Let me introduce myself. I moved to this area in 1996, growing up with this column as a familiar voice. I’m feeling like I finally got invited to a cocktail party because it was weird not to. My son and I went to Jerome’s second annual music festival last weekend; we enjoyed the temperature in the shade and the jaunty vibrations of Jerome’s relaxed haunting. I watched the frisbee being tossed across the street in the same way I may head nod to a particularly chilling folk ballad. The music festival on wrap-around winding streets got me thinking about a Flagstaff music festival and the 90s when African drums seemed to be a little more prevalent around here.
Toggling through my 60-hour workweek mind of late, I land on the difference between making something into nothing or transforming nothing into something. Both are dangerous and require a creative act. Spending long enough in the art world, it starts to seem just as creative not to create, to pause, and even to look the other way. I wonder if the intention behind these things, the process and journey, or the product made from them makes the art, knowing full well it is all three. I imagine a museum of stopped ideas, halts of pleasure, whiffs of potential, with the stiff white gallery card underneath detailing each barrier between what could have been.
I am Flagstaff’s testiest prodigal daughter. I returned after a six-year stint in New York City, following a marriage and coming home with baby-in-tow. So, if you see me around town, you’ll know the most mile marker years of my life didn’t occur on San Francisco Street, but it certainly set the tone. What it meant to return this past decade has been bewildering, something most writers need to swim in for any voice to emerge out of the waters. I try not to look on with tainted goggles and instead enjoy the success of those around me, inspired by ones with eager energies to explore the surroundings that have become drier each year.
It seems sacrilegious to speak about Flagstaff as being anything but the best place around. It reminds me of doublespeak, the way people look at you when you say anything to the contrary of this belief, reminding me that only certain things are allowed to be told in a society that seems more and more image-based and less and less drumbeat, more pretense and fewer slacklines in the park. Less waving four times downtown and more slithering past, knowing the parents of the person you just walked past have fallen ill, and yet because of the fifteen-year silence between you, you acknowledge it just as silently. As would a starved snake in the grass.
Between all the gearheads, I’ve got the waxy gears of my heart to offer, unsure where to head for sunset. Being restless doesn’t seem okay, although most characters in our favorite movies or stories embody this. I ruminate on a rock inside a shoe and how it only turns into tinier rocks when you attempt to shake it free. You can tighten up the laces and protect your feet, or you can accept that living here or anywhere without celebration, support, knowing, respect or even interest will hurt for a little while.
I found myself as a member of the aerial community, something I never thought I would do as it was trendy, and I try to stay just on the sidelines of any trend so that if someone ever measured, I would not show up in the blueprint. I am impressed that many of my classes contain children at the same level as me. I enjoy the intergenerational aspects of learning something new together off the ground, even though our bodies are decades apart. Other than that, I like to get away.
My child recently asked me what it meant for something to be haunted. I explained about time, about the rock, and the shoe. I shouldn’t be complaining, but I do so in delicious ways. So, let me begin my time here with you with an even sweeter sound: thank you. It is a long-term relationship that requires as much focus, forgiveness, gratitude, spicing up, looking away, and an inner determination to create your sense of mystery as anything else. Please, take my grace as a small and gentle pivot from what needs to be done here to the spaces I could be filling, from sourness to bittersweet. I can only fess up to all that hasn’t lined up, occurred, or amalgamated with a chipped-tooth smile and a runaway bunny story—a sense of majesty versus ownership.
When I tell my child to smell the bark of the trees I grew up hiking in, I stand back as if the scent doesn’t apply to me anymore. As if I do not need sun-roasted strawberry butterscotch. But I do. I do. I do. I need the wafting, the sizzling aroma of canyon flute, of the drum, the whiff of these familiar touchstones, the rainsticks, the sausage place on 66, tea and sympathy, the place where I wrote my first poem, the rock where I had my first kiss as my father pulled up, the place where my child first saw the moon. I need this Greek chorus of past, belonging, a little girl who believed the future was a song rather than a shell. I need this breath of worry-less wild to wash over me and tell me that, between soul-regeneration and soil erosion, this is my first time here. And as I carve away my regrets, embarrassment, shame, drama, delusions, fragility, bird-nest voice, and old, old things, it feels crisp to be new, like the green apple on the tree where underneath, the man stands with a long stick to shake, shake and gather, in slow hopes of harvest time.
