“I hold on to them for when I get married,” Samantha told me as she opened the wooden chest in her one bedroom apartment, pulling out layers of plastic and fiber.  She smiled, delighted with her statement, and adds, “I guess I should find someone to marry, then.”

Sam has chosen her mother’s wedding dress, pulling the 1981 lacy, dramatic garment from its disguise of a black garbage bag and laying it out for display.  Unlike the smooth, sleek silk of the dress that belonged to her father’s mother, this matriarchal beast of a garment comes complete with a hat and a veil that must be secured with a pin– neither of which Sam intends to bother with this morning after a late shift bartending.  And, somehow, the moment she puts on the blast-from-the-past, the dress– and Sam– are transformed into a serene archetype of classic beauty.  “Cool,” says Sam, looking herself over in the mirror, “I’m not going to do my hair.  I’m hungry.  Want coffee?”

It should be noted that Sam isn’t a stranger to the camera or the spotlight.  A singer-songwriter in Nashville, Sam has been plucking away on various stages around the country for years, crooning lovesick and homesick country songs like someone destined for a cliche break:  a smoke-filled honky-tonk, dirty cowboy boots, and one important person who happens to be present and ready to bring her out of her ass-busting touring schedule and give her a proper chance to sing her songs under brighter lights.

That hasn’t happened, yet.  So she waits, in the constant transition of career, for a break or the right song.  It suits her.

It is here, in her prided apartment-for-one, with every room a different color, and every piece of furniture and artwork Sam-picked in a style that weds family heirlooms with stranger’s lost vintage treasure, that she recovers from her stints on the road.  Like every performer-homebody dichotomy, she confesses the need to force herself out of the house and see people instead of Netflix, all while getting her health back– pulling each piece of the road’s gravel from her skin until it’s time to go back out again.  This is Samantha of the Present.

Samantha of the Future talks about buying a house, something small, “I won’t need anything bigger.  It’s just me.”  But Just Me Samantha is making hints at Samantha of the Future to give a sign about a certain Mr. Samantha.  The moment is brief, though, and Sam is back to being happy just being Sam.  Friends and strangers often shake their heads and declare her too special to find someone right away.  I think they’re right.

While her encounters with Samantha of the Future seems brief– a quick Kramer-style drop-in– she also maintains a more consistent roommate.  Samantha of the Past has been entrusted with more family heirlooms than space to fit them.  She declares the framed old-timey pictures and two wedding dresses and knick knacks a default, “I’m sort of everyone’s historian.”  This hitch-a-ride roomie seems to be what is simultaneously driving her away and pulling her home.  Maybe it explains her need to perform– to be the one documented instead of the one documenting.  Or to have both at the same time.

Regardless, Samantha of the Present seemed well adjusted to the constant time travel– the pull of what was and what is and what’s to come.  She looked lovely in her mother’s dress as a photo of her mother in the same dress peered from the refrigerator with full approval.  In spite of Past and Future Sam, making breakfast seemed like a good enough occasion to wear it as any.

 

A lady named Tula sold it to her in a Russian dress shop in Canfield, Ohio.  When Megan got married, she didn’t want to wear her mother’s flowing, hippie thing– much to her mother’s relief.  And while her grandmother preferred that Megan wore her dress, years of maintaining a too-thin, 1950’s figure made her betrothal garment a modern day less-than-size-zero an impossible feat for a healthy human being.  So, just as with the last few years of Megan’s life, when faced with a decision that came detached from generational story and should-and-should-nots, she chose the lace-and-bustle of a perfect fit.

 

 

Megan is perpetually in a state of What-I-Chose-Instead, and being grateful for it.  Within seconds of the last corset loop and button being tethered, she was in a sincere state of reflection, remembering the life she had chosen over the life she didn’t want.  She recounted dreams of nightmarish quality in which her marriage to Daniel costed people their life’s happiness.  And then, as if waking again, she would turn herself to the dress and go about the business of living a life she favors.

 

 

 

In that morning’s light, in a house she bought years ago, she is aware and can accurately recall the moments that led her to where she is now.  She can name it down to the movie on TV (Audrey Hepburn) and what she was eating (ice cream, on the couch).

