Unexpectedly Moved in Baltimore

Clint took me to Baltimore this past weekend for my birthday. (50! Woot!) Before we left, Essie, my front of the house manager at the wine shop, gave me a travel watercolor set and small watercolor pad for my birthday, just for the trip. From train trip there to train trip home, I pulled out my paints any time I sat anywhere for any amount of time. At one point, I wondered if I was being rude or if this was bordering on addiction. I decided there were worse addictions.

The things I painted were in-the-moment reminders of where we’d been. Cafes, bars, restaurants, the Lucy Darling show. I painted to remember the trip and also for the practice. Trees are hard. Wine in a glass is damned near impossible. Fresh coffee bubbles…well, mine ended up looking like pubic hairs.

I’m definately learning my weaknesses. I’m also learning that I either need to get past the need to paint beverages or lean into it and write a book called Burgundie’s Burgundys. Wouldn’t that be funny to have a whole book of poorly painted glasses of wine? What if the whole premise, though, was that I traveled to gorgeous places to make these rather awful paintings? Would skill improvement kill the book? Or would the reader expect I got better by the end? Would if be funnier if I didn’t?

What’s cool to me is that I even have these ideas about illustrating my own books. Twenty-plus years ago, my mother had suggested that she and I work on a book together. I would write it, she would illustrate it. Needless to say, it never happened. Perhaps, now that I’m fooling around with watercolor, it will.

A side benefit to all this watercolor business is that it gives me a way to connect with my mother from beyond. Unbeknownst to Clint, Baltimore was the perfect town for that.

I don’t exactly know when, maybe around age 19 or 20, my mom took art classes at Maryland Institute College of the Arts (MICA). That’s pretty much all I know because I was terrible at asking her more about her life. When you’re young, dumb, and self-absorbed, you think you’ve got more time than you really have.

One of her pieces, that I think was from her time at MICA, was a self-portrait, pencil drawing. It hung in my grandparent’s hallway near their bathroom my entire life. It was a relatively small piece. Maybe 8x10 and nicely framed. The title written at the bottom was “The Harshest Critic”. My mother before she was my mother was sitting on the floor, hunched over her wooden art board, drawing. Standing behind her was a cartoonish man. His arms are crossed over his fat belly and he’s smoking.

When I was 12-ish, my mother, step-father, and I drove to Baltimore. I don’t know if we toured MICA. All I remember was ordering frog legs for the first time in my life and being disappointed by how little meat there was. Later, of course, I would be appalled at having even tried it. I’d been frog-gigging with my step-father but I hadn’t eaten the frog. Coming full circle on that was important, I guess. I learned what it’s really like to eat frog legs and that - all around - it wasn’t worth it. Also it made me feel bad. I would hate it if someone killed me to eat me and then felt that eating my meat was hardly worth their time.

Still, I enjoyed the trip. Or, I had a sense coming out of it that stayed somewhere in my sub-conscious that I liked Baltimore. Strange, then, that until this weekend, I hadn’t been back. But, I’m glad. Baltimore remained untainted to me so Clint and I could experience it together.

He and I like to do similar things when we travel. Run early in the morning, find cool museums, walk the hell out of the city. At breakfast, Clint searched Google Maps and found a museum he thought I’d love: The Peabody Library. The pictures of the shelves and the floors of books were bibliophile porn. After our breakfast, where I drew the pubic hair coffee, we walked to the Peabody. Kids carrying instrument cases were going in with their parents before the place opened. While waiting, Clint and I walked around the park in front of it pointing out the patriarchy and mysogyny of its statutes: two wealthy, heavily clothed men with name plaques and one entirely nude, nameless female body in mermaid pose.

Finally the Peabody opened but it turned out the library was closed the exact days we were in Baltimore. Clint was miffed and blamed the kids for “diverting the resources” away from staffing the library. Since Baltimore is nothing if not culture-filled, we went to the next closest museum which happened to be almost directly across the street.

What first excited me about The Walters Museum is that admission, every day, all the time, was entirely free. For whatever reason, that fact caused my eyes to well up and my throat to tighten.

Viewing art should be free, damnit. And I like to be around art and the kinds of people who like to be around art. When admission is free, it gives me a sense of hope that there are people in the world that still care about art and the importance of it - as a form of self-expression, as cultural exchange, as a history lesson, and simply as beauty.

