Of the Heart

There are some people in my life who aren't in a romantic relationship and they don't know why.  There are others who are in a romantic relationship and I don't know why.  Others don't have a steady +1, and they don't care.  And a few pay the bills on their own, and they hate it.  Some of them suffer.  Some of them wonder.  All underestimate.  None are alone.

Did you ever thank another human being for doing a job well?  Not just "kthnxby" but one of these:  "I appreciate that, and you, and here's why."  If you did, you stirred the spirits of another human being.  You validated his or her work.  You affirmed a life's calling or you made the day at the cash register shorter.  You made him or her feel useful and competent and clever.  Because of that, you're not alone.

Maybe you've been responsible for placing a hand beneath another's as he carried this wearisome burden of being human, and you did it by brushing that part of the soul which responds to the eternal ethereal nature of art.  Doesn't matter how. You sang, plucked or blew one glorious note, you trailed beauty across the canvas, you spoke life into another's world with a single properly placed adjective, you snapped a photograph that made the subject think "Well, I'm not all that bad, am I?"  Because of that, you're not alone.

Oh, you're left brained?  Then you're the cake which made that icing of an adjective possible.  You're the grammar producing the understandable sentiment.  You're the marvelously, evenly lined bristles of the brush.  You're the structure, the ladder, the framework, the foundation.  You adjust the insurance policies, complete the boxes of the tax returns, square the corners of the TPS reports, and without you nobody can hear our poetry reading over the mad chaos of bouncing checks.  The rest of us totter about on your shoulders.  Because of that, you're not alone.

Or you're a parent.  This little life was held out to you and you opened your arms.  The little life got a runny nose and an attitude.  You braced your back against the wall at 3 AM and closed your eyes and didn't question, just pushed through.  Tangled hair and scattered heaps of Matchbox cars and vacations days given over to rivers of snot in some pediatrician's waiting room.  Sometimes, for all this, there is the wrenching backhand--far, far worse than any physical blow-- of sullen silence or "I hate you."  But it is the most important job any human being can take on.  And because of that, you are not alone.

Are you lost?  All these job interviews that's always that.  All these classes and nothing, nothing strikes at your heart, makes you fizz inside and say "For the rest of my life... this."  Or you're on a path which you thought was all the fizz, and now you're there and it's just syrupy, room temperature, and flat.  Or it that path is suddenly obscured by brick walls and brambles and not a single soft place to rest.  But this is not a cul de sac.  This is a highway, with exits, and tacky truck stops and the world's largest ball of twine.  And it is within your power to alter the route, or, at the very least, change the radio station to clear tones instead of staticy, muddled dreariness.  You have all you need, your fingertips on the dial, your hand on the wheel.  And because of that, you are not alone.

If you have ever, out of absolutely nowhere, tapped the text icon or clicked the "Message" menu or opened a new email to say something, anything, even just "Hi!" or "We haven't talked in too long" or "That thing... I forgive you, " then... oh, you are not alone.  You are not alone because you have reached across this great void, not just the physical or technical space which ever more separates us, and you have said, "I am saying this with a computer or a smartphone, but the human that is you, that is operating this device, I remember that you exist and I love you, miss you, honor you."  It's not a matter of skywriting or laser lights or the penthouse suite.  One of the dearest gifts my best friend ever gave me was to sit and braid my hair as I lay weak and in exhausted pain in the hospital.  It cost her five minutes, and zero dollars, and it made me well again inside.  One of the most cherished, most rescuing Facebook messages I ever got arrived in the middle of the night, as I baked Christmas cookies far from dawn, missing my father and my innocence.  And this is what it said:  "Hey."  It cost him two seconds, and zero dollars, and as we typed at one another about absolutely nothing it made me smile, touch my cheeks in wonder in the darkness. 

If you are of these, if you pick up that phone and type that name and hold out those arms, you are never, never alone.

Even when all the world is foil-wrapped and awash in thorn-clipped roses and you fear you are.

Vital Conversation

In the previous post, we discovered that improper preparation for the deployment of a marching band results in loss of one of Earth's major elements for the surrounding population. Today we take on the somewhat less vital mater of acute human suffering.

I say this although I gots me a perfectly functional husband who showers regularly, does the laundry, and permits a fair amount of figure skating exhibitions on the DVR.  He is an excellent Valentine.  It doesn't make Valentine's Day any less of a minefield of misery and high-wire angst.

