Art in Autumn

Today was beautiful, both weather-wise and just...good-day wise. Slept in a little, got up and read a little (The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger - READ IT if you haven't). Took a shower and went to downtown Weaverville to walk around the Art in Autumn exhibits. It's only the second year they've done this, and it's the first year I've gone. It was really, really great, and I hate that it's only for one day. They block off a big section of Main Street and have all these booths of arts and crafts...no extra stuff like games or hot dog stands (although the church was selling barbeque for a fundraiser off a side street).

The booths were all just fantastic. The one that impressed me most was this guy I've heard about before, and seen his paintings in a magazine, but seeing them up close was just breathtaking. I nearly cried looking at a few of them. The paintings themselves are absolutely gorgeous, but on top of that, the guy is paralyzed from the neck down. He paints all of these beautiful works of art by holding a paintbrush in his mouth, and I can't even begin to describe the perfection and the detail of what he does. It's really and truly astounding. I ALMOST bought a really small print of these two mourning doves that just struck me as especially beautiful, but even the little print was $60, and I just didn't have that much money with me.

I did buy some stuff, though. I bought some really beautiful hair barrettes, two for me and one for my neice. I almost didn't get them since my hair is so much shorter now, but it's still long enough, and they're really gorgeous. I also bought SEVERAL pairs of earrings...they're all fashioned out of antique buttons, and they're so cool. They were also way cheaper than a bunch of not-so-pretty-or-unique earrings at other booths. I wish this woman had a website, but she doesn't yet. Anyway, I bought some for me, my mom, my cousin, and my aunt. I just haven't decided who's getting what, yet. I guess I'm getting the pair that I'm wearing right now, though...but there's still one extra pair, so I'll get those, too. They're really neat...I wish I had a picture to put up here.

Even with all these beautiful art exhibits and crafts, the most beautiful thing I saw all day was in the form of this four or five year old girl I kept seeing on the street. The first time I saw her, she was dancing with what must have been her little sister and another girl about her age on the street in front of where they were playing bluegrass, and the child just took my breath away. Her hair was so long, it didn't seem possible that at such a young age, she could even have been alive long enough to have grown all that hair. Her eyes were sky blue, and she just looked so happy, and so beautiful, dancing there, as well as later on when I saw her giggling and holding hands with the other girl her age. Somehow that one happy child was just the perfect embodiment of a beautiful, end-of-summer day in this tiny town. But I think what really drew me to her was she looked so familiar...any of you who know me at all know that I have very vivid, memorable dreams, and once in a great while, I dream about a little girl. Sometimes she's just a baby, sometimes she's a toddler, but I always know that she's mine. Usually I'm watching her play. This little girl that I saw today...I was just awestruck by how much she reminded me of the little girl I dream about. I sat down on the rock wall in front of the eye doctor's and pulled out the little notebook I carry with me, planning to jot down just enough about what I was seeing to remember it, but somehow the jotting turned into almost a poem.

Children dancing, bluegrass on Main St.
Little girl, long long long dark hair, cerulean blue eyes
Smiling, laughing, dancing, just as I've dreamt her -
Little sister falls down, and mother hurries them away
The spell is broken; I am awake.


Anyway, I don't want it to sound like I was going to steal this child from her mother or anything, it's just that the resemblance to the little girl in my dreams was uncanny, and for a moment while I was watching her, it really was like seeing one of my dreams acted out.

I'll end with a little bit from the Prologue of The Time Traveler's Wife, since I love this book so much right now...and honestly, since so much of this book seems to fit my life at the moment.


Clare: I keep myself busy. Time goes faster that way. I go to sleep alone, and wake up alone. I take walks. I work until I'm tired. I watch the wind play with the trash that's been under the snow all winter. Everything seems simple until you think about it. Why is love intensified by absense?
Long ago, men went to sea, and women waited for them, standing on the edge of the water, scanning the horizon for the tiny ship. I wait for him. Each moment that I wait feels like a year, an eternity. Each moment is as slow and transparent as glass. Through each moment I can see infinite moments lined up, waiting.

Imagine

I was watching the news tonight while eating supper, and almost the entire program was covering the woes on Wall Street going on right now. However, there was an exception that really struck me; during some technical difficulties, they switched over to talk about what's going on with the hurricane aftermath in Houston. It was all about kids going to visit the zoo that just reopened today because there's nothing to do at home without power, and about how students whose classes have been cancelled are spending that extra time volunteering, loading up bottled water to take to people who don't have any. One kid they interviewed said, "You know, all of us here volunteering are in the same boat, we don't have any power or water either." It was just such a heartwarming thing to hear on the news...

