Holly Selph

The Lovers, the Dreamers, and Me

This is a photo of the rainbow couch that my parents have had since the seventies. Yesterday, my friend, Katie, said that I am the only adult she knows who hasn't changed at all since I was a child, that I am a time warp.  I am the rainbow couch. She claims that this was a compliment. We've been friends since we were six years old. If I haven't changed, she would be an authority on the subject

This couch has been through a lot. When I was a child, I would unfold it into a bed and pretend that along with 100 of my closest stuffed animal friends, I had been exiled from every country in the world and was forced to live at sea, through hurricanes and pirates and periods of loneliness that were usually combatted by finding a teddy bear or a unicorn floating on a raft, at which point I would take them into the safety of my giant rainbow ship. Fortunately, most of my stuffed animals could speak.

When I was a teenager, this couch was in my bedroom. I think someone lost her virginity on it. (Not I.) Someone spilled half a bottle of Jose Cuervo on the cushions. I couldn't begin to count how many friends slept on it.

It is back in my parents' den now, the couch they use for watching television and reading the newspaper in the morning. I don't know why they don't buy a new one. I suppose because then, something would have to change.

I woke up this morning at four a.m. My first thought was, "I don't want to go to Arizona anymore." Technically, it wouldn't be difficult to bail. My plane ticket is non-refundable, but was inexpensive, and my hotel will let me cancel my reservation with no penalty until 6 p.m. on the day of my arrival.

I want nothing more than to be exiled from the world, adrift at sea, and forced to survive on my own. I just want my boat to be a familiar one, rainbow and retro. Am I going to find something new, or is this a time warp?

My friends have reacted in full spectrum. One says I am her hero. Another says she has lost all respect for me. Most are somewhere in between: envious, supportive, hopeful. 

I want to appear unwavering and brave, but I'm not. The only thing I ever change is my mind.

 In a few days, I have a seat with my name on it to go backwards in time, three hours behind everyone I know and months behind everything I thought I knew. I don't know if I am going to sit in it, or if I should just stay on the couch, warping time or chasing rainbows.

Had Too Much To Dream*

Last night I had dinner with friends to celebrate Kim's 30th birthday. Kim is an artist and jewelry designer (Plug: Go buy her stuff. It's fantastic. http://www.kimquinn.com/home.html) who I have known since she was sixteen and wearing Doc Martens with pajama pants.

 I hosted her 18th birthday party when we had to have a friend of mine in college buy the booze because we were underage. I hosted her 24th birthday party during which another friend and I spent hours creating a door-sized vagina with tissue paper. It was so anatomically correct that Kim blushed when she walked through it to get into the room and got mad at her boyfriend for touching it. I am tempted to upload an image of it, but I am afraid that you'd all want one for your own doorway.

Four of us met for dinner at a restaurant in Atlanta owned by Kim's boyfriend. We brought flowers and balloons and, my contribution: a jar of beer bottle caps I'd been saving for a recycled art project she is working on, and we started catching up, the way women do when they are thirty: Bosses are a drag. Men are a drag, but when will any of us ever get married, or in my case, stay that way? Did you notice my new wrinkle? I found a gray hair.  Holly, you must drink a lot of beer. No, I have a friend who is a bartender and she's been saving the caps for me. Yeah, right. No, really.

Seven buffalo tofu tacos, two fried calamari tacos, one barbecue pork taco, and a slice of creme brulee cheesecake later, we were ordering another round of drinks, because when we're together, we aren't thirty-ish anymore. We're eighteen again and drinking Boone's Farm and spiking cherry Kool Aid with vodka swiped from someone's parent's liquor cabinet. We are leaving our purses at the table and sneaking outside the patio to smoke cigarettes. We're fighting over the attention of our 22 year old waiter who had curly brown hair that fell all over his face. 

Someone mentioned a wedding shower we are all invited to, and said we should go together. So, I had to let the cat out of the bag. It would have been easier to tell them that I really had consumed 200 bottles of beer in two weeks and not just fifty.

 "I won't be here." I said.

