June 17, 2009
I am interested in what other people have to say about love. Granted, I am more interested in reading about what they have to say about love than actually conversing about it. Maybe that’s akin to my aversion to talking about religion. I like reading about it, but it’s uncomfortable to talk about it.
But as I’m reading all of these New York Times pieces on Modern Love, and responding to them in what seems to be becoming my own series, love isn’t the flickering thing I am thinking about. I am thinking about how I want to be a writer.
Damn. My desire to be a writer is one of those deep and shameful truths that lies close to my bones. I keep it in the same place with my jealousy of my niece (me, twenty three, her, four), my resentment of my sisters’ exclusive friendship, my desire for real honest-to-God true love, and all of those other horrible, immutable true things I know about myself. Wanting to be a writer, though, isn’t an emotion in the same way that jealousy is. I could do something about it. Unfortunately, another one of those horrible truths that, ironically, sits right next to “Desire to be a Writer” is “I Really Like Security.” What self-respecting twenty-three year old person would be willing to admit that?
I like security because I grew up, in the sense that I spent the years from two to fourteen, in one comfortable house. My childhood in this sense was very different from my sisters’. I hate moving; one of my sisters feels like the walls are closing in if she stays somewhere more than two years, or so she told me several years ago. I am actively thankful for my healthcare: having been hospitalized about once a year for the past nine years with asthmatic episodes, not to mention needing three maintenance prescriptions a month, keeps me fully aware of how much I need it, and am thankful for it. I like to be comfortable, I like to be stable. I am the most boring twenty-something alive.
Except for that truth that lies close to my bones.
I have always written things. Things that in retrospect are horrifying and hilarious (I began my memoirs at age eight, to abandon them two weeks later), but nevertheless, the act was always there. Rilke understood the truth, and he said something like how if you ask yourself “can I not write?” and the answer is no, then you’re a writer. Fairly simple equation, right? As I’ve gotten older, my writing has moved (although not entirely) away from brief and repetitive fantasies of happiness towards a more confessional essay mode. It makes sense—I’ve also kept a journal since I was fourteen, so the streamlining of journal writing, inner-monologue, and internal ruminations was bound to take place eventually. Did I mention I’m lazy too?
So reading these New York Times pieces tugs on me—it tugs at my essays. I would not have the slightest idea of how to begin submission. I had a close encounter with publishing once, which ended up bitterly disappointing me at an already difficult time, so I am understandably gun shy. The writing is easy—it’s always been happening—but actually doing something with the writing is tempting and shamefully nauseating.
I worked in the special collections library my sophomore summer of college, and in cataloguing boxes, I became traumatized to think of some student, however many years later, cataloguing my box: my poor little poems, essays, journals, alone and cold in a box in a basement. That fear flared in me, and I became briefly adamant that I would pursue publication. I didn’t want to be Emily Dickenson.
I put together a “collection” of my own poetry. It was a strictly vain project: I wanted to see them all in one place. It is an interesting personal timeline—tracking from my Slam Poetry, which were valuable poems in an occasionally obnoxious medium, through my senior year writing class, many of which are colored by the death of a friend. I love that little “book,” in the binder I bought at the drug store on Main St. In time, I’ll probably put together another one, this time of essays.
Maybe I’ll figure out where to send it. Maybe I’ll just keep it on my shelf: ghosts next to real publications. And when I continue, as I inevitably will, to read essays at nytimes.com, I’ll see the ghosts of my own essays on the screen.
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Reflections on “Modern Love”: Love Rock
June 16, 2009
I just read an article, conveniently provided by nytimes.com, that I found under the heading of Modern Love, which had so interested me a few days ago. Turns out, Modern Love had risen to number 1 in popularity. Could it be because it’s a Tuesday?
The point I liked, and am holding onto to turn over in my head, is something about love being a verb and not a noun. Love as a noun is often experienced retrospectively or from the outside. You hear about someone who found love like you find a rock or a shell. I have rocks and shells all over my apartment—it’s sort of a compulsion. The comparison is a little jarring. You find your love rock, dust it off, are pleased with yourself for having spotted it, take it home, and leave it on your table or your shelf. Odds are, when you go back to it however many days or months later, it won’t have changed much. If we’re playing the mad-lib game, “I don’t know much about love but _____.” I would fill in “I know that it changes.” Maybe that’s why some people find the love rock, take it home, leave it there, come back and are shocked that it’s changed. The love is different, it’s not as you remembered, or in some cases it’s just plain gone. I’ve never mourned over misplacing a shell or a rock. I guess that’s a key difference.
