The Wings on My Back

As a writer I'm always hearing metaphors, always seeing patterns, and I love the way so many things in a life are connected and progressive, and not just in my life. Each aspect furthers the action and relates somehow to the theme, in a well-crafted story. I've been reading a wonderful book called Storycraft, by Jack Hart, about narrative nonfiction, which is by far my most favorite genre to read and to write, though short stories are not far different. I'm really excited to be taking my informally educated self to a higher level in so many ways.

Yesterday Baroness Indi and I were trading life stories, something we do often now that she has appointed herself to my care and nurturing, which I came to recognize yesterday she has been doing for the whole time we've known each other, something I knew, but didn't really get as a sacred task as intentional as it is. As it turns out the Radar Angels take their wings seriously, and in their quest to put on performances and generate fun and positive ions, they try to encourage others, especially women, to grow into their wings and soar. As a person who has tended to hang out on the fringes afraid to fly for the myriad reasons of my complicated growth, which I hope I will not be too specific about here, I have not really been aware of this little campaign on my behalf, that led to my recent crowning. They kept the secret for a year, but it had been forming for a decade or two in advance of the Jell-O Show this April Fools.

I've always had wings, of course, because if you examine life metaphors, I was a good little innocent Catholic angel as a child, with my escapist flying dreams in which I would flap my arms with great effect and get away from all oppressors (the Catholic Church being too huge and insidious to fully escape, not suprisingly). Peter Pan and other musicals were my vehicles, and although I was shut down artistically by my diabolical first grade teacher, I danced and created and, although I avoided the spotlight, proceeded to craft an immensely creative life with many tangible objects to show for it. I even spent a good part of my working career in art-related jobs at my son's school, Family School, whose motto is *From Roots to Wings.* And we can't forget flying up from Brownies to Girl Scouts, my flight from the East Coast strictures to the west coast of the FREE-flying freak-flag hippies, and a memorable moment when after reading a letter from a suicidal friend, I noticed the bright setting light shining on the underside of a very lofty bird one afternoon, causing me to respond to her detailing that joy, and to race back to Indiana from DC during the student strike to visit her, to be in that safe place when other important memories were set. All of which shall be further revealed in their time.

My greatest challenge in writing my life stories is to abandon all of the many related connections of my personal air flow and stick to the point, the narrow underlying theme, and to leave out the less-essential details and anecdotes that serve to distract, but it's my blog and I don't have to craft that series of memoirs yet. My posts do get way too long though and I do need to keep getting back to the point. Wings.

One point being that I already had wings when I met the Radar Angels, but they were tiny and hesitant to unfold. The men I chose, in particular, tore many feathers from them while they blew their tiny puffs of hot air in my general direction, though ultimately they did allow me to soar to my next perch. Hap was the single most self-destructive man I was involved with, except for my father of course, but Hap was essential to illustrate how self-destruction could work for me. Indi and I went over some of that era yesterday. I did figure those issues out eventually I'm proud to say, but I was thirty then and the sexual hold Hap had on me was not something I could have let run from my feathers like rain without getting severely bedraggled first and that stream had to run its course. It's probably terrible to admit that the best sex I had was thirty years ago, but we didn't have AIDs then and I was a late bloomer and boy did I blossom in those three years with him. That was when I met the Radars, in fact by the disgraceful occurrence of seducing him away from one of them by little fault of my own, he being the irrepressible and irreparably damaged Hap whose slogans were *Everything's Negotiable* and *Die Young and Leave a Good-Looking Corpse* which despite his efforts he has so far failed to do.

Anyway, that story will be written, because it is my story and it's compelling and full of not only metaphor but damning detail and incredible tension. But yes, Indi was there, pristine and having already well-earned glossy white wings, and without her perhaps we would have all been lost to the pirates. She was at the start of everything, and it all started with her. She's the greatest treasure in the Radar Angels' Pandora's Box. Angela was there shortly after, and the three of us are the only ones who have remained active throughout in our various ways, though others have dipped in and out. Celeste had her sphere, and Leslie, and many people who were lucky enough to be around thirty in Eugene in the 80's, and lots of memories will have to be tapped to tell the full story, if it is ever told. Which is unlikely, unless in fictional form, because no one would believe it as nonfiction anyway, and there are far too many digressions to fit into one volume. And I certainly wouldn't want to pin any similar crimes to mine on any of these esteemed persons.

But Indi started grooming my tattered wings back then, so as you can see it has taken a long time to be fitted for my crown, which probably she should be wearing, but her role is actually greater than Queen, more like Goddess, which is not something we are permitted to grant. Maybe we are; if so, I proclaim her Goddess of Angels and Art and I may be able to make that one stick.

So there these amazing women have been, blowing gently at my wings from their various perches, and by now there have been dozens of them. We mostly jettisoned Hap with many other men who were too dangerous and debilitating to carry with us, but the women always transcended whatever we had to in order to stay together. Lots of us slept with the same men, but that never really mattered. The men were peripheral. There were satellite groups that were more or less important, the Art Maggots, the bands, the work situations where we all connected.