"What?" one of them said. She leaned over the table and lit a cigarette. By this time, we were the last people at the restaurant and stopped caring that we weren't supposed to smoke. No one asked where. Or why.

Before I could say it, another one said solemnly, "she has to go. It's just for a month."

"I have, like, a plane ticket and everything." I said.

"I thought this was just a...pipe dream!" and then she started laughing. We all started laughing.

 And then I knew that they would back me. 

"You're not coming back," said the one who thought it was a pipe dream. I ordered another round. The 22 year old waiter gave his number to the only other single girl at the table. She laughed and said, "he is 22!  I am old!" We reminded her that if the genders were reversed, it would be a conquest.

Kim's boyfriend asked if we would come inside and finish at the bar. So  flowers, balloons, bottle caps, pipe dreams and all, we marched in line to the bar and sat down. 

The bartender came over and said, "Kim, this is your what...35th?" We gasped, horrified.  Then realized thirty-five isn't that far away. And maybe isn't so old after all, which just makes us older. One day, we'll be eating cheesecake at the kitchen table where we all live together in Florida, insisting that at sixty, we're in our prime. The illusion of adolescence we create when the four of us get together is a womb, and with that one comment, it was gone. It looked anatomically correct, but it was just made of tissue paper.

We grabbed our keys and started mumbling things about it getting late. A dog needed to be walked. Someone had a meeting in the morning.

So one of us did the only thing she could do. She pulled the 22 year old waiter over to the corner and kissed him. Then, they sneaked outside where they made-out by the dumpster. We rushed to the window to spy on them.

We regrouped in the parking lot, giggling. 

"He asked me to come home with him!" she said.

"What did you say?" we asked her.

"Hell no! Who does he think I am? Some twenty-two year old?"

"That's what they do now. They meet boys and go home with them the same night." Kim said seriously.

"That's disgusting. They need to grow up," someone said, rolling her eyes.

"Really," we agreed.

Four girls each walked to her car. None of us is twenty-two and none of us is thirty-five. Had we imagined, though, at twenty-two, this 30th birthday, we might have envisioned baby strollers, husbands, mortgages, and kitchens that needed remodeling.

None of us could have known then that we'd have something better. A bunch of white hydrangeas, a flower that keeps its bloom from early spring until late autumn, without showing age. Three balloons tied to the railing, but still blowing in the wind. A jar of bottle caps that will be remodeled as art. And four girls who still believe, even at their age, in making a wish before you blow out a birthday candle, in staying up just a little longer in order to have more time, putting off sleep for a pipe dream.

* My friend, Meleah Whitmoyer, is writing a song with this title. I thought she was rather brilliant for it, and she asked that I write a piece using it. So, I did. But, I gotta give her credit.

P.S. She is also the bartender in this story and can vouch that I didn't drink all those beers.

Girls Sink, Mermaids Swim

Dear Internet,

I am sorry for offending You, and by You, I mean the five or six people who actually read this and were not only put off by the fact that Feedburner sent out an email informing you that there was a new post that had a lifespan of about two hours, but also that you received another one today, informing you of a post from--oh, about a year and a half ago. 

I have no explanation for this except that I blame Feedburner, whose parent company is Google, whose slogan is Do No Evil. Obviously, a lie.

So, I am making up for it by writing a post I promise not to delete. In other words, stop emailing me! It wasn't worth it.

I am going to share with you something intensely private. Having liberated myself from a seven year marriage to someone who has affixed a Bluetooth headset to his ear as if for adornment, but still wears baseball caps daily, I now officially own nothing. I don't even own a cup. Nor do I have a car, a horse and carriage, a motorcycle, or any other means by which to travel, but a few pairs of high heels and some Old Navy flip flops. I do not have a house. I do not have a spouse. 

Naturally, I have some necessities: a toothbrush, books, a pillow, a bright yellow Kate Spade handbag and a pair of Versace sunglasses. But, I haven't anything that I require to have a stable life, nor does anything require me. I do not have a plan. I do not have a man.

Since there is something auspicious about midnight during a full moon eclipse, at that moment I will be making an appointment with the sky. In other words, my bank deposit will have gone through by then, and I can buy a plane ticket.

