Do Bold Things, Live Large---or Not

It’s Saturday morning and I should be half finished with writing a post for next week but inspiration isn’t coming. I have a file of possible topics to write about when my muse leaves me and even that file is uninspired. It’s filled with poems and half written posts---some I just deleted because their timing has come and gone. Also in that file I’d bookmarked several pages at Advanced Style Magazine. That internet based fashion blog for older women both fascinates me and revolts me at the same time. I would never in a hundred years dress like those women but I’d love to have the self confidence to do it, not to mention the money. It would cost a fortune to come up with the costume quality of their unique looks day after day as they walk the streets of New York.

Sue Kreitzman (photo above) was born a year after I was and is the author of many cookbooks. She's also a pop-culture artist who’s been featured a time of two at Advantage Style and she says when she leaves the house she wants to take her art with her and she likes to push the envelope to one step below looking like a clown. In an i-D Vice article about Sue they included a CCN video tour of her New York apartment and I don’t know about you, but it would drive me to Crazyville to live with that Colorful Clutter Fest. (When I'm not trying to be a Nice Nancy, I'd call her apartment a hoarder's nest.) I do admire her philosophy of life, though, but I couldn’t live it. “Be bold, be adventurous. Do profound things, dazzle yourself and the world. Contribute to society, and live large. Life is short, make every moment count. It is never too late to find your passion.”

My passion at the moment is watching the first squirrel I’ve seen since I moved here last October. The complex just put landscape bark down around some steam vents opposite my den window and the Fox squirrel is having a grand old time digging it up to find nuts that he then goes all over our green space to find a place to relocate the nuts underground. One nut, though, he took to our piazza which is all cement except for a 2’ x 10’ strip of bark around some shrubbery. And that’s where the little ‘genius’ choose to bury it. Another time he took a nut on a full tour of the green space only to come back to bury the thing two feet from where he found. Inquiring minds want to know how did the squirrel know to come across the green space from the woods beyond to look for nuts in the bark?

Back to Sue. She says something else that I find amusing: “I am not really an old lady, just cleverly disguised as one.” You can bet money that I’ll find a way to work that into a conversation around here and that’s about as profound and bold as I’m getting these days. Except for the fact that I’ve been eating my lunch alone on the piazza lately so who knows how long I’ll have to wait to say it. Others here say it’s too hot out there but for someone who is always cold from anemia it feels great even if occasionally it’s like eating in a wind tunnel. The piazza overlooks a lake and the wind coming across it blew the sunglasses right off my face once and chair cushions from the decks that over look the piazza are routinely banged up against the resident’s glass doors.

According to the IT guy the wind is responsible for the bad TV reception in the lakeside apartments. It cuts in and out. I love hearing the cons about owning one of those apartments with the fabulous views. It keeps my jealousy at bay. The wildlife they get to see every day, all day long is like a stop at Diary Queen or Starbucks to me---an occasional treat. I’ve got the squirrel. They’ve got swans, geese, ducks, herons, egrets, turtles bigger than dinner plates, three foot koi, hawks and harriers. 

Do bold things, live large. That advice from Sue sounds good but its not that easy to follow and I question if people who are "on" all the time, who are always looking for the next bold thing to do, might be trying too hard to be happy? I would also question if anyone whose living space is a hoarder’s nest is truly happy. Sue’s apartment is a colorful, well organized hoarder's nest that gets photographed and praised because she's well known but so was Howard Hughes before his eccentric behavior, his obsessive-compulsive disorder took over his life. Rich hoarders fascinate us but poor hoarders who live in gray mountains of plastic bottles and old newspapers we report to our the zoning boards.

One might make a solid case for there being a difference between hoarding and collecting. According to the Mayo Clinic website the difference is that collectors search for specific items where a hoarder can’t part with anything. Sounds good on paper but I say there is a lot of overlapping of the two. Haven’t we all seen collections that have taken over someone’s life? Doll collectors, Avon bottles back in the day. Someone living here has over 200 blue bottles in her one bedroom unit. 

