Beautiful Mess

Ah yah. I've got the downs. No real mystery here. It's two days after Thanksgiving, I haven't been off the property in four days and Christmas is coming up. People are murdering people from India to your local Walmart and Toys (backward) R Us and I want to go to Mexico.

Why Mexico?

Quien sabe, as they say down there, who knows.

Well, I know. But I've gone into that before and what the hell?

The man has offered to take me to Dog Island for Christmas and I suppose that will do although after my breakdown there last July, I'm not sure that going to a place I was more depressed in than I've ever been in my entire life in order to escape depression is the answer.

Quien sabe?

I gotta get engaged, I think. I gotta get out in the world and do shit.

Yeah, what?

I read a book yesterday as the rain came down and I moved from one prone perch to another. It's called The Legend of Colton H. Bryant and it's by Alexandra Fuller and if you haven't read her books, go find them right now. This book is about a Wyoming kid and his family and his friends and about the oil and gas companies and what they'll do for a buck. Sound heavy and depressing? Well, it is and it's not. Fuller's writing is the kind that makes you open your eyes wide and gasp out little sounds of amazement, makes you stop and reread, makes you want to fly through the book and then dip down, soar up and come back again for another flight.

Anyway, those people in Wyoming have a saying, which is Cowboy up, Cupcake, and I keep thinking about that but hell, I'm not a cowboy and I'm not a cupcake, I'm just a depressed middle-aged woman on the swift downside of life who'll never be able to write like that.

Depression is a weird thing and at least it's not anxiety. There's a blessing for you.

It did rain all day yesterday and I was glad. We need the rain and I wanted an excuse not to do anything. Mr. Moon went hunting in the rain and he doesn't mind that at all. An old friend dropped by on his way back home to Tennessee with a CD for me to listen to, especially one song. The CD is by a guy named Jason Mraz and the song is called Beautiful Mess. We sat there in my hallway and listened to it, the dogs all over us and I wept. I wept. My friend plays the violin on the CD and he can make your heart soar with his playing and he and his violin are in high demand for session work. But I know him from when he was a student at FSU, and I'd listen to him practice in a little house on Call Street that isn't there any more, an old slave shack, I guess, and his playing even then could bring me to tears.

We only see each other about once a year, if we're lucky, and we catch up and he's one of those friends that there's no awkward pauses, no speed bumps in the conversation, just get straight to it and cry if you want. His wife was at one of my births, I was at one of hers, and she couldn't make the trip this year because one of their daughters just gave birth to a four pound premature baby and she couldn't leave that precious, perfect child. Their fifth grandchild. A fertile family, indeed.

Anyway, there we were and then it was time for him to leave and he said, "Mary, suffer all you need to," and he didn't mean it in an ugly, you're-really-stupid sort of way but in a loving way, like this-is-how-you-are-and-it's-okay sort of way. Like maybe I'm a beautiful mess.

Like maybe it's all a beautiful mess, babies and depression and the music business and love and holidays and general life and trying to figure out who we are, even now, fifty-something years down the road, working on that one daily.

I don't know. I do not know.

But what are the choices? Fold your wings and give it up? Give up that gift of flight we all have, even if we've forgotten that we have it?

I guess not.

Suffer if we have to. Weep for the suffering of it, the beautiful boys working the rigs in Wyoming; the people driven to take guns to the streets of India for some reason, not clear, but it probably has to do with poverty and hopelessness and fear. Weep for the weirdness in our fellow humans that causes them to get out and stampede Walmarts at four a.m. on the day after Thanksgiving for electrical devices and toaster ovens.

Weep for the beauty of it, the words, the music, the way the wind tosses the orange Bradford pear leaves down to the ground. Weep for the whole damn beautiful mess it is. Weep for the joy and the hardships of the years behind us, maybe the ones in front of it.

I don't know. Quien sabe?

I do know that life is not a Mexican vacation with a musician playing at your table.

But sometimes it's a good book. It's an old friend. It's a song that makes you cry.

Tears are tears, whether they're sad ones or sweet ones, they're the overflow of the heart-juice.

Cowboy up, Cupcake. Get on with it. It's all just a beautiful mess.