le début

I am not Jackie Onassis.

An American flag topped with brown hair and more class than a bottle of 1850s Merlot. I'm not as flawlessly wed to a worshipped US President with a thing for blondes.  In fact, I fall under much more of a Marilyn persona, but who can say Jackie O didn't have a brooding alter ego that craved higher heels and twirled champagne in her silk robe? What do you think she was doing while her other half slipped the ring off his finger and loosened the tie?

I like to think she sunk under plush blankets with a glass between her fingers and something Austen on her nose.  Or maybe she had paint smeared across her cheekbones with a canvas mounted in front of her, in some warm room with billowing curtains and the sound of children--pretty children--ringing out from all sides of her.  Perhaps she was as iconic as the smiley picnics and yacht parties portray. 

Too much tragedy in too small of a person. 

But tragedy, it stops for no one.

I want to be like her. Because nothing is more tragically eloquent than the woman who got all spiraled up in the business of the Kennedy's.  They're a dark household.

But there's a lot of corny musical quotes that tell me the exact opposite.  Like "be yourself", since there's some idea that "everyone else is taken".  I hate that.  It makes me antsy.  Whose permission must I seek in order to be like Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis? I will seek it. Dutifully.

So, here I go: me being "myself".  Raised in the deep Southern everglades amidst pillared houses and curvy streets lined with a mess of trees too thick to see into. It was under the shingled roof of a handsome colonial thing with the symmetry and painted shudders and gravel walkway that you see in your world-class dreams. The redbrick and white pillars, sheltered by the piney bungalow along the curve of a cul-de-sac in a suburb that never stayed dry.   I was raised on a canvas, under a piano bench, in the hollow of a violin... you name it.  My parents threw books at me until I learned to catch them, and suddenly it became a sport.  

Mamma is a tiny woman with a crooked nose and an addiction to baking desserts from her memory of her cookbook brain. She has a warm face and rough hands from years of scrubbing and wielding things to look pretty.  Daddy was one of ten kids in the chaos of the Delta countryside, extracting milk from restless cows and using his fists to prove a point until law school taught him another way.

But it's the art that counts. It's always the art that counts. Me in my element: paint between fingers, on old chambray t-shirts, dried and streaked onto long strands of hair. It is not a punishment to be lonely. It's just bitter girls and books, stainless steel mugs, and a sheepskin blanket that provides all the same comfort as pretty $5 containers of caramel gelato.  

Not to be like that kid who always fights the good moments of class with his, "I'm here to be educated" speech, but it's my passion. Of sorts.

Don't be under the impression that my thoughts are all dark and tragic.  That's cliche.  I just ride the night train back and forth between every district of Paris, staring at the pretty empire and making art out of all the things artists make art out of.

Like paint, and clay, and watercolors and canvases.

And even words.