Everyone in my house wants a piece of the volume dial. So they can turn it in opposite directions. Up! Down! A little louder but not as loud as before, please. Oh, I hate this song, turn it down! But this part’s good, can you turn it up?

That’s the kids’ version. Here’s the grown ups’:

Remember this? (turning up) It’s that guy from the 90’s, what was his name? Oh yeah…something about a blue sky?  No, you’re thinking of that Australian group, “Mining.” Wait, is it Matthew Sweet? Yeah, he was good back then, but this song is way too dissonant now (turning down). This is the famous verse (up). Dude, he’s talking about drugs! (down, glancing over shoulder at kids).

Rewind thirty years. Family car outing, Jimmy Buffet, our parents piloting the tape deck.
“Why don’t we get drunk and…“   Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzwhipppppp!

Fast forward twelve years to high school. My rebellious teenage brother stealthily teeing up Led Zepplin’s “The Lemon Song” for the background music as my family poses for its preppy holiday portrait. Smile! I jab him in the ribs and whisper: What are you doooooing? Turn it down!

My husband Joe and I have always had different volume tolerances. If you paid one of our friends to wear a blindfold, sit in our car, and turn the ignition, he could instantly determine which one of us drove last. Blasting rock + rancid biscuit smell = Joe. Total silence + sour chai stench = me.

Early on in our courtin’, Joe and I went to a Farm Aid concert. On the the long drive home, we nearly blew out the tweeters scream-singing to Pearl Jam. Joe roused the pleasant memory recently, and asked how I could drift so far from my head-banging roots. I confessed I was wearing earplugs that night. My stock plunged.

As parents, Joe and I have finally found common sonic ground. Forty loud plays of Taylor Swift’s “We Are Never Getting Back Together” means we’re both ready to yank the plug on our daughter’s jambox.  I go to her room and ask her to switch to a new song (any song), please, and she leaps for the volume knob.  She’s afraid I’ll find a certain verse offensive. That’s when I realize life has come full circle. Specifically, a silver circle labeled VOL.

Everybody who worked on today–Tuesday morning–come up here on stage with me! Keith, our mail carrier, (pointing), I know you’re out there, get up here! (applause). Because today wouldn’t have been the same without all of you.

First, I want to thank my husband for sleeping on the sofa last night. Our daughter needed to crash in bed with me since her room was stinky with new paint. (Even low VOC, people!)

To my daughter, thanks for warming up the mattress for me between 8:30 pm when you went to sleep, and 11:30 pm, when I finally fell in.

Son, your mistaken lyrics to “Hello My Darlin'” (“Hello my honey, hello my lady, hello, my wrestlin’ gaaaaaaaal”) lit up my morning.

High heel black boots, thanks for making one footie and one knee high look so stylin’ (because you covered them up.) You always have my back!

Keith, you are a rock to us. You not only bring our mail in the ‘snow, rain, heat, and gloom of night,’ you also put up with the spiders and earwigs that party in our mailbox. Seriously, thanks.

To my breakfast team: eggs by chicken, buttermilk biscuits by the incomparable Camille Glenn, honey by bees and jam by berry farmers. Mmmm. Still licking my lips.

Teachers: I owe you a huge debt of gratitude for taking care of our kids today and every school day, for inspiring them and  lighting their way. And also for coming up with Tuesday dumpling day because I didn’t have jack squat to put in my son’s lunch box, especially since he can’t eat anything crunchy for 60 days per dentist’s orders because he hurt his two upper adult molars on a trampoline last week.

