Glory Ho

• When someone shows you who they are, believe them. (Oprah)
• Tell me slowly and I will understand quickly. (Eat, Pray, Love)
• We are all responsible for our own happiness. (My Mom)
• What you put into the universe ALWAYS comes back. (Maury, Abraham, Buddhism, Life)
• Don’t worry about changing the worlld. Just do something that makes you come alive. Because that’s what the world needs. (–Harold Thurman Whitman)
• Keep your goals in focus, but be flexible on the path. (Life lesson while on olive farm in Turkey)
• When making big decisions, remember that often, the moment of absolutely certainty never arrives. (My Mom)
• Two sharp stones cannot make flour. When you become the surface, you are not lesser, you are wiser. (Bulgarian Proverb from friend Ellie)
• Act as if everything depends upon you, but pray as if everything depends upon God. (Live Life to the Fullest Plaque from my Aunt Sue)
• All truly happy people share the understanding that happiness exists at just one time and that time is now (Paraphrased from Willie Nelson)
• Look for God. Look for God like a man with his head on fire looks for water (Eat, Pray, Love)

This is my new favorite song. For anyone enchanted by bluegrass, carnivals and rockabilly style, cup your ear to this:

Snaps to Thomerson for the rec.

Writhing. It’s not a word that should be used lightly. It indicates pain and suffering. But that day I saw it. 

I’m certain that the idea of “snorkeling”, in most beaches across the earth was started by some marketing genius to make tourists feel “active” after all the Coronas and lying around. So at least I knew, as we counted the pesos and lopped our legs over the side and hissed open a cold Tecate, I knew that this excursion was just putting a little wind into my hairstyle.

Luckily after 45 minutes of ho hum snorkeling, we saw an octopus.

I have this playground of images which live in an old pirate trunk at the back of my mind. Creatures which I full well know are real, but remain mythical and monstrous until I actually see them in person without the presence of fences or glass. Giraffes live there. Sharks. Gorillas. And definitely octopuses.

When it was first thrown onto the beach by our mustached, Mexican guide , it wasn’t writhing. With all eight arms–or were they legs–slithering in cartoon-like coordination, the octopus wasn’t squeezing some diver to death. The octopus was only walking, just trying to go home, back to the water. He was scary and scared all together, with iridescent, army-green skin and a layer of viscous slime.

But then we watched that Mexican turn that boneless creature’s head inside out, clutch the brain and toss it into the Gulf. All the octopus’s defense mechanisms–an ink sac, color camouflage, arm detachment to distract a predator–were each a merely fascinating Animal Planet factoid in the face of a human.

Then we heard the octopus cry, its toothed tongue rasping for life. A wheezing sound one makes when they are laughing so hard that they can’t breathe.

Then. We watched the octopus die, all three of its hearts slowing to a stop on the beach.

On the way home, the wind tied knots in my hair, the octopus lie still on the floor and my eyes followed the scalloped V of our wake.

Life is a game to be played. Do you want to play with me?  –Michael Boudreaux, December 2008

That night, we went to Cherry Creek Mall and I picked up a couple things at Z Gallerie. Boudreaux drove around while I ran my errand. When he picked me up, we called our friend, Greg, in his Janus office building across the street and made him come to the window to see us. Then we went to the Esquire theater, bought our tickets and walked a block to the liquor store. We bought beer, grabbed two, put the rest in the car, then entered the theater, opened the bottles with my mascara and watched Slumdog Millionaire.

There is no climax. Nothing else happened.

It was the most normal American night in our old ‘hood.

And I’m still thrilled about it.

I noticed something when i was in London this past July.

For years, when traveling, I’d always hoped to find a face I knew. An old advertising professor in the Frankfurt airport. A kindergarten classmate on the Spanish Steps. I’d think of something clever to say, we’d chat briefly and then part, both lost again in the metropolitan common collage of expectations and emotions, backpacks and cobblestones.

But last time I was in London, not so. As we walked the Thames riverfront, fascinated by starving artist’s faces in the sand and perusing the used book market, (where I bought Veronica Decides to Die) I saw bits of everyone I know in others. That woman in the pea coat and paisley scarf-the soft cushion of her chin and nose reminds me a little bit of my Aunt Beth. That man there, he walks just like Dustin–with such urgency. The tanned shoulder of a Swiss tourist–it’s the exact shade of my Mother’s skin. A shade of coffee sprinkled with melting snow.

Instead of wishing it was them, I was simply glad to be reminded of them. I was appreciating what was there, intangibly on my table. A memory. A glimpse. A moment.

The feeling hit me again, from a different angle, in Mexico.

We were wandering the avenue, now overrun with high prices (is that pesos?) suburban mall windchimes, tequila trinkets and beaded belts that would look beautiful hanging in my closet for the next ten years. I was seriously considering some purple earring made of palm fronds when an art gallery caught our eye. My first thought: But we can’t buy anything. It’s just not in our budget right now. So why go in?

Why, to appreciate the art of course.

And so we did.