How convenient, though, to find your love rock: fully formed and ready to go. I had a love rock last year. What I picked up, from a restaurant and not a beach, turned out to be pretty much a fully formed, instant relationship. It was noun love. Unfortunately, it was a noun that didn’t translate over distance. How do I carry that metaphor forward? I lost the love rock? He threw it away? I’m turning in circles trying to find its logical conclusion. In any event, for whatever reason, this was one of those “just plain gone” cases.
But what about verb love? I’m engaging in an ambivalent friendship with a guy I met several months ago… the situation is all wrong, and for some odd and novel reason, my heart is listening to the case my head is making. There is no particular noun between us, but there are many verbs, which are a lot less complicated at the moment than trying to foster an ill-fitting noun. It is easy at the moment to just verb, but I long, if unadvisedly, for the noun; something to hold up to the light and admire. How sad.
I met someone this morning at my bus stop, someone who is inevitably in a relationship, which I judge from noting that his dachshund had a pink harness on. But I found him, if only briefly. The possibility of an anecdotal meeting creates the ghost of a noun, a rock, a story I am writing that is nothing but fiction. I know that I will never see him again, and if I do, he and his dachshund will be accompanied by their mutual love (insert suitably irritating woman’s name). Nevertheless, the ghost of the noun keeps me warm this morning. That could be because it’s a Tuesday.
I just read an article, conveniently provided by nytimes.com, that I found under the heading of Modern Love, which had so interested me a few days ago. Turns out, Modern Love had risen to number 1 in popularity. Could it be because it’s a Tuesday?
The point I liked, and am holding onto to turn over in my head, is something about love being a verb and not a noun. Love as a noun is often experienced retrospectively or from the outside. You hear about someone who found love like you find a rock or a shell. I have rocks and shells all over my apartment—it’s sort of a compulsion. The comparison is a little jarring. You find your love rock, dust it off, are pleased with yourself for having spotted it, take it home, and leave it on your table or your shelf. Odds are, when you go back to it however many days or months later, it won’t have changed much. If we’re playing the mad-lib game, “I don’t know much about love but _____.” I would fill in “I know that it changes.” Maybe that’s why some people find the love rock, take it home, leave it there, come back and are shocked that it’s changed. The love is different, it’s not as you remembered, or in some cases it’s just plain gone. I’ve never mourned over misplacing a shell or a rock. I guess that’s a key difference.
How convenient, though, to find your love rock: fully formed and ready to go. I had a love rock last year. What I picked up, from a restaurant and not a beach, turned out to be pretty much a fully formed, instant relationship. It was noun love. Unfortunately, it was a noun that didn’t translate over distance. How do I carry that metaphor forward? I lost the love rock? He threw it away? I’m turning in circles trying to find its logical conclusion. In any event, for whatever reason, this was one of those “just plain gone” cases.
But what about verb love? I’m engaging in an ambivalent friendship with a guy I met several months ago… the situation is all wrong, and for some odd and novel reason, my heart is listening to the case my head is making. There is no particular noun between us, but there are many verbs, which are a lot less complicated at the moment than trying to foster an ill-fitting noun. It is easy at the moment to just verb, but I long, if unadvisedly, for the noun; something to hold up to the light and admire. How sad.
I met someone this morning at my bus stop, someone who is inevitably in a relationship, which I judge from noting that his dachshund had a pink harness on. But I found him, if only briefly. The possibility of an anecdotal meeting creates the ghost of a noun, a rock, a story I am writing that is nothing but fiction. I know that I will never see him again, and if I do, he and his dachshund will be accompanied by their mutual love (insert suitably irritating woman’s name). Nevertheless, the ghost of the noun keeps me warm this morning. That could be because it’s a Tuesday.
Reflections on “Modern Love”: Sticking Points
June 12, 2009
I just had kind of an interesting moment when, after an excruciating morning, I decided to take a little time before my lunch break to do one of my favorite “at work but not exactly working” activities: cruise the NYT website, especially the “most popular” section. I noticed there’s not only a “most frequently emailed” section, but a “most searched” section. Up there with China, Obama, Cancer, Air France, and Swine Flu, is Modern Love. That kind of brought me up short.
So is the appearance of “modern love” on the most searched list encouraging or depressing? Or is it both?
