The Found Art of Dancing.

Friday night and company rolled into camp for the weekend. It was my husband’s sister and she is as much as fun as he is–always game for an adventure that promises a good time.

Gypsies like to dance so we invited our guest to a dance lesson at our dance studio where we are taking lessons, followed by a dance party where we could practice whatever we learned. The featured dance lesson that night was The Swing. Using all my powers of concentration, I moved my feet in the demonstrated patterns. I practiced a few rounds on my own. I practiced with a dance partner. I tried putting it all together with music.

It was great. We were all having a good time with a lot of laughs.

But then came the transition that used to make me pop out my eyeballs and drop my head onto the desk when I was a kid in school–it’s that moment when you’ve figured out how to add two plus two AND you’re good enough to get it to equal four, AND you’re satisfied–ready for recess. But the dang teacher waltzes over to your desk, puts his or her hands on your shoulders (tells you to pick your eyeballs up off the floor) and starts leading you further and further onto the dance floor. He or she wants you to find unknown values for x, y, and z using mathematical slices of pi.

You’re ready for this! The great educator smiles.

NO. You want to say. Can’t you see I’m in a happy place? Can’t you see I want to grow up and be a professional doodler?

If only I could learn how to mete out my powers of concentration, instead of using up everything I’ve got from the start.

After the dance instructor taught us the basics of bopping and swinging on the dance floor, he stopped the music and said the next thing we were going to learn how to do, was underarm turns. Turn is such a tame word because we weren’t turning, we were spinning. And, there wasn’t just one spin, there were three. I felt like a ballerina-school flunk-out spinning in a music box owned by Sid on Toy Story.

But I knew I just needed to regroup my powers of concentration, and see if I could get two plus two, to equal four plus four, to equal eight plus eight. I needed to figure out the dance pattern, learn how to count the pattern with the timing of the music, and do it all without looking at my feet. Grade-school never promised me that if I learned math, I would be able to dance. Actually, math is important if you ever want to learn anything that has to do with music. In fact, if all I ever did in grade school was learn how to play the great music of the world, using all the great musical instruments of the world, along with learning all the steps, to all the great dances of the world–well, there you have it: another one of my plans for education that would save the world.

After our dance lesson, it was time for the dance party. I’m too old to act silly, so I kept it to myself that all I wanted to do was throw not only my head, but my entire body out the window. I’m an introvert, too, so I’d rather stand in the corner and watch. And doodle. Honestly, dancing not only works out your brain, but you are expected to get your body in on the action, too. There are leaders and followers and it doesn’t happen in the safe, sedate world of cyberspace with a little thumb action–it happens in real time, with real brains and bodies grooving to music. There were waltzes, foxtrots, tangos, rumbas, cha chas, and other dances going on that did not look easy. It’s one thing to jump into the lake when you don’t know how to swim–you can thrash around on your own. It’s quite another thing to be thrown onto the dance floor, and find yourself thrashing in the arms of a stranger with twinkle toes that have been lovingly placed into a pair of official dancing shoes.

The polite dancers smile at you, tell you what to do, and after a few trips around the dance floor, they say: You’re ready for this!

*****

For the past several months, I’ve drawn a few doodles on the dance floor with my feet. I’ve filled my brain with counting patterns and steps. In between, there’s my body. My whole body. Every part of it can move to the music, with a partner. I’m the follower. And, oh, the places I go through the music of the world and the dances of the world.

There’s a lot of following going on in the world nowadays. Dancing is my kind of following–I get to meet the people I follow and together we perform the dances that used to bring people together in real time, for shared enjoyment and pleasure.

Anyone can learn to dance and begin traveling across dance floors close to home. The next thing you know, you and your dance partner will be lighting up the dance floors of the world.

But you have to know how to count!

*****

Buenos Aires. Our niece took us to a tango parlor, where the musicians and dancers cast a spell on us.

Nonviolence. The Legacy of MLK.

When Martin Luther King, Jr. was murdered, I was in a shoe store in downtown Ft. Wayne, Indiana. The somber news interrupted the store’s calm atmosphere: “Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. has be shot….” Ever-ready gusts of depression blew in and snuffed out all the excitement of getting new shoes. My birthday was the next day and I was going to be 8 years old. Up until then, my life had been dominated by news reports and images of violence crackling out from radios and onto newly-mass-produced TV screens—Vietnam, Civil Rights, the Cold War—all part of a steady stream of announced assassinations, race riots, protests, campus unrest, impending nuclear annihilation, evil communists. We left the shoe store immediately; my parents feared the city would react violently to the news of MLK’s assassination.