Finally, Whitney, so often in life, women put themselves last. Though you’re doing it right now, at least you’re consistent. Thank you for remembering to wear your mouth guard to Krav, even though you forgot to take it out of your bra when you went to bed in your exercise clothes. While gross on two counts, the sight of that silicone crescent under the silky strap this morning made you weirdly proud. Wrap up? Oh there’s the music, ok, yes, and of course thank you to my parents and family who always support me, and who always send my kids Halloween costumes and birthday presents, you’re the best! xoxox

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49EoV50oba0

Now, I was thinking the other day about hair, and that the weird thing about it, is that people will touch other people’s hair. You will actually kiss another human being, right on the head. But, if one of those hairs should somehow be able to get out of that skull, and go off on its own, it is now the vilest, most disgusting thing that you can encounter.              -Jerry Seinfeld

People are very sensitive about artists “selling out.” They want creative folks to succeed, but if money or advertising becomes involved, artists get accused of losing their integrity and identity.

Take my thick hair. It has quietly dedicated its career to dropping strands on household items such as novels, yogurts, keyboards, and mouths. Lately I’ve been thinking Coke might sponsor my hair. That way, the strands could sell out and stop shedding like they used to. I close my eyes and try to imagine what it would be like to wrap a birthday present—just once—without getting a piece of hair caught in the tape. Being the nostalgic type, I’d probably miss it, like that single, wiry chin hair that “some people” still reach for after it’s been plucked.

However competent my shedding, I’m no expert. While living in Venice during grad school, I witnessed the skill of a true afficionado: my roommate. She dropped keratin with an artistry worthy of the Old Masters at San Marco. Every night before bed, I’d sweep up her daily wig to avoid wrapping hairs around my toes and cutting off their circulation. They were oddly beautiful, the mounds of black strands in the dustpan. I had no problem letting them go, though, because there would be plenty more tomorrow.

“It would be good for us to see other people,” my college boyfriend said. He could do three things at the same time: talk, roll up his floor futon, and break up with me. We had a strong bond, but not as strong as the bond between my waist-length hair and his staticky carpet. Through my tears, I watched a good sixty strands lift from the carpet fibers and glom onto the futon as he stashed it, like a jellyroll, between his guitar amp and his copy of 9 1/2 Weeks. Though I was heartbroken, it was comforting to think that one of his “other people” might find herself unwinding my hair from a certain ice cube in the not-too-distant future. Or spy a strand emerging from my ex’s nose in the morning light, like the world’s longest nostril hair.

On second thought, my hair won’t be selling out to Coke. Nor to Dyson.

A perfect swirl of hummus glistened under the container’s taut, clear lid. I studied it in the grocery aisle while shoppers floated by. It was the kind of swirl I’d fill a cake cone with this week, if I owned an ice cream shop. “Here’s your large vanilla!” I’d say, handing the hummus peak to my non-repeat customer. Maybe I’d realize my mistake. Maybe not.

This was the week my brain packed its bags. A child loved by many of my friends perished in a tragic accident. Grief may reside in the heart, but its ravages also reach the mind. On Wednesday morning, I found an oven mitt in the refrigerator–my handiwork from the night before. Two hours later, I poured laundry detergent into the dishwasher.

It could have been any child, any parent. Any one of us doing our best to be vigilant, in any given moment. I sob, and terror spools between my head and heart like a cassette tape, rewinding, fast forwarding, and then snarling into a hideous tangle of unrecoverable loss.

“Can they see us?” my son asks. In the Fall, hot air balloons fly over our house. We hear passengers in the basket, and can almost make out their conversations. “Hello!” we shout, waving our arms, but they never seem to find us. I explain that from where we stand, they’re a pinpoint against the sky. But to them, we’re a thousand-piece puzzle of trees and rooftops. Whose view is the real one? Is the world bad or good? I’ve been asking since I was a child, and I still don’t know.

Driving home from the grocery on Saturday with my wallet on the hood, I longed for my Thorlo socks. I bought them years ago at an outdoor shop while faking that I like to camp. When I got home with the week’s food, I knew the floor boards would be cold. Later, after my children were in bed, I sat in a miniature chair, at the little table they’ve outgrown. It resides in a place of honor in our living room, calling, hey, you pinpoints and puzzles–come and sit, you have a place here, and are loved. The floral-print tablecloth billows out when the heat comes on, and you feel warm enough, even in bare feet.