I had my first Match.com date last night, and was much encouraged. We had emailed for a little while, and in the perfect conversational arc, he asked me out to dinner. I consider the breakthrough of the night to be, when I asked him what his favorite books were, he began a standard list of non-fiction and generally modernist stuff, then added as an afterthought something about how he didn’t want to freak me out with all of his sci-fi favorites. In reply, I pulled out my very worn copy of “Belgarath the Sorcerer” from my bag and said, “NOW we can have a conversation.”
Our date ended on a lukewarm note, although my sister pointed out that physical contact on a match first date might have been a little weird. It’s hard to adjust my expectations in this new world of dating in which I find myself: the greater Boston area, circa now.
I am now one year out from my ex (ptuh ptuh). Our first date went a little differently for any number of reasons: we lived in a small college town; we met in person and had instant chemistry; we saw a lot of our own outgoingness and charisma in the other, and therefore weren’t as cautious about showing too much too soon. What seemed in large part to be a relationship taking its cues from a romantic comedy ended badly, when he left me for New York in (in my opinion) an unnecessarily cruel way. (New York, incidentally, has taken to absorbing the men I could potentially be or am in love with—a disturbing phenomenon.) And so, after having moved to Boston and not being a club or bar person by any stretch of the imagination, I joined the website and entered a strange world of looking for modern love.
Where is the line between lowering your expectations and simply being realistic? Is there even a line? Sometimes it’s a little easier to tell. Walking to my bus in the morning once, I lost a shoe in the T trolley tracks. Part of my brain hesitated for a nearly imperceptible moment—cue Prince Charming. Telling, perhaps, that would I have stood there waiting for him, I would have inevitably been road kill. So I picked up my shoe and walked to my bus. Maybe there’s a difference between modern love and modern romance. They’ve had to split, in some circumstances, where we believe in the past they were joined. You can absolutely have romance without love, and perhaps a different kind of love without romance. Will we know what it looks like, though, if it isn’t decorated with romance? On the flipside, all that glitters isn’t gold, and all that is romantic is not love.
Moving from the cowardly we to the more truthful I, I believe one thing and know another, though for the life of me I cannot pin down the sources of these beliefs and knowledge. It is a hazy bibliography: too many romantic movies and neat endings, my parents’ happy marriage, my parents’ compromises, my own heart ache, my own experience of romance. Qualifying “love” with the adjective “modern” seems in some way to downgrade it, as if from “modern love” we expect less than we do from the perhaps elliptical “classic love.” Should we expect less because of the time that we live in? Or rather, should we expect something different? Who is to say that the original would have been so much better?
I will email my date tomorrow and hope that we will go out again. I will try not to become instantly smitten and simultaneously cripplingly suspicious should a man send me flowers. I will try to find love on acceptable terms, because maybe it’s unconditional surrender that is the sticking point.
I just had kind of an interesting moment when, after an excruciating morning, I decided to take a little time before my lunch break to do one of my favorite “at work but not exactly working” activities: cruise the NYT website, especially the “most popular” section. I noticed there’s not only a “most frequently emailed” section, but a “most searched” section. Up there with China, Obama, Cancer, Air France, and Swine Flu, is Modern Love. That kind of brought me up short.
So is the appearance of “modern love” on the most searched list encouraging or depressing? Or is it both?
I had my first Match.com date last night, and was much encouraged. We had emailed for a little while, and in the perfect conversational arc, he asked me out to dinner. I consider the breakthrough of the night to be, when I asked him what his favorite books were, he began a standard list of non-fiction and generally modernist stuff, then added as an afterthought something about how he didn’t want to freak me out with all of his sci-fi favorites. In reply, I pulled out my very worn copy of “Belgarath the Sorcerer” from my bag and said, “NOW we can have a conversation.”
Our date ended on a lukewarm note, although my sister pointed out that physical contact on a match first date might have been a little weird. It’s hard to adjust my expectations in this new world of dating in which I find myself: the greater Boston area, circa now.
I am now one year out from my ex (ptuh ptuh). Our first date went a little differently for any number of reasons: we lived in a small college town; we met in person and had instant chemistry; we saw a lot of our own outgoingness and charisma in the other, and therefore weren’t as cautious about showing too much too soon. What seemed in large part to be a relationship taking its cues from a romantic comedy ended badly, when he left me for New York in (in my opinion) an unnecessarily cruel way. (New York, incidentally, has taken to absorbing the men I could potentially be or am in love with—a disturbing phenomenon.) And so, after having moved to Boston and not being a club or bar person by any stretch of the imagination, I joined the website and entered a strange world of looking for modern love.