And always, she comes back to what she has now.  At the cost of what she left behind.  What she chose instead was to be happy and confident– at the expense of feeling like a pariah.  She is tired of apologizing for what and who she didn’t choose, and the dress is a smug reminder of how constricting the right choice can sometimes feel.  The choice to choose your own dress and not your mother’s.  The choice to accept you are not your grandmother’s size.  The choice to marry someone your friends weren’t expecting.  The choice to trust him with all of your collective baggage.  And the choice to carry it, too.

 

 

And today’s choice: what dress to wear.  There were more– one with tags still in tact that could be returned, though she’s never tried.  A couple of bridesmaid dresses.  Those stay, too.  Another too tight from a blue period of cigarettes and starving.  She won’t take it back.  She won’t get rid of it.  Maybe because it reminds her of all she’s chose since then– and all that’s better.

 

“Some people call it the Land of Enchantment, others call it the Land of Entrapment,” the long-time New Mexico resident told me yesterday.

I am currently perpetuating the image of Contemplative Writer in a Far From Home Cafe, one year after sitting at this same Albuquerque cafe, where I contemplated the speed in which one’s life can turn to shambles.  At this time last year, I had dropped the divorce papers at our previous stop in an Amarillo post office, and wept my way across West Texas.  This year, I travel backwards, with Amarillo waiting for me tonight, and Flagstaff already two sleeps past.

My great adventure West was well documented, my Instagram buckling under the wealth of desertscapes and sand dunes and Pacific ocean views.  I bought a new film camera and more rolls of film than I could afford, and snapped as many photos as emotional threads.  I posed, hands on my hips Wonder Woman style, my trusty security blanket dog by my side, daring anyone to tell me I was breaking, “Look at me! I am an amazing human being!  Look at all of these feelings I have and not a single one hurt!”

The Land of Entrapment wrapped me up like a blanket to the face, and I was gasping for breath by the time we hit Tennessee again.

In the year that followed, I meticulously concocted home remedies of drinking til I slept and chain smoking and other romantic Hollywood break up endeavors.  And as the grieving process goes, I switched to caffeine free teas and yoga.  Then attending public functions– and not just the dark movie theater kind when you’re two margaritas in with your sister and choose the most depressing film Julia Roberts has ever made (thanks, Devon).  And then, taking pictures.

The problem with depression is not just the general crisis of wondering whether or not to live or die, but that it is all that exists.  I baked Gluten Free Depression Biscuits and took Butter on sad walks in Depression Park and learned to play the Depression Accordion to accommodate all of the Depressingly Quirky Songs I was writing.  But then there was a time a few months in when I realized I still hadn’t offed myself, so I may as well keep trying.

The art of seeing is the first thing lost– before my feelings could catch up, I was staring at every Enchantment offered, and could only make out the fuzzy image of a lost moment in Entrapment.  And then, I would snap a photo.  Maybe I could see it later.  South Dakota.  Rhode Island.  Georgia.  A year’s worth of Enchantments captured for later hope on film and phone, while my vision stayed keenly square on What’s-The-Point-Of-It-All-Anyway.

When we started this year’s trip out West three weeks back, a paralyzing fear that all I had worked on to Keep Going would be squelched at the first sight of a cactus.  In the panic, I took up meditating under a couple friends’ suggestion, and found one word interrupting my usual whycan’tifeeldifferentwhycan’tIfeeldifferentwhycan’tIfeeldifferent mantra: SEE.

The instruction felt simple enough to follow, so I did.  In a letter I penned from Omaha to my friend Bryan in Nashville, the whole ordeal unraveled itself.  It turns out, Depression is just a giant spider monster who demands complete attention in order to survive.  And I had given it the attention it needed devoutly.  So it grew.  This new proposition, to SEE, caught me like a magpie’s eye on a shiny object, and suddenly, every object shined.  And it wasn’t just the friendliness of trees and all the other hippie nature shit, it was the way my dog’s slobber glimmered in the Nebraska sunset, and the humor of a cricket stowing away in my suitcase.  I remembered the feeling of the universe delighting in my delight.  And the spider monster, at least for a time, packed up its gigantic web and went to haunt some other divorcee’s corners.  As it left, it didn’t seem so big.  I don’t know for sure.  I was busy admiring the cacti in the Land of Enchantment.