It is the fault of the fake conversation heart.  For the want of a rival candy, Valentine's Day is a wreck of human misery, and such is the case whether you're married, single, or single-but-Facebook-status-yoked.  For in the season, unlike any other, once is presented with the anguish concerning choosing the correct brand of candy hearts for self-consumption.  Choose correctly, and one is rewarded with 60 crunchy calories of vividly tinted, delightfully balanced confection.  Choose unwisely, and the unfortunate soul is doomed to a mouthful of tactically unappealing sugar-mush with the aftertaste of drywall and bitter regret.

Correct

Incorrect

After such a year of intense learning and increased enlightenment on the arts and human nature, I anticipated that my hard-won wisdom would lead to an increased ability to correctly identify the proper form of heart despite new packaging and an increased array of imposters to choose from.  Alas-- I selected a purple heart, and rather than the veritable taste of violets, I instead consumed horror.

You win again, O pastel imposter, O darkness of the soul.

Dear Sharkbait

Previously on Blonde Champagne:

• There's an S Row within The Ohio State Univeristy Marching Band, and it has a Tiggles, and a Frank the Carnivore, and really a delightful sense of whimsy.
• Time passes in Jacksonville, too
• Turn the page, my dear

"Can you write 'Happy Birthday Sharkbait' on it?"

This, then, was where my MFA had led:  Standing in a Dairy Queen in Jacksonville, Florida, with the social leadership of S Row of The Ohio State University Marching Band.  A girl in my position (non-OSU student or alumni, non-Band member, non-tuition payment ability) doesn't go anywhere in this group without first receiving an invitation.   No invitation sporadically meant lunch consumed whilst hiding behind the nearest available stadium pillar because everyone else was quite understandably snug in their rows and I feared their mighty flugelhorns.  But tonight, I was invited. 

I was invited because after months and months of observation and conversation, cookie baking and hand shaking, some members of this tightly coiled group were receiving me into their social lives.  Sometimes these invitations consisted of several insistent texts from Frank The Carnivore, announcing that he and forty-five of his closest friends were in the hotel hot tub and I should come too.  Sometimes I was introduced to the occasional parent on game days ("Mom!  Come here!  This is the book lady!")   Sometimes I was--major step, enormous relationship moment--asked to attend row dinners.  Once I was winding my way to a bookstore with one group, met another row coming the other direction, and was author-jacked to a Caribbean restaurant. 

I'd driven to Jacksonville from Mobile, a nine hour journey I originally assumed would take maybe four.  I discovered this at 1 AM the day I left, this geographical reality that Florida panhandle was slightly longer than originally anticipated, and also, unlike Alabama, in the Eastern time zone.  There has not been so much weeping and cursing at a map since Hitler found out Twitter was down again.

The Band flew from Columbus to Florida, upon which busses unleashed them into a Marriott and where the hotel staff was astonished to discover that some 250 people simultaneously returning from a mulitmile parade might want to, I don't know, take a damn shower.  The water pressure in the entire hotel slowed to an ooze, and as I stared at the drip easing its way out of the bathtub faucet at a far slower pace than the almost-tropical sweat was trickling down my neck, it occurred to me that yes, this Band was a force to be reckoned with.

But now... now some were beginning to trust me.  Also I had a car.

This car ferried an ice cream cake for an S Row rookie known as Sharkbait, up and down A1A from the Dairy Queen to the Walgreen's across the street (Oh! We need candles!  And a lighter.  And plates!  Oh, and forks... and...) then back to the hotel, all part of an intricate multi-faceted surprise party plan involving a side door to the hotel, a Mexican restaurant, and the International Atomic Time Scale.  A year ago I was somewhat dimly aware that this thing called Script Ohio existed somewhere on an enemy's space-time-college football continuum; now, I was in Jacksonville, in Florida, having just wept upon seeing Ohio State's marching band exit the field for the final time, cramming candles onto an ice cream cake in the back seat of a Corolla with a person introduced to me as "Tiggles."

"You're welcome to be part of the singing hoard, of course," she said as we darted up and down the hotel lawn, melting cake in tow, in search of a fabled hotel side door that, as it happened, did not, technically, exist.  I paused, savored, and kept door-hunting. 

When the lights went down in the hotel lobby,  I hovered in the background, camera phone at the ready because the batteries on my point and shoot were long since exhausted; he might want evidence of the moment once the pink gel HAPPY BIRTHDAY SHARKBAIT had been consumed.  And yes, Sharkbait was surprised, but no more surprised than those of us who thought the trick candles in a low-ceilinged, closed-in room were a really hilarious idea. 