Where is the line between lowering your expectations and simply being realistic? Is there even a line? Sometimes it’s a little easier to tell. Walking to my bus in the morning once, I lost a shoe in the T trolley tracks. Part of my brain hesitated for a nearly imperceptible moment—cue Prince Charming. Telling, perhaps, that would I have stood there waiting for him, I would have inevitably been road kill. So I picked up my shoe and walked to my bus. Maybe there’s a difference between modern love and modern romance. They’ve had to split, in some circumstances, where we believe in the past they were joined. You can absolutely have romance without love, and perhaps a different kind of love without romance. Will we know what it looks like, though, if it isn’t decorated with romance? On the flipside, all that glitters isn’t gold, and all that is romantic is not love.
Moving from the cowardly we to the more truthful I, I believe one thing and know another, though for the life of me I cannot pin down the sources of these beliefs and knowledge. It is a hazy bibliography: too many romantic movies and neat endings, my parents’ happy marriage, my parents’ compromises, my own heart ache, my own experience of romance. Qualifying “love” with the adjective “modern” seems in some way to downgrade it, as if from “modern love” we expect less than we do from the perhaps elliptical “classic love.” Should we expect less because of the time that we live in? Or rather, should we expect something different? Who is to say that the original would have been so much better?
I will email my date tomorrow and hope that we will go out again. I will try not to become instantly smitten and simultaneously cripplingly suspicious should a man send me flowers. I will try to find love on acceptable terms, because maybe it’s unconditional surrender that is the sticking point.
Note from Dylan
My next three entries come somewhat out of sequence, but necessary as background. The groundwork for the idea that became this blog was my discovery of the New York Times "Modern Love" essay section in early June. It may have been the reading of essays that nudged me, slowly but firmly, towards consistently writing my own and wanting to actually put them somewhere.
It seemed a shame to have written these first, but never put them in the somewhere I created.
It seemed a shame to have written these first, but never put them in the somewhere I created.
The Unbearable Lightness of Ian
The best line in a Robert Frost poem, as far as I’m concerned, involves neither roads less traveled nor birches. The line comes somewhat unexpectedly at the end of “Hyla Brook” when he says, “We love the things we love for what they are.”
I have the firm belief that every now and then the universe reaches down and smacks me upside the head, effectively saying, “Hey you. Pay attention.” My discovery of that line was one of those moments. Sometimes the self-evidences in life aren’t so evident to me; fortunately, the universe seems to be looking out for me.
How many times have I thought in my life, about some romantic interest, “This guy would be perfect if…” I am not the only heterosexual woman of my generation to have the distressing tendency to take a romantic interest in, for lack of a better term, “fixer-uppers.” My own beloved father was a fixer-upper, and he and my mother make each other incredibly happy. I guess it isn’t that strange that, working from that model, I’m drawn to guys who would be perfect if only…
Granted, some of those guys in memory were not worth the price of the caulk. However, for some guys, it was incredibly unfair of me to have ever hoped that they would change. That change may have only been the alteration from “not in love with me” to “completely in love with me,” but it’s a change nevertheless.
I have a friend named Ian, but I never call him Ian. His last name happens to coincide with a ubiquitous cereal brand, so it’s the cereal that stuck. I recently ran into him when I was visiting my college for Homecoming weekend. Stepping within a fifteen foot radius of him is one of those dependably marvelous experiences, like getting a package in the mail when you aren’t expecting one or sinking into a hot bath after you’ve been cold all day. He’s a cookie straight out of the oven: he’s just that wonderful.
Naturally, when we first became friends, I was quite interested in his being in love with me. Unfortunately, he was not.
One of the best decisions I’ve made in my life of friendships was to let go of wanting to nudge Ian towards a version of himself who would be madly in love with me. As we became better friends, I reflected that, in fact, we were remarkably unsuited for each other. The best thing we could do for each other was to be friends, and we are wonderful friends at that.
Ian is one of the only men I have met who can really, truly dance. In my experience, dancing is a lot like speaking a foreign language: you have to be willing to screw up, look or sound like an idiot, and just move on. Ian intrinsically lacks self-consciousness, so as a result, he has become an amazing dancer. One of the happiest places in the universe, I have discovered, is half way through a particularly pretzel-shaped spin with Ian holding both of my hands. I have absolute faith that the strange and impossible weaving of our arms will suddenly and miraculously release, like a human slip-knot, and I will be exactly where I should be, spinning with a grace I could never accomplish on my own.
