Narrative

"It's all about the food with them."

-- Rick, the Kentucky barber who cut my hair this morning

--

Been staying late at work the last few weeks. Overtime hours, as of June 1, no longer count for anything here, but at the very least it's an opportunity to use the internet and--especially at 5pm on a Friday--to do so in peace. Right now, the only sounds are of puttering motors outside and the slosh of the break room dishwasher. I'm not even playing music. For now, silence is golden.

Got a haircut this morning at Rick's, my favorite place for that sort of thing. At Rick's, the only employee is Rick, and his hours--no joke--are:

Monday - Wednesday - Friday

9:30ish to 5:30ish

Rick just got back from a trip to Michigan, and we talked about it while he buzzed and clipped at what has been growing on my head since mid-March.

He asked what was going on later that day, and I told him I was teaching a workshop at Starfire again. I told him how I hadn't expected adults to be so childlike even if they had mental disabilities, and that I wanted to do something out of the ordinary with them today, something we didn't do the last time I went. He told me about his sister-in-law, who has Down's syndrome, who is one of those semi-mythic people who can tell you whether May 23, 1905 was a Thursday or a Friday (it was actually a Tuesday).

"She's amazing," he said. "And you know what the key is? Food. It's all about the food with them. My sister-in-law literally has a friend who she calls every night just to tell each other what they had for dinner. One says, 'Hi, I had spaghetti,' and the other says, 'Oh, I had pizza,' and they hang up. They just love talking about food."

"Why do you think that is?" I asked, keeping my head still.

"Something to look forward to."

--

Sometime when I was at Hillsdale, I must have been in line at the dining hall when I had a minor epiphany: a lot of foods, at least in America, are between yellow and brown/red on the color spectrum. This includes most soups and sauces, along with anything made from grain or flour. It even applies to most fruits. I don't know why it is, but you don't see many purples or blues. Greens, yes. But not many others deviate from the "warm colors," and in general we don't find black foods appetizing at all; black is the color of burnt or rotten.

Yellow seems to be the color of appetite, of carbs.

--

A few weeks ago, I had a Mark Twain workshop at the Cincinnati Art Museum. One of the activities was to have the kids create their own pseudonym--and that's all that was in the study guide notes. Very open-ended, and very uninteresting in itself. I stole a stack of yellow papers and two dozen markers from the copy room and brought them along. I had them share the markers. They were first to draw what they most liked to do, then brainstorm related words that could function as names on the same sheet of paper.

For example, one boy drew a baseball player and brainstormed words like "out," "play," "diamond," "home run," and "bat." His pseudonym? Homer Unn.

The papers and markers stayed in my backpack for a long time after, not because I was sentimental about it but just the opposite: I kept forgetting to return them to the copy room.

All that goes to say: I had a bunch of markers and yellow papers in my backpack after my haircut was done.

--

They sat in a wide circle. I had a volunteer pass out the papers and placed the markers on a table in the center of the room; they were allowed to take one marker at a time, returning it when they finished, and they should raise their hand if they wanted another piece of paper.

They were to use their imaginations to turn their pieces of paper into their favorite foods. I demonstrated first, coloring a sheet green and then folding/crumpling it into a rough broccoli shape. I wanted them to make their projects as three-dimensional as they could, which in my opinion is more creative than drawing a picture of the food. We would later play a sort of charades game, acting out the eating of the foods while everyone tried to guess what each was.

I wish I'd brought my camera. There were a lot of pizza slices (minimum folding and it stays two-dimensional); one old man grew frustrated but settled for creating a whole personal pizza, folding in the corners to suggest a circle. A lady showed us the layers of a cheeseburger before stacking it and taking a bite. She also tore short, thin strips into French fries. Two other women made ice-cream by wadding up the paper and using a bunch of markers for sprinkles and asking for more paper to make the toppings; one had a fudge brownie beneath it and the other nestled nicely into a waffle cone. A young man made a fish and pretended to eat it tail-first. Someone took their time forming some mac'n'cheese, and another dared to attempt spaghetti. One of the guys who chose pizza folded his slice lengthwise and informed us, "New York style," how he eats his pizza.

--

From a barbershop to a children's theatre to a center for mentally handicapped adults, this was a day when a lot of things came together: advice on the food approach, leftover items from the copy room, and a room of creative minds.

Makes me wonder a little about how we piece our lives together. We justify our past by seeking a narrative in it, something that says, See? You were always this kind of person, these are your tendencies, you are this kind of character. This is the method for job interviews (this is your experience, these are your goals) and relationships (these are your exes, notice their flaws and avoid them in the future), and I'm sure plenty of other categories. But isn't the idea of those categories also part of the puzzle? When I was at this bad point in my life, I worked at a job I didn't like and turned out to hate who I dated. The idea of a bad part of life, separate from a worse or better present, is also categorical. I used to be that way, now I am this way.


What I wonder now is how to turn categorizing into improvising. Quickly recognizing that small accidents can lead to small victories. What object left in the car is going to rescue me later? What will I find in my pockets tomorrow? What old acquaintance will hire me in a few months? Have I already seen the face of the woman I will marry?

And so on.

I know this whole line of thinking eventually leads to folly, but in moments of reflection (i.e., blog time) I think it's good to seek out our narratives. We can't read them objectively, we'll scan over key words and kick ourselves later, but it's good to see how the threads are lining up, to analyze the data, to search for our own coincidences. We can't always share them with each other--fewer things can be more boring than listening to or reading a person's idiosyncratic life story--but it is sometimes more revealing to share it with yourself anyway.

My dad once told me, "You aren't who you think you are, and you aren't who other people think you are. You are who you think other people think you are."

That just might be true. At the very least, looking for my narrative makes me believe I'm trying to see myself through eyes of the Other. And as with many things, within that Other, is Order.