Velvet Verbosity

He is homeless, his address written into the deep lines of his face.  We stand face to face over the opening of a trash barrel.  I throw away a package wrapping, he digs through looking for scraps to cobble together a meal, or for redeemable cans for change.  There are band-aids all over his face.  He pays me no mind as I glance at him, wondering what broke him.  He is the kind of man I think of when people smugly say, “That which doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger”.

This man is the living, whispered argument to that quote.   The man we ignore so we can continue to believe the lie.

Should I give him a dollar?  Or would he only be insulted?  Or worse, would his wet eyes make contact with mine in gratitude?

Artwork by Crowsong

With love,

P.S. Challenge, write your own word portrait, tips are here.  Leave a comment with a link to your post.

She is sweet faced and dimpled, smiling gently at everyone in general, and no one in particular.  Kindness spreads from her like angel wings.  The glint in her eye is apple pie, and picket fences, and rosy-pink babies dressed in organic cotton.  It is hand-knit mittens, woolen socks, and comfortable shoes. It is coordinated decor, neat stacks, and pure-bred puppies.  It is intelligence focused humbly in one virtuous direction.

She will make her way through life one tiny, careful choice at a time, measuring each decision by a delicate code of balance that is nearly unconscious, for she has been loved well, and raised wisely.  She will listen before speaking, look before leaping, but perhaps unnecessary when decisions come easy to one who has been raised without doubt. Everything will progress as it should.  She will be made wife, and mother, and balance a steady, slow progressing career in between.  Fulfillment is not a question in the vocabulary of her psyche.  It is already here, and there is more to come.  Temporary plagues of inconsequential insecurities only serve to wrap support more snugly round her shoulders.

She is, in a word, unmarked.

With love,

P.S. If you would like to write your own word portrait, tips are here.

A writing meme in November?  You might wonder if this is just a happy coincidence since it’s day 4 of NabloPoMo and you’re a l r e a d y banging your head against the desk and asking the writing gods WHY, WHY, WHY.  No Internet, this is not a coincidence.  I just can’t help myself from helping a blogger out.  You’re welcome.

Here’s how it works.  Write a short “word portrait” of someone you know (or don’t know), post it on your blog, and leave a comment here.   And don’t forget to say “Walla!” when you’re done.  Because it’s satisfying, that’s why.

These “portraits” are word paintings of a person, a short description, but much more than that.  The way I write mine varies somewhat, and you can see examples here, and here, and here.  Aaaand, there’s more in the sidebar under “Portraits”.

Sometimes they are written about someone close to me, sometimes they are written about someone I know only a little, and sometimes they are written about someone I saw in passing.

Since I don’t have a conscious method, I can’t give you an exact formula to write your own portrait, but for what it’s worth, here are some tips (this is the part where I give away magic secrets):

1. Don’t necessarily “look” for someone to write about.  In other words, don’t try too hard.
2. Don’t try to think of the most interesting person you know, or try to find the most interesting person in the room.  Start with whoever is right in front of you.
3. Take your brain like a Halloween candy bucket, and empty it out  (eeeeewww Mom!  Someone gave us brains in our bucket!).  Now, with your emptified mind, just observe and experience this person.  If they are familiar to you, empty your mind anyway, because trust me, there’s always more to “see”.
4. As you begin to have thoughts, DON’T WRITE THEM DOWN YET!  This is important.  This is like when you’re listening to someone talk, and one and a half sentences in you’re not listening to them anymore because you’re already thinking about what you’re going to say.  Yeah, this is bad, and you’re probably missing a whole lot of stuff.  You need to get out of your own head so that you can “receive”.
5. Spend a good 10 - 15 minutes just quietly observing.  Let the thoughts bubble softly.  You should start to notice that certain sentences or words are starting to re-occur or get “louder”.  These are what you want to write down first.
6. Now you’re ready to write.  Start with those words or sentences that were re-occuring or louder, and then flesh the portrait out from there.
7. Like a portrait, you are not looking to capture every detail of a whole life, but just one moment, one impression.