*****

Five years before MLK was murdered, he spoke in Ft. Wayne on June 5, 1963. Two months before that, he had written “Letter From a Birmingham Jail,” but had not yet delivered his “I Have a Dream Speech,” which would happen three months hence at the March on Washington. A year later, he would be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

Dr. John Meister, a pastor of the First Presbyterian Church introduced MLK during his visit to Ft. Wayne: “A glorious disturber of people and the peace.”

At the podium, MLK said, “Some say slow up. You’re moving too fast….But we are through with gradual-ism, token-ism, see how far you’ve come-ism….We have learned to stand up against the evil system—and still not hate in the process. We have discovered that love works miracles.” MLK warned that segregation was not just a problem for the American South, but that de facto segregation existed throughout the country.

King was right. One of the most troubling consequences of de facto segregation was that it created school systems throughout America which did not offer equal opportunities for education to all children. After MLK’s death, Ft. Wayne started trying to integrate their schools. None of us were prepared for the busing of Black kids into our all-white neighborhood schools. One day it just seemed to crash land in everyone’s front yard. Chaos ensued and while the adults were desperately trying to protect their children from harm, their children were desperately trying to make it through the school day. We were sexually and physically and mentally assaulted by each other. Our school bathrooms became war zones. So did the hallways, the lines for lunch, the gym locker rooms. I was a fifth grader in elementary school and the stories I heard about what was happening in the junior high schools and the high schools kept waves of fearful depression washing over me. At one point, I stopped going to school for several weeks. I didn’t tell anyone I was one of the girls being sexually and physically assaulted. I just kept saying, over and over again, “I have a stomach ache.”

*****

In honor of the MLK holiday, I took an excursion up the road through a driving rainstorm to go see the movie Selma. Most people in my region of the world were cheering on the New England Patriots, so I enjoyed a quiet night at the theater for one. I guess the movie isn’t getting the attention some say it deserves. I hope that won’t cause people to dismiss it as unworthy. The movie is not only well-directed with great acting and music, it’s also important because it’s a catalyst—it’s one of those films you go to see and after you see it, you start doing some research. You want to find out for yourself what’s true, what isn’t, and what happened to the people in the film. The movie triumphs as a work of art because it makes you think and thinking for yourself is one of the most crucial ideals of Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy:

“INJUSTICE ANYWHERE IS A THREAT TO JUSTICE EVERYWHERE.”

Injustice is everywhere. What do we do when we come upon it?

The legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. suggests that we consider the practices and philosophy of nonviolence. The MLK holiday, along with my excursion to watch the film, Selma, inspired me to learn more about MLK’s philosophy and strategies for nonviolence and how he developed them. One of the greatest men he admired was Mohandas Gandhi, best known as Mahatma (Great Soul) Gandhi:

“…I was particularly moved by the whole concept of “Satyagraha”. Satya is truth which equals love, agraha is force; “Satyagraha” means truth-force or love force…As I delved deeper into the study of Gandhi, my skepticism concerning the power of love gradually diminished, and I came to see for the first time its potency in the area of social reform. Prior to reading Gandhi, I had about concluded that the ethics of Jesus were only effective in individual relationships. Gandhi was probably the first person in history to lift the love ethic of Jesus above mere interaction between individuals to a powerful and effective social force on the large scale….It was in the Gandhian emphasis on love and nonviolence that I discovered the method for social reform that I had been seeking for so many months. The intellectual and moral satisfaction I failed to gain from the utilitarians of Bentham and Mill, the revolutionary methods of Marx and Lenin, the social contract theory of Hobbes, the “back to nature” optimism of Rousseau, and the superman philosophy of Nietzsche—I found in the nonviolence resistance philosophy of Gandhi. I came to see it was the only morally and practically sound method for oppressed people in their struggle for freedom.”

In MLK’s 1959 Sermon on Gandhi, he elaborated on points he’d made in a 1957 speech, Birth of a Nation:

“The aftermath of nonviolence results in the creation of a beloved community, so that when the battle is over, a new relationship comes into being between the oppressed and the oppressor. The way of acquiescence leads to moral and spiritual suicide. The way of violence lead to bitterness in the survivors and brutality in the destroyers. But, the way of nonviolence leads to redemption and the creation of the beloved community.”

King emphasized that the Beloved Community was not some utopian Garden of Eden with gentle serpents and luscious apples. The Beloved Community was a community of people devoted to the methods of nonviolence.

