the scariest

I sit. We look at each other. Finally, they say it.  ”Can you tell us a little about yourself?”

I don’t like when it begins this way. Why not a pointed question?  With a pointed question I fare much better.   Thoughts swirl. I need to be fair. This earnestness makes me sometimes seem unwell by social standards, though my friends tell me, I'm very grounded. 

I don't share any of this, I'm quiet. Be fair. What a dumb question really,  ‘Tell us a little about yourself?’  All of us are liars, if we’re to be honest. What to share, what to leave out, which part, and am I really the best person to ask? I clear my throat. I start.

I spend an irrational amount of time thinking about urban forests. I sleep with a nightlight. At 42, I'm still afraid of the dark.  I’m really into beverages, at any given moment during the day I may have two, sometimes three in rotation.  

I love marching bands. Percussive instruments make me cry. I'll never step foot in a church again, but Gospel music, folk, blues … brings me to my knees.  Odetta, AMANAZ, Ask me about Nice Artist in Zambia, Vashti Bunyan, these somewhat obscure musical references. If I tell you my love for them, will you think I have an eclectic musical palette?  Will you think I'm a sophisticated person?  What if,  instead, I told you that I had not heard of  Led Zepplin until I got to college, then what would you think? 

Elisa Daprato, laughed at the thought. “What? How? In Through The Out Door? Coda? Self Titled? How is that even possible?” 

It’s true, my parents were in a van club, how was this possible? 

Elisa Daprato. We met over 20 years ago in film school. She was one of six women in our graduating class of 25. She got called a cum dumpster too, but, you know,  boys will be boys.   

Outside of my learned pecking order,  I suppose I was a bit green.  Elisa Daprato on the other hand spoke multiple languages. Her mother was a french model,  her father an angry Italian. When she asked who my favorite author was, I said, well, my favorite book is probably HANDMAIDS TALE,  by Margaret Atwood, and she said, yeah.. I read that book in middle school. 

She had big teeth, harry legs, and Bridget Bardot bangs, elegance, finesse, poise… everything. She was an Editor, a DJ and now a chef. She creates sonic meal prayers, and cures her own meat. She forages, and candies edible flowers. 

She smoked cigarettes like a fein, and would say things like “Skin of a cunt”  and  “Henry Miller that…” and she drank bourbon on the rocks, while I was still drinking Franzia and screwdrivers.
The only thing I questioned about Elisa was her affinity for spending time with me, a green little white girl from a rural place that she instructed me to call, ‘provincial.’  

But I was young then, and new, and damaged of course, and didn’t know of the saving grace of Kintsugi yet. I didn’t yet know that it was actually the distance between the image and the reality,  that there in that space, is where the beauty, the magic, and the truth of life hangs out. 

I didn’t yet know what I know now, which is that Vashti Bunyan, well,  her real name is actually Jennifer, and after playing with a then unknown Jimmy Page, Vashti decided she wasn’t good enough, and abruptly ended her music career, abandoning her love for art for nearly 35 years. All that time lost, all those years with no music because she didn’t live up to this image she had in her mind of who she thought she was and should be. Instead, she decided she wasn’t good enough. 

You know, when you asked me to talk about myself, the first thing I thought to share was some big transformative moment.  For some reason, a big event seems more indicative of our true nature, though I think, perhaps the mundane things say really just as much.

I like walking barefoot outside on my Dymondia. I like shaking out the seed from a dried yarrow,   deadheading my cosmos, cutting back brittle bush and cowboy cologne, while listening to my wind chimes. It’s one way I can be still - in motion, because I can’t sit down. I can’t sit down in a tiny few square feet of my planet earth, where I remediate the soil to sequester carbon and provide habitat for pollinators because Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, could, but they won't. Did you know hummingbirds can identify 50 faces? 

The person I sit across from is silent. So, naturally I go on.

I haven’t told you about dead Holly, or how I was the last person to see her alive.  I didn’t tell you about violent Jeff, or the cruel white women at church, or those two young pompous cops that night, with my best friend Arlet, near the Berwyn House.  I didn’t tell you about the Ipecac, or the lithium, or hanging upside down in my seat belt.   I didn’t tell you about the hospital, or the abortion, or my alcoholic step father. I didn't tell you how the most important decision I ever made was leaving the small rural homogenized town I grew up in with the chem-lawn grass that doesn’t need to be watered. All the while, growing up, thinking to myself, is this real life? Barely old enough to understand that it was, but just not mine. I didn’t tell you about how the first guitar chord I learned was E minor, or that I was a pool lifeguard, who played with baby dolls until middle school, whose Grandmother taught her to play cards competitively at age 7, and Grandfather taught her to play Boogie Woogie on the piano. Did you know that all you need are three chords to make a song? 

I find small talk to be anything but small, some days it is the only thing that makes me feel like a human being at all.  I’m on a first name basis with my mail delivery person, Saul and my cobbler, Abraham, yes you can save shoes by having them resoled. Re-souled. I ask for a bright red thread, so I will never forget how far my feet have brought me. 

And still even after all these details- do you have a sense of who I am?  I don't like how question marks look. When reading, don’t all words strewn together by someone other than yourself beg a question? How much do you really know about me now, especially when I am the one sharing.  As the saying goes, be mindful to question the narrator. Because in the end, to you, I will be just an image, a short hand recall.  After all this, I might still just be that “white girl with the straight teeth and the vintage coca cola sweatshirt.  ‘Was she wearing it ironically?;’, you’ll think to yourself. Somewhere between too much and not enough has always been my problem. What to share, what to omit.  Which is why, instead I decided it was best to tell you about Elisa Da Prato and Vashti Bunyan; whose real name is Jennifer.