August 26, 2003
*my reply
It was about 2:00 in the afternoon when at last some clarity about all of this started to surface. It made my ears ring and made me sickly nervous like I was back on the stage in the 4th grade spelling bee. I had to pull off the highway and try to write it all down.
I was driving on the interstate in ohio. It was hot. All my windows were down. The blurry sun shone heavy on everything. The trees breathed with their green-leafed lungs and the queen’s anne’s lace grew thick in the median between the double lanes of bleached asphalt. I was driving away. She had left on a train that morning that was headed, in every way possible, in the other way from me. I felt empty. Like the white rooms where they put people in straight jackets. I felt clean. I felt nothing. So in my clean empty white room, I began to think. I thought about her and the conversation she had with my father over the countertop in the kitchen last week. I could continue farther back through the events that have led to this, and all the evidence that has been mounting, until the day I was born, and likely farther back than then, but one week is all I need right now:
"I guess I just don’t understand it." My dad said to her as he leaned onto the white and tan patterned countertop in the kitchen at home, and rested his chin on his hand.
She was visiting from her internship in Manhattan, and was talking to my dad about the world of fashion design .
"Well," she shrugged, "Everybody does something. I guess that is what I am interested in."
"What I admire most, " my dad said, almost as an afterthought, "is the kid who lives on the farm down the road who can be perfectly happy wearing any old t-shirt and blue jeans he got at J.C. Penny’s."
I didn’t realize it just then; but I have been thinking about that discussion between them since.
And now, a week later I joined the conversation:
"But everything there is has been designed." I said to the gentle curves in the gray dashboard. "Every old t-shirt and every old pair of blue jeans that every kid on every farm wears has been designed to look just that way; -- to be just that way. Every book we read; every car we drive; every house we live in and every casket we end up in and all the clothes we wear along the way have been designed. Someone has dreamed up, sketched out, and devised everything, whether one considers it mundane or magnificent. Everything has been designed because it once was nothing, then only an idea, and now, it exists."
I began to get excited. I pushed in the clutch, looked at the white numbers on the tach, and shifted into 5th gear. Then I looked up out of the tempered glass and into the bright white world and saw the heavy sun and the green trees breathing in the fields.
Then my mind stopped. How arrogant I am for thinking that. And how concieted I am about all of us. There are things, beautiful and efficient, and mysteriously simple things out there that I - or anybody else - have had no part in their creation. This world has, and will exist without us. And with a frustration as long as a lifetime, I know it would be better without all of us. Everything in this world that is beautiful, and simple, and perfect we did not create, and we cannot take ownership for. We did not dream up the stars. We did not sketch out the sun. We did not devise who and what we love.
The biggest apology I can offer for my presence here is to aim to make everything that I do as beautiful, as simple, and as perfect, so as if it belonged here. I want to make everything that I do as beautiful, as simple, and as perfect as it would be had it not existed at all. I closed my eyes and began to see it all; and there is so much of it. Everything we design; the systems we contrive and the products and machines we build for our sustenance, our gratification, and our convenience, take up a lot of space.
We have designed our cars that drive upon our roads and sit in our parking lots. We create our meals put on our plates upon our tables. We wear our clothes that we buy in our stores from the advertisements that teach us to want them.
And right there, with my hand on the black steering wheel, driving between the yellow lines, and the red needle pointed at the white numbers, I began to finally feel like I was getting somewhere with all of this.
I looked back out into the white sun and thought about what I have seen, and about who I know and hold close in my life. And right there, I made a commitment to myself before I got any older: I want not to forget to always appreciate, enjoy, and respect what is in my life that I have not made, do not own, and cannot control. I want to learn to distinguish what I am able to create and control. I want to look for inspiration in everyone and everything that has happened without my effort; and to try my best to design towards that perfection with everything else that I can.
And with at least some certainty in my voice, I said to them, "There are beautiful and perfect things in this world. Everything else is left for us to design".
Posted by Todd Roeth at August 26, 2003 12:56 AMThe most beatiful and sensitive piece I have ever read.Pure and real a gentleness that speaks of a bygone day.Great appreciation for the photo of my son and myself that you took on Belmont ave near the lake.It is a treasure. Regards,Sholom
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