King’s study of Gandhi influenced his Six Principles of Non-Violence. In his first book, Stride Toward Freedom, (he was attacked and stabbed while signing copies of the book), he lists the principles:

1) Nonviolence is a way of life for courageous people. It is an active nonviolent resistance to evil. It is aggressive spiritually, mentally, and emotionally. 2) Nonviolence seeks to win friendship and understanding. The end result of nonviolence is redemption and reconciliation. 3) Nonviolence seeks to defeat injustice, not people. 4) Nonviolence holds that suffering can educate and transform. Nonviolence accepts suffering without retaliation. 5) Nonviolence chooses love instead of hate. 6) Nonviolence believes that the universe is on the side of justice. The nonviolent resister has deep faith that justice will eventually win. Nonviolence believes that God is a God of justice.

His Letter From a Birmingham Jail spelled out Six Steps for Nonviolent Social Change (Love in Action):

1) Information gathering. Become an expert on your opponent’s position. 2) Education. Inform others about your position. 3) Personal commitment. Eliminate hidden motives and prepare to accept suffering in your work for justice. 4) Discuss and negotiate. Use grace, humor, and intelligence. Do not seek to humiliate. 5) Use direct action. When the opponent is unwilling to discuss/negotiate—impose “creative actions” to supply moral pressure. 6) Reconciliation. Nonviolence is directed against evil systems, forces, oppressive poles, unjust acts, but not against persons.

*****

Most important of all to MLK’s activism and legacy was his wife, Coretta Scott King. She isn’t often listed as a great American Black woman, but she is one of the greatest. She was born in Alabama, was the valedictorian of her high school class, and attended Antioch College until she was awarded a scholarship to study voice and violin at Boston Conservatory of Music. Corretta Scott King met MLK in Boston when he was at Boston University. The two married and settled in Montgomery, Alabama. Mrs. King was the mother of four children. In her “spare time,” she composed and performed “Freedom Concerts” which combined prose and poetry narration with music. The funds raised from her concerts supported MLK’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Upon her husband’s death, she established the King Center—a legacy to the philosophy and practice of nonviolence. She traveled the globe on goodwill missions, she was arrested for protesting against Apartheid in Washington, she was an author, an activist, and a civil rights leader who championed women’s rights and gay and lesbian rights. She was awarded the Gandhi Peace Prize and more than 60 honorary degrees from colleges and universities. She worked exhaustively to establish the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday and, by doing so, she has kept the spirit of his dreams alive.

*****

If you watch the movie Selma you will get a sense for how the principles of nonviolence led to, among other things, the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. (1965! In America! Voting rights still being challenged!)

Talk about courage. It takes a lot of mighty hearts, and a lot of people willing to think, in order to rise above the injustice of Selma’s Bloody Sunday and its attendant vicious attacks against human dignity.

Watching authentic footage of the people marching from Selma to Montgomery I found myself wanting to look into the eyes of every freedom fighter. I wanted to touch the power of every heart that must have leaped into the arms of guardian angels that day, praying for the safety of all. Could I ever believe so fully in the weapons of nonviolence? In a situation as dangerous? In a country that claims to protect liberty and justice for all?

If I continue to study the principles of non-violence, and think of those who have practiced them before me, I think I could.

Romancing the Mind.

Why the Gypsy Apprentice? The autodidact? The pilgrim? It’s because I believe in the quest to feel life, so I can live it better.

For me, it’s not gut feelings that influence my decisions or processes. I’m more mindful of the feel of a shine to the heart, or a surge through the head. If I’m trying to learn something or trying to improve existing skills, or if I’m trying to care for relationships, or believe in myself–I want to replace fear, vulnerability, shame, and humiliation, with something better. Something that feel good. I seek the shine and the surge of elation, but I also know that I have to journey through the fundamentals in order to arrive at the shine. So there’s a kind of faith I believe in–it’s a promise–that if you keep trying, you’re going to be jumping for joy at some point. And, it will start out to be just a point, so brief–but memorable enough to hold your attention and make shame, humiliation, and frustration more bearable, more humorous, and more useful as you get better and better at living and learning.

We are born knowing how to breathe, our hearts already work, but we have to learn how to eat. We try drawing, reading, and writing. Then someone else shows us other ways to draw, read, and write. We observe, we self study, we copy, we practice, we ask for help, we are judged good and bad, we experiment, we fail. Then we try again. Or we don’t.

Once, my mother put a small clump of flowers–sweet alyssum–into my hands and told me to plant them in the garden. I was little and I didn’t know if I could do it. As my mother kept working, I kneeled nearby, watching her. I cradled the plant like a little fledgling that had fallen from a tree, afraid I would kill it and cause my mother to stop loving me. By mid-summer, the plant was blooming in the garden, saturating the breeze with its distinctive perfume every time I visited it.

There was the time I came upon the studio of a woman in Maine whose weaving and chair-caning skills mesmerized me. I asked her, “Where did you learn your art?” She said, “I taught myself.” It’s so hopeful, whenever I hear something like that. There is desirable prestige in being able to study with great masters and being able to attend great schools. But finding your own way to skill and knowledge is another excursion all your own. I am drawn to the wabi-sabi spirit in life, the perfect imperfections, the shine of a unique heart, revealed.