As the candles sat smoldering in a hastily produced glass of water, I distributed hugs and faded back out of the smoky lobby.  They were a force to be reckoned with.  A beautiful, brassy, once in a lifetime, fire-hazardous force.

Single Candle

This is Dark Week, when NASA honors the crews of Apollo 1, Challenger, and Columbia, all lost over the span of decades in the same horribly painful week.  I face it now as I always have; slowly, with reverence.  When I was small it was tinged with horror that human beings had been lost in the conquest of space.  When I was older it was tinged with knowledge as I watched workers bring what remained of Columbia into a hastily constructed outdoor structure for cataloging, for study, for answers as devastating as the questions.

“What is that little white building?”  visitors on tour busses would ask as I attempted to divert their attention to the Saturn V Center in the distance.

“Storage,” I’d say, and quickly divert the discussion to the wonders of guidance and telemetry rings.

Last year, there was snow and silence.  This year, there is Kyle.

Kyle is in C Row.  I spoke with him when I was in Jacksonville with The Ohio State University Marching Band on the day of the Gator Bowl.  We boarded a bus; we sat in tension. 

It was the last day. 

Nobody mentioned the fact this was the last day. 

But it was the last day.

I made my way to the center of the bus to sit with Wonder Pam, The Miracle PT. (More on Wonder Pam later.  Wonder Pam should have a book on her own merits.)  As she and I compared notes on the highly dubious marvels of college teaching, members of C Row sitting across the aisle, one of whom was entering the education field, listened with attuned expressions, the slipping moments momentarily replaced with a professional wailing wall on the evils of group projects.  The first stop was a rehearsal-- the final rehearsal. 

Nobody mentioned the fact this was the final rehearsal. 

But it was the final rehearsal. 

Out the windows, Jacksonville and the minutes rolled past. 

At one point I pulled out a notebook to record the shocking fact that Jacksonville and the minutes were rolling past. Kyle, struggling with reception on his phone, saw this happen, and delivered a compliment that only writers and sad women like to hear.

“I like your notebook.”

It was a tiny little memo pad, built for speed and chicken scratch, and he revealed that he, too, was from Cincinnati. That he worked at Kings Island in the summer months. That he liked to write music.  That once he’d lost an entire notebook full of ideas to a flood in the amusement park.   That—oh, he was finally getting a signal, and he needed to get his jam on before rehearsal.  Were we friends on Facebook?  We were not friends on Facebook.  Let's be friends on Facebook!

I returned my attention to the window, to the passing time and the palm trees, and thought again of the plain white building by the side of the road that once stood in this same state, the one that shouldn’t have been there, the one nobody really planned for. 

Sometimes what you see out the window comes without warning.  Sometimes it slides into view despite your best efforts to hold it back.  But what keeps you in your seat is Kyle— the unexpected smile, the light in the eyes when music bends into the conversation, the improvised staff in the wide lines of a notebook.  The turning of one page, the clean, wide field of another.

A Year With You's Been Worth It

One year ago today, I wrote this, and my life changed.  It changed a lot.  And it hurt while it changed-- also a lot.  Like all major remodellings, this business of knocking down interior walls and restructuring the roof was necessary to rebuild, to expand.

After standing beneath the seats of Block O for the third quarter of the OSU-Wisconsin game instead of prowling the sidelines by the Band as planned, listening to the thudding echo of the percussion, feeling the concrete heave, and watching the metal brackets bend, I am more apt to learn from the moment I'm experiencing instead of fretting over where I "should" be.

After watching a fifty-seven year old haul a mellophone up and down the hashmarks of a football field with people younger than her grandchildren, I am rethinking what my later years will be like.  They will be stompy.

After hearing a horn player shout my name from across the field just to administer a hello wave, I am reconsidering what the bullies who made my grade school years hell really knew, if they ever knew anything.

After seeing a nineteen year old's entire body heave with sobs after he was cut from the Band, I am grateful I'm not nineteen anymore.

After pouring a single glass of wine in four mintues into an empty digestive system, I am not doing that anymore.

After watching a twenty-one year old Drum Major who had been training for the position half his life walk quietly off the field at the end of his term, I am reconsidering my knowledge of heartbreak.

After watching women smaller, shorter, and slighter than I am chairstep in perfect time with their male counterparts, I am proud to have a uterus. 

After a year of their rituals, their sorrows, their surprises, their anger, their support, their secrets, and their music, I am... fuller.

And I am going to to my best to give them the words their lyricless world deserves.