She just has an ease about it.

Never mind that her life–in less than a month– has gone from cozy house-for-two, enviable to every local-goods-only hipster in the metropolitan area to a potentially haunted fixer-upper with a Dairy Queen around the corner.  The holes in the ceiling and the drywall on the floor, the peeling wallpaper and the lack of appliances doesn’t seem to weigh in against the previous owner’s care to plant enough variety of flowers so that something blooms in every season.

Dawn is better able to teeter along the discomfort of the Now-But-Not-Yet better than me– or most people I know.  Wandering around between each falling down room in a wedding dress she wore one year earlier, she is nearly giddy with the destruction.  Tools are already in use, progress is being made.  But the progress is so slow: one tiny nail in one giant rafter in one room of a dozen rooms each day.  And Dawn is just fine.  Thriving, in fact.

While the house gets into shape, Dawn and her husband live their time in a small portion of the house with two active cats and one lazy golden retriever.  It seems like a near-classic movie scenario: newlywed couple, broke down house, close quarters, ghost lady for comic relief.  And the lovely bride taking each set back and frustration with a can-do attitude and a smile.

The delight of Dawn becomes your delight.  Maybe there is something to having nothing together– to have everything completely falling apart around you and not one person there to judge you for it.  What Dawn has figured out is that the falling apart is not forever, so there is time to enjoy it.  No need to get it all together at once, either.  A clean bathroom and a dish-less kitchen sink can be just the peephole one needs to see what is Now… but Not Yet.

  In her bustley, heart topped, lattice-work backed wedding dress, complete and bejeweled, Dawn makes a lovely contrast.  The choice she made in that dress has brought her to this work-of-love-and-art house, and she is serenely enjoying every minute of it.  I believe that makes Dawn a lovely contrast anywhere, wedding dress or not.

 

 

 

 

 

I interrupt this blog series on beautiful women wearing nice dresses to bring you perhaps the most meta blog I will post.  And maybe the most narcissistic.  Truthfully, I am having terrible technical difficulties that inhibit me from doing what I want (which is the next installation of the Overdressed series).  That is perhaps something I choose by a life of touring with finicky and sparse internet connections.

But, since I started this blog 11 weeks ago, I have been determined to post each week, regardless of how prepared or adequate or generally stable I feel.  Like a practice in self discipline.  Or a practice in finding something to pour all of my dread into each week.

I have since encouraged my pal, Scott Tyler, to buy into the dread of blogging, and he snarkily replied by writing a blog of pictures he’s taken of me taking pictures.  And as much as he wanted to believe it was just a way to laugh off his own urge to write, the truth comes out that he is a very good writer and has particular insight into the curves and bogs of the creative process.  Not only does he engage in it on a regular basis, but he also witnesses and takes a vested emotional interest in the creative lives of others.  He, as the only other member of our band, has also become the primary subject matter of spare film over the last couple years.  A very gracious sort of soul that also happens to be extremely photogenic.

He has begrudgingly sat on this blog for a couple of months.  And I used the same pushes he pushed me with all these years, and he has finally posted the first installment of what I think will be a long and engaging series of his strangely God-view-esque perspective on the creative life.

All that saying, you should read it.  Now.  Go!

Bethany was, at that time, a woman caught between two lives.  Or a woman caught between a series of lives.  In the least, she was a woman caught between two marriages– years from one that took her old soul like antique lace to a flame, and weeks away from one that has replaced reams of her life’s fabric.  This is not to describe Bethany in relationship to one man or another.  This is just to say that Bethany did not choose her old wedding dress for this project, nor did she violate the Sacred Rule by pre-wearing her new one.

The 11-year-old J. Crew A-line cotton white dress was bought for her christening at the Eastern Orthodox church– and she just can’t let it go.  Not because of her devotion to orthodoxy over a decade ago– she has since disengaged with the church.  It’s just that the dress, at the time, was so damn expensive.  Buyers blues evidently can have a startlingly long trail.  But judging by the faces of the occasional icons on the walls, casually placed among the photos of her four children and fiance, the dress isn’t just a guilty pleasure.  It isn’t an anchor to history masked with denial, either.  It is a snow white declaration of re-purposing what she has to tether a long rope into a future made of better things– as Bethany described, the value of the love of self over the art of suffering.