...and then suddenly Charlie Gibson was back on, apologizing for the technical difficulties and going back to the stock market coverage.

Why can't more of the news be about the heartwarming stuff? I know, drama sells, but seriously....do we really, REALLY need to be drowned in information about how badly the world is doing? We all know we're screwed, people. We all know that the economy is collapsing and that crime is rising. Why beat us over the head with it? Why can't we be reassured that there's still some good in the world?

I wish we could all just focus on the good a little bit more. Maybe that sounds cheesy and overly optimistic, but I mean it. Everyone wants to bitch and complain all the time...and while I know how to do my fair share of bitching and complaining, I get tired of it and feel the urge to compliment someone every now and then. I want to encourage and help and heal. I want to support the people I love in their endeavors, even when it's hard, or even when I don't really know what to DO for support except send them good wishes. We all get trained these days to be suspicious of compliments that come out of nowhere; everyone seems to think that everyone else is just after something.

Maybe I can't change the world, but I'd like to at least try to change my part of it. I'd like to remind people to smile a little more, to help strangers a little more, to just be kind a little more. Honestly, what harm could that do? It might take a little effort sometimes, but I guarantee at the end of the day, if you've managed to make another person smile, you'll be smiling, too.

...good grief, I sound like a Hallmark card. Anyway. Good thoughts to anyone who's reading this. Here's a song lyric. Thank you, John Lennon.

Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to live or die for
And no religion, too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace

You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope one day you'll join us
And the world will be as one.

Driving

So last night I was driving home after the show, and I literally don't think I've ever been so tired in my life. I didn't really realize it for a while...I even went out to Waffle House with Peyton and gave her a ride home, but by the time I hit 19-23, I was so exhausted I almost pulled over to take a nap. Then I thought, "It's just a few miles home, it'd be silly to stop now."

...and then I started hallucinating a little bit. Not kidding. One of the cars ahead of me took the vague shape of a really, really big fish swimming sideways, and it seemed to be leaking green slime all over the road ahead of me. The realization of what I thought I was seeing jerked me back awake for a bit, but the next thing I knew another car looked like the tail lights were eyes, and I swear it was growing clown hair out of the trunk. I got home, took out my contacts, pulled off my dress and went to sleep. It was a wild ride.

Speaking of driving (I've done a heck of a lot of it the past couple of days), it amazes me how beautiful it is to drive through these mountains. Especially on the smaller roads that twist and curve. I think I took one of the most beautiful drives of my life yesterday, even though the day before I had sworn I would never take that road again because of the fog and the curves. Anyway, I did. It's nice to be able to reflect on the road like that...it was just like one giant poem, in a way. All the youngest trees bend over the road curiously, peeking down at the cars passing by. The middle-aged trees stand up the straightest, tall and proud, as if they aren't even acknowledging that there's a road there and that life is continuing on the mountain just as it always has. You'd think the eldest trees would have that attitude, but they don't; they stand up straight, of course, but they're the ones who bend their branches out invitingly over the pavement in a canopy and let the sunlight filter through in a patchwork. Maybe they're being inviting, or maybe they're covering up the road so that, from the outside, you'd never know there was a road there at all.

The trees aren't the half of it. This time of year there are all sorts of caterpillar nests, and with the dew that stays on the mountain, the cobwebby globs shine white and ethereal in the trees. Every now and then, rivulets appear around the bend, cascading down the mountain in a shimmer. Moss creeps up the sides of boulders the size of small houses; the huge rocks appear just as suddenly as the rivulets, sheltering and sheilding. Above everything, there are clouds that descend in patches, misty angels hovering above and around and through everything.

It's all so beautiful, and I know it can be treacherous alone, but I still see it as a giant playground. I don't think I can help it. It's something in my blood. I see those mountain streams and giant boulders and all I want to do is jump out of the car and run through the woods, playing. I want to look at all the tiny flowers growing out of the moss, and run my fingers through the slime beneath the stream water. I feel more at home out in the woods, on a mountain, than I do anywhere else, and I'm content to just be left alone to wander out there. It's why I can run away from my friends while hiking and scale a boulder with no shoes, and still find my way back to them. It's why I take off running down little paths until it somehow leads me to a huge waterfall I didn't know was there. It's why I can sit in the middle of the shallow part of a river and just watch the minnows swim around my skirts like I'm just another rock.

