SubscribeDo you remember Froggie, in Wind in the Willows? Adopting every fad that came by as the final answer to a question that he probably would never even ask himself? Discarding it just as quickly? Vroooom, vroom, racing around from bikes to boats to cars and back again.
I get that frog, and I suppose I get the limitations to the approach as well. When I feel good about myself I can describe me as a Renaissance Man, interested in almost everything. When I’m feeling judgmental I recognize the same reality differently; to be interested in so many things is to focus on nothing and (while limiting risk around putting oneself out there) certainly assures you will never be acclaimed as number one at anything, either, thus insuring that no waves of adulation will ever lap at my feet. Too bad, so sad…..
….and yet this character strength or flaw does allow me to experience other lives, sometimes one after another, if only in my still-fertile imagination and if only for a few moments. Take today, for example….
Irene and I started the morning exactly where we have been for awhile, on the outskirts of Auburn, AL., a small still-redneck not-quite-cosmopolitan University town about an hour out of Montgomery, if that helps you geographically. Jake, now recovering a bit more regularly from his cancer surgery of this past Tuesday, actually walked with us all the way to the trash receptical and almost all the way back, a distance of half a mile, easily the best he’s done by two times and prompting us to believe we could leave him alone for an hour and get a bike ride in before the humidity came to join the already-evident heat. Changing into our bicycle touring gear, putting on the orange breathable top, the dark gray pickleball short, the cool lighter-gray short-fingered gloves, the charcoal hard helmet, I became like Lance Armstrong, of course too old, too heavy, riding a hybrid bike that Lance wouldn’t laugh at, him being seemingly way too polite a guy, but surely would snicker at behind a metaphorical hand, but I was he for just a moment, and straining to cross the semi-busy rural highway and rocketing up and down over the train crossing just past it. Just for a moment, but I got it. The ride, no more than ten miles and maybe an hour, was done with no stops to celebrate my Lance-ness…the first longish ride we’ve taken non-stop, as it were. VERY cool, good to be him.
Fifteen minutes later Irene and I were bound for the Jule collins Smith Museum of Fine Art at Auburn University, a pretentious title for a fine modern building housing a few terrific permanent collections. One of them, Dale Kennington’s Shifting Mythologies exhibit, consisted in part of five richly painted multi-panel screens and brought me so far into the art that I thought I could never escape. All of her perspectives are uniquely arranged to draw her viewers in, take for instance the panels depicting a beautiful pre-pubescent girl, standing and struggling through some obvious anguish, glancing at us as if to recognize that we weren’t going to save her, but could, if we only wanted to. And in THAT moment, I wanted to, wanted to have the skills of Dale Kennington, knew I never would, but, oh, my….I got it, and her, right then, if just for that second.
Around the corner, same gallery…and there is a permanent exhibit of…would you believe it?…pop-art Icon Andy Warhol, arranged to show first the polaroid snaps he took of subjects and then the paintings themselves, so heavily stylized and yet so true to the photos, showing another exposure, another side of the same thing that didn’t exist until he put brush to canvas, and what genius, and, after we talked about it a bit, I think both Renee-girl and I got it, and him, although I could feel myself losing it as I turned the corner and left him behind.
The rest of the day has gone like that. At lunch in the wonderful Amsterdam Cafe (”wonderful” and “cafe” are two words that only juxtapose in Auburn at that particular place, home of, among other things, a lump-crab-meat-and-avocado-on-croissant sandwich that ranks as “one of the hundred things you have to eat in Alabama” for very good reason.), I talked over with Irene this book I’ve been reading, a great little first-edition of Big Deal: A Year as a Professional Poker Player, by Anthony “English Tony” Holden, in which, ala George Plimpton, Tony takes on another life, a life EYE have often dreamed about, playing in, among other places, the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas. VERY, VERY cool…a life that I still want, but believe that, now, I may never see it unless something changes. That something may be in me or just in my finances but I’m putting it out there now….just give me a year, and let me show just a small profit, and I’m a happy man. The book is written well enough for me to know that I don’t want to be Tony, not all the way through…I just want to do what he did, and still dream about it.
I wasn’t through yet, though. When we left, we stopped by, next door again, into a vintage clothing shop, and as I look to my left into the mirror here in our coach, I see a short-haired aging geezer-jock, not quite over the last hill yet, wearing a true vintage tie-died tee-shirt, orange and red mostly, with the most bitchin’ picture of Mickey Mouse falling down on the front. Who IS that cool dude, I ask out loud, just playing, knowing, of course, that it’s another version of me, a version that may continue to please, who knows? And, really, who cares? Consistency can be badly over-rated, don’t you think? Vrooom, vroom!