“I have extracted all the good parts and left, traveling down this road alone, now.  Just like everyone needs to.”

Add in a bucket of paint, and you have one of the prettiest metaphorical ropes in history.  Her house is divided by color, but united by the lived in and tenderly cared for.  A house that has the vibration of regeneration– one that held her when she wanted to leave, and forced her to paint small patches each day to help forget about the old life and marriage, “I would buy something small every day with my 50% off coupons at Michael’s to recreate the space.  Little steps.  Every day.”

While I was surprised and delighted that she didn’t choose a wedding dress, it was apparent she chose a dress of renewal– which surrounds her every day– because she actively pursues it.  Her curtains are her grandparents dresses and tablecloths.  There is a wall of heroes who, I swore, moved Harry-Potter-painting style as she lightly tapped each one and described their importance.  And that bucket of paint.  It sits now with two brushes between the kitchen and the laundry room, resting-in-wait of the next old memory to be painted over new.  The house is mystical with the energy of a woman who has taken careful time to be brave and keep working.  Even her two black cats– Dusk and Dawn– spend most of their time beneath her feet, bewitched.

Who I met that day was not who I would’ve met seven years ago.  Probably none of us are.  But some people– like Bethany– are able to wear their past selves remarkably well, without shame, and know that the transition is where most of their life is squeezed in.  And it is her responsibility to proclaim those times as starting new.

Also, I’ve never seen anyone eat cereal so elegantly in my life.

 

Maybe I should have taken it as an indicator– a subconscious plea to make an exit, a turn around.  What woman meticulously plans to have a wedding dress made under the specifications that she will be able to wear it again after the big day?

I had called on a local artist friend in the Asheville area to weave it: an A-line, heart topped, knee length thing with off-white vintage warp and silver (it sparkled!), orange, yellow, and burgundy weft.  After each fitting, the weaver would describe to me how to wear it after the wedding was over to make it less bells-a-ringing and more dress-up-party-down.  It was possibly the cheapest bill the entire wedding, and simultaneously the most well thought out.

I’ve worn it twice since.  Once to a dinner party to prove to myself that I would wear it again.  A second time for a photo shoot for the band, and as dress up rules apply, doesn’t really count.  All of my I-never-want-to-have-dead-real-estate-in-my-closet-when-someone-else-could-use-it’s are now best intentions, and the dress sits in the same place it does for many women: under an internally lit sign that says, “Not Yet.”

The compulsion is not just with wedding dresses.  Last year when I visited a friend and former college roommate in Louisville and admired her dress collection, she instinctively welcomed me to try them on.  And, of course, I did.  When I reached a particularly sleek, gray-nearing-drab-but-perfect-for-professional-or-winter-day-activities one, I was smitten.  Liz insisted I take it.  But then that thing happened:

“But if you get it home and ever stop wearing it, you have to bring it back.”

I’ve worn it three times in a year, but it weighs heavy in my closet.  Have I done it justice?  Should I keep it to prove that I will wear it enough? Should I return it just to rid myself of the pressure?

Of course, Liz never mentioned the dress again– even when I met up with her in Boston last week.  Likely, it never crossed her mind.  My neuroses is the only one still fixated on the dress.

As I was going through the early stages of divorce almost exactly a year ago, I made a trek to Ohio to find solace in my closest friends– who also happened to have been my bridesmaids.  We spent the days watching zombie movies and The Prime of Miss Jean Brody, eating anything that contained both chocolate and peanut butter, and considering each break in the rain as an invitation to walk the neighborhood.  We talked about what-went-wrong-what-will-I-do-what-about-everything-I-haven’t-thought-of-yet… and the dress.  What will I do with that dress?

Well, I would keep it.  It wasn’t a representation of all I had lost, it was a representation of artistry and care and beauty.  And it may be the only good thing I take away from this mess.

A few weeks later, I returned to Ohio, and found that my friend and former professor had done some life purging of her own: she was getting rid of her old dresses.  She used explanations of I’ll-Never-Fit-in-it-Again-Anyway and This-Will-Never-Be-Back-In-Style, but there was a resoluteness about her.  She was parting from a 20 something life she couldn’t return to and choosing, instead, to embrace the life of almost 50.  But not without a fair fight.

