Last weekend, while driving to Philly to see my good friends Cobalt & the Hired Guns, and later that evening on my way to Manhattan’s East Village to visit my spiritual advisor Kitzie, I had plenty of time alone with my lived-in experiences of adulthood. (For some reason, everything to me lately is lived-in if it’s good. All good things are lived-in things right now, and all lived-in things are good.)
The Detroiter in me did not feel like going to the ATM before I left Gettysburg, but has been collecting her days’ pocket change in a yogurt container wrapped in duct tape for the past couple of years. This piggybank (which, really, is a firebees canister — it says CAUTION: FIREBEES on it) is heavy with coins, and was made one afternoon years ago with Kitzie for a Piscapo’s Arm orientation show in Oberlin, Ohio. I like containers, found items, functional art, and things that remind me of my friends, so I have had this kind of trashy-wonderful item since… 2004? And, yes, thank you for asking, I do self-identify as a packrat. Anyway, the point of this rambling paragraph is that I brought my firebees canister full of change with me in lieu of paper money.
I should also say that as I’ve gotten older I’ve started to notice myself turning into my father in particular ways. These ways manifest most clearly in my interactions with people in the service industry. When I was little, I used to find his attempts to make our waitress laugh or the cashier smile utterly mortifying. It seemed intrusive. Please let the busboy do his job, don’t distract him with conversation! Little kid me wanted to escape the server/served environment as quickly as possible because it was uncomfortable. I always felt like I was a nuisance there, which made me even more deeply uncomfortable. To my younger self it seemed disrespectful to stay any longer than you absolutely had to to eat your food or buy your groceries. Like something a man who doesn’t mind being mistaken for Santa Claus might do. And I knew, because I kept careful track of him, that my father was not Santa. I knew when I snuck down into the basement to surprise him in his office in the early mornings — I knew that this man belonged to me, not to every child. So it was understandably offensive to me, in my little kid self-righteousness, that anyone could ask my father if he was Santa and he could think it was funny, could revel in it a little bit.
As I’ve grown up, I’ve come to realize my father may not be Santa Claus, but he is saintly. With his actions and his smiles and the connections he makes to people, my father helps you feel supported, appreciated, and seen. No work is too small for him to notice or thank you for, no bad day too big a barrier for him to keep from trying to make you laugh. He really values the relationship between server and served, he sees it as a partnership, and he lives these partnerships as examples to others. To his disgruntled daughter, or to that waiter that’s short with you because someone important to him died, or that cashier who is giddy at being seen and heard and laughed with for the first time today. Because he knows — in a way that many people who don’t value struggle don’t know — that he could just as easily be server as served, and he has been both, and always is both of those people. My father is merry, and because men are supposed to seem closed-off from the world, people view him as too sensitive, a little weak, not serious enough. But his smile will outlast your frown, his stubborn kindness will survive your stormy mood, and his willful disregard of your discomfort as he comforts you will be a beacon of light during your worst day. As I’ve grown up, I’ve come to know that there is nothing more serious or more strong than my father’s joy, his wet-eyed laughter.
My father is also not afraid to inconvenience other people, because he realizes that convenience is a privilege we cannot always afford. He will apologize, of course, for any inconvenience, and he will probably help you have a good time while he is inconveniencing you, if you let him. Little kid me, the rule-follower, the lover of structure, the fearer of authority — hated inconvenience. Didn’t appreciate it in the lived-in moments. Would have rather died than laughed and said, “well, that’s life, isn’t it?”
Little kid me freaked out when we got into a crowded restaurant, where a Taylor Party of Four had come and gotten tired of the wait and gone, and had been called twice by the time my father went up and told them, “My name is Taylor, but there are only three in my party,” words carefully chosen to say, the universe has opened itself to me in this moment and I will gladly walk through it. If we realize our momentary poverty in advance of getting our bill, the Bunchies will eat less food so that we can tip you well in appreciation for your service to these universally inconvenient truths (never less than 15% before tax unless you’re awfully, intentionally horrid to us, and even then you almost always get 10%). In my embarrassment of riches lately I have been tipping around 20%, rounded to the nearest dollar. Little kid me told my parents they were leading me into a life of crime when we went to see three movies in one day, when we had only paid for one ticket each. How could they! How could they make me have so much fun at the expense of society and its not made-to-be-broken laws? My parents scandalized me. Didn’t they understand that when they got arrested for all their mischief I was going to have to live without them?