Dear child, I didn’t have the privilege of knowing you. But when I sit here, I hear you from the basket, saying go on, lady, write that book, let’s dance, and where are the chips? Precious girl, I will, yes, let’s, and in the pantry by the Ritz.

The leader of the family art event walked fast, her feet flicking in a bee-line towards my face. “How are we doing?” she asked nervously. By ‘we’ she meant me. I was on all fours, chopping up a pretty Pachysandra border by the architecture school. It was good-strange to be back at my old stomping grounds, the A-school, as we once called it. That’s where a group of eight families with children—including mine—gathered last weekend for an environmental art “jam” sponsored by UVa’s Fralin Museum of Art. “Great, it’s going great!” I said, looking up. With her hands on her hips, the leader made a Superwoman silhouette against the blue autumn sky. She peered at the scissors I was wielding and saw her job security flash across the blades. “I don’t know how the faculty will feel about this,” she sighed.

Question: when people learn about Burning Man, do they want to go out and torch things afterwards? Because spending an afternoon at the museum learning about environmental artists Patrick Dougherty and Andy Goldsworthy sure made me want to slice some nature.

The event leader was a force of nature herself, and not only because she could’ve stomped my head with her foot. In just an hour’s time, she’d expertly introduced our mixed-age group to environmental art, given a tour of Dougherty’s recent installation, screened a film about Goldsworthy, and plied us with delicious snacks. The least I could do was offer some reassurance. “Oh, this groundcover grows back super-fast, trust me,” I smiled. Snip, snip. This was no botanical BS. For years Pachysandra’s blobby creep has bullied my front walk. The leader gave me a worried look, then returned to the courtyard where all the other parents and children were sculpting.

Dougherty’s installation stood just down the hill from us, towering like a twisted-branch, half-scale Stonehenge. The North Carolina artist’s work never disappoints, but his piece at UVa surpasses all others I’ve seen. Members of our party were alternately giddy and contemplative as they flowed into reed rooms, stepped through apertures, and measured their wingspans between columns. Children fell to their knees and pulled at trunks, asking how deep into the ground they reached in order to hold the structure up. Parents lay on their backs and looked at disks of sky framed in the roof’s round openings.

The museum had provided an array of natural materials for the families to make their own environmental art, including stones, flowers, branches, and gourds. This abundance explains why I was the only tool cutting up specimen beds beside A-school faculty offices. The other reason was this: the courtyard at the architecture school is cavernous—too big to share the limelight with any creations the families would make that day. From across the brick terrace, the adults and children were dwarfed, their artwork invisible. To cope with this type of scale problem—and the fragile, solitary, and ephemeral nature of his work—Goldsworthy’s art is mostly known to the world through photographs. His Google byline reads “Photographer” ahead of environmental artist, or sculptor. Fittingly, a museum photographer circulated in the courtyard at the art jam, capturing the day’s production.

English artist Andy Goldsworthy working in nature

What drew me to kneel in the Pachysandra was its manageable, sixty-square foot size, and its location against an open-flight of stairs. There, a sprig of art had a fighting chance of being seen. A student descending the steps might look over the railing to see that something had changed since the day before. A cafe employee might notice an orange streak bisecting the plants that line her walk to work.

“Come and see!” my kids called, debuting the work they’d made with their fellow jammers. In the courtyard, piles of pine needles tumbled from retaining walls like Niagra Falls. Rocks formed spirals festooned with berries and gourds. When my daughter asked me to explain my way-over-there project, she listened and then responded, “Cool.” She even found scissors and helped. Others wandered over and watched, perplexed. As with my architecture practice, I continued, betting that people would come around as the idea took shape. The snip, snip eventually yielded a narrow trough that ran the length of the green bed. When I began lining the trough, kid volunteers shuttled handfuls of leaves from a nearby maple and followed my specs that they all face the same direction on the ground. Butts stuck in the air. The event leader looked on and nodded.