In Argentina, my husband and I were copying the patterns of other tango dancers in a dark and sultry warehouse in Buenos Aires. We danced around and around in a circle with everyone else, our bodies succumbing to shame, humiliation, fear of failure. And then, a teacher danced into our embrace and said to us, “Feel the music.” She stayed with us, holding us up, showing us how to believe in the music. The tango in Argentina is improvisational, you must feel the music.

This week, my son texted me: “How’s the blog going?” I texted him back: “Fun. I like practicing my writing skills.” He replied: “Good. It’s all about the feel.” It feels fun. Good. Like. Definitive words.

Today is Friday. The end of another week writing down words I don’t know, or words I liked, that I came across in my travels: scabrously, temerity, ableist, putrid and pitiful, caper about, baseness, slatternly. The week was not a bust.

I watched snow fall.

I made a good meal.

I began reading a new book.

I wrote letters and put them in the mail.

I called my mother and father.

I text chatted with my little niece–her incoming texts are so funny, not annoying at all. They are arrivals of shine and surge.

I blogged. What an ugly word–blog. I am a blogger I said to my daughter. A blogger. The word is ugly like booger-(which should be spelled like bugar, rhymes with sugar).

And–there was a day when the house was empty and cavernous and into that vast void flew the bedeviled foul breath of remembered shame, humiliations, vulnerabilities, and failures as I tried to work. I sat down at the piano. There has been a piano in my home since the year 2000 when my husband’s parents gave us $1,000 for Christmas to celebrate the new millennium and we used the money to buy a piano for our children. My husband, my son, and my daughter are all musicians. I am not and I have never played piano in all of my life. But I sat at the piano that day. I put my right hand on a set of keys. And then, I played a note. I don’t know what the note was, but I played another note and another and it sounded enough like Kumbaya that I kept pressing down keys in all the right orders until I had played the song. Then I played it on other positions on the keyboard. I loved how long the music from one tap of a piano key would linger and rise up, sounding so sweet, coating all the remembered ickiness in my mind with the bright yellows of corniness. I don’t think anyone has ever played Kumbaya on our piano. I am sure of it. Whenever streams of children sat at our piano, they played Mary Had a LIttle Lamb, or Jingle Bells, or Chopsticks, or Smoke on the Water. I remember how my son, during the bedeviled days of his adolescence, played Clapton’s Layla on that piano. We’d all jump on board his ship when he did it, happy to escape into the passionate anthem to angst.

The whole little foray in my home, the excursion to nowhere that ended up at the piano, put a shine to my heart.

And a surge through my head. I moved on through the day, the romance of my life restored.

Ten Books to Read Before You Die.

1. The ones your son gives you.

2. The ones your daughter reads over and over again.

3. The ones your son and daughter were assigned in high school and college.

4. The ones your son and daughter write.

5. The ones your husband reads, even if they’re about industrialists, capitalists, and how to achieve your dreams. Because he always reads the ones you give him to read about artists, dreamers, lovers, and rainbows.

6. The ones your mom and dad are reading and have read.

7. The ones your mom studied so she could master financial independence.

8. The ones your mom and dad give you.

9. The ones your sisters give you.

10. The ones your sisters write.

11. The ones your brothers and sisters give to your son and daughter.

12. The Bible. King James Version. (Might not finish before you die. But there will be versions of these stories wherever you end up.)

13. The Dictionary. (Hahahahaha)

14. The ones your friends, teachers, and spirit guides recommend.

15. The ones your friends write.

16. The one your sister-in-law suggests.

17. The ones you took from “take a book, leave a book” shelves in campgrounds. And the ones you bought from people you met in the gypsy camps–the ones they read aloud on the gypsy stages. Those precious pages of self-published souls.

18. The ones in the homes of your brothers and sisters.

19. The ones your nieces and nephews are reading. And writing.

20. The one your uncle mailed.

21. The ones your cousin gives you.

22. The ones your cousins write.

23. The ones that were dropped off for you when you were lost to grief and couldn’t think, or concentrate, or enjoy anything.

24. Every single one written, by every single one of your favorite authors.

25. Every single one written, by every single unappreciated woman.

26. The ones that protect the art of poetry within their pages.

27. The surprise ones you find in random bookstores in your travels.

28. The ones you read a zillion times to your children, and to other children, out loud.

29. Read those ones a zillion times more.

30. The ones about love.

31. This is all about love.

Chocolate Covered Marshmallows. Cold Roasted.

My daughter had a roasted marshmallow collection. I liked it the best of all her collections. But it’s a tough call.