That is a very happy place.
You can’t pin Ian down—he’s too buoyant. His enthusiasm is an incredible, enormous, weightless energy. And it’s catching. When you enter that radius around him, you get lighter. Seeing him recently just reminded me how really loving someone is function of accepting their own terms of being. It’s only unbearable to love someone if you’re holding out some hope that he or she might change.
Fortunately, I’ve come to my senses, and I love the Ian I love for who he is.
I have the firm belief that every now and then the universe reaches down and smacks me upside the head, effectively saying, “Hey you. Pay attention.” My discovery of that line was one of those moments. Sometimes the self-evidences in life aren’t so evident to me; fortunately, the universe seems to be looking out for me.
How many times have I thought in my life, about some romantic interest, “This guy would be perfect if…” I am not the only heterosexual woman of my generation to have the distressing tendency to take a romantic interest in, for lack of a better term, “fixer-uppers.” My own beloved father was a fixer-upper, and he and my mother make each other incredibly happy. I guess it isn’t that strange that, working from that model, I’m drawn to guys who would be perfect if only…
Granted, some of those guys in memory were not worth the price of the caulk. However, for some guys, it was incredibly unfair of me to have ever hoped that they would change. That change may have only been the alteration from “not in love with me” to “completely in love with me,” but it’s a change nevertheless.
I have a friend named Ian, but I never call him Ian. His last name happens to coincide with a ubiquitous cereal brand, so it’s the cereal that stuck. I recently ran into him when I was visiting my college for Homecoming weekend. Stepping within a fifteen foot radius of him is one of those dependably marvelous experiences, like getting a package in the mail when you aren’t expecting one or sinking into a hot bath after you’ve been cold all day. He’s a cookie straight out of the oven: he’s just that wonderful.
Naturally, when we first became friends, I was quite interested in his being in love with me. Unfortunately, he was not.
One of the best decisions I’ve made in my life of friendships was to let go of wanting to nudge Ian towards a version of himself who would be madly in love with me. As we became better friends, I reflected that, in fact, we were remarkably unsuited for each other. The best thing we could do for each other was to be friends, and we are wonderful friends at that.
Ian is one of the only men I have met who can really, truly dance. In my experience, dancing is a lot like speaking a foreign language: you have to be willing to screw up, look or sound like an idiot, and just move on. Ian intrinsically lacks self-consciousness, so as a result, he has become an amazing dancer. One of the happiest places in the universe, I have discovered, is half way through a particularly pretzel-shaped spin with Ian holding both of my hands. I have absolute faith that the strange and impossible weaving of our arms will suddenly and miraculously release, like a human slip-knot, and I will be exactly where I should be, spinning with a grace I could never accomplish on my own.
That is a very happy place.
You can’t pin Ian down—he’s too buoyant. His enthusiasm is an incredible, enormous, weightless energy. And it’s catching. When you enter that radius around him, you get lighter. Seeing him recently just reminded me how really loving someone is function of accepting their own terms of being. It’s only unbearable to love someone if you’re holding out some hope that he or she might change.
Fortunately, I’ve come to my senses, and I love the Ian I love for who he is.
Thursday, October 22, 2009
Soft Skill Structure
During my senior year of college, I took two sculpture classes. The first was to fill the studio requirement for my art history major. The second was born out of my complete unwillingness to be separated from the wood shop, welding studio, and plaster room. I took one day of early morning introductory French that term, realized the radial arm saw was a much better companion, and switched classes.
I think what I valued most about my time in the sculpture studio was how it used a completely different part of my brain from the rest of my school work. I could happily spend large chunks of time working on a single project without noticing that I hadn’t sat down or had a drink of water for several hours. It was a small class, and as a project deadline would loom closer, we would all end up in the studio at the same time at night, listening to oldies on the radio (the one station to which we could all agree). It was a parallel universe that smelled like saw dust and paint thinner: my happy place.
I never had any delusions of becoming a sculptor in the real sense; my commitment to the craft came more from enjoyment than driving passion. When it came down to it, I just loved working with my hands, and still do. I never wondered about the origins of that love until one of my own projects took me by surprise.