Hysteria rides on the shoulder of every creative person.    –Patrick Dougherty

Although allowance is a big word in the creative world, resistance is its silent partner. Resisting self-doubt and shouldering the risk of ruffling feathers is as much of an acquired skill as balancing reeds and twisting branches. Whatever our vocation, we face the possibility of a disappointed client, a disapproving banker, or a booing audience. These outcomes, as it turns out, are the weird reward for winning the fight to be seen.

I make a lot of crap, but I have to be out there, trying things…when I get beneath the surface of things, these are not moments of mystery, they are moments of extraordinary clarity.       –Andy Goldsworthy

Postscript: An exhibit of Dougherty’s work is on display at UVa’s Fralin Museum of Art through December 22, 2013. His site-specific installation, completed in October, will be in place for approximately two years.

Thanks to my husband Joe and my friends for photographing the art jam for me when my phone battery died.

Rest stops rarely feature nice playgrounds. So when my kids and I happened upon one last summer in Illinois, I shelved my miles-per-hour plans and parked it in the mulch. The children boarded swings and sailed over the wind turbines that spun like toy pinwheels in the flat, distant corn fields. How long could we afford to linger? We were just two hours into the drive, with seven more to go. Legs stretched out and folded under. Over by the monkey bars, a group of teens leaned against the poles, still waking in the mid-morning light.

The din of the highway and the squeak of chains wrapped all of us gathered there in a blanket of white noise. We entered restrooms in lockstep and breathed the same scented air. What we’d never share again was each other’s company. In adjacent moments we gained and lost the biker adjusting his wind-whipped flag, the retirees browsing pamphlets, and the poodle tied to the welcome sign.

When I was in college, my Wharton friends complained about a required statistics course. What if once, I’d gone to class in their place?

Find the combined odds:

Of assembling a team of forty-two photographers on the first try, just by agreeing to meet at Ninth Street. Of boarding the same subway car and pairing with a passenger. Of the pairs gradually disembarking at the rider’s stop, and feeling the raised, round disks at the platform’s edge. From there, of walking up stairs, down streets, over grates, under causeways, into elevators, and through doorways, all the way back to the bed where the passenger lays his head. Of reboarding the train to find that pictures of the beds have replaced all the ads. Of seeing the covers laid bare–double, single, soiled and silky, filthy, pretty, pillow ticking, firm and sinking, horizontal, we the people, created equal, we the people.

Down the hill at the drugstore, I saw that Mountain Dew is back in cans. Duly noted, but I was shopping for a Coke. There were only plastic bottles, twenty-ouncers that cost $1.79 and don’t hold a chill.

You know that feeling when you have to scram, just for ten minutes? I burned through five minutes driving to the brown bottle, the one that would prop my eyes open for the rest of the day. For my last five minutes, this was the plan: sit in the parking lot and stare up at the sparrow’s nest in the “a” of the pharmacy sign. If history is a guide, someone in a red shirt will climb a ladder soon, reach his hand into the hollow, and slide the home into a Hefty.

“What is UP with this heat?” a woman said to her friend as they struggled out of the Toyota parked next to me. I looked over when their doors slammed, and my eye fell to a pattern of chewed gum and cigarettes at their feet. Dashes and dots. Morse code for “Three minutes remaining,” pronounced in a Blade Runner voice.

I cracked the seal on the soda, gulped, and leaned into the void of the driver’s door. The little black bristles that ate the window brushed against my cheek. When they grow up, they’ll line an escalator and catch chewed gum and cigarettes.

Disclosure: I wasn’t wearing underwear. Not in a sexy way, in a mountain-of-laundry way. Remember those old Underalls ads? Like it was a felony to have panty lines show through your drawers. The camera should have panned up to the woman’s face so she could say, hey, cut me some slack, it’s the 70’s and thongs haven’t been invented yet. P.S. Stop looking at my butt.

