When I left the movie theater on Sunday, I felt like a flute of champagne: fizzed, giddy, and ready to spill. I’d been given a few unexpected hours to myself– my in-laws were in town and S took his parents and the angel to see our local, underwhelming sights (mall, beach). I was glad for those hours because it was an opportunity to get Stuff done: errands, a scroll-length grocery list, laundry, and a closet patiently waiting for over a year to be cleaned.
I drove to the library and returned a few books. Item number 1, check. Then I had a sudden crazy thought: I don’t want to spend my day doing errands. I don’t want to spend my day trying to keep life neat, orderly, and manageable for us so I can say at the end of the day look how much I got done…my place at our table is justified. I wanted to throw the list out the window and go to the movies. And that’s exactly what I did.
The movie I selected was Midnight in Paris and I relished every second. A struggling writer! In Paris! Exhibiting antisocial tendencies! Hemingway, the Fitzgeralds, Gertrude Stein, T.S. Elliott all in one movie? Yes. Forgive my momentary lapse into Siskel and Ebertland, but it was a rollicking, frolicking, delightful few hours. So cheerful was the mood in the theater that when the woman sitting a few seats away from me creeped by to get to the restroom, she touched my knee as she passed and we shared a conspiratorial grin. Gertrude Stein, played by Kathy Bates, reminds us that the job of an artist is to help people forget their mortality. If this is true, then Woody Allen is back in my good graces because less than ten minutes into the film, I’d completely forgotten my tremor and angst. Thank you, Woody, for a job well done; for the giggles, chuckles, and grins. Thanks for the writing advice, the argument against nostalgia, and Owen Wilson’s nose.
Until yesterday, I’d never tossed a carefully written To-Do list out the window (well, actually, I tucked it in my purse for later). I had never brushed the crumbs of responsibility off my hands with such recklessness. I had never, in all my life, gone to see a movie in the theater by myself. The grocery store will wait! I cried, pounding the steering wheel with a gleeful fist. It felt good to be wild, but I was also a bit disturbed by how timid my idea of carefree abandon has become: popcorn and diet coke at a matinee.
I need to shake things up a bit, to unfurl that tightly coiled devotion to domestic order. I need to pour the thick finger-licking sauce of insouciance on the structure of my days. Maybe I’ll leave the beds unmade one of these days, even if the thought of disheveled beds is simultaneously unsettling and thrilling. Maybe I’ll swizzle-stick the evening by serving dinner at the wild and wacky hour of 8 p.m. I know; this is crazy talk and I should restrain myself before the situation gets out of control. But it might be too late to stop the tornado…I sense a laundry strike, red hair, and a tattoo coming on.
Which act of daring/abandon/irresponsibility have you recently committed? Which small act of liberation will set you free this summer?
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Bukowski is a model citizen when learning how to track mudprints through tidy and proper days.
Today’s Poem: (click link to read entirely)
My Doom Smiles at Me by Charles Bukowski
there’s no other way:
8 or 10 poems a
night.
in the sink
behind me are dishes…