But I was no orphan. Somehow society didn’t care when we got into that restaurant or saw those movies. Somehow that had been us taking advantage of the opportunities the universe had provided us because we were open to them in our poverty. And that openness, those many open doors they happily dragged me through —grumbling and grouching and grieving about society and the rules of law and the order of operations and the propriety of moral codes and the politeness of well-cultured people and OH! the humanity! the economy! this slippery slope! you are ruining me beyond belief!— that openness has continued to resonate long past the clinging to structure that children must do to begin to walk upright in the world. My parents have been married for 36 years, a longer amount of time than each of them was old when they had their first child, me. Part of what has made that possible, I think, has been their openness to lived-in experience and partnership in its many, beautiful, multidimensional forms.
Once, my father told me that he’d heard or read somewhere that accepting compliments is an assertive thing to do. Like my father, I always try to accept compliments even when I don’t feel worthy of them, because I would like to be a more assertive person. I have found those subtle assertions of you and me experiencing this genuine moment together in space and time to be incredibly empowering. My motto is, “When in doubt, accept the compliment,” because in those rare moments when we are together in space and time, I believe we must thank each other in every way we can. And, in those moments of reasonable doubt, when I thank you for saying something incredibly irrefutable like “You have abnormally large sinus cavities,” our laughter can only bring us together. This is how one person becomes a gentleman, a gentleperson, a member of the elite, high falutin’, and kind of a big deal.
This is how we are the richest people we know, how we have become the gentry, how we behave more fully upper middle class than in the suburbs where the grass is always greener. At my house in Detroit, our grass is taller, my friend. Because we are learned people and we understand that some white man invented lawns when he created a tool to mow them in 1830. And screw that man and screw the man’s technology. It takes 2009’s Londoners as long to travel across their city with its heavy traffic congestion as it did for 1909’s Londoners to navigate those same streets by horseback, foot, or carriage. We are only as smart as the tools we no longer use because we have outlived their usefulness. Here we jury-rig our own solutions and keep at it until our house is held together with elastic from old, holey, holy underwear and binder clips. We appreciate binder clips especially, such that we keep a running list of all their potential uses. We are the conceptual blockbusters, inside your boxes, pushing outward with as much oomph as we can muster. When I was younger and my parents could not for the life of them step foot into Border’s without spending at least $100 on books, my dad bought one on cooperative games to play with me and my mom bought one to teach me about the electromagnetic energy that powers our bodies. We invented Tic-tac-draw, and I made the type of mazes a little kid would make, and I discovered the awesome truth that amputees have phantom limbs. We are tinkerers and thinkerers. We have the technology.
We exude a bubble of Dover-Taylor Time, and in our bubble we acknowledge that Time is an invention (as well as a rotation of our planet around the sun), a social contract that has eluded our clerics, our philosophers, and our scholars for centuries; that being lost in places with people you love could never be a waste of time; that if you want to leave the house on outer world time you have to tell Daddy a time which is at least half an hour before you actually want to leave; that over the years the buffer has to get bigger because he will factor it into his calculations, plans, and strategies; that adult rituals often require a narrative, a dog to be walked, a child to be tucked in, and talking through the screen door long after you’ve said goodbye. In my love for you, I will acknowledge your tardiness, will agree that you are right on Dover-Taylor Time, will indulge you for the convenience of your company, and will continue our conversation. Love is the subtlest revolution I know. It happens constantly, it surrounds us, it moves through us, which makes us the gentlest of all revolutionaries. This is why, above all else, I wish to live my life in a welcoming way and why my fear of all fears is alienation (both alienating and being alienated by). Our way of living is as simple and as difficult as gratitude, which is why thanksgiving has always been our most important holiday.
So it was with nothing but pride that I, a ghetto-fabulous white girl in a rented, dragonsblood-red Hyundai Sonata, blasting Cake’s “Love you madly,” rolled up to the Pennsylvania Turnpike Tollbooth, told the attendant, “Six twenty-five? This may take a while,” and slowly, carefully, gathered my silver coins from my firebees canister one handful at a time — one dollar at a time — to pay for the privilege of using that road. While the line behind my car became so long that it discouraged others from joining, while my music played and the turnpike attendant smiled, talking on the phone to her friend, I reveled in my inconvenience. As I pulled away, having successfully counted $6.25 (mostly in quarters), the driver directly behind me, his arm outstretched from his open window waving his paper money — individual dollars distinguished like a hand of cards — honked in frustration at the extra minute I had added to his drive.
“Whatever dude, you’ll live!” I said, though I was sure he couldn’t hear me. I laughed at myself as I rolled up my window and powered into Philadelphia.
ə
Related Words for : 