She offered the dresses to me, taking care to remove each one from its plastic sheathing, and explaining the importance and value of each one: where she bought it, where she wore it, why she stopped wearing it.  It was a fantastic assembly, as each dress bowed to its previous owner and waited expectantly for me: are you my new mother?  I chose a couple I knew I would wear, some I would alter, and some for the value of her story.  Her first date with her now husband suit was taken, not because I would wear it regularly, but so that someone would care for it the way she had.  She didn’t need the expectation of history staring her down every morning, anymore, but also couldn’t throw the over 20-year-old piece into a pile for Goodwill.  As I packed it up, that thing happened again:

“If you get home, and you decide you don’t want it anymore, I have first right of refusal.  You’ll have to bring it back.”

These attachments we make, I’m sure we all realize, are not to the dress itself, but the memory.  The day that changed our lives.  How we looked in that moment.  How much money we spent on it then, and how we still can’t forgive ourselves for it.  The hope that we will feel as happy as we thought we did when we wore it then.  And when we give it up, it’s always with The First Right of Refusal.  Here, you carry this in your closet for a while.  Prove its worth.  Validate that what I believed was true of it still stands.  Then I can let it go.  Maybe this is why mothers hand down their own wedding dresses.  Maybe it’s why some don’t.

As part of my homespun therapy, I spent a couple of months this year photographing five women in my immediate vicinity.  Mostly, I needed a friend– a whole gaggle of them– to pull me out of my embarrassed-to-be-seen-post-divorce hibernation.  Partly, I needed something to keep me busy– something good and present and focused.

I prompted each of the five women to choose a dress– any dress– that they have that they will likely never wear again, but absolutely can’t get rid of.  Then, I asked each of them to wear that dress in their home, and let me photograph them– one roll of color and one roll of black and white– as they perform their run-of-the-mill tasks  What resulted was five interesting and beautiful women with five interesting and beautiful stories that I am delighted to leak onto the internet over the next five weeks.

I gave each of them First Right of Refusal before I shared.  They declined.

Ricky got drunk again.

Last week I saw him in the daylight.

A renown nocturnal acrobat

would not remember an audience like me.

His finest act yet:

the double backwards somersault

balance upturned vodka

(rare and Russian)

He’s got a .45

and the talent of youth.

Pallid Ricky-of-the-Day,

gray and working

for the famous

Ricky-of-the-Night.

While I am trying hard

to not remember what I can’t remember

A black, long haired, lanky dog

trots up the northbound ramp

of a Nashville highway.

Collar swinging,

Head set forward.

Someone will miss him.

I twist a poem on to his trot.

When I resume

the not remembering,

I slow to a stop.

A breakfast clementine rolls,

suicidal,

from the passenger’s seat to the floor.

I tap the eulogy

of the dog’s trot,

and leave the fruit be

with last November’s leaves

and the other things

dying not to be remembered.

 

Fluffy-Snowball-Wigglesly-PinkNose-Kitty-Puppy-Princess earned her reputation as the fiercest in the kingdom of my bedroom shortly after that one vomit incident that landed her in the washing machine faster than I could pick her name for the week.  Or his name for the week.  The process of naming the white stuffed cat was difficult enough without also having to consider its gender.  And for a girl who believed she may have accidentally had her own gender swapped at birth, who was I to base my sex-assessment on the creature’s delicate whiskers and powder pink nose?

My allegiance to Fluffy-Snowball-Wigglesly-PinkNose-Kitty-Puppy-Princess was a quiet one, squashed somewhere between my family’s reputation of we-drive-only-Fords-and-love-only-dogs and my Grandma Graham’s intense phobia of cats, which weighed down the family compound’s air with a magical thickness that averted every stray cat in the neighborhood.  And if that spell didn’t work, they were methodically executed.