I drove home boosted with corn-syrup serotonin. Man, that lady has such a pulled-together stoop. Every day is New MLS Number Day at her house, how does she do it, dang! “Hi!” Wave. Oh, I like that guy because he lets his dog walk way out in front of him like he’s not supposed to. Wow, there are my kids waiting for me in the driveway. Two seconds remaining. Yes, I got the toothpaste. I know I just got some yesterday, but we needed more today. Thanks, monkeys, I’m really glad to be back, too! I am so, so glad to be back.

Rubber bands look nice, round, and relaxed until you stretch them. Grab a piece of the arc and pull it; you’ll make an oval, then an ellipse, then the outline of a hotdog. What’s more, let it go, and the hotdog will fly.

For most of my life, I’ve longed for flying hot dogs. By that I mean I’ve aspired to meet and understand many types of people. Especially people who appear to be one way, but who have many, often-surprising qualities that become known over time.

I lived in Japan when I was seventeen, and had the eye-opening experience of being a minority for the first time. With my Casper-white skin, curly hair and killer fork skills, I stuck out like a sore thumb in my host family’s rural town. Even though people meant me no ill-will, they stared, and sometimes trailed me. When I returned to America, I was drawn to the Autobiography of Malcom X and books about Japanese internment camps during World War II. I knew my brush with “otherness” was the tip of the iceberg. It was temporary–blunt and frozen—and nothing like the magma of racism that simmers in society, then erupts and destroys lives.

Over the years, friends of different religions, races and sexual orientations have tutored me in Lesser Cluelessness. Thanks to their tutelage and the awards they’ve bestowed, my epitaph will one day read:

Devoted Mother

Coconut Girl

Honorary Jew

Honorary Lesbian

What it won’t read, until I evolve a little more, is: Honorary Republican. Now hold up. If you’re a Republican, don’t rebuke me just yet–I might say something more offensive later, and I’ll need you to gently set me straight.  And if you’re a Democrat, hang tight, because this is for real.

An article I read today about the government shutdown pointed out that conservatives and liberals have their own cable TV channels, radio shows, think tanks, and publications. Most Americans identify primarily with one of the two main political parties, so they eddy into its pool of talking points. From there, many people get sucked into a vortex of political vitriol where they lack exposure to other, reasoned viewpoints. They can and do come to think of their counterparts as wrong/evil, and proceed to elect officials with extreme views.

Meanwhile, parallel to this political phenomenon is regular, untelevised life. The retiree with the Romney sign in his yard tells his neighbor with the Obama sign that he spied the critter that’s been upending everyone’s trash cans at night: a skunk!

Which brings me back to the flying hot dogs.  I want to hang out with that retiree with the Romney sign. First of all, I noticed he took down his political posters on the first Wednesday in November, just like I did. In addition, he has a cool Southwest Virgina accent and shares my penchant for early bird buffets. I can tell he’d look slick squatting in a crisp, white gi doing knife-hand blocks with me in karate class. But in case that doesn’t happen, I’d be willing to try a ceramics course with him or hell, even skeet shooting. Any endeavor where we’re both hacks, along with our fellow Christian/Jewish/Muslim/athiest/gay/straight/old/young/biracial/African-American/white/Asian/Democratic/Republican Americans.  Why, just today in the Krav Maga class I’m taking, a Marine platoon sergeant let me wail on him with my lame hammer fists. Next, I got groin-kicked by a quiet computer programmer. Do I know or mind what these students’ political affiliations are? No. But I do know that we’ll all be back on the mats next week, working hard and looking ridiculous.