This is the most wonderful part: not one person knows when or exactly where I am going. When I step off the plane, no one will be there to greet me. I will lift my own bag (ok, it's not my bag. It's borrowed, but I will carry it myself) and find my own taxi cab that will take me to a room of my own. All I know is that it is very small, but for thirty days, it is mine. And, it comes with a cup.

After these thirty days that belong only to me, I can stay if I have provided for myself to do so. I could tag along with a band of gypsies, if I meet some. I could walk the entire coast of California in high heels and find a cave to sleep in, if that is my part. I could fall in love with a stranger, or myself, or both, if they are different.

I am packing one bag of things and leaving behind a magical cat, all of my books, my friends, my family, magnolia trees and nights of candles and wine, a cabinet of cups. It is an act most of the people who know me don't understand, or they understand but think it is unwise with little money, a bad economy (please, never say that to me again), no support system. But this is the true magic of it, everything is at odds with what I am doing, but it feels effortless. I needed a computer and one appeared. I needed an instant sum of money, and it appeared. I needed a place to stay that would have cups, and it appeared. The hard part will be sitting with myself, and all of the little braveries: eating alone in a crowd, folding my clothes in a room that no one will ever see, having no one to verify that I actually exist, knowing that I will sometimes cry and have to comfort myself. No one, nothing will appear.

This is as close as I will get to being a Hindu ascetic, with nothing but a bowl begging for grains of rice. I don't expect to achieve enlightenment in thirty days, but I have this hope---and maybe it's just the eclipse on a day of lucky sevens---that I might gain something from having nothing when I have always had everything and having no one when I have always had someone. But this is my only shot. I can either keep my cup full or find it empty.

A Tale of Two Cities

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of
wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it
was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the
season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of
despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we
were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other
way - in short, the period was so far like the present period, that
some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for
good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.
-Charles Dickens in the real Tale of Two Cities

From the sky, Phoenix, Arizona is a grid. It is calculated. Someone
decided to slice the land into perfect squares inside perfect squares
so that no matter where you are, you are always on the corner of the
vertical and the horizontal.

From the ground, Phoenix is wide open. Nothing inhibits the sky except
for the grandiosity of naked mountains which only makes the sky look
bigger. It gives the illusion that there is the possibility of
something more than having everything.

Atlanta is surrounded by a highway that runs in a circle. You can exit
at any point and move further inside, or you can drive on it long
enough to realize that there is no such thing as north and south, east
and west. There is only one direction: forward.

So, it makes sense that when he traveled the 1852 miles from Phoenix,
Arizona to Atlanta, Georgia and we saw each other for the first time
in four months that he would be standing on the corner of two
directions while I continued to have faith in the promise a circle
makes.

And so we sat once again across the table at the restaurant with mojitos where we invented the mythology of Lexington, that suburb of love where everything slides off the table. We went to a hotel where a man named Mr. Chestnut asked that we slide him something under the table, which had to, not inconspicuously, actually be handed it over it.

We drank the profanities of fucking champagne and bloody marys at the sacred place where the light is both too bright and too dark, depending on your angle, and we went somewhere new where the wind blew and napkins unfolded like white flags in the air.

In an act of obvious improbability, the mythological and the literal were joined in such a way that we were standing on the corner of what is actual and what is possible when he admitted he had found the price of one way fairly inexpensive, if also a potentially terrible gamble in which he could lose everything, as if choosing the actual means forgoing what is possible and not the other way around.

And so, there are no answers or outcomes. This is a tale of two people in two cities who have each lived in both, but only find home in each other. It is a circular tale where the ending looks just like the beginning--south becoming north--and a tale where the ending will forever be a right angle--east becoming west. It is a love story and a mystery, the twist is not in the ending, but is that there isn't one. It goes on, it comes around, and then it loops back. It hovers at the corner like suspense but never moves.

If the ending were there, it would look like this:

Two people from two cities sit across a table and pass a watch back and forth. He wears it in his city and she wears it in hers, but they never adjust for the difference in hours. It is some kind of promise and also the very thing that defeats the promise, but they continue forever passing the watch back and forth across the table while time itself passes under it, as if it doesn't end.