When I chose my next important ex-, he was also with an Angel, though they were officially broken up. He had been with quite a few, in various ways. (Did I mention this was pre-Aids?) Anyway, he was the one who took me to the highest levels of art productivity, and it was in that era that Jell-O Shows began. He was connected with Jody Coyote Jewelry, another Eugene legend, and lots of us worked for them. Mike and I first collaborated on a business making printed niobium earrings to sell to Jody, our only customer. A year later we were using my screenprinting experience to make Fibergraphics, through which we rode the Golden Age of the T-shirt, and in fact Mike made the first Jell-O Art t-shirt, though I have made the subsequent twenty-some. We rode on the success of our Fish Tie T-shirts, which spawned the Fish Tie Phenomenon of 1986 and forever changed the retailing of ties, and ranks right up there with the tuxedo shirt, and the Pocket-O-Slugs which generated a line of pocket designs by me. Another story, but the concept was stolen by none other than Disney, so yeah, it was important. And I can prove it.

Mike had the wonderful generosity of someone who accumulates new ideas, equipment, and stuff at an alarming rate and he was the visionary to match my hard work. Our business thrived and only fell apart when I decided to have a child, which until recently was my peak experience and greatest contribution to the human race, and which will probably prove to be so again, when the crowning glory of my Queendom fades and he fully comes into his own. He's a fantastic person and I'm super proud of him, mostly for what he learned in spite of my least efforts, and well beyond what I was able to teach him with my best. Indi also paved the way in the Radars for the graceful integration of art and children and family, which can sometimes be awkward and limiting. I wish I had consulted her a lot more during the decades of single-parenting. I pushed aside most of my women, not to mention all those men, when I concentrated on my son and the creation of the safety and security I needed to build my life with him. He has now fledged rather successfully to the big city and that delightfully coincided with the decade of my sixties, which I believe might just be the best one a woman gets.

Them decades all good in their own ways, the *happy* childhood, the awkward teens, the traumatic twenties, those thirties of renown, the forties when we work our asses off, the fifties when we coalesce, and now the sixties where we unfold out mature, developed, and immensely strong wings. Unlike my calf muscles, the underuse of one's wings during the years of family-building does not make them emaciated. They just wait, preening themselves, and when they unfold, it's impressive as hell...um, heaven I mean. You've gotten a glimpse of mine, and I'm just turning 62.

In this decade, you may see me writing a shelf of books, creating a legacy for the Saturday Market and the Oregon Country Fair, putting my owner-built house on the literary map, finally getting that final piece of the therapy or credentials or approval or whatever it is that still blocks me, adopting my healer self to share her widely, establishing financial security at long last, or perhaps even sadly descending into the self-limits I find so tempting still. We shall have to see. But along with the big store of butter-pecan ice cream in my freezer, I have everything I need.

I plan to continue to be original, surprising, and to express my considerable and wide-ranging self-taught skills and gifts for the consumption and inspiration of others. Being declared the Jell-O Art Queen has assured my fate as nothing else, at least to me.

Because Jell-O Art is the central metaphor of my life, and is exactly what has reminded me to notice my wings. Being invisible, people's wings are easy to deny and ignore. We tend to look for halos, but I've never aspired to wear one of those. We look on people's sleeves for their hearts, and you will find mine there, prominently bleeding and pulsing with the greater Life.

But to see someone's wings, unless they are over sixty and glowing with glory in their momentary luck, you have to turn around for a second look after they have passed by. You have to be so disturbed by their wake that you will stop, look, and see. We mostly don't have time, and are almost all of us so absorbed in looking at the quarters and dimes and pennies that might have been dropped in our paths, looking down in sadness and regret for all that we have not managed well, looking behind us for whatever might be gaining, that mostly we don't see each other's wings.

But there they are. You can thank the Radar Angels for that constant reminder that we all have a set, a pair. We all have the potential to fly like the hang-glider pilots I saw on Oregon Field Guide last night, catching the thermals and making it look easy. Approximately one in the hundred was a woman, a young woman. We're still the gender that is barred for reasons internal and external from stepping to the brink of the precipice without a thought of falling, our senses alert for the rising warm air that is ours to find.

End all wars. Liberate all beings. But above all, look to your daughters, your friends, your sisters and even your mothers and give them a caress, smooth their ruffled feathers if you can.

We carried you, we birthed you, we fed and cleaned you, and we were happy to do it. Every body needs a mother. But when we launch you, and then turn to the often neglected tasks of claiming out own place in the sky, get out of the freaking way. Do not make us look back to take care of you, even when we insist upon it. Because women do a lot more than hold up half of the sky.

We belong in the sky. We put down our roots, and now we will soar. With gratitude and glory.
Goddesses and Queens.