Sawdust

I tell my mom that, to me, she smells like sawdust.

Ripped fresh from the wood molding.

My mother can use a circular saw as if the blades were just her fingers softly caressing the pieces of wood. She made something that looked inherently violent a labor of love. She is the reason I subconsciously refuse to accept that the triangle is the strongest shape in nature; her squares and rectangles of walnut and burgundy were the first perfect thing I ever knew.

My mother is the reason I will never run from a chainsaw at a haunted house or jump when someone starts cutting wood. That sound is as comforting as the sound of her running the vacuum obsessively before company coming. She is the reason I make lines in the carpet of my apartment.

I remember being excited to take trips to the frame shop, a bleak, not at all child-friendly warehouse filled with molding and large uncut colorful mat boards. That warehouse was my castle.

It was probably the only store we went to where she never told my brother and I “don’t touch anything.”

We touched everything.

My brother and I would first seek out the cheap 50 cent vending machine carefully hidden amongst long piles of wood. The warehouse felt like a maze that only my mother could rescue us from.

On our quest to get grape soda, I would carefully run my fingers along the flawless intricate designs of the precut wood, wondering if my mother would the buy the ornate antiqued molding this time.  Wondering what those long pieces of wood would frame.

Sometimes, they framed my childhood. My dreams. My aspirations.

My mother made me appreciate art before I knew what art was, pointing out and explaining the small numbers on the limited edition prints she so carefully framed.

My mother can cut glass so beautifully that it looks like it never was cut at all but rather it kindly separated itself to bend to her will.

Our garage became a workshop and a waiting room.

I would huddle next to an old kerosene heater that I was sure would one day burn down our house, patiently watching my mother work.

My mother sounds like a piano. She can pluck notes with a joy and a ferocity that should never be able to accompany each other. She plays the piano as if each note represents a sacrifice.

My mother can play like her soul hurts for things only notes can verbalize. I didn’t realize that she could even read music until I was a teenager. Her notes don’t need a notation. They just are. Existing in the abject and somehow settling deep enough to make you cry and laugh at the same time.

Sawdust sounds like the forgotten remains of something broken and deconstructed.

Sometimes, I think I am sawdust.

But then I realize, my mother deconstructed and then reconstructed wood too carefully to leave something broken. She constructed me too.

My mother has shaped my artistic philosophy with her own passions and I love her for that.

I want to create art that sounds like music and smells like sawdust.

-les

Paint

I am waiting for the paint to dry.

Literally.

My roommate gave me a small, white unassuming end table that I saw as a blank slate, a project. I paint it with a vengeance that could only be preceded by an exhaustive, frustrating week.

As I painted, I became frustrated with the drying paint, so easily absorbed by the wood surface. I felt like the wood was taking advantage of all the paint I so liberally applied to the surface; when would it be enough? I become infuriated with the tight corners and careful edges. I begin to paint with a mantra; it is all about the details.

I remember I was watching this show once about people doing horrible things with the aspiration of gaining something for themselves. One character asks a question in an attempt to justify their actions. The other character responds simply, “God is in the details.”

I think, God is in the details.

I have been so ungrateful for this week. In the most cliched and terse phrasing, I have been drowning. I wanted to press reset and start over. I feel like each and every one of my efforts has been met by adversity. Each step I take feels so small in the grand scheme of things.

But at least they are steps. They are small strokes on a bigger surface. I don’t know how big that surface is. Most days, I am not really sure whose surface I am painting on or if anyone is painting on mine. I just keep painting.

I am trying to be grateful for the paint I have been given.

I keep hoping. I am doing my best to work passionately on those small things: the grades, the grad school applications, the endless grades, and the emotional turmoil.

I hope God is always in those details.

-les

Dear Dad

Dear Dad,

I don’t tell you this nearly enough, but I love you and I am so incredibly proud to be your daughter. Thank you for loving me more than I deserve. Thank you for being proud of me when I have accomplished little. Thank you for singing “You are my Sunshine,” because you will always be one of the few people that we be able to make me happy when skies are grey. Thank you for the Bible verses and reminding me that I should “Learn Everything,” so I can “Be anything.” Thank you for continuing to say that to me even when I felt like I was capable of nothing, much less anything. Thank you for building me up and being wonderfully critical at the same time. Thank you for never making me feel stupid even when I made stupid mistakes. Thank you for giving me faith because faith comes by hearing and hearing by the word of God. Thank you for torturing me with NPR and Allison Krauss. I will always be your Prairie Home Companion. I will always sit in the car with you to wait for Car Talk to finish. Thanks for saying it best when you say nothing at all.

             100 miles away, sometimes I sit outside when they mow outside of my apartment, just so I can pretend to smell your grass decorated skin after landscaping.

Thank you for teaching me to swim and how to not drown in this world. Thank you for always responding, “look it up” whenever I’d ask what a word meant. I owe most of my vocabulary to you.  Thanks for passing down your OCD; people mock me for my keeping doors closed and lights off. I am okay with that.