Wait.  That sort of looked like a conscious method, didn’t it?  Well, take it all with a grain of salt.  Write for you, and do it as it works for you.  Any advice I give is only to help you if you’re stuck…by all means, don’t let it squash your creativity if you suddenly find yourself going in a WHOLE other direction.

I don’t know when I officially started writing  “portraits”, but I’ve always done them in my head.  I think that’s how you know you might be a writer.  When there are chapters and vignettes being written in your head on a more or less constant basis, and at some point, if you don’t start writing it down and getting it out of your head, all those words threaten to clog up the entire workings and land you in a padded room with only crayons for company.

That’s it.  Post by midnight, and remember to comment with a link to your post so we can find it!

P.S. Yes, I re-used an image.  I’m way too tired for Google Images at this hour.  Will fix tomorrow.  Probably.  Not.

P.P.S. Never mind, I fixed that.  I’m not a perfectionist, shut up!  As a bonus for my original sloppiness, here’s a time lapse video of the current art being made.  (Artist Justin Simoni)

He is a porcelain doll writ large, too tall for grace and yet, it is all he possesses in every gesture and every motion.  Even the way he eats cake is graceful, when the length of his limbs says it shouldn’t be anything but awkward.  He carries the refined features and low brow of the German or Dutch, and sits in the common modern repose - face over laptop - but his bend is different.  Perhaps it is the ghost of a smile that plays upon his perfect mouth as though his face could split open into laughter at any moment.  Perhaps it is nothing more than that strange sense of “other” we pretend doesn’t exist, but is betrayed by our constant fascination.  I let myself imagine that he is blissfully unaware of his outer beauty, so that when and if he ever looks up at another person, the smile he will surely gift will be innocent, for it is too tragic to think that such physical perfection corrupts the soul.

With love,

He moves through the light and sound of his efficient machine, pulling levers here, pushing buttons there, trusting the process, a business acumen akin to faith.  He presents a mystery I don’t care to unravel, but now sitting across from me there is talk, and then there are the words between lines, unspoken but heard like thunderclaps.  We chatter about things pulled from the air to fill the space, idly taking inventory of possibilities.

He shifts, always moving, not just in body, but in mind.  Emotions and attention flicker and I wonder where the line is between his confidence and his fears. He would hate to know how he morphs so easily into awkward.  It would help him to know that awkward isn’t so bad. It is the awkward in all of us that endears us to others, wrapping tiny fragile tendrils around hearts.  It is the juice and gristle of compassion.  The very ground of tenderness.  The places we are all afraid to go.

I listen, watch, am perplexed and amused, but unmoved.  What he says means little since I am aware that it means little.  Instead I study the landscape of his face, for it is a curiosity to me, the bodies that our minds inhabit, and how the perception of the “who” is influenced by the “what”.  Peripherally I am aware of his collar because of its close proximity to his neck.  Some little corner of my mind collects the possibility of his scent, measures the pulse, and calculates the arc of electricity I would find if I touched my face there to breathe him in.  For it is in these crooks, these vulnerable joinings of this bone to that, softened by flesh, that we find the most extraordinary thing - the pulse of mortality.

Photo: The Searing Sound of Light - Ian Duncan Anderson (courtesy of)

“No man loves life like him that’s growing old.” ~Sophocles

He is an elegant man, tall, slender, and white like a beech tree bending gracefully over his task.  I ask him where I can find the vinegar but he doesn’t hear me.  It is then I see he is wearing a hearing aid.  I speak more loudly, move in closer but not too close.  I don’t want to give him a start.  I want him to remain graceful like he is.  He hears me at last, turns slowly toward me, blinks a couple of times and then efficiently tells me, “aisle eight”.  He is turned back to his work before I can even say thank you.

It is Saturday and the store seems full of old men today.  Or maybe it’s that I’m noticing them today.  Perhaps some yearning to understand where it is I’m headed, to find a message in the lines on their faces that yes, there is meaning, and they’ve found it.

