I am disturbed in spirit.
The last six months have been a revealing time for me. My mother's health declined toward a fairly peaceful death (although the skitter of dead leaves on the street is so much like the death rattle of her last two days that my heebee-jee-bee spot at the base of my spine shudders), my last and favorite aunt died a month later. My brother and I built a consensus with my father that is a compromise between what we wanted him to want (move to our hometown where my brother lives) and what he wanted to do (absorb the loss of sixty-six years, avoid the cold of our native Montana winter).
I've experienced a painful rift in my family -- but discovered cousins I love like siblings. This was the best Christmas I can remember which I didn't in the least expect. There were ornaments I couldn't bear to put on the tree that my father, with macular degeneration, can't see, but he wanted the tree and the new CDs of Christmas carols and the planning of holiday meals. We listened to his Library of Congress Books for the Blind and I was enthralled by the story of Magellen's voyage as I baked butter cookies for gifts.
I went to Prague in early September, and in November began the process of switching from Writer to Author.
The word that keeps coming to mind is "reinvention". My father, brother and I were forced to reinvent our nuclear family and, in turn, I have had to seek out new family for that deep sense of belonging. I reinvented Christmas. And three times I've reinvented myself from messy-haired, shower-challenged, mud-spattered dog walker/writer to someone who gets up each day ready to speak, appear, listen, be observed: for the week of my mother's death, my trip abroad, and now to promote me book.
And I did it first with shoes and then with clothes.
Does this feel familiar to my female readers?
Once I found the right shoes I could build a wardrobe. Summer was lingering in Prague so I found myself in black Dansko sandals. One way of paying respect to a new country and culture, I feel, is to dress up for it as appropriately as possible. At size 22, I wanted to feel thin; I would, after all, be doing the walking that thin people were doing. I also wanted to be comfortable. I found pairing fitted or semi-regal clothes with a flouncy skirt and leggings, working off variations of black and blue, allowed me not to question whether I was being perceived as a freak.
I was not, in retrospect, perceived as a freak. Travelling alone to a country where the language is strange or at least difficult is perhaps a thing everyone who can should do once every year or so. It forces one to really be. I sought company by asking every chatty clerk, waitperson or tour guide to teach me a word for how I was feeling or what I was looking for. My one week's Czech vocabulary expanded from hello, goodbye, please, thank you, and excuse me to include the words "nice," "clumsy," "insane," "delicious," "unusual," "beautiful" and "stork". I had waiters in Old Town Square shaking with laughter and an entire Nerudova Street store's clerks hauling out jewelry and nesting eggs, writing down my slim strange words and saying they'd never had so much fun after I pronounced a thrumming band of Hari Krishna "bluzni" -- "crazy".
That piece of paper with my words written in European script (is that a "b" or an "l"?) is one of my prized possessions.
I'm certain that being the woman on her own, who was wearing the J. Jill shirt with a soft black shruggie and black leggings allowed me to be the funny, curious, party-making idiot savant that I loved being.
Which brings me to my present perturbation of spirit.
I'm active promoting my new book, Angry Fat Girls: Five Women, Five Hundred Pounds and a Year of Losing It...Again. I had to prepare myself for meetings with publishers and interviewers, television appearances and photographers, and once again I started with shoes -- or, more precisely, a pair of brown riding boots. They set the color scheme and I amassed a lovely wardrobe centered on browns. It has served me well enough until last night when I got an email from my publicist saying that an early morning television show I'm taping tomorrow in Florida prohibits brown, tan, black and white tops. They want chirpy colors instead: "royal and light blues, light greens, purples, pinks, etc."
But I'm brown, I want to argue back. Chocolate, mocha, toast. What could be more morning show than that? And I don't have gorgeous nutty shoes for being a spring garden. My shoes, like Samson's hair, are my strength.
All night long (and it was a long night: Daisy wanted to go exploring the wildlife of Brooklyn at 4:30 a.m.), I kept waking and muttering, "Jewel tones. Jewel tones."
I better go look in my closet and shoe boxes and try to invent a Jewel Tone Me quick.