There was order in my animal kingdom.  Lists and schedules were in place to ensure that everyone from Izzy the Plastic Lizard to Thomas the Overweight Walrus With the Missing Tusk had equal Going Out time.  As the youngest, equality was extremely important. And yet, for a creature I had such mixed feelings for, unable even to settle on a name, Fluffy-Snowball-Wigglesly-PinkNose-Kitty-Puppy-Princess found herself tagging along more than her fair share.  This often caused minor revolts among the Plush, leading to heartfelt speeches explaining that it wasn’t that I loved her more, it’s that…

But I couldn’t explain it.  I really didn’t like Fluffy-Snowball-Wigglesly-PinkNose-Kitty-Puppy-Princess more.  I wasn’t even sure that I liked her at all.  They sensed my uncertainty.  I paused too long.  I was overcompensating.  Brandon the Blue Smiley Man sneered.  Soda Pop Dexter the Dalmation sniveled.  Mutiny!  And before I could stammer an adequate apology, even the balcony of Beanie Babies turned away in disgust.

If I learned nothing else from The Neverending Story, it is that having a pet dragon would be ideal.  And also, the importance of naming things.  While authors and artists will tell you that naming things dispels fear and creates a brighter world, the art of naming and remembering those names is tricky business.  It is the commitment to something more chaotic than our brains find manageable.  Or it is accidentally loving a certain white cat I know I have been genetically predisposed to hate.  A stalwart in time and space is established, and the name can be loaded up with memories and the sorts of feelings and judgments it didn’t bargain for.  If I didn’t pick and remember a name, I didn’t have to care that Fluffy-Snowball-Wigglesly-PinkNose-Kitty-Puppy-Princess was dangling precariously from a second story window with a leering 10-year-old boy holding her by the tail.  I could casually pick her up from the mud, you know, whenever, and no one would suspect my secret-traitor-cat-liking tendencies.

Only three animals remain, none of which are Fluffy-Snowball-Wigglesly-PinkNose-Kitty-Puppy-Princess.  None of which are even from my childhood.  For reasons that are beyond me, I still take them off my bed every night, and place them back on every morning.  I get mad when my dog tries to chew them.  I guard them like I guarded my Plush inner circle– back when they spent nights in my bed and days playing on my floor, instead.  And I named them, definitively.  Doris, a cheap, lightweight bunny with a pink bow, became mine the day my mother picked me up from the psych ward in seventh grade.  My mother pleaded me to squeeze her instead of cutting myself next time I felt overwhelmed.  Lion, with his bean butt and his tousled mane, sits center.  He was purchased by my mother as a surprise from a play we traveled all day by bus with her church to see.  He was the beginning of the end of my religion, and the end of the start of leaving home.  Moose-Moose, all white and wearing purple earmuffs, was given to me after that five-year-secret-relationship-with-that-guy-who-should-be-in-jail-because-he-is-14-years-my-senior ended.  My mother presented Moose-Moose to me as a consolation for the bruises on my arms, and as a hopeful re-institution of the teenage years I never had.

They spent most of their time in the bottom of my closet during my three years of marriage, while I took on someone else’s name.  When I got my name back, they got their place back, too.  And now, a bullmastiff named Butter joins them in the carrying the secrets and weight of what I can’t always hold on to at once.  They are a difficult crew to keep tagging along, but at least they are remembered because they are named.  That’s more than Fluffy-Snowball-Wigglesly-PinkNose-Kitty-Puppy-Princess ever got.

It is not so much what the name is, but the the remembering of the name.  The uneasiness of remembering names is the uneasiness of knowing something or someone so well.   We can group them and break them apart and reassemble them under a different blanket that is still as functional as the first:

Chair = Red Chair = Furniture.  And we sit in that comfortably.

But name the chair Harold, and suddenly our ears prick and the room becomes a little more confusing and full of this presence: Harold.

We know chairs.  Red ones and blue ones.  We’ve met comfortable ones and cold metal ones, but we’ve never met a Harold Chair before.  So we commit to remembering the parts of the chair that make it distinctly Harold.  And we wonder how many other chairs we have mistaken only as chairs.  We’ve spent all this time stereotyping and grouping, and now with Harold erupts chaos.

So we forget his name.  It’s easier.  And when we see him next, we can uncomfortably sit and squint our eyes and find a way to casually ask, “And what was your name again?”

But Harold won’t answer.  He’s only a chair.