Dress Sizes

I enjoy the overstuffed Laura Ashley chinch cushions scattered carelessly around my cerebral office, like a cup of Joe on the go, so is my office. An anywhere room to retreat to, make notes in, to take comfort in, to sip Coppla’s Claret from cut crystal wine glasses, as needed.  I purposely decorated the virtual Room of my Own to resemble the real one—it reduced my bank balance by eighty thousand dollars and the single biggest purchase in my vast, and color-tainted life—because the physical room is the gateway to me.  It’s where my girl and boy collect.   ‘Mommy, can I?  Where are my…? Do you know..?  I need twenty dollars.  Do you have a book called Wuthering Heights?’  I wonder if the eighty thousand was wasted.

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Dear Lover~

I read an article tonight in the Arts and Entertainment section on the Wall Street Journal’s website. The article was about the loss of artist’s—poets and all others—muses. The writer mentioned Zelda, Gala, Yoko, Gonne, Georgia, and Suzanne (Fitzgerald, Dali, Lennon, Yeats, Stieglitz, and Balanchine’s respectively). There were other famous muses that I remember reading about over the years, it also mentioned others that I had no knowledge of, my incomplete education, I assumed.

The journalist only mentioned male writers, and their female muses! Appalling reporting I thought, what about us women, and our muses. I have to think all women artists have their own muses, but I couldn’t think of any except for Lillian’s Dash. According to the WSJ writer, the muse-world has thinned out, and while the male artist might still have a muse, the infamous relationship between the muse and the artist is no longer. My heart ached for the romance of the past.
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My family tree is sparse.  What I know about previous generations I learned by hiding behind the sofa when I was supposed to be in bed while the adults sat around the kitchen table reminiscing. I have more Intel from my mom’s side of the family because she and her sister’s were storytellers without knowing it. I wonder sometimes if this influence has something to do with my love of writing, and making up stories.

My Latin family had secrets, exotic and mysterious ones, and the only way to learn them was to resort to tactile maneuvers while the girls—my mom and her sisters–poured sweet wine into their tumblers while listening to an eclectic selection of albums, the combo set the tone for the story hours.  Telling stories preceded dancing, which meant the LP’s dropping down on the Magnavox were the mellow sounds of my dad’s collection.  It was probably Eddie Fisher, Patsy Cline, The Four Tops, and Dean Martin, anything pleasant that didn’t get the foot taping or change their mood.  A ritual went along with our annual family reunion dinners, rowdy drinking music during dinner preparation, Glenn Miller and Artie Shaw during dinner, and then after, background music during their memory weaving.  Much later, there would be more wine, and dancing music.
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I grew up in home with a father that restricted my television viewing.  I was almost a teenager before I realized that we had a color television.  I am not that old and the tube had been around a long while before I was born.  He wasn’t a PBS subscriber, and to be honest I don’t know if public television was even around then, and if it was, if we watched it.  He wasn’t a Harvard professor or even in a white color profession, he was a Latin man that married out of high school and worked long hours to support his young family, but he had educational passions that he pursued his entire life.
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I enjoy the overstuffed Laura Ashley chinch cushions scattered carelessly around my cerebral office, like a cup of Joe on the go, so is my office. An anywhere room to retreat to, make notes in, to take comfort in, to sip Coppla’s Claret from cut crystal wine glasses, as needed.  I purposely decorated the virtual Room of my Own to resemble the real one—it reduced my bank balance by eighty thousand dollars and the single biggest purchase in my vast, and color-tainted life—because the physical room is the gateway to me.  It’s where my girl and boy collect.   ‘Mommy, can I?  Where are my…? Do you know..?  I need twenty dollars.  Do we have the book called Wuthering Heights?’  I wonder if the eighty thousand was wasted.
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I read the poem….

“You Bring Out The Mexican In Me”
by Sandra Cisneros

 I fell on it.  I think that is the best way to find things, when it’s the last thing on your to-do list.

• Go to cleaners
• Stop at pharmacy and pick up Birth Control Pills
• Drop off the clothes from weekend closet clean out at the Goodwill
• Other mindless tasks that you hate doing but that need to be done

Nowhere on the list is

• Discovery of the unexpected

Without a warning, the unexpected finds its way into your life.  Such was this poem for me today. I read it through once without breathing or blinking.  I finished, and then released my muscles, my eyes leaked, and the air trapped in my lung bust through my mouth blowing me, and the chair on wheels that I sit on a few inches back.  WOW, that was big and mighty, so big that the sentiment settled into my skin for a long winter’s night.

I put it aside hoping to forget about it, but the voices clamoring in my head had other plans for me.  “It’s like the book, like the book,” they said.  Not exactly, but close enough to for me to pause and consider the possibility of an epiphany.  I had finished Hungry Woman in Paris by Josefina López recently, and the sparks flying in my head were connecting the dots between the two readings.
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