Portrait of a Grandmother

It was never me who was going to be the artist in the family, but I was just the first of six grandchildren. There was hope. My brother, Alex, was showered with cray pas, watercolors, fancy markers. He had some success. Our grandmother framed one of his pieces and hung it in her home. He had an innate understanding of perspective. He advanced and took on the family's other passion, music, and the burden was placed on the shoulders of her third grandchild, Preston. I remember visiting her when she announced that Preston was showing great artistic promise. "Mimi!" I said, "he is four years old!" She took a piece of manila paper from the refrigerator and held it up and said, "but you should see what he can do with crayon."

Even though I wasn't destined to become the next Renoir or Chopin, my grandmother taught me other things. The first things were simple. She taught me that I could like tomatoes, a food I found useless, if they were cherry tomatoes we picked from her front yard. You can slice them, if you can be careful with a knife, so that they make a pocket for a drop of cream cheese and sprinkled with salt and pepper.

 At Thanksgiving dinner, under the guise of having me help her clear the dinner dishes, we'd sneak in the kitchen where she had saved the wishbone. We'd each take an end, shut our eyes, make a silent wish and snap it. Somehow, I always managed to have the larger piece and somehow she always knew my wish. She would invite me to spend the night, with her, where we'd stay up much later than my parents ever would have allowed and we would talk until we fell asleep.

 My grandmother put me to work by the time I was seven years old. While most of my friends were baking cookies with their grandmothers, I was stuffing envelopes for art openings. It was around this time that I realized I didn't have a normal grandmother. She didn't teach me how to play bridge. She taught me how to play Mancala, a game she brought back from Africa. She ran the Peachtree Road Race. Elton John was on her mailing list. He never came to an art opening, but to her, that was his loss.

When I was in college, my grandmother officially hired me to work at her art gallery. By this time I was doing more than stuffing envelopes, but I learned that when it was time to stuff envelopes, even she sat down and did her part. It was there where I learned the art of persuasion. Each week, she managed to trick me into working on my day off. I walked away thinking it had been my idea.

There are images of my grandmother I won't ever forget: her hands, decorated with ornate and exotic rings, but also plain, hardworking, strong. She was always tending to something: walking her dog after dinner, feeding the koi fish in her pond, trimming a bonsai tree. She never threw away stale bread, but saved it to feed the birds. Life thrived in her presence. 

 And there are lessons from her I will remember: She never underestimated me. Even at five years old, it never occurred to me that she saw me as anything but an intellectual equal. She fell in love and remarried at seventy-two years old. She was traveling the world, still, just months before her death. You are never too young or too old to do anything. Each day after lunch at the gallery, she would bring up a bag of cookies, usually white chocolate with macadamia nuts, and she would eat just one. All things in moderation. She reused things other people would throw away, like the cardboard backing of legal pads, which perfectly fit in large envelopes and keep the contents from folding. Everything has not just one purpose, but many. She was strong, stubborn, but graceful. I remember her telling me that when she met Maya Angelou, her presence could be felt when she walked in the room. My grandmother had this sort of presence. She held her head up, her mannerisms natural, but an elegant perfection and suggested that when she spoke, it was a good idea to listen.

I am proud of her. She went to sleep late and woke up before the sun rose. The last time I spoke to her, I was calling from Phoenix, Arizona. I asked her if I had caught her in the middle of anything and she replied, "oh, Sugah, I am always in the middle of something." Still, whatever it was, she set it aside long enough for us to catch up.

 She exuded what poet James Dickey called, "The strength of fields." It's a humble strength, a consistent strength, one that is best explained in his words:

Lord let me shake with purpose.
Wild hope can always spring
from tended strength. Everything is in that.
That and nothing but kindness. More kindness, dear Lord,
of the renewing green. That is where it all has to start:
With the simplest things. More kindness will do nothing less
Than save every sleeping one and night-walking one of us.
My life belongs to the world. I will do what I can.