Her feather collection was neat, too. I remember one tiny feather, and the way her small fingers pincer gripped it in a meadow where it hid, trying to pretend to be a blade of grass. We were out hiking. As soon as my daughter spied the feather; she captured it.

She organized her collection of feathers by sticking them into a repurposed block of styrofoam. We knew the blue jay’s feather, but everything else was known as biggest, smallest, tiniest, prettiest, coolest, best polka dots, best stripes. The collection is still on display in the library upstairs.

Her roasted marshmallow collection, though, was unique. She started it when she was in third or fourth grade because by then she was a champion marshmallow roaster.

Marshmallow roasting–real marshmallow roasting–inspires a life-long appreciation for patience. The fire has to be just right. (Use glowing coals, not flames.) The stick has to be just right. (Au natural, native to the campfire location, tip nicely cleaned with a few swipes of a jackknife.) And the marshmallows can’t be knock offs. (Jet-Puffed.)

At our campsites, the kids chopped the wood and built the fires. It was a wild thrill for them to be able to swing the axe, especially if they brought friends who never got to go camping. We had some good competitions setting logs up on a stump and waiting to see who could split them with one slam. There were a lot of strikes, but that just made the kids more determined to figure it out. Wood chopping uses the same tricks as baseball and golf–you gotta keep your eye on the ball–and, you have to keep your grip tight on the axe. We never lost any fingers or toes or arms or legs. Or noses. No eyes ever got poked out with the marshmallow sticks. No one’s hair ever went up in flames once the campfire started to roar. I’ll always be grateful to the gypsy winds for blowing fair through our camps.

So, my daughter’s Perfectly Roasted Marshmallow Collection was dedicated to preserving marshmallows that had been slow turned over the campfire coals just right–until a brown as soft as my daughter’s sun-tanned skin appeared–and then–ever so carefully–only for a few more turns beyond, in order to form a coating of delicate crunch. All gypsies admire excellence in the campfire arts.

Marshmallow roasting is a many-splendored thing. During one excursion to find the perfect stick, my daughter was led astray into a thicket on the shores of Lake Champlain in Vermont. She claims a flash of light distracted her and seduced her curiosity. Into the thicket she went as the sun set. I thought she was lost, but before panic stopped my heart, I heard her gleeful shouts and, soon after, I saw the silhouette of my little girl, back lit by the last glows of the day, leaping up and down. She had come upon the nearly-complete skeleton of a deer and when she showed me where it was, I couldn’t figure out how in the world she had ever crawled into such a tangled hedgerow. We braided the vertebrae onto a rope and marveled at how precisely they connected, one to the other. You can read all about how the world was made, but when your daughter finds a deer skeleton and you play around with it like a puzzle, suddenly the hand of God strokes your soul.

Here’s a simple way to make chocolate-covered marshmallows, sans the fuss of a campout. They are surprisingly fun to eat and there’s no waste–you eat the stick, too.

1. Put sturdy pretzel sticks into big marshmallows and line them up on parchment on a tray. I used Snyder’s pretzel sticks–not the skinny ones. You want some heft.

2. Set up bowls of decorating bling.

3. Rig up a double boiler. (I put a stainless steel bowl over a pot of water.) Break up a bar of dark chocolate–I used 70% dark, but you could use semi-sweet, too. I used one bar and it coated about twenty marshmallows.

4. Melt the chocolate and dip the marshmallows. You can dunk them or dip them.

5. Dab and dress the marshmallows up with chosen accessories. Here’s my version of desirable food porn:

6. Let the chocolate set outside if it’s wintertime and you live in a wonderfully wintry place. Keep a close eye out for bandits! Only takes a few minutes for the cold to roast the chocolate and create that perfect coating of crunch.

7. Check them out!

8. Wrap them up. I use butcher’s string to tie the sandwich bags. I cut off the zip-loc tops.

ONE TASTE HITS THE SPOT.

Habitat for Humanity. Building Soul.

First home. It’s a little house on the prairie or in the big woods. It’s a flower-laden cottage in the English countryside. With bunnies. It’s a Gilded Age grand slam on the coast of New England. It’s a tiki hut, well hidden, in a grove of bamboo along a river that runs to the sea, on the island of Kauai. (Three waterfalls crown the hanging valleys all around it.) It’s a castle in Scotland. A townhouse–in Paris, or Rome, or New York City.

It’s the first fort you built in the woods where you played all day without a helmet on, or a cell phone in your pocket, or a friend. You were all alone. It took you about three whistled and hummed versions of “Hey Jude” to ride your bike there. (The fat-tired junker from the town dump your dad fixed up. The bike had a fender, with a rack over it. You could stack and tie salvaged wood to the rack and haul it to your own building site in the forest. You took the wood from scattered piles of scrap around the construction sites of new homes that were popping up, like swarms of giddy grasshoppers, from the glacier-scraped flatlands of Indiana to form America’s newest suburban dreamvilles.)

