Candlewaxing Nostalgic

Today, while listening to Stevie N doing Landslide I got to thinking about the things I used to have that I don't have anymore. Probably because I used to like to try to play that song on my old guitar that I also, don't have anymore.

I never could play Landslide all the way through without making a mess of it. But I tried.

Believe it or not, but once upon a time, I had a couch. I also had some "art" that I composed myself. It was truly horrific and amateur and would most likely get me banished from most art-loving societies, but it was my own bad art so I hung it with reckless and nonsensical abandon. I owned a rickety piano that I rescued from a friend. Ancient and fiercely upright, it fought me when I played it like a petulant child-- stubbornly refusing to stay in tune. After months of pounding and fuming, I eventually learned to play it as it wanted to be, and one day we simply stopped fighting.

And one day, I simply started writing music again.

I used to own an apartment full of painstakingly refinished furniture that I trekked all over Los Angeles to find...at yard sales, and estate sales, and thrift shops. I became the proud owner of a monstrous pink, antique desk that I purchased from a manic furniture artist named Claudia who lived in Venice beach and wore nothing but paint-smeared caftans that billowed and ballooned like psychedelic clouds around her enormous and frenetic frame.

Thanks to Claudia's sheer force of will and an inherent inability to comprehend failure, that desk made its way into my second story bedroom window via a series of precarious pulleys and gnarled ropes that creaked and moaned as they heaved the gargantuan thing up into the light of a dying Los Angeles afternoon.

I still remember the day I bought it, and how excited I was that I would finally have something substantial to sit behind as I wrote. How the desk made me feel like I had finally made it, as a writer. "This will make you famous one day!" Claudia beamed at me, her blue eyes twinkling behind reigns of smeared mascara as she stood triumphant and bold beside the hulking monstrosity now holding court in my bedroom.

That night, as I sat there at my new desk, I hoped she was right.

Of course when I moved to my next apartment, I left the desk in that second story bedroom. There was no place for demonstrative furniture it in my new home. Some things are meant to be left behind I guess.

But then I bought a chair. A white chair so enormous and cloud-like and magical that I never wanted to leave it. I'd melt into that seat for hours, writing blogs with my laptop perched upon my knees, smoking cigarettes and drinking wine into the forgotten hours of early morning.

I called it my writing chair.

When I left Los Angeles, I sold my magical writing chair to a woman up the street, who also purchased most of the furniture in my apartment. Her name was also Tara. "It's like you were in my head and knew exactly what I was looking for!" she shrieked the day she drove up to my yard sale and hopped out of her SUV.

"This is exactly everything I need and want! You have my everything!"

Sad as I was to see my everything go, I was comforted by the knowledge that my things would at least get to stay together, if not with me, with some other Tara who loved them.

Every once in a while I wonder about the magical chair. And the big pink elephant desk. And the ornery piano.

Today I remembered how, every once in a while, I'd turn off all of the lights and ignite every candle in my apartment and sit with the things I had accumulated and worked for during my life. I'd glance around at my stuff and remember how we all got there, and at what cost. In the dim and flickering shadows, somehow it all came together. The bad art, and the writer, and the piano and the dreams. 

Sitting here  in North Carolina with only the clothes I showed up with and not much else, I don't really miss the things that much.

Not really.

Except the chair.

I do miss the writing chair. I wish I could buy it back and I am sorry that I sold it.

Some things are just meant to keep. Even if it means dragging them across the country. Even if they're a big pain in the ass to haul. They're worth the expense, and the pain and the irritation.

Not because they mean anything on their own, or have any intrinsic value just sitting there...but because they remind you of what you can be.

And somehow, they inspire you to be it.



 
Tara Callahan

A Manufactured Life

Today, while getting ready for my job as a hostess at a chain restaurant that entails me pulling on a uniform that makes me look like I should be scanning your Tampax at Target, I got sucked into a favorite movie from my youth: An Officer and a Gentleman.

For those of you too young to know, (and I can’t believe I have friends too young to share this knowledge with me)…but the actor Richard Gere used to exist without gray hair. He used to be kind of gritty and dirty and vulerable in a real enough way that made him believable in this life-changing part as a guy from the wrong side of the tracks who does right and becomes a charming Naval Officer.

But I’m not here to talk about how good Gere was in this film and how he went from being an Officer to a Gentleman, even though he did a great job at being both.