We knew an artist once who saw beauty and value in broken things. He wanted a worn out broom my husband took off his street sweeper because he saw it as the body of mythical creature/sculpture. A few years later that artist was fighting with the zone board because his rusty metal sculptures took over his yard. All marked for sale, but marked so high no one would buy them. We had tried to buy the dragon with the old street sweeper body but the artist kept raising the price because he couldn't let his 'baby' go even knowing the city was breathing down his neck to get rid of it all. I suspect that’s true of a lot of the 'art' in Sue’s apartment. ©

 Photo at top by Michele Martinali

"I’m a Lazy Slug," Confessed the Widow

If you look up the term ‘Lazy Slug’ you’ll find my picture and this explanation: Lazy slugs can’t be motivated short of using an electric cattle prod. Lazy slugs know there are things to do and places to go but instead of doing and going they live inside their heads. Lazy slugs spend so much time playing on their computers they wear the letters off their keyboards and can't help wishing those keys came with heaters like seats in automobiles. And lazy slugs have been known to erase the word ‘Monday’ at the top of a job list and write ‘Tuesday’ or ‘Wednesday.’ 

Yup, here it is Wednesday and I’m still working on Monday’s job list. Worse yet, it’s almost February and I’ve yet to complete December’s goal list. I had planned to deep clean the entire house this winter and all I’ve gotten done is two rooms with five to go. Or is it six, seven or eight? I can never decide if the laundry room and the dining area get counted as rooms since they’re connected to other rooms with no door to close them off, and since the two bathrooms are small, should they count as one on a cleaning chart?

Lazy slug that I am, I read the words of Sue Kreitzman on a Post-it note above my computer with no reaction. “Be bold, be adventurous. Do profound things, dazzle yourself and the world. Contribute to society, and live large. Life is short, make every moment count. It is never too late to find your passion.” I read those words then I go back to picking lint out of my belly button. Metaphorically speaking, of course. Everyone knows you pick at your belly button lint in the bathroom where you have a magnifying mirror.

I wish I could be bold and adventurous but someone has to deep clean my bedroom closet this week. The only way I’m going to find adventure in there is if I fall off my step stool and break a bone while surrounded with red hats from the box I smashed in the fall. I know why I’m dragging my feet about cleaning the closet. I still haven’t lost the five pounds I gained over the holidays and I’m afraid to play the game of what fits and what doesn't. I still have a box of too big clothes sitting in the garage ready to donate from the last time I cleaned the closet even though I go past Goodwill once a week. I have a serious problem letting go and believing in my ability to maintain the size I'm wearing. Even my Fitbit has lost faith in me. It gives me a weekly report that I’m not meeting my goals. Get in line Fitbit, I’ve got goals all over the place that aren’t being met. If I ever win the lotto---which won’t happen since I haven’t bought a ticket in years---I’d hire a personal assistance to meet all my goals for me. And that day-dream has Lazy Slug written all over it.

In all seriousness, how is it even possible to take Sue Kreitzman’s advice to live large, dazzle yourself and do profound things making every moment count when the mundane chores of life keep getting in the way? If I don’t go to the grocery store, for example, the dog and I would eventually have to eat that back-up box of Bisquick in the cupboard or starve to death, and if I don’t do the laundry I’d be a smelly old lady trying to live large and that won’t work well in this age of grooming products galore, including belly button brushes. (Yes, I have one. I’m obsessed with belly button lint. Where does it all come from and why is it sometimes pale purple?) And if I didn’t take time out to be a lazy slug I’d never hear my inner voices debate the meaning of life and what it’s going to take to make me truly happy. Without my lazy slug down time, I never would have figured out that if I want to paint my niece-in-law's portrait it doesn’t matter if her eyes are hazel or gray because either way I’m going to have to buy a damn tube of Naples yellow to mix both those colors.

Have you ever admired someone but no way on earth would you want to live their life or be them? That’s the way I feel about Sue Kreitzman. She’s an artist who says that “color is like a drug" that she can't live without and "it makes life possible." She’s flamboyant and walks the talk but if I lived in her house or clothes I’d go stark raving mad in a month. I’m the anti-Sue and I suspect that if everyone was like her she’d become as subdued as a Rembrandt painting…all raw sienna, burnt umber, lead white, yellow ocher and bone black. What I admire, though, is she knows who she is and what it takes to make her happy. We should all be so lucky as we negotiate the life changes that come with aging or loss and as we live small while dreaming big. ©

                                                                 Sue Kreitzman