Not yet ten years old–you staked out your fort’s foundation, leaned walls in on each other, and when you set the roof, your heart skipped a beat. You crawled inside and sat like a little buddha, all the world’s mysteries at rest inside the tranquil float of your newborn gypsy soul–the one you cleansed every Saturday morning in the confession stall at church. Where you told lies. Because you never kept track of your sins.

Gardens, you soon thought. Now that I have a home in the woods, I ought to tidy up the land around it and make everything look really nice. And you arranged rocks into nice rows, raked out the dirt, made little seats with logs.

************

I was displaced–always on the lam for a new home–throughout my life. From the time I was a baby until after college, I lived in about 13 different houses, in three disparate regions of America–the midwest, the southwest, and the northeast. I attended seven different schools from fifth grade through 12th grade. “Did all that moving and all of those schools have an effect on you?” Someone once asked me.

Here’s one story about it: My parents, who had seven children, (the last one was born in Arizona), scrambled through the economic classes in the blink of a childhood–mine. Mom and Dad’s first house looked like the houses in the picture below which stand across the street from where our house was–now there’s just a vacant expanse of grass near a warehouse in Ft. Wayne, Indiana, where the ideals of home started for my family.

Mom and Dad bought a new house eventually. (But kept the first one as rental property–a key move for building wealth.) The new house wasn’t much bigger. Dad built a garage behind it. (Sweat equity.) They planted a little tree in the front yard. It’s the only big tree on the street growing in any front yard–still. That tree is the most regal thing we left behind. A good way to leave your mark! “Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree.” Martin Luther.

Mom and Dad had more babies and bought another house. Mom began to design houses. She taught herself how to invest in real estate and the stock market. (Mom graduated from high school early, at 16, but never went to college.) Mom designed another house and they built it. The post-war boom years were losing steam. So Dad accepted a job opportunity in Mexico, just over the border from Arizona. Mom got her driver’s license and we all headed west in two station wagons. I’d been dreaming of becoming a hippie and going to California. But I ended up in the desert in Arizona. We lived, at first, in a house on a highway near the truck stop in the picture below. Pretty depressing. Then we moved to two apartments in a resort area–Mom, Dad and the littlest kids bunked down in one apartment. The older kids (including me) partied in the other. Mexican border+young kids in their own apartment+Led Zeppelin+late-night TV and poker games. Mom and Dad built a nice house for all of us eventually, but our family was like the rest of the country–as the Vietnam War faded and Watergate ushered in many more “gates” to come–we were kind of dazed and confused. After almost three years, Mom and Dad abandoned Arizona and we headed east. We moved to a town on the Connecticut shoreline when I was sixteen. I got my own bedroom. I learned about LL Bean and bagels and jocks and college. I unraveled the experiences of loneliness, alienation, being uprooted–and I came to realize that it doesn’t matter if you’re a gypsy or if you came over on the Mayflower and established a compound where your family has lived forever–if you’re on the lam from yourself, and you never find a place to call home, life won’t ever be special.

Mom and Dad’s sweat equity helped all seven of their children end up in college. We were like every other family–the wars inside of each of us, got mixed up with the wars between each other, got mixed up with the wars from intruders and events beyond our household. But–no matter where we lived–Mom and Dad made our house a home. We kept our homes fixed up, we planted gardens, and we ate dinner together.

************

A gypsy kid never forgets how cruddy it feels to be an outsider. When everything else is foreign to you, a home isn’t. It’s the one place where you can land and try to get it together and find someone to love. So, when I was approached, recently, by the Massachusetts Master Gardeners Outreach Coordinator and asked if I would consider volunteering as a garden designer for Habitat for Humanity, I didn’t even have to take a minute to think about it.

Habitat for Humanity was founded on, and remains devoted to, a non-denominational Christian housing ministry. People with scant resources who desire to own their own home (such a sacred dream!) can apply for a home through Habitat for Humanity regardless of race, religion, or ethnicity.

Volunteers must support the organization’s mission statement: “Seeking to put God’s love into action, Habitat for Humanity brings people together to build homes, communities, and hope.”

Habitat for Humanity is not a give-away. Applicants agree to invest 500 hours of sweat equity into the building of their own homes and they agree to help build other homes or, if they are disabled, they agree to work in other, suitable capacities. They pay their own mortgage. And–this is where I get to be involved–the new homeowners need to learn how to keep their homes looking nice outside and how to take care of their property. If any of them would like to learn how to become gardeners, (and some have already expressed interest), we will coach them and encourage them to do that also.