It wasn’t any wonder that my parallel sculpture universe was so comforting: the rest of my world had slowly yet surely started to gravitate towards graduation and job applications. My resume was suddenly important in a very real way. This wasn’t about a summer internship anymore: I was working towards a deadline of being an adult with a real job. When a sculpture didn’t turn out the way I wanted, worse came to worse I could always thwack it with a crowbar to see if that would help. That theory didn’t quite work on my job applications.
During my non-studio hours, my brain constantly ticked with what my resume skills were: what internships had I completed, what had I accomplished academically, what were my numbers? I never thought about how you can’t really put your best qualities on a resume, like loyalty and the ability to mix the perfect gin and tonic, and so in a way, I stopped appreciating my skills that I couldn’t include in a cover letter.
One night I started work on a project I had been tossing around: it would be a ladder, made of cloth and stuffing. It would be full scale, almost seven feet tall, but essentially like a stuffed animal: no structure within, just cotton. I was smug with my own pretensions, thinking this was a feminist work, commenting on the relegation of historically female creations to the “crafts” realm. The very fact I thought the words “feminist work” in relation to one of my own sculptures should have tipped me off that what I needed, in addition to several yards more fabric, was a swift kick in the ass.
Nevertheless, I began measuring my material and marking off where to cut, where to sew. Dragging a pencil across fabric, guided by the edge of a ruler, is a very specific sensation, and for me a very familiar one. My hands knew how to cut, where to draw, and how to piece. About the moment I became aware that I was following muscle memory was the moment the truth hit me like a crowbar to a misbehaving sculpture. This wasn’t a feminist work, something cold and academic.
This was about my grandmother.
My mother’s parents would visit us frequently when I was little, and the home I came back to when my grandmother was there was one of the warmest, safest places on earth. She would always have tea waiting, and she would read aloud to me, old English authors like E. Nesbit, Elizabeth Goudge, and Rudyard Kipling. When I, along with most other girls in my age group, fell into the American Girls craze, wardrobes appeared for my dolls: night gowns, ball gowns, capes, slippers, bonnets. She taught me to sew at a very early age. While she made the doll dresses on the sewing machine, quilts were different: all of her quilts were sewn by hand.
I use the gifts she gave me every day of my life, often without even realizing it. My friends in college benefitted from those gifts too: I was one of the only ones who knew how to mend a pair of blue jeans. One friend in particular developed a sixth sense for when I was cooking meatloaf in my apartment, and he would miraculously appear without fail about fifteen minutes before it would come out of the oven. I know how to hide a stitch, embroider over a stain, knead bread and scald milk. I can recite from memory “The Beginning of the Armadillo,” with all of her voice intonations, like a chant. I can trace my lineage back several generations, including anecdotes about distant ancestors.
And none of those things will ever go on a resume.
When my ladder was finished, it looked kind of like a floral stuffed octopus: a very large, soft heap on the cement floor. My professor wanted me to include some sort of internal skeleton, but I flatly refused (which I rarely, if ever, did). This wasn’t a sculpture project anymore: this was a conscious, purposeful homage to one of the most important people in my life, who now was gone. It would have been more efficient for Grandma to make her quilts on a sewing machine; it might have looked better if my sculpture had a skeleton. But that wasn’t really the point, was it?
I presented my project the Tuesday after the Sunday my grandfather followed my grandmother, and died in his sleep. He was a hard man, and the best thing he did with his life was to love her. I guess we all have skills that aren’t strictly marketable.
I miss my grandmother every day. The smell of tomato vines, the rattle of Tic Tacs, the feeling of scone dough, the smell of bergamot in Earl Gray tea, the panes on a quilt: she’s in every one of my senses. How do you construct a life? I have the suspicion that when it comes down to it, the most important things I do in my life, the things I teach my children and grandchildren, won’t be the things that went on my first resume. It seems like a misnomer to call them soft skills, because my grandmother’s “soft skills” build my insides. They’re the framework on which everything I can do and will do hangs, the marrow from which it grows.
And if I’m ever on my way to an interview and rip my suit, I can have a needle threaded and an invisible whip stitch in place in about five minutes flat.
I think what I valued most about my time in the sculpture studio was how it used a completely different part of my brain from the rest of my school work. I could happily spend large chunks of time working on a single project without noticing that I hadn’t sat down or had a drink of water for several hours. It was a small class, and as a project deadline would loom closer, we would all end up in the studio at the same time at night, listening to oldies on the radio (the one station to which we could all agree). It was a parallel universe that smelled like saw dust and paint thinner: my happy place.