            Thank you for listening to me even when you are busy at work; thanks for calling me back to listen to my insignificant life details. Thanks for existing in my life.

            Thank you for teaching me to be stronger than those that have hated me. Thank you for loving me when I was not strong enough. Thank you for not forgetting about me.

Thank you for supporting me through my silly endeavors. Thank you for approaching these endeavors like they were the most important thing in the world. Thank you for not comparing me to my brother so that I could find my own passions.

Thank you for not disappointing me. Thank you for not hating me when I have disappointed you.

Thank you for letting me fail miserably.

Thank you for encouraging to be better.

Thank you for understanding. Thank you for fighting.

Thank you for loving me relentlessly, a mere imperfection in this world, as if I were not this little flawed person. 

Fortune Cookies

I hate fortune cookies.

I really hate them.

I have a problem. I always get bad sounding ones. I can remember a time when they weren’t so awful “Riches will come your way,” and the generic “Your future is bright” shenanigans. Now, as I have become an adult, they have gotten steadily less bright. One of the last ones I remember reading “You’re laughing now, but wait until later.” I don’t know about you dear reader, but I’d rather receive threats elsewhere. Imagine my dismay after a delicious Americanized-Chinese food meal, I unfurl that little piece of paper from shell of a cookie. My expectations for the taste of the cookie and the fortune are vaguely similar; one would assume that what awaits me will be generic and bland but hopeful.

Fortune cookies creep me out. They shouldn’t. They are just little strips of paper manufactured in some little factory. They are still creepy. They predict too much. Opening them begins with promise and it ends with a weird sense of gratification and dismay; you could have gotten a better one. Nothing should have that much power.

Somehow, I think of fortune cookies and I think of the phrase “best friend.” Like those cookies, I view something that should be positive as creepy and foreboding. When I look into my personal background, I dislike 90% of the people I have once claimed as my “best friend.” But Les, maybe you are just picking the wrong cookie-people. No, I blame the phrase. I can get away with friends, but as soon as you add that qualitative “best” onto, we have entered friendship purgatory and things will be heading straight to...

I don’t like to fall into that middle school cliche of “I hate labels.” I honestly love labels; they make things orderly and delightful. I think when we try to label things or people, we often overburden them with the expectation of being something great and are disappointed with they are not the “best.” We frame people with a destructive qualitative energy that reeks of “This is what you should mean to me.”

I know I am blessed. I am lucky to be surrounded by people that constantly exceed my expectations when I honestly should have none. I know this when the best compliment I receive from a friend all week is “She writes for fun” as if to say “She kills for sport!” I love this.

Maybe I should stop opening cookies for the words.

Maybe one day, I will just let the cookie be a cookie and appreciate it for what is.

Tests

Sometimes, I don't like to talk. When I was 3, my teachers would run out to the car and tell my dad "Leslie TALKED to us today!" My dad thought they were crazy.

Do you remember that graduation speech that came out a few decades ago and has circulated on every radio station ever during graduation season?

A few years ago, I downloaded it. Then, I found the version with music. I would listen to it on constant repeat like it was a Britney Spears song in 1999; I knew it was relevant but wasn’t quite able to grasp why.

Like a catchy song lyric, one quote somehow got stuck in my head:

 “Do one thing every day that scares you.”

So I did. Because I am neurotic, this is usually pretty easily accomplished. Sometimes I call people and tell them I am thinking about them without worrying why. Sometimes I go on an adventure. And sometimes I sign up for $175 dollar tests that I am completely unprepared for.

Yes, kids. I am referring to the terror that is the GRE, a test that is too long and too quiet. The eery silence of the room makes it feel like it's always holding something back.

I find it funny that we spend most of our high school years attempting to prepare for the SAT, but somehow I feel nothing in my college career has gotten me to a place to feel prepared for the horrors I saw on that test. Absolutely nothing.

But then again, I don’t think it was supposed to.

            Today, I joined my roommate to spend the other part of my day desperately trying to conquer homework. Absentmindedly, I said, “This is nice; I feel so focused. I wish I would have spent more time in here getting things done.”

This semester is quickly going to end. My undergraduate career is quickly going to end. And somehow, after 4 years, I never realized the value of going to a place and surrounding myself with people that were attempting to do the same thing I was. I am learning. 

I am learning what it means to be tested.

            I realized that things are not just happening to me anymore. I am trying to make them happen. I have to prepare myself and forgo the expectation that anyone will prepare for me to be any kind of successful. I am learning how to listen again to what people are really trying to tell me.

            I don’t know if I will get into grad school. I don’t know where I will be a few years from now and that scares me. Still, I refuse to second-guess myself into an all too familiar downward spiral.

            For some reason this week, I told someone that life is too short to constantly question yourself to make other people feel comfortable. I think that my 3 year self understood what is in the power of silence. I think my 3 year self liked making my pre-school teachers uncomfortable. 

            For this reason, I hope no one ever gets comfortable around me.

-les