She did what she could. She always did what she could. It sounds simple, but which of us truly has, in all of our moments, done what we could? I will miss her, would break the bigger end of every wishbone in the world if I could have more time with her, but she has left so much for me to learn, to live up to, that I will always be learning from her. I will always be getting to know her more, deriving strength from her example. She did what she could, and with turquoise rings on her fingers, colorful scarves around her neck, her head high, and her eyes always looking forward to what she could do next.

The 59th Story (Which Is the First One Because Everything Is Done Backwards.)

I won't tell you the beginning because I am not certain when it was. I don't know if it was during the purchase of a bouncy ball from a coin-operated machine or a car ride toward beer.  I don't know if it was summer or winter. So I will start with the fact that I was wearing pink tights. This is important because I took them off in a room on the 59th floor of a famous hotel. If this ruined the suspense, let me make it clear that this is not a mystery. Or a romance. It's a story about a boy and a girl and the feeling you get when you've walked through a spiderweb: you're not sure if you just ruined something delicately intricate like the whole fabric of the universe, or if you became a part of it. You're also wondering if you are going to get caught wearing it.

So, I guess the real beginning is that there was a spiderweb. I knew it was there, and I still walked into it. Kindly, he opened the door.

He was driving the car, but I told him where to go.  If I was going to be a person who leaves her estranged husband at the bar with a man who lives across the country, I wanted to be taken somewhere with high thread count sheets to get tangled up in. We took an elevator so high that we were, literally, in the clouds, and we stood by the window and pretended that there was a view, because how do you just kiss someone you've never kissed before? Someone has to make a bold presumption. And so I did.  I was wearing the pink tights that once got me out of a speeding ticket.

We were magnets, attracting and repelling, alternating between being in the present and trying to prepare for the consequences. I was thinking about how the last few months have been a series of these inevitabilities. Things that I always knew must happen were happening in quick succession. A collision was occurring between that which I've wanted to happen, and that which was actually happening. They become something wholly other in the moment of contact. I was thinking of all of this, kissing him, and then I just stopped thinking. It prevents feeling.

There was light in the room when I woke up to him whispering my name. I opened my eyes. My first thought was about mascara, how it must be around my eyes like the mask of a creature that should only exist at night. There were sheets tangled and a glass of water beside the bed. There was no magic, only the stark reality that the fullest moments often suck the breath out of the ones that follow them.

I rode an elevator down 59 stories in a little black dress with pink tights that, in the light of morning, seemed a ridiculous shade of mistake. There are things about this story I'd like to leave out, like that my clothes were hanging from trees under the balcony when I got home, that I yelled and then cried, that this was the same day my husband packed up and moved out for good. But if I didn't reveal those things, I couldn't also explain that none of them made me wish I had worn tights of any other color.

While this certain shade of pink might remind you of the blush of indiscretion or the garishness of judgment, it is also the raw color of what we look like inside out. It's the truth. It is the shade of a tulip's willingness to open. It is the shade of lipstick you chose the first time you wanted to rush to grow-up.  It demands that you see it, that you not pretend it isn't there lurking underneath our desire to be perfect, well-behaved, and have our legs crossed always. It is the color of love, and the shade of our shadows if they were allowed to walk without us.

God, I love to Turn My Little Blue World Upside Down

There are some things I can't do, even if I try: blow my nose, understand what the big deal is with The Sopranos, and miss a Tori Amos concert. November 14 will be by seventh show, or maybe eighth? And I've never bought a ticket.

It's a religion in which I can have faith. After the first few times, it was a bit like walking a tightrope without the certainty of a net. Now, it's easy. When I hear she's coming in town, I just sit back and wonder where the ticket will come from this time. I don't put the word out or ask for help. It's a silent prayer between me and The Great Ticketmaster in the Sky.  I have had the ticket appear anywhere from the date they go on sale to the day of the show, but it always happens. Someone has an extra ticket, someone won them without meaning to, someone's father works for the venue or the sponsor, and most recently,from a good friend who is a well-known local music blogger. Supposedly, she's some sort of VIP, but to me, she's Leah, the girl who has fabulous eye make-up.

