The embarrassment didn’t settle on me as my treasure was secure and jangling in my hoodie’s pocket two blocks from home.  Seven shiny pennies would clink into my circus elephant bank in a matter of steps– seven!  Nearly a dime’s worth.  But better, because there are seven.  And there is something about the bronze-copper skin of Lincoln that is superior to a dimming silver in that from-the-shores-and-caves-of-Tortuga sort of way.  You know.  Pirate stuff.

But these gems weren’t procured after a fortnight’s voyage through the Caribbean.  These are the result of me bent head first into a stranger’s bright blue trash can, my 97 pound dog pulling the opposite direction with the mortification of a 16-year-old accompanying her institutionalized mother on a rare town outing.  Never mind the honking horns and slowing cop cars.  Never mind the disgusted look on the face of my now-ex when I explain where these most recent riches were found.  I’ve got seven pennies ringing like New Year’s Day because some fool misplaced their belief that all that glitters is gold.

Magpies and me?  We are like a regular Bonnie and Clyde of shiny objects.  These Eurasian-and-sometimes-Coloradan birds, best known in Scottish folklore for their role of bringing death to each household they window-perch, have a knack for everyday thieving that would earn them gainful employment for Bill Sykes himself.  They have a distinct advantage over me, of course, with their sky high getaway cars and bird’s eye views.  But I’m certain the delight in each acquisition of glistening garbage is evenly matched.

Before the onslaught of congratulations for holding the same values as a literal bird brain, it is important to note that magpies aren’t your common robin IQ.  These are the only birds who can recognize themselves in a mirror or a photograph.  These are the only birds who cut their food– and their babies’ food– to appropriate portions.  If you hold these feathered friends in captivity with bad housekeeping, they will literally build tools to clean it out (and likely complain to the general manager).  These creatures can take down predators of mass destruction with more tact and strategy than the US government.  And that’s just to get them through winter.

And despite all of their intellect, luck-and-death folklore, and general beauty (have I mentioned these birds are also gorgeous?  I took on a full about-face on my first encounter just to catch another glimpse), they are best known for their insatiable need to collect shiny objects.

Last weekend would have been my fourth anniversary had I decided to stay and work things out and hope that two angry birds could share one tiny nest.  Magpies mate for life.  Though usually the annoyingly chattery type, the men use the ancient secret of low sweet talking to lure their lady.  Once she is secured, they resume their cackling banter for the rest of their lives.  Or until one of them dies.

It is also common knowledge, however, that the sight of two magpies is the promise of good weather.  When the weather is fine, the magpies concede to hunt together.  But the moment a storm or cold scarce winter begins, the two separate, agreeing that it is better that they each scavenge and keep what they find for themselves so that they may both have a chance to survive, rather than splitting feathers over who gets the larger berry.  Practical birds, certainly, even if a little less than romantic.  This life lesson sponsored by Nature may not be one that I need in most situations, anymore.  But for occasions like the commemoration of what is lost, this bird is happy to have flown solo.

Autumn is playing its trickery, again, where the trees masquerade themselves with too much rouge and slowly lose layers like a well practiced show girl.  Even the gold of these Halloween leaves couldn’t persuade a magpie.  They would be more preoccupied with the coin I found today in the movie theater parking lot.  This puts me one beak up on the magpies, I think.  The end of the storm– if this is the end– may not have brought me back to an old once-smooth-talking-mate-for-life.  But I’ve got two eyes full of fall, one dime to thumb in my pocket, and more shiny objects than I can carry in one hand.

 

She was shocked to see it when her mother-in-law brought it down from Michigan.  It was dirtier than she remembered.  More beat up.  And it broke her heart.

When I asked Nicole to take part in the Overdressed series, it seemed that between her wild hesitation and the chronic scheduling conflict, this last piece would need to be left undone.  Upon my arrival that morning, though, the timing (as always) was perfect.  Nicole had spent our missed times warily walking past the guest bedroom where she had placed the dress after the initial reunion, and hadn’t had the courage to enter that room since.

“I just thought, if this looks this bad– so much worse than I remember– maybe the whole day was worse than I remember.  Maybe it wasn’t perfect.  Maybe I wasn’t,” she told me.

She feared the dress.  She had refused those days that it haunted her house to try it on, or even look at it again.  What if it didn’t fit?  She flashed to her grandmother’s dress, how so much money had been spent to preserve the dress and, still, how it fell apart in her hands years later as she took it from the box.  Not enough tissue paper and all was lost.  Her own dress felt like a different sort of loss, “I didn’t feel worthy to put it on again,” she admitted.  “For the first time in my life, I don’t feel completely comfortable in my own skin.  I’m scared.  And here’s this perfect picture staring back at me that I don’t fit in, anymore.”

This incubation process, stuck in her lovely home with this ghostly expectation, left her distraught even a couple days before the shoot.  She relayed that a friend of hers took her fear and unraveled it, reminding her that if she met her husband on this very day, he would still choose her.  Nicole seemed a little more reassured at this thought.  But it was Nicole herself who had the final say on the matter.  And she chose to walk into that back room and put on the dress, presenting herself boldly with a container of safety pins for me to use where the zipper failed.

The rest was left for her to hold up on her own, and she did so in her tiny backyard kingdom with the ease and grace and cheerfulness of Snow White– her chickens and dogs and flowers bending to her every movement.  Her caramel-lined back glowed as she wandered around the life she has grown and loves and fits into perfectly.

And she is more than a worthy picture.

“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.