"Please . . . Tame Me!"

"Please . . . tame me!"
showpiece made of pastillage, marzipan, sugarpaste, and fondant (2007) 

            When I was sixteen, if someone had told me what my life would be like now, I would have laughed in disbelief, then snapped back in anger.  For one, at sixteen, I thought I’d be married by the age of twenty-two. Twenty-two seemed like eons away, plenty of time to mature and develop, I thought. I had wild dreams and concocted various scenarios of how I would meet my future husband. For instance, I thought perhaps I’d meet him while making a geometrically puzzling origami butterfly out of a torn page from a magazine in the waiting room of my dentist. This man, who was also scheduled for a routine cleaning, would walk through the door and immediately be smitten by me. He would lose all his inhibitions, because he too would be an origami aficionado, and therefore he would boldly ask if I would join him that night to gaze into the night sky. I would agree, giving one condition: that he first climb a tree with me. He’d agree and we’d climb a big saucer magnolia and just sit on one of its outstretched arms, watching the day sky saturate itself into a night-night blue. Of course on that particular night, the sky would be cloudless and clear, exposing all of heaven’s favor upon our meeting. The stars would gaze down upon us, as my truelove would trace all the constellations in the night sky with the tip of his finger.  Quite naturally, we’d fall irrevocably in love, get married and move into a lighthouse. The lighthouse—obviously situated on a precipice—would house our love. The thrashing waves would add to the soundtrack of our daily chores as keepers of the lighthouse (and our lovemaking, of course). In my teenage journal I had dreamed of “folding into him each night, as the smell of his neck would ease me into sleep.” And all of it would make perfect sense: our vigil of light would bring hope and rescue to those lost and tossed at sea.

            Such were my dreams at sixteen. My friends called me a “hopeless romantic” and older people advised that I put away such “childish notions.” I would correct them and say I was a hopeful romantic and that my notions were childlike not childish, and that there was a world of difference between the two.  To be honest I used to feel sorry for them because I believed they had lost hope in the alchemy of  childhood dreams.  You see, at sixteen, facts had no bearing on me. The facts—that lighthouses were no longer in use to safeguard seafarers to shore, that most of them were abandoned and dilapidated or turned into tourist attractions—did not daunt my dream in any way at all. If anything, it fueled my passion to revive the lost art of lighthouse-keeping. I even joined The Lighthouse Preservation Society in hopes that my yearly contribution of $30 and my awareness of their demise would somehow bring about a lighthouse renaissance. 

            But I was a sentimental sixteen-year-old who had filled her cup with books, music, movies, and art. I was steeply influenced by my favorite books The Little Prince and The Catcher in the Rye; my favorite movie Out of Africa; and my favorite miniseries The Thornbirds. My preference in music stretched across eclectic genres from classical to top ten Billboard hits. The only requirement was that whatever music I gave myself to would wrench my heart out to bleed. True to my love of story, the story of the composer or the performing artist had an integral part in my appreciation of the work. Chopin, for instance, had power over me because I thought I could hear the melancholy of his unrequited heart in his earlier work.  In other pieces I would imagine his slight body hovering over the piano like a phantom composer composed of water, his fingers bidding time—each elongated note that borrowed count from the next measure—rendered my heart sick with love for his singular passion for a singular instrument, the piano.           

            If at sixteen, Chopin was my classical composer of choice, then as no surprise, the impressionist and Van Gogh were my painters of choice at that age. I remember spending my lunch period at the school library. I’d lug huge volumes of art books back home and spend hours staring into the large prints of impressionist paintings. Easily obsessed at that age, I fell deeply inside the images. Renoir’s colors would dance into a kaleidoscope of changing hues of shifting light. Inside his paintings, I was able to feel an autumnal chill or hear a summer garden. Van Gogh would lull me into a momentary state of physical paralysis, while my brain would go into a frenzy of grooves and shadows caught in the textures of his strokes. 

            I would take Metro to the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC and spend hours there as though it were my home. And as strange as it sounds, I felt so near to God whenever I gazed into a painting, or floated on the notes of a song, or felt the pulse of a character in a book.

A womb of books and light
pencil drawing (2006)

             I had a particularly keen love for books.  I loved the feel of books in my hands, the way they smelled, and the way the pages gently chafed against each other whenever a page was turned—like a billowing sigh that escapes between sheets. I loved how the black print appeared on white paper, and how the congregation of all those symbols on what was once a blank page created the miracle of language, the wonder of a story. 

            But these things I kept to myself, because sometimes out of excitement, if I shared my love of a book or a painting with others, their eyes would glaze over with disinterest. So I learned to keep most of my interests and fascinations to myself. So much so, I was most content when alone in my room with my books and journals.

            I tell you all this, because at the age of sixteen, life was full of possibilities that only my imagination could cap. I could dream and my dreams were not encumbered by disappointments. I had a plan. I would become a writer and marry the man of my dreams and live happily ever after. I didn’t think I was asking for anything out of the ordinary. It seemed simple enough. It all sounded typical: a career and a family.  
            Ever since my teens, my pursuits were fueled by my desire to feel everything. I wanted to devote all my senses to the things that made me sigh endlessly. I couldn’t quite articulate at that age exactly how to qualify those things which made me want to shout, jump, close my eyes and relish the experience; all I knew was when I came upon it, I knew it, just as I know my own mother and my own name, as though I had been predisposed to recognize it; and my enjoyment of such things was as tactile as crashing into a human being. Bam! As I got older, I realized that those things which repeatedly aroused me, and which I couldn’t easily explain, were simply moments of pure Joy experienced when confronted by Beauty.  Moments such as riding my bike in October through my neighborhood would fill me with impish glee.  The fiery autumn trees that lined the streets as I swooshed down the hills of my neighborhood would blaze like notes of a chromatic scale in my peripheral vision. My heart would ache with pleasure. The crisp breeze against my face, the rustling leaves beneath my wheels, the candied colors all around me, the dry sting in my throat, the exhilaration in my chest—all of it—would stab me with such marvel and astonishment. And without me even knowing, my eyes would fill with joy and my lips would audibly speak, “God, why is everything so beautiful.”

            At sixteen, why did the curl of a baby’s fingers when fast asleep wound me with tears? Why did waking up to the smell of cookies baking in the oven make me want to weep? And why did my mother’s massaging hands, whenever I was ill, make me cry? Ahh, but how else could I have responded to moments of such pure Joy? How else was I to react to utter Beauty? Why do we cry when astonished by things so beautiful?

            Hence, now, I’ve come to realize that my hardest mission in life has been not to lose the childlike awe I was created to keep till the day I see my Creator face to face. It is too easy to become jaded and no longer capable of hoping, as when I was sixteen. And often, life has been such a struggle. But I’ll tell you this: there are “things” worth struggling for, and for me, every day I will will myself back up again in order to recognize the Beauty in all of life. I will not give up on all my dreams. So, despite how bad circumstances may seem at times, I don’t ever want to look at a baby’s curled fingers and say, “I’ve seen plenty of those.” I don’t ever want to smell cookies baking in the oven and get tired of their sweetness. I don’t ever want to expect my mother to massage me when I’m sick and feel as though I had somehow earned it. I don’t ever want to look upon the Cross and not cry.