On my way out to the car, a largish man leans his stomach over the handle of the cart, leaning on it for support more than pushing it.  The cart is full of cheap bottles of soda and I imagine him sitting down to a dinner of microwaved meatloaf and a glass of iced pop in front of the television.  Later he will fall asleep in his chair with a blue light flickering across his face and his stained t-shirt.

Driving home there is a light drizzle.  Not enough for the delayed wiper setting, but enough that I have to manually send them swiping every few minutes.  It is near dusk.  I drive past a robust old man with an unruly white and gray beard that billows like a storm cloud around his face.  He is walking in this gray drizzle and yet seems not to notice.  He strides along, piercing the drizzle with his dark-eyed squint, carrying his round belly and that mass of hair like he means it.

Two brothers resisting age, fighting it with all their might.  The regimen of vitamins, maniacal exercise and pretending they’re still in the game long past their prime.  Resisting settling in or down they achieve little but looking restless and never quite satisfied with the Now.

I pull up to the intersection where the bike path suddenly disappears.  Out of the shade and the quiet the path dumps out on a four lane trafficked road lined with strip malls, fast food joints, and gas stations.  A gaggle of cyclists wait with me at the light for the cross signal.  The father asks me, “So where the heck is the bike trail from here?”.  I eye his family.  The seven year old just barely off her training wheels with her pink glitter sport bike.  The 10 year old on a wide three wheeled bike that seems fit for an 80 year old.  I wonder how she’s going to get it through the narrow dirt path I’ll have to show them.  How she’ll get it over the train tracks and down the wooden pallets.  The mother who, contrary to Gary Larson cartoons, does not want to take directions from someone else thank you very much.  The 12 year old who blends into the background with her normal bike.

“You can follow me”, I say.   They don’t follow me, they surround me like a cloud and we swarm across the busy intersection, and into the parking lot.  They fan out on either side of me in migration pattern.  We part after the tracks.

The sun beams down and I’m flying, ripping through air.  A cat sits watching me approach and when I call out to her she blinks yellow eyes at me in greeting, lifting her nose as I pass.

Under the bridge a young man naps, a handkerchief tucked into the back pocket of his jeans, his bike tucked in next to him like a lover.  I stop a little way on to adjust my seat and passing cyclists call out in the code of the trail, “you ok?”; “Tools?”, “Need anything?”.  I smile and wave them on.

He is tall and moody, though a light comes into his eyes if only you just say, “hey, how are you?”. I watch him out of curiosity, trying to determine if he’s thinking about anything at all besides the salad he methodically eats. It would be a remarkable feat, wouldn’t it? To think about nothing but exactly what it is you’re doing. Many people spend years chasing down such sublime “nowness”. Yet I’m not entirely convinced that is the state of this man’s mind, even though he does seem to be entirely focused on the precise movements needed to gather the lettuce, the carrots, the avocado, and dressing onto his fork until nothing but the smears of oily vinaigrette with tiny bits of food smattering remain. For a moment I think he might lick the plate, not out of hunger, but out of some need to complete.

From behind, which is how I first see her, she looks like any teenage girl. Dressed in pink fuzzy pajama pants with a striped hooded sweater, her hair curled up into a casual loose bun. She is the epitome of adolescent girl. But her face, oh my god, her face. She hears my footsteps approaching from behind her and turns toward me. I can only hope that my own face does not reveal the shock at what I see when she turns, because the truth is, I’m ill prepared and horrified.  It is a ravaged face of 40. A skin that has seen too many harsh winters. Eyes that are nothing more than portals into a shriveled dark hole that smells of putrefying memories. A mouth whose only and rare smiles are bitter. Her features are chapped, blotchy and abnormally swollen. All the pain of her life that might have made her young face look this way curls into my stomach, delivering a cold hard punch.