The first garden I ever had was outside my apartment building in Boston. It was about the size of my childhood bed–where I passed many nights pretending that someday I would be rich and have a swimming pool. That dream ended when I became a camping girl and my dream house started to look like this lean-to in Vermont with a view to the Green Mountains: If you look closely, the lean-to has a desk and a bookshelf in it.

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Habitat for Humanity believes sweat equity can build decent housing and dignity, it can create stability for families, it leads to health, safety, and security in communities, and–it opens up job and educational opportunities. I believe in sweat equity, too. It’s the one resource you have, when you begin with nothing, that will transform your life and enrich your soul.

“We have all known the long loneliness, and we have found that the answer is community.” Dorothy Day.

Everyone needs a place where they can set their soul afloat. And what a dream-come-true it would be, if you could call that place, home.

Words. Images. Communication.

The ancient art of satire and the art of cartooning can so effectively catch us off guard and make us laugh at ourselves. In the same way that you might learn more about someone when you discover what their favorite books are, or their favorite bands, or their favorite places to travel–the comics and cartoons they enjoy also reveal personality quirks.

I started out reading comics in the Sunday newspapers. The funny pages, as we called them, had a lot of uses: we’d press Silly Putty onto the colored pages to lift off imprints, we made hats out of the festive pages, and we used the Sunday comics as wrapping paper. Mom and Dad posted comics on the fridge:

Family Circle

If I had some extra money, I’d buy comic books:

I really liked Charlie Brown.

When I was a pre-teen obsessed with cute things, I collected the love is comics.

My university had a funny cartoonist, Paul Catanese. His comic strip, “Bedlam Hall”, branded all of us as last-minute crammers who couldn’t hold our liquor and couldn’t stand the dorm food. But we all thought ducks were cute. Here’s one:

It says: First square: Engineering nerd with glasses: “Snake sent me here. He says I’m too naive.” Dude with a goatee says: “We can fix that…Dregs will demonstrate how to use a bong.” Second square: Dregs is smoking a bong while the others watch. Third square: Dregs is starting to lift off. Fourth square: “Of course, a hit like that takes years of practice…”

My kids liked Calvin and Hobbes: Here’s one about how much Calvin hates everybody: “My parents are the two stupidest people on Earth.” “Just my luck they’d get married and have me.” “I hate everybody.” “I don’t see how anyone could ever fall in love. People are jerks.” Hobbes chimes in: “Sometimes they are, but look at all the colors on the trees today.” Calvin still grumbles: “Yeah? So what.” Hobbes: “I think it’s more fun to see something like this with someone than just by yourself.” Calvin thinks. “I guessss so…but I’d still rather see this with a tiger than a person.” Hobbes: “Well, that goes without saying.”

And, my kids liked Garfield:

It says: “Check out that cute girl over there!” Garfield warns: “And check out her big boyfriend returning with ice cream.” John returns with the ice cream cones plastered onto his chest: “Actually, it’s kind of refreshing.”

I have some old comics still on the fridge:

The commiseration: “I, too, am disappointed. But perhaps the joy was in the journey.” (F-Minus/Tony Carillo) I suppose you only like this cartoon if you grew up playing on playgrounds.

There’s another one on my fridge, by Tony Carillo, that I posted above a picture of my son, (the drummer and multi-talented musician), and my daughter, (the piano and guitar player who likes to sing):

It says: “Although your baby is quite healthy, our preliminary tests indicate that the child was…born to rock.” And the doctor looks really grouchy, like music department teachers look when they find out kids would rather devote their physical and mental efforts to rocking and rolling instead of playing in the marching/pep band for the football team.

And, just yesterday, I found a funny cartoon worthy of the fridge, which doesn’t happen often. (Bizzarro by Dan Piraro) It’s a couple of cowboys riding through the Old West and one is riding a donkey piñata.

Then, today, I found another cartoon to keep. This one will be posted in our barn. It’s Doonesbury (part of a series saga, but this little excerpt works fine for us on its own):

Hippie Mom and Dad huddled together near a fire hose: Square one, Dad says: “Everything under control, Inspector?” Fireman answers: “Seems to be, you folks okay?” Square two: Dad: “Well, we’re understandably shook up. Any idea what caused the blaze?” Inspector: “Yeah. It started in the barn…” Square three: Inspector: “Looks like it was caused by a burning cigarette. My guess is it was a marijuana joint.” Square four: Dad: “Hear that, Honey? It was those damn kids!” The inspector advises: “You should have kept it locked. That’s what I do.”

