The Evolution of Style, Year 1999.

I've always had lots of fashion girl crushes.  I appreciate women, and just how dang hard it can be to grow up to be one ... so it's just come naturally to me to harbor deep admiration, to compliment strangers freely, to remind girls that they are beautiful and unique and everything else we refuse to tell ourselves on a daily basis.  I remember so many girls who influenced me, though I doubt they realize it.

Laren was in my poetry class Sophomore year of college.  I noticed her shoes before I noticed her; she wore great thick-heeled boots in a shade of chalky pale blue.     Besides her boots, I admired her long, sleek black hair and whiskey eyes.  She was dusky and quiet and fascinating; when she leaned over, into her textbooks, the black curtain of hair concealed a softly squared jaw and almond eyes, like some modern, Tiger Lily, Native American princess who reeked of coffee and lavender and silver rings.  I was amazed.

No one could figure out what the vague poetry professor wanted out of us when she analyzed William Carlos Williams with such fervor, or how to get a genuine iambic pentameter just right.  Nobody, that is, except Laren.  I watched her stand up next to her desk, a bit like a Victorian girl would to recite her spelling words to the schoolteacher ... and she read her poems aloud without the slightest hesitation or question in her voice.  Her legs stood straight in perfectly faded jeans, and the fluorescent classroom lights caught the dark angle of her nose, where a teensy stud cast a pinhole-sized sparkle.  I figured she got an A on that poem.

 

And the next day, I went out and bought my own chalky blue boots.

Watercolors, or Why That One-Hit Wonder Makes Me Cry

In 1995, I was a 14 year-old with braces, crippling shyness and awkwardly-growing-out bangs (no thanks to you, pesky cowlick).  High school loomed large and scary, my clothes never fit quite right, and boys were still a heady mystery.  But for some reason, in my early 30s, I've started to romanticize this time period.  Like, with a vengance.  If anything from the Live "Throwing Copper" album comes on Pandora, I'm practically weepy.  I long for another pair of Doc Martens, fervently wishing that I'd kept the cool bronze pair I wore in the eighth grade.  I miss CDs, rudimentary technology and Jewel.

That summer, I was taking an art class taught by a local artist who was semi-famous; meaning that anyone who was moneyed in town bought her paintings for their living rooms.  She was strikingly beautiful (for a "mom", I remember thinking), with long-ish chestnut hair and a steady voice that never seemed to rise above the same soothing level. She had rented out this little cottage that sat between two homes near the courthouse - it had maybe been a tiny storefront or somebody's workshop many moons ago, but whatever it was, it was adorable.  I can only remember creaky wood floors and late afternoon-sunlit wavy glass. 

We were all supposed to be learning watercolors.  I had a thick pad of fiberous white paper and the prescribed beautiful blue tin box of french paints; it was like a strip of Crayola colors gone cosmopolitan.  Watercolors, real ones, are notoriously tempermental, and I spent most of my time in the little cottage trying to reign in each dripping color with that beautiful European paintbrush.  I painted pink watery flowers, abstract slashes and shaded spheres.  I ripped an ethereal, Venus de Milo-type picture out of a magazine and copied it - it was from a birth control ad, which one of the other teenage students, a frizzy-haired blonde, deigned to loudly point out to the class.  But I was intensely proud of it, with all the blue-toned shading on the nude woman's skin, and the arbitrary flowers held over her mysterious lady parts (it was a birth control ad, after all), and it might still be hanging in my bathroom.

I rode my bike to these lessons, clutching my paintbox over one handlebar and holding the paper tucked under the opposite arm.  And because it was 1995, I still had my Walkman headphones on, usually just set to the Wausau top-40 station.  One night I was biking home, and the sky was flaming with pink and deep yellow and blue - like someone's rose gold jewelry had melted into the clouds.  Some Sophie B. Hawkins song came through my headphones, and when I heard the line about "the whistle of a train on a summer evening", the same thing sounded out from the tracks down the hill, mournfully low but building in intensity as it snaked through town.  I remember stopping and just standing there, thinking how someday I would be grown up and gone and not hearing train whistles while riding my bike anymore.  

Now, feeding my son, watching him awestruck over the most rudimentary things in the room (the ceiling fan takes on legendary status), I have a deep hope that one day, he will have his own version of 1995 to miss.

Minus the bangs.

The Kid

If blogging in the middle of the night is cool, consider me Miles Davis.  (Yes, blatant Adam Sandler-movie-quote-rip-off, but I'm just too damn tired to think of any witticisms of my own).  

The Bub (aka Luca James, aka Supreme Ruler of All Things) has just finished a Dr. Brown's bottle of delicious Sensitive Tummy formula (stay tuned for the inevitable future blogging re: whining over my insecurity about not breastfeeding), and is doing that weird eyes-half-closed baby thing that I'm convinced is a diabolical trick to make me THINK he's asleep.  From down the darkened, 2:30 AM street (bar time, as I can foggily recall), I can hear shouts and shrieks from the sketchy occupants of this ramshackle house that we secretly wish would just burn down.  I have an overwhelming urge to run outside, spit-up stained burp cloth in hand, and furiously reprimand them using my newly acquired mom-superpowers.  Their creepy rusted-out trucks and arrest records don't scare me, nuh-uh.

Two-thirty AM used to be that time you'd get ousted from the bar, tripping out into the pre-dawn hours with cocktails and a million enthusiastically-belted jukebox songs swimming in your head.  Sky-high heels, red lipstick, cigarettes.  Now, it's the only time that I sit still long enough to remember waiting for Luca - how hard it actually was.  The expensive needles and the copious doctor appointments, the miscarriage when I laid on the bathroom floor in my own blood and wondered what it all meant.  The odd thing is, even (finally) feeding my  beautiful son in the middle of the night, I still don't know.  Baby after infertility wasn't the glorious, rainbow-filled daydream I'd pictured - we're still just slogging through these first months like anyone else, trying to get our footing, ready to fall, ready not to.  And that's ok.