I never had any delusions of becoming a sculptor in the real sense; my commitment to the craft came more from enjoyment than driving passion. When it came down to it, I just loved working with my hands, and still do. I never wondered about the origins of that love until one of my own projects took me by surprise.
It wasn’t any wonder that my parallel sculpture universe was so comforting: the rest of my world had slowly yet surely started to gravitate towards graduation and job applications. My resume was suddenly important in a very real way. This wasn’t about a summer internship anymore: I was working towards a deadline of being an adult with a real job. When a sculpture didn’t turn out the way I wanted, worse came to worse I could always thwack it with a crowbar to see if that would help. That theory didn’t quite work on my job applications.
During my non-studio hours, my brain constantly ticked with what my resume skills were: what internships had I completed, what had I accomplished academically, what were my numbers? I never thought about how you can’t really put your best qualities on a resume, like loyalty and the ability to mix the perfect gin and tonic, and so in a way, I stopped appreciating my skills that I couldn’t include in a cover letter.
One night I started work on a project I had been tossing around: it would be a ladder, made of cloth and stuffing. It would be full scale, almost seven feet tall, but essentially like a stuffed animal: no structure within, just cotton. I was smug with my own pretensions, thinking this was a feminist work, commenting on the relegation of historically female creations to the “crafts” realm. The very fact I thought the words “feminist work” in relation to one of my own sculptures should have tipped me off that what I needed, in addition to several yards more fabric, was a swift kick in the ass.
Nevertheless, I began measuring my material and marking off where to cut, where to sew. Dragging a pencil across fabric, guided by the edge of a ruler, is a very specific sensation, and for me a very familiar one. My hands knew how to cut, where to draw, and how to piece. About the moment I became aware that I was following muscle memory was the moment the truth hit me like a crowbar to a misbehaving sculpture. This wasn’t a feminist work, something cold and academic.
This was about my grandmother.
My mother’s parents would visit us frequently when I was little, and the home I came back to when my grandmother was there was one of the warmest, safest places on earth. She would always have tea waiting, and she would read aloud to me, old English authors like E. Nesbit, Elizabeth Goudge, and Rudyard Kipling. When I, along with most other girls in my age group, fell into the American Girls craze, wardrobes appeared for my dolls: night gowns, ball gowns, capes, slippers, bonnets. She taught me to sew at a very early age. While she made the doll dresses on the sewing machine, quilts were different: all of her quilts were sewn by hand.
I use the gifts she gave me every day of my life, often without even realizing it. My friends in college benefitted from those gifts too: I was one of the only ones who knew how to mend a pair of blue jeans. One friend in particular developed a sixth sense for when I was cooking meatloaf in my apartment, and he would miraculously appear without fail about fifteen minutes before it would come out of the oven. I know how to hide a stitch, embroider over a stain, knead bread and scald milk. I can recite from memory “The Beginning of the Armadillo,” with all of her voice intonations, like a chant. I can trace my lineage back several generations, including anecdotes about distant ancestors.
And none of those things will ever go on a resume.
When my ladder was finished, it looked kind of like a floral stuffed octopus: a very large, soft heap on the cement floor. My professor wanted me to include some sort of internal skeleton, but I flatly refused (which I rarely, if ever, did). This wasn’t a sculpture project anymore: this was a conscious, purposeful homage to one of the most important people in my life, who now was gone. It would have been more efficient for Grandma to make her quilts on a sewing machine; it might have looked better if my sculpture had a skeleton. But that wasn’t really the point, was it?
I presented my project the Tuesday after the Sunday my grandfather followed my grandmother, and died in his sleep. He was a hard man, and the best thing he did with his life was to love her. I guess we all have skills that aren’t strictly marketable.
I miss my grandmother every day. The smell of tomato vines, the rattle of Tic Tacs, the feeling of scone dough, the smell of bergamot in Earl Gray tea, the panes on a quilt: she’s in every one of my senses. How do you construct a life? I have the suspicion that when it comes down to it, the most important things I do in my life, the things I teach my children and grandchildren, won’t be the things that went on my first resume. It seems like a misnomer to call them soft skills, because my grandmother’s “soft skills” build my insides. They’re the framework on which everything I can do and will do hangs, the marrow from which it grows.
And if I’m ever on my way to an interview and rip my suit, I can have a needle threaded and an invisible whip stitch in place in about five minutes flat.
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