Change

Staying clean

A promise to you my dear readers, that these new pants will never be worn for work outside. I should have paid more attention as a kid, when I watched Mr. Rogers come in and take off his outside shoes and put on his inside shoes. Perhaps I associated this with the control I tried to escape, those Sundays when my dad said, “Take off your church clothes before you play.” Or maybe, I was fixated on the cute woman hung around with the guy who kept the toy train spinning. 

Yesterday morning showed one pair of pants untouched by soil. White linen. A blessing. A pair of pants didn’t fit until I started to swim. Today, I tripled my stock of pants and what I might wear when among people, when expected to look a certain way. There is something to be said about feeling clean, about the difference between sweating like a pig (Is that an expression? If so, is it accurate? Do pigs even sweat?) and dryly encountering people in clothes that are clean.

Fred Rogers had more to teach than hygiene. He ordered boxes of books written by Bo Lozoff. And so from Fred I came to Bo and from Bo I came to this. And on a morning when I thought I might write of the thrift store, of my gratitude for the people buying what might otherwise be wasted, for the gratitude of the people who make production unnecessary, instead I offer Bo, “The cause of all our personal problems and nearly all the problems of the world can be summed up in a single sentence: Human life is very deep, and our modern dominant lifestyle is not.” 

I stole a book from a hotel room in Japan. Fukuoka to be exact. Funny that Masanobu Fukuoka would turn out to be one of my heroes. It was 2002. I ran out of money. I ran out of booze. And in the next two days of shaking, that black book saved me. The Teachings of Buddha. If I had it now, I would show you the part where clothes are broken down. Where a torn shirt becomes a towel and this threadbare towel becomes a rag and this rag might then be used outside and what strands are left become compost.

I heard today that I stitch and God gives the pattern and I am cast back to the Indians inside a little smoke filled bar on Second and Dryades and how they sang, “Sew, Sew, Sew”. And if you don’t know, now you know.

I consider prayer flags. I consider how kids might tie their old clothes together and stretch these across power lines instead of shoes. 

I have seen for a long time now, for over nine years now, what is supposed to happen, how I will be surrounded by art and plants and music and food and laughter, and I have had glimpses of this in the 9th Ward.

Today I had a vision, planing the two by fours from my dead dad’s old deck into quarter inch strips, a deck he built by hand because he believed, boards that I hauled from Iowa to New Orleans because my mother was about to pay somebody to take them away, boards I drove around the city with for a month, red flag long gone.  

I envisioned a six foot by six foot canvas, these strips tacked to two by fours, and I saw faces painted along the lines of Alexei Jawlensky, bright cheeks and eyes and a warmth from a cold place. And I saw empty glass bottles each filled with different colored shards of glass. And I saw rust in old milk crates.

There was art and happiness everywhere. Trash became life, became surrounded by vines, by voices, by what I have always known. 

We are never alone.