I feel like this is some secret part of myself I'm sharing, but it's not really meant to be a secret. It just isn't something that many people have seen in me, and those who have just sort of shake their heads when I take off running. Bless Bob's heart, he understood somehow. Not in a kindred-spirit kind of way, but in a way that made him just run doggedly along after me until I stopped all of a sudden to listen to a bird or a frog somewhere off the path. He never spoke, and I never spoke, because I don't speak when I get out like that. I just have to run. It's in my bones. It's the one part of me I know will never have to grow up.

...which puts this lyric in my head, so I'll close with it.

If growing up means
It would be beneath my dignity to climb a tree,
I'll never grow up, never grow up, never grow up
Not me!

I was at Jack of the Wood last night to hear Firecracker Jazz Band (those guys are fantastic, by the way, check them out if you're in this area). While sitting outside, I looked up to see one of my daddy's first cousins looking at me and grinning. I immediately jumped up and hugged him, and then laughed and told him not to dare tell anyone in the family he'd seen me at a bar. He sat down and we got to talking, reminiscing about people in the family that are gone. He's been coming to JotW for years, apparently, and he knows the owners, so when he orders a rum and coke it's a tiny bit of coke mixed into a beer glass full of rum (side note: he also bought me a Long Island Iced Tea that I had to stop drinking halfway through and give to my friend because it was so potent).

One thing I ought to explain: my family is sort of divided up into sections. Even though this man is my daddy's first cousin, there's still a section that's considered my side of the family. It's a really large section basically consisting of my Granny and Papaw's eight children and all of their progeny. Anyway, while we were talking and the alcohol was slowly getting lower in the glasses, he looked at me and said, "Amanda, I don't know if you realize how much your family means to me. I would walk straight into the middle of hell for any of your people." He then made it a point to introduce me to all his friends that started walking up to the doors, and each and every one of them he said, "I would kill for this girl's people. They mean the world to me." Then at one point he said, "Every now and then I go to Marie's house, even though she's the only one there anymore, because it still feels like going home."

Then he got to talking and showed me a scar on his thumb and told me about how "Aunt Geneva", who was my Granny, had cooked him up a big batch of biscuits way up in the morning when he got home from the army, past the time when she'd normally be cooking breakfast, and my Papaw went out to the smokehouse and cut a big ol' slice of country ham (our country hams are three times the size of those in the stores) for her to cook. My cousin said that the ham was so thick, he couldn't get through it with the knife, and when the knife slipped he got that scar on his thumb. He finished the story up with, "And it was the best damn ham I've ever eat in my life."

It just makes me feel so damn blessed to have the family that I do. I know they're a little backwards in their thinking sometimes, but they are the most genuine, loving people in the whole world. I know that none of them even realize the effect they have on other people, the effect that their kindness and their generosity and their all-around good spirit has, but whenever anyone talks to me about my family, it's always the highest praises. They don't extend hospitality the way that they do out of any sense of duty or begrudgement; they do it out of the pure goodness of their hearts.

I hope that I fit into that category with them. I think maybe I do; I remember when Mrs. Shepherd's husband died, her son Robert came up to Daddy at the funeral home with tears in his eyes and told my Daddy how much my visits to Mrs. Shepherd mean to her. The highest compliment I've ever gotten came from two different people, with slightly different wording. The first said, "Mandy, you are the only genuinely kind person I've ever met in my life." The second said, "You're one of the few really genuine people I know." And I want that, more than anything, just to be genuine in whatever emotion I have. I don't want to put on a show. If I'm going to be happy, I have to be genuinely happy. I am so, so thankful that 90% of the time, I am able to be genuinely happy without faking any of it. For that matter, if people can't deal with that 10% that I'm not genuinely happy, then I don't care to be around them. One of my favorite quotes is from Marilyn Monroe when she said, "I'm impatient, selfish, and a little insecure. I make mistakes, I am out of control, and at times hard to handle, but if you can't handle me at my worst, then you sure as hell don't deserve me at my best."

So I'll end with a song lyric today...this song in particular because after my cousin had gotten up to smoke a cigarette and I was sitting there chatting with his friends, out of nowhere he started singing this chorus to me, and it's a song my family has sung me ever since I was a little girl.



Amanda, light of my life.
Fate should have made you a gentleman's wife.
Amanda, light of my life.
Fate should have made you a gentleman's wife.