Inspirational Property

It was late summer 2013. I was at a popular brunch spot for a lively celebration of a friend’s 40^th birthday. I had just had a baby 3 weeks prior and was feeling a little lost from myself between the sleepless nights, the constant feedings, and the ignited neediness of my other two children, both of them home all the time, waiting out that last hot month before school begins. And I don’t mean to add all that in as though it were a feeling only a new mother could have, as though we had the market cornered on displacement. But I do think we are, perhaps, more prone toward it; tip toeing around familiar places, spit up in our hair and on the shoulders of shirts we Just. Changed. Into.  All day long: keeping rooms straight and bottles clean, keeping the time, keeping the peace, breasts full and body aching, so deeply grounded in motherhood. I would welcome 3am and the quiet of the playroom where I could sit in the still of the night, hooked up to my pump, remembering who I was before all of this, before I shopped for nursing bras and knew what a Boppy was.

And then: this Sunday afternoon, a long and lonely shower!! A dress that still fit just fine and plans with friends. Beignets like clouds. Cinnamon sugar. Someone playing a piano. Laughter. Mimosas! Uninterrupted conversation. Heaven…And I found her in the powder room mirror, staring back at me with an electric grin. 

A while later, warm from the sun and champagne, I turned on my car and with it the radio which was playing “Blurred Lines” and I was young and happy and full of love and gratitude for the simplicity of fun. I turned the music up as loud as it would go and, windows down, driving faster than I should have, I sang and I danced and I lived in the moment, just like everyone is always telling us to.

I’ve been thinking a lot about that day in light of the court’s decision to award the Gaye family millions in damages due to copyright infringement, a decision which I find sad and perplexing, making the creative process about money, two things that really should never be in the same room together if anything truly great ever hopes to leave.

While I am not an artist in the professional sense, I like to think that, when writing, I have a method that resembles theirs, if only on an elementary level. And here’s what I know: My words are mine in the sense that they come from my hand and are put on my paper, but their origins are rooted in the first novel I couldn't put down, prose that stirred my soul, rich poetry that changed how I understood the movement of language, an English teacher’s kind, encouraging smile, the summer spent at writing camp, our desks in circles, our hands shaking with the energy of mutual enthusiasm for finding the right words. A professor with higher expectations and an insistence on fact checking. A ball point pen that glides. The smell of the ink, the lines on the paper. It is all mine but it belongs to all these things, a lifetime of useful moments.

Years ago, a particular night with a particular boy: we sat on the floor in a half-lit basement with half-full glasses of wine and listened to Marvin Gaye and King Curtis and Otis Redding, their music providing the pulse for two young people talking about things that young people like to talk about: moving to a bigger city, doing something that means something, ideas seeming important and the future full of gravity and potential.  

Alive with Motown and heady saxophone, I went home and wrote a lovely poem for him which I hope he still has today…

…I guess I owe Nona Gaye 50 cents for that.