Or not. Not all art is beautiful to me. Some of it revolts me, but that’s the joy of it! I don’t have to like it or look at it, but someone felt the need to create it.

Something about all of that made me want to cry. But I stifled it.

Inside, the docents all wore red tops of all kinds.

“Honey,” I said. Again, my eyes teared up and my throat stuck. I was aware he was waiting for me to say more. All I could do was whisper, “They’re celebrating Lunar New Year”.

I had to breathe deeply so as not to start sobbing and possibly create a scene.

Why cry? I guess because some other culture’s holiday was deemed important and important enough for non-East-Asian’s to recognize and celebrate.

It reminded me that there are still people in our country that don’t want to rewrite and white-wash American history. It gave me an injection of much-needed hope.

The throng of people and their children didn’t subdue my emotions, though we did weave through the crowd to avoid getting into a line for a tour group. After trying in vain to find a way up and out of the gaggle, we finally picked up a map. It didn’t make sense at the time, but the docent said we couldn’t take the stairs up but we could get to the fourth floor and then take them down.

So we took an elevator up. After touring the Asian art on 4, Clint found the almost exterior, wide open, spiral stairs at the back of the building that would take us down to 3. He started down. I was almost paralyzed on the first step. My palms began to sweat, so did my armpits and other unfortunate areas. When he noticed I wasn’t right behind him, he turned.

“What’s wrong?”

“No. I got this.”

“Are you okay?”He looked confused. “Oh, you’re scared.” He stepped toward me as if to let me hold his hand.

“No! No! Don’t touch me! No touchy!”

After he re-started walking down, I walked slowly and steadily, directly in the center of each step, away from either side that might disappear and cause me to fall to my doom.

By the time we got to the third floor, it was clear we wouldn’t be able to take those stairs again to go to 2.

I wiped my hands on my pants and my scarf and my sides after I walked through the door.

Once inside, we decorated horses for The Year of the Horse, and then put them in “the pasture”.

After the horses, we walked down the large marble interior stairs to the 2nd floor atrium. Down below was a floor covered in children and their parents, all sitting cross-legged. A younger person with the new mullet that’s in style these days read kids-books to the crowd, did sing-alongs, and magically engaged these children for well over 30-minutes. After watching some of this, we walked down another flight of marble stairs and nearly bumped into two young Asian women in a yellow lion costume practicing a balancing move for the upcoming lion dance.

Again, my eyes watered and my throat tightened. At this point, I was annoyed with myself. Becoming so damned emotional about every damned thing was making it hard for me to have conversations. I can’t talk about the thing making me emotional becuase I’m too fucking emotional!

We had to walk through two rooms of South American art before I had the voice to say to Clint, “I’d love to stay and watch”, but by that point, he didn’t even know what I was talking about.

If I wasn’t my birthday, I don’t think we would have stayed. Clint’s face told me he was close to tapping out. There wasn’t the usual solemn quiet one ususally expects. The museum was packed to the portraits with families. They were having fun. It was unusually loud. It was my birthday, so he obliged. This man’s love for me held him together for another 45-minutes.

We found a place to stand, mostly out of the way, to watch the performance.

At 11:30, the drumming began.

Two Chinese lions came out puppeted by two young men in one, and the two young women in another. They blinked their long eyelashes, wagged their heads back and forth, and danced around two heads of lettuce.

Somewhere during their performance, I looked around me. At another entrance, people kept streaming in. On the floor around the lions were no less than 200 children and their parents. Around them, another few hundred people. So many colors of skin. So many different accents. So many different cultures. So many ethnicities represented.

I looked around, amiled, and again my eyes watered. My throat tightened. This time, I put my hand to my mouth to stop sobbing.

“It’s just so amazing,” I managed to say to Clint.

“What is?” he asked, at first without looking at me. “All the art? The lion dance?”
Then he looked at me. “Are you crying?”

I nodded. I had to take deep breaths for several long minutes before I could say more. At one point, Clint looked away. I’d talk when I could. This could take awhile.

Finally I said, “All these people showing up with their kids at an art museum.”

My reasoning seemed lame, even to me. All the art or the lion dance would have made more sense. Not just that people were coming into the damned museum.