I’m here to say that as I stood in my bedroom in my own uniform, flat-ironing my now-graying hair, I heard the young Debra Winger character say something to Richard Gere ‘s soon-to-be Officer character that stopped me in my tracks.

She was talking about the factory in which she currently worked with her best friend. A factory just outside of town. I don’t even think the screenwriters ever tell you what it was the factory manufactured. Just that it was a factory where people worked their lives out, and where they presumably toiled until they died.

The line that stopped me was a line I’d never heard before, even though I’ve seen this movie approximately 15 times in my life. The line was:

“My mom is almost thirty-nine years old and has been working in this factory for her whole life.”

I know writers are always yammering on about how someone’s heart stopped. How her heart stopped, or his did, or the cat’s did or the whole world’s did.

And I know it is cliché.

But mine did too. As I stood there, almost thirty-nine years old, stepping into black, hideous, non-skid shoes, a pair of tan pants, and a threadbare red t-shirt, on my way my own factory… mine did too.

I hadn’t heard that line before, or cared much about it, because it wasn’t relevant to me, and now, suddenly, it was. And it made me view that film in a whole new light. Not as a hopeful, young and naïve girl, waiting for her hero to come to the factory to sweep her away from the hopelessness, but as a 38-year-old woman who knows better.

This woman who knows better finally understands that no officer or gentleman, or soul mate, or pr-job, or overseas adventure, or 401-k plan, or god for that matter, can ever truly change the rules of the game. A woman who knows better knows that no matter what happens, the compromised life she climbs into is hers, and hers alone, as long as she continues to choose to climb into it.

The Officer and a Gentleman movie now made me mad and irritated and snarly,  for all of the right reasons---which is how most truths tend to come at you. Truth tends to rise from the shit festering way out in left field, where the seepage and roughage of life tends to settle.

And from there it beckons and taunts and dares you to wear it, like an armor.

And if you are courageously dumb enough to do so...that shit might one day, when you are not even looking for it, when you are not even caring about it,...when you are not even remembering why it even existed in the first place... but that truth, cloaked in the most foul-tasting shit, may set you free.

One day.

Tara Elizabeth Callahan

Death.

It is a slow, and a quiet thing.

Life does not instantly leave us in an abrupt and fatal finale. It recedes, like an ebbing tide.

Last night during my shift at the hospital, one of our patients died and I was asked to help my friend with that patient’s post-mortem care.

It was the first time in my life that I have ever touched a dead person.

As we methodically removed the labyrinth of lines and tunnels of plastic tubing connecting him to this earth and cleansed his body with warm soapy water, I wondered about this man.  Raising his slightly-muscled arm, I noticed his personal tattoos and wondered how old he had been when he received them. I wondered what kind of man he had been, while he was alive. What sorts of things he had seen in his life. How he felt during his last breath.

I hoped he felt safe, and strong, and loved.

We carefully removed and changed his bedding, tucking him into fresh linens so that he would look clean and restful before his family came in to say their final good-byes, and we waited.

That was the worst part. Not the death, but the living beings left behind to keep their heads above water in the wake of it.  I will remember the face of one woman entering that room, for a very long time.

Grief for a loved one is a more terrifying and emotional thing than death, any day.

I know that now.

 After the family finished and departed, we prepared our patient’s eyes for organ donation.

The eyes we irrigated with saline solution may once see again. As my friend and I stood there holding his lids open during the procedure, I wondered who might receive these eyes that ceased to have life and light behind them.  I wondered if those deceased eyes would ever remember anything they had seen thus far.

I wondered if organs have any memory at all. And for some reason, even though I didn’t know this man---but for some crazy reason--- I sort of wished that they did.  I wanted what he had seen, to help in some way.  I wanted them to serve as a guide and maybe protect the person who would peer through them next.

As I held his hand in mine and carefully washed it, he felt warm. And strong. And vital. And alive.

But that too, eventually faded.

We later transported this man’s body to the morgue…which sounds like a scarier process than what it truly is, because what we were transporting was simply a husk of what once was.

A deceased body is a container of life. Not a life itself.

We as human beings are ultimately greater than the sum of our parts.

But those parts do eventually wear out…

And so do we.

It is an intimate experience, death.

I feel honored to have been a part of it.

-Tara Callahan