If you haven't seen a Tori Amos show, here's the secret: they are magic. You'll relive you childhood, the indulgence of adolescent emotions, and your past life as a fairy. It's an experience that's both primitively sexual and virginally pure. Tori Amos is self-aware enough to know that it's theater, but powerful enough to put you under her spell a couple of hours, at least.

I am excited that I get to go again. It will, as it always does, conjure a period of time when I lived on the floor. I did away with my bed and shelves and dresser, and lived solely on the floor, which was covered in comforters and blankets and pillows. I burned jasmine incense and kept my windows wide open in the middle of winter.  I had a five disc CD player, also on the floor, that rotated five different Tori Amos albums (or bootlegs, singles with rare B-sides, European releases.) I read Allen Ginsberg, and I hated Jack Kerouac. I had a boyfriend who believed that the government was conspiring against him, hair almost to my waist, and a Motorola pager. It was strange times, and Tori Amos made them stranger, and also, less lonely.

Everyone with ears has a Tori Amos. Others have a Sarah McLachlan, a Prince, a Metallica, a Nirvana, or Nine Inch Nails. Someone gave you a hand when you crawled down those dark adolescent pipes that only lead further inward.

Tell me who they were. Tell me where you were. Tell me who you were.

The Visit

Written Monday, October 22, 2007

The narrator in my head keeps saying that I met the Dalai Lama today. I suppose I did. He just didn't meet me, or at least, not any more than he met anyone else in the sea of people who filled up Centennial Olympic Park this afternoon under a sky that was both ominous and merciful, as not a drop fell from the clouds.

At about noon today, I decided I had to go. I have a list of people I have to see before I die: His Holiness, Sir Elton, Sweet Baby James, and the Divine Miss M. In that order. So, I finished up my work and ducked out of the office at 3:30, got on a MARTA train to avoid traffic and walked the rest of the way downtown to the park, half-hoping and half-afraid that somebody was selling vinyl rain panchos bearing the Tibetan flag.

There, on a small cushioned seat, was a small sitting man in robes who kept his palms pressed together, bowing slightly each time a senator, or the Emory president would welcome him again. When I saw him, I pretended I was stifling a cough because I had, quite unexpectedly, burst into tears. Every trite and indulgent description I had heard about seeing him was true. You don’t just see the Dalai Lama, you feel him. You don’t have to be a Buddhist or a pacifist or a hippie to feel him, although I’m not certain how I know this, since most people who know me would describe me as at least one of these things. But, I’m certain, that if you have a metaphorical heart, you’d metaphorically become aware of its beating in your body, happily impermanent and delightfully suffering through life.

He laughed. He lost his train of thought and so made us laugh. He told us how to change the world, how we must disarm ourselves of negative emotions: anger, hate, violence, jealousy in order to disarm the world. He had no script, no prepared speech. He stood up there with ease, and just talked to us. This is why I keep forgetting that I didn’t actually meet him.

If you’d like to believe you have met him too, you can download segments of his public speech here: http://www.emory.edu/dalai_lama.cfm.

When he finished, we all stood. He bowed to us. We bowed to him. And then he was gone, and the girls in the long skirts and patchwork bags lit up clove cigarettes. The group in suits grabbed their cushions, dusted off and moved briskly toward the Coke building. Students slung on their backpacks, couples grabbed children by the hand, and everyone filed out. Over where the fountain usually sprays water straight from the ground (we’re in a drought, the fountains are off) three monks stood smiling in their robes as a woman in turquoise took a photograph at their request, with their digital camera. Hundreds of people gathered under a tarp at the Tibetan Bazaar, where monks from the Drepung Loseling monastary sold t-shirts, singing bowls, prayer wheels, and mandalas.

I walked to the center of the park, in front of the stage where the empty seat of the Dalai Lama remained, and I sat on the grass. Monks were chanting over the speakers. Behind me a couple sat in half-lotus, his hair was long and hers was shaved, and they leaned toward each other, both slightly smiling, with their foreheads touching. It was beautiful and embarrassing, the way they were willing to love each other. I realized I wanted to believe that they were posing, even flaunting somehow, their spirituality, but they weren’t. I sat in the middle of the park until I was surrounded by wax paper Coke cups, butts of clove cigarettes, abandoned tarps, trash. I watched the monks file out on the side of the stage and disappear into a railed-off curtained area just like the almost-famous rock stars do after a concert.

