants to quack like a duck, and I’m borderline freaking out now, because my carefully constructed habitat is in flux with the new juggling of back to work and home and not running and eating too much shit and trying to answer mail and pay bills and remember to put the milk away before I run out the door in the morning. Sweet Jehovah, I can’t remember the last time I flossed, and it’s really starting to burn a hole into my stomach lining just thinking about it.

Linens and coping deficiencies aside for a moment. Lately I’ve been reading and wondering a lot about intuition. Feeling the future, developing our different ways of knowing rather than stuffing it down with food or drink or pharmaceuticals. So if I use this little freakout swirly-swirl that I’m in right now as on object lesson, what if this heart thumping, ceiling staring, restless period that crashes over me isn’t a handicap? What if it’s my own little The Color Purple version of “God is Trying to Tell You Something”? It’s always scared the shit out of me, made me run and hide and drop what I’m doing. Go underground. Fly south for the winter, whatever. But what if it’s really a gift, and what I’m supposed to be doing is poking my head OUT instead of in? Maybe it’s a shift in the breeze, opportunity beckoning, the gates are about to open, don’t leave now or you’ll miss the best part. Maybe the fates have my number, and I still haven’t learned to answer the phone.

Or, maybe I could just be all sorts of effed up.

So what does all of this have to do with dirty laundry? Here’s the deal. Laundry is my THING. It wasn’t my mother’s thing. It was her un-thing. Which is exactly why it’s MY thing. She would let it pile up in great mountain ranges in our sometimes wet basement. And when she did do it, she would fashion intricate sculptures of wet and dry tangled masses -- on the tops of the washer, dryer, couches, chairs. I learned from a young age that pulling up the stepstool and doing my own laundry, start to finish, meant I would have clean skivvies the next day. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t. I can’t stand searching for socks in piles, trying to find a mate while you’re late for school, or work, or the dentist, or whatever. And yes, I’m always late anyway. But my underwear is clean and my socks match thank you very much.

The gist is that I don’t let laundry pile up when the life machine is working even half-ass properly. So when the laundry IS piling up, there’s mischief afoot. It’s a harbinger of doom. Karmic disarray, the Juli equivalent of standing in the middle of the forest and watching the animals all run in frantic life-saving desperation in the opposite direction I’m moving.

A moment to reflect.

I know what this all means. I see the bright white light of my self-exploration. I need to get off my tired ass and head down right now. Face the waiting state of whatever it is I’ve been ignoring. Untangle the twists and knots of my no-iron percale. Maybe I’ll find it’s not so bad after all. Maybe the laundry isn’t a huge wet starting-to-mold mess, and it’s just patiently waiting to be dried and folded, still smelling faintly of lavender and vanilla. Wouldn’t that be nice? Then we’d both be redeemed.

Banjo Dreaming

By Juli

Before I die I want to learn to play the banjo.

It now tops my list, plucking “finish writing that godforsaken book and be the writer you’re supposed to be” and dropping it to the number two spot. A musical goal at the pinnacle of my bucket list is admittedly odd. I’ve never played an instrument beyond grade school lessons for the violin. Never been in a band, don’t have a natural ability to play or sing really anything. But I have an ear. When life has been more rock climbing than joyriding, music has been that well-placed handhold for me, the will to hang on and keep going. I love music.

But not all of it.

I’m not a huge jazz fan (sorry), don’t love me that punk metal shit from the 80s. And I’m all for a good dose of pop (and that’s probably what my car radio is set to right now), but it’s manufactured, packaged. Don’t you dare play Madonna at my funeral or your ass is haunted forever.

Not that the soundtrack of my life would have direction or focus to a casual observer (hmm, telling?). Paul Simon, Lynyrd Skynyrd (not kidding), Tracy Chapman, Ella Fitzgerald, M People, The Bridge, John Denver, Carly Simon, James Taylor, Queen, Fleetwood Mac, Sinead O’Connor, Sonia Dada, Lauryn Hill, Alison Krauss (her album with Robert Plant is FANTASTIC), The Bridge, Ray LaMontagne, Pink. I mean, really, who is this person?

Give me a musical Rorschach, and this is what you’d learn: I’m a hillbilly.

I did not grow up in the south, nor the hills, nor the country. I did grow up poor white folk. Which, if you know your banjo history, throws another curve into the mix, since the banjo was originally developed by African slaves in the U.S. But I digress.

My mother told some pretty vivid stories of growing up in the hills of California and can probably really claim to be a hillbilly at heart. Maybe I’m a hillbilly at heart too because of the invisible umbilicus that transcends all dysfunctional mother/daughter relationships. Or maybe, it’s because my grandmother’s funeral when I was five, my first big loss, was punctuated by folksy, bluegrass music. And sometimes I think that’s what we always go back to. Wherever we go, there we are. Trying to fill in that first hole.

This may seal my fate forever as tragically unhip and uncool, but my three favorite voices of all time are Emmylou Harris, Dolly Parton, and Johnny Cash. Diamond in My Crown and Sweet Chariot can make me cry instantly. Emmylou Harris has the most distinctive, beautiful voice I’ve ever heard. Go listen to Where Will I Be right now. And then there’s Dolly Parton’s I Will Always Love You, Coat of Many Colors, and Jolene. They are all lovely, simple, human, real, genius. And Johnny Cash’s quirky baritone. Flawed, perfect. Ring of Fire, Walk the Line, A Boy Named Sue, When the Man Comes Around. I love them.

Tapping this all out now, in little clicks instead of picks, I just realized something. I gravitate to music that’s rough around the edges, that tells a story. And maybe that’s why there’s the banjo, waiting for me someday. Because there are stories I won’t ever be able to tell on paper.