It occurs to me that I do more thinking about life, than
actually living my life. I plan. I plot. I dream of different scenarios of what
my future could look like. That’s nothing new. I’ve been doing it as far back as I can remember.
Even when I’m busy doing a boring or repetitious job I’ll be transported in my
head to another place, another time and that sometimes gets me in trouble,
especially when I’m driving on the expressway because it causes me to miss my off
ramps. In the meantime, how much of real life is passing me by? Once in a
while I’ll get on a kick where I feel I need the discipline and practice of living
in the moment. You know the drill: if you’re slicing tomatoes you pay attention
to the way the knife cuts through the red skin, the subtle smell that drifts up
and how you do your next slices so they’re all even and beautifully fanned out
on the cutting board. I can only do the living-in-the-moment exercise for so
long---a week tops---before something in my brain calls up images of things like spending
the summer on Nantucket, playing the role of a Bohemian artist and before you
know it, all my tomato slices or clean socks are mismatched.
Have you ever looked up the word “Bohemian?” I just had
Alexa define it for me and she came up with six different meanings. Picking out
the one I like the best, she said a Bohemian is, “A person, as an artist or
writer, who lives and acts free of regard for conventional rules and practices.”
I know what’s keeping me from spending the summer as a Bohemian artist on
Nantucket---it would cost a bundle of money and I look gad-awful in floppy sunhats---but there is
nothing but my own inhibitions keeping me from being a Michigan Bohemian. That
and I truly am a conventional kind of person when it comes to following the
rules of society. So what does being a Bohemian really mean to
me? I ask myself for better clarification.
And all I can come up with for an answer is a wish to be a really, really
good artist that has people admiring the crap out of my work and telling me I’m
the reincarnated John Singer Sargent minus the scandal of Madame X. My childhood dreams are still my
childhood dreams. (It's all my mom's fault for letting me sleep with my first big box of Crayolas.) But have I lived the life where my art comes first above
everything else? For over a decade, yes, I did but for the
past 35 years art has come to rest at the bottom of the to-do list. You can’t (or a least I can't) achieve perfection at anything without a total
devotion and the selfishness that's seems to be its Siamese twin. The most artistic thing I give my time to now is trying to write a shopping list I can
actually read when I get to the grocery store.
I was thinking and writing about all this while having lunch
at the Guy-land Cafeteria but I got distracted by my apparent low tolerance for
children in a place that is normally filled with older people. Every single one
of the five kids near me were annoying including the two who were well behaved
and looked like they belonged on a Norman Rockwell Life Magazine cover. At
another table another pair of whinny kids were making their
mother look like a slug with no ears. The little girl---about four or five---had never been introduced to a comb or brush and I expected cooties to escape her head and come over to my table. Her older brother kept
standing up in the booth to get a better view of the other diners. Across the aisle from me another mother was telling her son to put his shoes back on or she
was going to pull his pants down and whoop him in front of everyone. He no more
than got his shoes on when Stand-Up Boy kicked his shoes off and in the direction
of the mom who threatens bare-butt spankings. Stand-Up Boy’s sister
decided that was a good time to push her whining up to a higher decimal point and demanded
that her French fries be cut in half. Who does that?
I had gotten a chocolate brownie to go with my grilled
cheese sandwich which was a good thing because I needed all the comfort foods
I could get, but I was wishing my mom had been there with me. Her kids or not,
she would have gone into drill-sergeant mode and told Whinny Girl to straighten
up or she’d give her something to whine about and she’d have told the shoeless
boys she was taking their shoes away for a week. “Don’t want to wear shoes?
Let’s see how you like walking on those hot sidewalks outside without them.” It’s
at times like that when I know the Universe knew what it was doing when it didn’t
give me the power to propagate babies. Back in the day, my mom might have been praised for her methods
of controlling children but in today’s world I would have ended up in Social
Services Prison where being a Bohemian in mind, body and/or spirit would not be
tolerated. ©
Note: The Painting at the top is one of John Singer Sargent's. Madame X is at the bottom. It was originally painted with the one of the dress straps falling off her shoulder which shocked the art world and was labeled "titillating" and "indecent." Yes, slut shaming in 1884, at a time when the art salons were filled with classical paintings of nudes. Figure that one out. He repainted the strap after the painting's debut but her reputation never recovered. In 1916 when he sold the painting to the Metropolitan Museum of Art Mr. Sargent renamed it to Madame X, not wanting to cause the socialite more grief by having her name forever associated with the work.
Note: The Painting at the top is one of John Singer Sargent's. Madame X is at the bottom. It was originally painted with the one of the dress straps falling off her shoulder which shocked the art world and was labeled "titillating" and "indecent." Yes, slut shaming in 1884, at a time when the art salons were filled with classical paintings of nudes. Figure that one out. He repainted the strap after the painting's debut but her reputation never recovered. In 1916 when he sold the painting to the Metropolitan Museum of Art Mr. Sargent renamed it to Madame X, not wanting to cause the socialite more grief by having her name forever associated with the work.