I am reminded of the faces of so many models in fashion magazines. Nearly pre-pubescent looking girls made up to look strung out. That’s fashion. Only there is no makeup on this girl’s face, and this is no glossy ad. This is real life run hard, and the only thing it makes me want to buy is a hot cup of coffee so I can stuff it into her chapped fingers and pray that it might contain some magic that will bring her soul back to her.

The thoughts begin to come.

I want to protect this girl from more pain. I want to protect my own daughter from girls like her. I want to take her home and let her get a warm meal and a warm bed.  I want to run home and tell my daughter how very much I love her and watch her while she sleeps thanking god that she has a warm bed.  I want to find all the people that did this to her and make them pay. I am grateful that my own daughter’s face, as angry as it can get, has never ever come close to looking like this.  I want to take her pain into myself and relieve her of it just long enough to show her a path out. I want to buy her a coffee.

I can’t. I don’t. My own children are waiting for me, waiting for their orange juice and milk. I know it’s not fair.

Image from http://neovermin.deviantart.com/art/strung-out-82871431
Artist Neovermin

The great pleasure of a dog is that you may make a fool of yourself with him and not only will he not scold you, but he will make a fool of himself too. ~Samuel Butler, Notebooks, 1912 From the dog’s point of view, his master is an elongated and abnormally cunning dog. ~Mabel Louise Robinson Our dogs will love and admire the meanest of us, and feed our colossal vanity with their uncritical homage. ~Agnes Repplier

With the exception of women, there is nothing on earth so agreeable or necessary to the comfort of man as the dog. ~Edward Jesse, Anecdote of Dogs

Dogs have given us their absolute all. We are the center of their universe. We are the focus of their love and faith and trust. They serve us in return for scraps. It is without a doubt the best deal man has ever made. ~Roger Caras

Mr. Shirty McShirty has been dogsitting for over a week now. The relationship between this man and this dog is a sight to behold. I’ve never been much of a dog person myself partly because my mother would have disowned me (i.e. she conditioned me so) and partly because, well, they smell, the slobber, they wag, they beg, they stick their noses where they shouldn’t, and most of them are as big as me and maybe that scares me just a little.

But Shirty McS? Definitely a dog person. He’s pretty sure he WAS a dog in a past life, and a pack leader at that. Alpha male.

The thing is, if you saw these two beasts together for a day, you’d believe it. Rover (name changed to protect the innocent) yields to S McS in every way and seemingly loves to do so. When S McS locks Rover out of his office so that he can take a sales call, Rover whimpers softly outside the door for several long minutes, and then finally concedes to curling up somewhere and pretending to sleep. When he hears S McS wrapping up the phone call, and yes, he knows, he gets up and goes to the office door which opens on cue. Bizarre.

One week and maybe a half and these two animals are bonded like the best of brothers, only one, of course is Alpha. Wherever S McS goes, Rover goes. When S McS sits in a chair, Rover climbs into his lap and I feel compelled to let you know that Rover is NO SMALL DOG. Rover is a beast. Part dalmation and part BIG DOG, he takes over S McS’s lap, half the chair, and he’s still dangling in several places. He doesn’t seem to care. He just wants to be as close as possible to his master. His master of just under two weeks.

Rover is a friendly enough dog. He’ll greet you with the usual crotch-sniffing because nothing says, “Nice to see ya” like a snout in your soft spot. That doesn’t explain the instant and un-breakable bond of these two. I swear to you, I could walk in the room with a giant bacon flavored dog bone for a head and garlands of dog bones around my neck and Rover would take his eyes off his master only long enough to shoot me a glance as if to say, “What are you trying to prove here?” and then turn his adoring gaze back to Mr. Shirty.

In fact, if I hug Shirty McShirty in Rover’s presence, he becomes extremely distressed. He sits at our feet and barks, then backs up and barks some more until we give up the nonsense. I’m afraid if I gave McShirty a love pat I might end up on the floor with some slobbery teeth on my neck.

So I get it. Man loves Dog. Dog loves Man. And that’s just how it is.