As a frustrated and despairing nation, we can’t expect to fix overnight the political dysfunction that afflicts Washington. It’s taken us decades to become divided, and it may take us just as long to find our way back to decency—and to each other. Ideological reconciliation, just like losing weight and gaining wisdom, is both worthwhile and irritatingly slow. It will involve all the usual suspects: caucuses, primaries, debates, journalists, and elections. But perhaps more than anything, it will require us, the American people, to take a class in something we truly suck at. Together we can re-learn that we really don’t know it all, and that democracy is a balm for this universal, human condition.

Things are going a lot better since I had a growth spurt last month and bought a piano. The effects of this bold purchase are both obvious and subtle:

Obvious: music.

Subtle: I keep checking my face for deep, craggy wrinkles since buying a piano is so adult-like.

Everyone has an idea of what it means to “arrive” in life. For some, it’s achieving a certain celebrity, social status, or bank balance. For me, it’s owning a piano.

The main thing to know is that it’s real. There are no electric cords or knobs, nor illuminated buttons labeled“Samba” or “French horn.” Hearing live music in the house, I feel as though I’ve passed a key test of parental character—maybe even competence.

Adulthood and piano ownership became entwined in my mind at a young age. When I was growing up, many of the families on my street owned pianos. At that time, kids tromped in and out of each other’s homes like a giant hotel party. Monopoly games, meat freezers, pianos—these 70’s standbys were regularly violated by a roving band of neighborhood marauders. In basements, we picked through frozen sides of beef in search of PushUps. In living rooms, our butts vied for space on shiny black benches so our hands could pound out “Heart and Soul” ten million times. Not once did a parent appear in a doorway to defend the Baldwin (and in one case, the Steinway).  That was the most grown-up thing of all. The pianos were beautiful to the eye and ear, and they were 100% accessible.

My house had the Monopoly game and freezer, but it lacked a piano. The absence of music in our lives was, I decided at age eight, making us tense. My sister and brothers agreed, and we made our case to our mother. The same mother who was putting herself through graduate school, working part-time, and single-parenting four children under the age of ten. “A piano?” she echoed, clutching the worn leather pocketbook suspended from her shoulder. Inside, sticks of DoubleMint were torn in half.

In an act of parental jujitsu that I now understand, my mother inaugurated “the piano jug.”  It was an antique, five-gallon vessel that stood twenty-inches high and sat just inside her bedroom door. The plan was that we’d all chuck our change into the jug until there was enough money to buy a piano.  From then on, (for about four days), every lucky penny my siblings and I found on the playground tumbled down the glass neck and into a dreamed rendition of “The Entertainer.”

“The bottom’s not even covered yet,” I’d moan to my sister and brothers. We’d stand around the jug in a circle, four young Frankensteins trying to conjure life from metal and hope.

It was my step-father, Will, who covered the bottom and then some when he and my mom married in 1978. Some people always have pockets full of change, and he’s one of them. He taught my siblings and me how to find a coin’s mint mark, and what the letters mean: B for New York, C for Philadelphia, D for Cleveland. These cities and more piled up in the piano jug every night, just before Will traded his trousers for the pair of PJs on his bedside chair.

As we grew older, the siren call of candy—and later, cigarettes—eroded the piano jug’s loot. A cork appeared in the bottle around 1982, emblazoned with the word “NO!” in my mother’s handwriting.  Over two decades later when my parents relocated to the Northeast, they tried to move the half-full piano jug. It broke from the weight of change.

In my semi-spooky way, I like to think that the Universe orchestrated the arrival of our piano last month to honor my mother’s birthday. I stumbled upon the instrument with my children at the Habitat Store while looking for building materials. We were in Doors and Windows, flipping flush slabs like Elton John LPs when we heard the notes of a piano, unexpected and true. We followed the sound to Furniture, and there it was, saying come on, baby, get your truck! Only professionals would do for this job, though. That I knew. “Where are we going to put it?” my daughter asked. “In the living room,” I said. “Right by the front door. Then we’ll learn how to play.”