I want to tell you that there was something bizarre about how it smelled like carnival food. I want to tell you that I think (and I’ve heard) that some of the Emory students were drunk. But, this somehow did not detract from the authenticity of seeing the Dalai Lama speak in person,  nor did that the atmosphere was tainted with disrespect, with consumerism, with a lack of awareness for that which is sacred. It just didn’t. Without sounding too Eliadean, the experience wasn’t auspicious despite the vulgarity of American culture, but because of it. It was hopeful to me that the same people who ate French fries, also applauded when the Dalai Lama called for us to make the 21^st century the “Age of Dialogue,” citing war as obsolete. Some of them wanted to light up cigarettes (and, mercifully, knew better) but were overcome enough to stand when he implored us to find greatness and value in religious diversity. Some people whistled and hollered like one would at a rock concert, but, hey---they were listening and accepting some pretty radical ideas, like peace and love and compassion for everyone, even the girl who was wearing a Tibetan flag to keep her shoulders dry, even the person who broke into your car and stole your brand new iPod, even for the sinners and the scorned and dirty and starved and mad. It’s certain hate doesn’t change a soul.

Watch the video. It’s at the bottom, segment 3 under ‘Public Talk-Centennial Olympic Park’. Your time is worth it. What you won’t see is that after His Holiness left the stage, and most people had begun to walk to the restaurants downtown, towards their parking space, or towards MARTA, one woman stood by the guardrail. As the monks walked by and ducked into the curtains, she blew bubbles at them. I thought it was odd, uncomfortably bold, but as each monk came out, he burst into laughter, waved at them, popping them with his hands. It’s a metaphor so obvious, that I’m not even sure if it is a metaphor, or if it was one of those rare times when the literal speaks for itself.

The Peace of Wild Things

Scenes from the weekend:

The line for the bathroom at the grand opening of Vinocity wasn't a line. It was a herd of women shifting their wine glasses in the air. Shawn Mullins was about to take the stage, and we hadn't even gotten our wine yet.  Outside, lights like large onions were strung over the brick alley where people were dancing or talking or setting their glasses down beside them too hard, laughing too loudly. Lightening in the sky threatened rain, but it never did.

.

Kirkwood is a neighborhood in Atlanta that's newly trendy. Wine bars, boutiques, restaurants that are all "fusion" of some kind, and white people with golden retrievers huddle together and wait for the neighborhood to spread and their investments to pay off. In between these lines is the statement that the area surrounding Kirkwood Station is predominately African-American and poverty-stricken.

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Music erupted and then went dull over the brick wall. Over the song, wine glasses clinked and when the door to the wine bar opened, a surge of conversation spilled out and then stopped abruptly as the door closed. Two African-American children had their faces painted white, red on their noses and cheeks, black around their eyes. They glowed on the sidewalk where they made circles on their bicycles around the street lamp.

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Two iced lattes at Inman Perk, where while I waited in line, rows of people sat around the bookshelves with their Mac notebooks open, caffeine-laced drinks and apricot muffins at their sides. No one knew that they were facing a stranger, almost brushing fingertips when they unplugged their earbuds from the backs of their laptops, almost staring at each other, but instead are blinded by the glow of a monitor, stock prices scrolling across the screen, something new has happened in the world and we must know it right away so we don't miss anything.

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I was waiting in line for another Strongbow. I knew my brother's drum solo was coming any second. Outside, everyone faced the stage. My drink sloshed over on my hand because I had decided to wear heels and because I was trying to run in them. I made it in time to watch my brother drum for five minutes straight, tossing a stick in the air with his left hand, imperceptibly switching the stick in the right to the left before catching the airborne stick with his right hand. He does this without missing, literally, a beat.

