Monday, June 28, 2010

Red Sweater

One way to go through life is to pick a thread and follow it along until another thread falls in front of you and you grab onto that one. I find that I have a handful of colorful threads and a whole world of possibilities with what to make out of them. Sometimes I find myself wishing that I had all blue threads or green threads or even pink, just so that whatever I ended up making looked more cohesive.

There are people who walk around wearing bright red sweaters, that I know they knit themselves, out of gathered yarn. I imagine how their lives were planned out with the goal of making a red sweater. All they had to do was keep pulling and tugging on that red yarn until they had it spun into a nice ball of yarn to knit with. That's what I imagine anyways, but I'm sure that in reality, those sweaters are full of differently colored threads. There are surely traces of blue, ocher, gold, brown, maroon, teal, emerald, and periwinkle knit in amongst the brilliant red. The reason that the red shows up so well is that the people wearing those sweaters are the ones adding the hue of brightness.


I've seen one of those red sweaters folded and tucked away in the closet of a good friend. Its color was a shade above a muted brick red--dull and dampened. But let me tell you, once he put that sweater on, the whole room lit up and the circulation in my hands improved.

Today I found a scrap of red yarn lying on the ground. It was half buried in the dirt--frayed and neglected. I wasn't even sure what it was until I picked it up, but once I did, a drop of rain falling onto my palm cleared away the brown shades of earth and let the red shine through. I took that scrap of yarn and washed all the dirt away, then I tied it in a knot onto a safety pin and fastened it to my own gray, wool sweater.

(I found this tucked away in an old journal as I was packing up my belongings. What I like best is the image of every person I know having a red sweater somewhere, tucked away in their closets, or left, half-finished on the knitting needles.)

Monday, June 21, 2010

...but first a story

She still enjoys a good story, anytime, anyplace. She loses herself in the sounds of consonants colliding in rhythm to form reticulating stories that dissolve at the edges, the place where imagery and imagination meld with reality.

And so it was bedtime once again, as it so often is when the sun lays down below the horizon. The fire crackled and the settling figures desired a tale to carry the mind away and beyond the present. This story began as every story does, with the inhalation of breathe and the vibration of vocal chords sending sounds through space. There was an image in her mind of a girl, her main character Olivia Jane, the girl with wild curly hair that housed a nesting hummingbird. She wove sentences together with pauses and space, giving her just enough time to place a perfunctory punctuation before beginning anew. The story was being constructed, creating itself even as she paused, unsure of the next sound to escape her lips.

A silent film, of the story she was weaving, played in her mind as she attempted to match up her words with the pictures behind her eyes. Her mind kept skipping ahead of itself, asking the consistent droning question, the question in mind at the onset of any story, "... how does it end?" The question hung in the air, like the suspended flight of a fly stunned into immobility by the spider's web. And in that moment, just as the web finished trembling, she understood something.

The role of our dear storyteller became clear to her, just as the role of Olivia Jane became clear with every passing breath. She was a character in her own story, writing in the captions on the slide show of her life. The soft sounds of snoring and the crackling of the fire reinforced her new found purpose. She thought, the bedtime story is not the newscaster's story, or the excited blurtings of a youth. Nor does it carry the same driving force as the lover's whispering sonnet, meant to stir up frenzy with it's wildly exaggerated hush. The bedtime story is about tone and meter. It is a song sung lowly and consistently that caters to the tired mind, providing a gentle humming, such as nature employs in her chorus of summertime crickets.

And so, as she finished her story and stepped outside into the night air, she opened her mouth once more.

This time the words that escaped were full of air, sung into existence by a storyteller who understood that singing and speaking are the same thing.