I found this cartoon in the New Yorker the year my son was accepted at Bard College. I couldn’t believe it. We delivered him to Bard in our motorhome–where he’d spent all the years of his youth traveling throughout the northeast. It’s a drawing of a boy with a Bard sweatshirt meeting another boy who says to him: “I was motor-home-schooled.”

Here’s one my son drew when he was little. I think it’s about me.

Boy watching TV, Mom nags him: “That stuff’s boring! How do you watch it?” And, later, when Mom is gone, he is free and happy to watch, un-assaulted, whatever boring stuff he wants to watch: “Today…on, A Napkin’s Life Cycle…”

Here’s one of my son’s later creations, fifth grade. His characters Lizardo and Dude:

And lastly, here’s a little cartoon, which is a refrigerator magnet. I bought it in Acadia National Park last fall. I guess this represents something that is always on the minds of those of us who wish the people of the world would learn to stop harming each other with such useless violence.

Pablo Neruda. Gypsy Camp Visitor.

Gypsies don’t have televisions in their bedrooms. But they have books. This morning I reached for Stephen Tapscott’s translation of Pablo Neruda’s Cien Sonetos de Amor. 100 Love Sonnets. The collection arrived to the world, in Spanish, in 1960. It was the same year I was born. No one in my country of birth knew of Pablo Neruda then, but it would happen soon—that he would become known as a man to revile, during the tumultuous and despairing times of the Cold War, for his political passions and involvements—which spanned the globe.

The book came to me through my son, who read it in high school for an English class. There is some marginalia on page 15 that I recognize as his handwriting: “Sunday: NOTICE NATURE. Bring it in.” What an absurd school assignment for a gypsy child. But it was 2008 or 2009, and, by then, many children in my country had stopped wandering off into nature. (Neruda wrote that he made his sonnets out of wood.) The page also has my son’s drawing of a bird, or maybe it is a bug—with wings—holding a bow and arrow. There are two hearts drawn, shot through with an arrow. They are marked with my son’s initials and those of someone he was thinking about during class. The drawings are underneath Neruda’s unabashed sensuality, represented by words, on the page. Here are the last lines:

“But my heart went on, remembering your mouth—and I

went on.

and on through the streets like a man wounded,

until I understood, Love: I had found

my place, a land of kisses and volcanoes.

On page 7, there is a graphic doodle on the left side of the page my son did during class. And many years later, I added my doodles to it.

And, at last, on dog-eared page 171, is the sonnet I found again this morning.

“De viajes y dolores yo regrese, amor mío…”

“My love, I returned from travel and sorrow

to your voice, to your hand flying on the guitar,

to the fire interrupting the autumn with kisses,

to the night that circles through the sky.

I ask for bread and dominion for all;

for the worker with no future I ask for land.

May no one expect my blood or my song to rest!

But I cannot give up your love, not without dying.

So: play the waltz of the tranquil moon,

the barcarole, on the fluid guitar,

till my head lolls, dreaming:

for all my life’s sleeplessness has woven

this shelter in the grove where your hand lives and flies,

watching over the night of the sleeping traveler.”

Neruda’s dedication in the book, to Matilde Urrutia:

“Señora mia muy amada…”

“My beloved wife, I suffered while I was writing these misnamed “sonnets”; they hurt me and caused me grief, but the happiness I feel in offering them to you is vast as a savanna. When I set this task for myself, I knew very well that down the right sides of sonnets, with elegant discriminating taste, poets of all times have arranged rhymes that sound like silver, or crystal, or cannon fire. But–with great humility–I made these sonnets out of wood; I gave them the sound of that opaque pure substance, and that is how they should reach your ears. Walking in forests or on beaches, along hidden lakes, in latitudes sprinkled with ashes, you and I have picked up pieces of pure bark, pieces of wood subject to the comings and goings of water and the weather. Out of such softened relics, then, with hatchet and machete and pocketknife, I built up these lumber piles of love, and with fourteen boards each I built little houses, so that your eyes, which I adore and sing to, might live in them. Now that I have declared the foundations of my love, I surrender this century to you: wooden sonnets that rise only because you gave them life.”

In my gypsy life, I fell in love with a guitar player. We got married. We found an old barn and took great care in choosing all the wood we used to build the barn up after it had been abandoned and left to die. Inside this little shelter of ours, I read poems out loud. I do it in the same way that my true love plays his guitar—for the simple joy of doing something that brings me pleasure.

Excursions

The Gypsy Apprentice

Category Archives: Love

The Found Art of Dancing.

Nonviolence. The Legacy of MLK.

Romancing the Mind.

Ten Books to Read Before You Die.

Chocolate Covered Marshmallows. Cold Roasted.

Habitat for Humanity. Building Soul.

Words. Images. Communication.

Pablo Neruda. Gypsy Camp Visitor.