A homeowner in my neighborhood likes to hang seasonal flags. In the Spring, a giant, nylon dogwood blossom catches the wind. Summer showcases a stitched red cardinal drooping in the humidity. In the Fall, a festive fabric ghost welcomes trick-or-treaters.
Though I typically don’t like the graphics on these flags, I do like the idea of accepting the present moment. The flags are a reminder to carpe diem, or to “rock what you got,” as my friend Susan would say.
For these flags to fly outside my house, they’d need words rather than pictures. Like giant fabric bumper stickers, but with better proportions. Yesterday’s flag would’ve read “Shambala Sun & Angel Soft” because I tripped over these items on the landing as I went upstairs. It’s just not fair to ask a flag stylist to pictorially render Buddha’s wisdom + toilet paper for the average dog walker.
Today my flag would announce “Destruction Welcome!” That’s the theme for February, you know, because February is still bossing everyone, even though it’s already March. We got nearly a foot of snow in the last 48 hours, and all that frozen weight snapped big branches off our trees. This morning I looked out the window while my restless snow-day kids stood on opposite sides of me, swatting at each other. “Good,” I thought, surveying the broken limbs and matted shrubs. “Very good.” On the other side of the glass, our neighbor’s cat breezed through the cavernous maw of our smashed fence.
I watched the cat’s surprise as she then sunk down into the snow. It reminded me of when I was a senior in high school. That year I won an academic award and attended a banquet dinner hosted by the mayor. I liked the man a lot, but even at eighteen I could tell he was BS-ing my fellow honorees and me. “You can be anything you want to be!”, he gushed. Sure, I was a little cynical back then, but cynicism wasn’t to blame. Wasn’t I being recognized for excelling in history and literature, both of which are chock-full of promising figures turned tragic? Hamlet, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Archduke Ferdinand, Oedipus, Emily Dickinson, Willy Loman, JFK, Julius Caesar…I looked past my certificate and saw them seated at an eight-top in the shadows of the ballroom, drinking pitchers of “Yeah, right!”
Why not a banquet for failure, I wondered this morning, looking at our damaged trees. Why not a prize for the D+ and the botched interview? For the mean swipe at your spouse, for using a sarcastic tone with your child? Why not raise a glass to still-February, and to that awful charge in a room where there’s just been a fight? Don’t these parts of life deserve a bon-voyage, lesson-learned, sadder-but-wiser send-off? When my mother and I talk on Sundays about the week’s foibles, we crack up by pairing two expressions we detest on their own but adore together: “It is what it is,” and “It’s all good.”
It is all good. When the mayor said I could be all I could be, he was partly right, but he might’ve rounded things out by saying my original plans might not go as expected. That after some thrashing around, I’d make some kick-ass new plans. He should have brought Ziggy Marley and Paul Simon onstage to sing “Walk tall, walk tall, even if you fall, get up.” Or even my son’s tragi-comic version, “Walk tall, walk tall, even if you fall, give up.” Yes, we have to dream, but sometimes we also have to take those fallen branches from the yard and build a log cabin. I’m pretty sure that’s what it says somewhere in that issue of Shambala Sun. Or maybe it’s on the Angel Soft label. Either way, “building a log cabin” is definitely going on my flag tomorrow.
Loved this one Whitney.
Thanks, Christie.