Living

Living

When it comes to saying or doing something that deep down in my heart I know to be morally and/or legally wrong, my rule is this: Will I be embarrassed by this statement or act 5 years from now?

If the answer is NO, then I’ll do it.

If the answer is YES, then I’ll do it and deny the whole thing ever happened 5 years from now.

The thing is, I don’t WANT to do it anymore, though, because when I’m doing it, it makes me feel like the worst human on the planet, and that’s saying a lot for a piece of white trash born in Memphis who isn’t REALLY white (HISPANIC) or Tennessean (Arkansan, being as how my mother’s uterus burst before we could cross the bridge from West Memphis).

So the words still spill forth, this bizarre need to write, even when the sense doesn’t come together, even when the sentiment threatens to drive a wedge between your thin grip on sanity and the few loved ones left who still have the patience to hold tight to their faith that you’ll come through for them. You always have in the past, no matter how much you swerved from lane to lane on the way home. They still know that you would stand in the path of fire to get them safely into their beds, tucked in, bellies full. Children will put up with the contradictions when safety is the carrot at the end of the stick. They can sense when a guardian is more afraid of failure than of dying.

And the source of my main contradiction is Martha Stewart.

I don’t watch television. The only time in my life I’ve ever had a cable bill was 1994, and that was against my will. So I don’t know much about Martha Stewart’s television show or legal woes or appearances on reality programming. The only thing I know about Martha is her 1991 book, Martha Stewart’s Gardening.

This book accompanies me throughout the house. Its edges are moldy. The cover is long since gone. The picture of her on page 127, knees filthy, transplanting basil is dog-eared to a factor of 17.

I feel like I know this person. She built fieldstone walls, cooked trout outdoors on iron skillets, built her garden for May.

And I know that by the way she put together a centerpiece arrangement of poppies and bearded iris (page 151) that she occasionally engaged in rough, kinky sex.

And I know that by her devotion to natural pest control through companion planting (page130), that she at one point took her daughter for a walk and said, ‘I don’t care what you do in your life, so long as you only let guys with some talent stick their cock in you. Because worthless boys with nothing to offer the world don’t deserve what you have to give.’

And I know, above all else, that her meticulous method of drying flowers, setting the most delicate blossoms in silica gel, gave evidence that she fought this calling that kept her from her family. She fought it with everything she knew. She smiled for the camera. She pruned. She fertilized. She had faith that the blooms would survive Vermont’s winter. And sadly, the only way she knew to express this inner turmoil to her children was through a simple setting of the most magnificent yellow tree peonies you’ve ever seen in a plain, yellow bowl (page 109).