 |
|
|
|
|
 |
 |
|
||
 |
 |
|
||
|
||||
 |
|
|||
|
||||
|
||||
Lap of LuxuryJuly 08, 2008 After I finish The Squatters' Speakeasy -- or maybe while I'm still working on it, if fate and the muses intervene and I no longer have to take in To Be Rather Than to Seem is going to consist of vignettes, each taking off from a particular incident that reverberated in my head and taught me something important. (Some of them are still reverberating.) I learned remarkably little from my parents: my father, reacting against a highly directed upbringing, gave little direction to us, and my mother lacked the confidence to chart her own course, never mind anyone else's. This wasn't as cool as it sounds. Of course they had expectations, but the expectations weren't openly expressed. We had to figure them out, sometimes by playing it safe, other times by testing the waters. Think of the computer solitaire Minesweeper, or the on-paper game Battleship on which it is based: put your foot in the wrong place and you're gonna get blown up. Anyway, here's one of my vignettes. I've been thinking about it a lot recently, for reasons that will shortly become apparent. In the early 1990s the artist Michèle Ratté had a workshop in the basement of what was then Piatelli Studios, next to the West Tisbury p.o. (I could go on at length about Piatelli Studios, home to music and dance and theater, whose pink exterior walls surprised some of the staid townsfolk, and about what it's become, a wood-shingled "wellness center," and about what that says about the last couple of decades on Martha's Vineyard. All my vignettes are ringed round with digressions. That's what makes them fun, if unwieldy.) In her workshop Michèle produced hand-stamped velvet items -- women's hats, scarves, and other accessories - that were quite the rage on Martha's Vineyard and elsewhere for several years. When I interviewed Michèle for the Martha's Vineyard Times, she pointed out that her hats and scarves looked and felt luxurious but, as luxuries went, they were relatively affordable. You could indulge yourself without, say, killing a bunch of minks or guzzling a lot of gas and still have enough money to buy groceries. These scarves and hats were gorgeous but they weren't exactly my thing. I wasn't a born-again horsegirl yet, but since the age of about 12 I've been dressing as though I worked in a barn even when I didn't. Also, at some point these items got to be somewhat of a cliché on Main Street: all the ex-hippie trustafarian women my age seemed to be wearing them, and I did not want to be taken for an ex-hippie trustafarian. However, at one of Michèle's "seconds" sales, I bought myself two hats for what seemed to be a wildly extravagant sum, probably $75 (slightly more than what it takes to fill Uhura Mazda's tank these days). One looked like something Henry VIII might have worn; I would have worn it more, but it turned out the gold-stamped burgundy velvet clashed with all the reds, purples, lavenders, and burgundies that dominated my outerwear. The other, a silver-stamped black number with a floppy brim, became a favorite. (Check out Rhodry's photo gallery; there's a pic of me holding a very small sleeping puppy Rhodry, and I'm wearing that hat.) When you're chronically living on a shoestring, "I can't afford it" tends to turn into a mantra, and if chanted long enough it becomes a barrier against new possibilities. I don't bother to cultivate a taste for lobster because I can't afford it anyway, but while this makes sense to me, I also know that self-denial can become a sort of compulsion, and in some cases it turns around and bites you: when compulsive self-deniers flip, they turn into compulsive gluttons, and it's not a pretty sight. The Massachusetts Bay colony was founded by compulsive self-deniers for whom self-denial was first a virtue and then a religion (or maybe the other way round). If you grow up in New England, you absorb compulsive self-denial from the ground you walk on, the water you drink, and the air you breathe. This puts you at significant risk for both compulsive self-denial and its flip side, compulsive self-indulgence, but it doesn't have to ruin your life. So a month or so I was pulling on a pair of old hiking socks, both of which socks had worn through at the toe, shortly after I'd pulled on a pair of underpants whose elastic was shot. Smelling a compulsive self-denial relapse in the works, I asked myself, "Is there any good reason you're wearing this stuff instead of throwing it out?" Answer: If I throw it out, I won't have enough socks. Question: Is there some reason you can't buy another pair of socks? Answer: I can't afford it. As excuses go, "I can't afford it" is right up there with "The devil made me do it." Sure, there are some things I really can't afford, like a house on Martha's Vineyard, but one week's beer ration would buy three pairs of good, hole-less hiking socks, or two pairs of hiking socks and some new underpants. Immediately I heard the sound of one hand whapping me upside the head: Buy yourself some new socks. Pick up some beer on the way home. What I did was, first, toss a pair of shorts that was worn through in several places and a very frayed tank top. (The shorts had been cut down from a pair of long pants that I tripped in and ripped at a chorus concert; the tank top had been in my repertoire for more than 20 years.) Then I consulted the Deva catalogue, went online, and ordered two pairs of lightweight shorts and one tank top of the same fabric. (If you don't know Deva, check out their website. I'm still wearing some of the first things I ever bought from them, back around 1985. Then they were in Maryland; now they're in North Dakota.) At the moment I'm wearing one of the new shorts (in sage green) and an old purple tank top that is a full sibling to the faded pink one I threw out. I feel indulged. Socks are still on the agenda. Trouble is, I get mine at Brickman's, and Main Street, Vineyard Haven, is hard to get to this time of year.
|
|
|||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
 |
|
|||
 |
|
|||
Home - Writing - Editing - About Susanna - Bloggery - Articles - Poems - Contact Copyright ©
Susanna J. Sturgis. All rights reserved. |
||||