Drums remind me of wild animals. There is an authenticity to drums, when they are played right and when they are played without any other instrument. Most people don't know this because most people believe drums are the skeleton of a song, just the bones, worthless without a heart, skin, and a soul. The truth is, drums are a pack of antelope running from a cheetah. The drums are also the cheetah chasing its prey. It's a gratitude that in the end, truth is more powerful than fear. I listened and thought of a line from a Wendell Berry poem that I read the day before:

I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief.

After the drumming was over, everyone allowed two inches more of space between them. They had gathered into a single trembling body, leaning into the sound, without the forethought that they had become a herd, without the forethought that there is ever threat of a chase.

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This morning I was stopped at the light on Freedom Parkway. I have come to recognize the homeless men who walk up and down this street with signs and tin cans. One of them holds a sign that says he is a vet. One asks for help because he has cancer. One has a sign that says, "Why lie? I need a beer."

Lately, there have been hand painted signs that say: "God is love. Show it if you know it." They are tacked to signs and on wooden boards that rest on the street posts. Today, I saw a trace of the creator. Under a tree was some wood boards, an open jar of yellow paint and a jar of blue. He was not there, but there was proof of him.

Every few days, there are new signs, and they say the same thing. Today, I spotted something new. A slat of wood leaned against the street sign. A triangular shard of mirror was glued to the top, and underneath it said, "If You Were Me." I imagine the point is to see your own reflection, maybe even right there on the side of Freedom Parkway where there is the best view of the Atlanta skyline, where Martin Luther King, Jr. is given tribute, and where many of those we call homeless, call home. There's something else, though. The 'then' portion of the statement is implied, but I don't know what it is. If you were me...is the rest,  What would you do? What would you think? Say? What would you see? Would you have done something differently? Or, is it a statement: If you were me, you would know how I got here. If you were me, you would know that you can lose everything at any anytime. If you were me, you would be able to look at yourself.

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Or, it is unfinished. It is a piece of mirror glued on a slat of wood. If You Were Me. It's just something to try to wrap your head around while you stall the chase, while you look around at anything that will distract you from finding your own eyes in those of someone else.

For Katie, Who May Not Know Where to Look to Find This

I went up to a local bar yesterday after work about an hour before I was supposed to meet a friend. I brought some essays I've been working on, a pen, and my Moleskine, and hoped for inspiration to strike while drinking a cold beer in an air conditioned bar. Outside, Atlanta had reached one hundred degrees. At least, this is my excuse for having a beer on a weekday, before the sun has gone down.

Nothing happened.

I got piece of lime pulp in my hair. I smoked a cigarette. I listened to some of the regulars make liquid friendships.  It was Tuesday, the most meaningless day of the week.

I stared across from me at the empty side of the booth. The wood of the booth was dark except for in the middle, where it was discolored, as if set briefly on fire.  The shape of it was heart-like, and I realized, it was a pair of backs shifting in laughter. It was the tipping back of tequila shots. It was where two backs would rest once enough drinks made it necessary for them to need aid in holding up the body. It was friendship-shaped, wood wearing away at the act of two people sitting side by side, again and again.

I had invited an old friend to meet me for the beer I was drinking, but she had other plans. She is such an old friend, I don't know if we're really friends. Our six year old selves were convinced a loon lived in her backyard. A loon was a crazy man who loved the moon too much. Our teenaged selves were smoking pot outside my bedroom window and sneaking out to meet boys. We created fantastic worlds that only we understood, our very own mythology that was perhaps my first taste of faith.  Our twentysomething selves insisted we were still inseparable as we made other friends, as we developed relationships with men, as we struggled with things the other could not understand. Our thirty year old selves exchange emails that promise a dinner soon, or a drink because, you know, we're busy.

It's a loss that feels as natural as the death of a great-grandmother, and at the same time I am still fighting the truth of losing the person who is my most undeniable proof that I used to be someone else. It's a stranger thing than death to have the person you knew best, become someone you don't know at all. I don't want to sound too dramatic.  I know each of us would come running should the other need anything. The thing is, if one of us needed something, we'd have other people to call.

So something did happen last night between the hours of six and seven. I sat in a bar alone. I wasn't lonely. I realized that it is futile to insist the present be just like the past, but that if you know where to look, there is proof that two people sat side by side for so long that even the bench remembers them.