I didn’t particularly understand why that moved me, but it seems I cry a lot these days. And not just because of my fears about fascism, authoritarianism, the loss of freedoms and democracy, and this mis-match I feel with Petersburg. Those tears are from anxiety and depression - and thanks to anti-depressants, happen a bit less than they did 6 months ago.

These other tears are different. And it’s not actually new to me.

I think I’ve always been a crier over obscure things.

One time I cried and didn’t understand it was back in Columbus, Ohio, during the Pride Parade. When the lesbians on their motorcycles (the self-proclaimed Dykes on Bikes), drove by, I cried. All I could surmise was that the parade moved me because these LGBT people (those were the only letters used back then and the T stood for Transvestite), were brave enough to be out and happy with finally being able to be themselves. I thought I cried for their struggle and their achievement.

I still cry at Pride Parades. But also I cry for simple beauty, awe, and when I see examples of all the things the President, his administration, and his followers want to crush, dissolve, ignore, belittle, delegitimize, and destroy. My throat closes up, which frustrates me, because the thing I want to do is cheer or acknowledge or sing along.

It’s exhausting because of how hard I have to work to not let it all out. The cry I feel in these instances isn’t quiet and gentle, either. It’s not an adorable cry. It’s snot and coughs because it’s climbing up from the depths of my soul.

It’s annoying because my crying stops me from enjoying the thing that’s causing the emotion. It stops me from participating. I try to take deep breaths but I worry that people will think I’m weird or hyperventilating. Since I can’t explain myself for 5 minutes, they just have to wait it out and wonder. Then usually, when I tell them why I’m verklempt, my reason seems so lame.

The Dykes on Bikes in the parade.

People are coming to a museum.

The young girl behind the ice cream counter smiled and asked me how I wanted my banana split built.

There’s a farmers market.

The homemade ice cream tastes so good.

Sometimes it’s hard to be me.

Tears aside, the lion dance was fun to watch not only because the lions tossed lettuce leaves all over the children at the end, but because I was surrounded by a whole rainbow of other people who also thought it was fun to watch.

Later, I wondered with more curiosity, why I cry like this so often. With all of the examples I have, why can’t I find the common thread?

Since I had examples from at least 20 years ago, I knew it wasn’t related to menopause or my current depression. As usual, I went to ChatGPT. It pointed out that the solution is in the question.

Connection.

And it shared with me a term I’d never heard of: Kama Muta. That’s a relatively recent term coined using Sanskrit as a way to unify the concepts many cultures have for, basically, “being moved”. Wikipedia says, “Kama muta is considered to have the evolutionary function of facilitating the devotion, commitment and connection necessary for human social union.

I felt a sense of relief that there was a term for this. It’s nice to know that others have these same kinds of overwhelming emotions that aren’t just your typical sorrow or fear. It explains why I have a consistent need to feel understood, to feel like others feel something like this, too. Because I long to feel like I belong.

My conversation with ChatGPT quickly morphed into sharing that I was frustrated that though I cry so easily and so often, I feel as if my writing is superficial, doesn’t go deep enough, and doesn’t use enough sensory details. ChatGPT suggestion I write about my experience with the Lion Dance but not try to find meaning in it. It said I often jump quickly to find meaning, but don’t allow myself to dwell with the discomfort of the emotions - even when the emotions are, for the most part, positive.

So, I suppose there’s irony in my explaining all of this. I do want to find meaning. Finding meaning is finding that I do indeed belong.

Everything seems to come back to that for me.

Although I tried to describe what I felt during the lion dance, I think the more important thing is to describe how belonging feels to me.

When I think about moments when I feel like I belong:

It feels soft on my heart, despite the initial squeeze. It feels like a pile of comforters on a comfy couch with all my favorite things within reach. It feels like energy surging through my veins. It feels like the blissful exhaustion after a good workout or a long run. It feels like my bones finally settling. It feels like running a mountain path in my favorite running shorts and my favorite running shoes. It feels like my wheels settling into the path that the cars before me formed in the foot of snow we got overnight. It feels like knowing how to get what I need, when I need it. It feels like going to a parade and feeling like I am welcome to share in the joy of others.

Belonging, to me, feels like being home.

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