The Tatt2ed Lady

I said the experience of getting a tattoo was another story in itself. First of all, I arrived at an immaculate tattoo "place" because I am really too old to think of myself in a tattoo parlor. There were several women customers, but no men other than the two who worked there. They turned out to be Christian tattoo artists, something I didn't even know existed, and every visible space on their bodies was covered with ink.

Honestly, on a stack of Bibles, I was the only woman there who wasn't getting a man's name covered up. I made an immediate mental note not to put my husband's name on my body unless it was with a washable marker. He would understand.

I was also the oldest woman there, certainly the only one paying for her tattoo with her retirement income. That was comforting, as if I had considered carefully for half a century that the pros outweighed the cons and decided this would somehow actually make the world a better place.

Although I knew I wanted a tatto of a dogwood blossom, Gentleman #1 graciously showed me several albums of photos of their work. They had page after page of every image, word and phrase under the sun. I didn't really expect to see where they had put them on both male and female body parts, but it turned out to be a complete lesson in anatomy.

In fact, I've never seen so many images of Jesus, not even in the church where I grew up. Jesus with crosses, Jesus on crosses, Jesus with eagles, Jesus with roses, Jesus with swastikas, Jesus with American flags, Jesus with Confederate flags. I was surprised to turn a page to find a photo of a man's bare buttocks sporting a drawing of a buxom nude woman with a picture of Jesus' face on the opposite page. I couldn't help but wonder about Jesus' reaction when they inserted his picture in the acrylic page protector and closed the book for the first time. Was it heaven or a new period of temptation in the wilderness?

My turn came quickly enough and I met Gentleman #2 who would actually do my tattoo. Indeed, they were both gentlemen and I had a wonderful time talking and laughing with the two of them as the needle hummed against my leg. It wasn't painful and I was grateful that I had chosen my calf to be so adorned. My criteria were simple - it had to be in a place where I could see it, it had to be in a place with no cellulite, and it had to be in place where I could easily cover it if I was afraid to show it to my mother. That didn't leave me with many options.

As my tattoo was being completed, another young woman came into the front room. I caught snippets of her story about her family still treating her like a child and heard the words "independence" and "konji" a time or two. It all came together when Gentleman #1 declared loudly in a thick Southern drawl, "But, darling, your family can't read 'independence' if it's in Japanese!" Another mental note to myself - no text at all and no foreign languages.

I drove home $50 poorer but wiser for the experience. My husband laughed, my children were surprised that I actually went through with it, and our closest friends came by to marvel at my tattoo that night. I haven't regretted it and don't think I ever will. And, unlike tortilla chips, one is enough.

The Tattooed Lady

For years I've been ashamed, embarrassed, frustrated and angry about my inability to control my weight. I was aware of how cynical I had become about myself as I'd gotten older and I was exhausted from the effort it took to fuel those negative emotions. Like most obese people, my body image was so poor that I couldn't even think about having my picture made. I was always the one holding the camera.

Fortunately, three years ago I was referred to a wonderful endocrinologist who walked me through my medical history following thyroid cancer at age 21 and explained why I had reached this point. Finally I understood how the medical treatment I'd had for thirty years and my own choices had gotten me here.

I was instantly confronted with an entirely new image of my body. It wasn't my adversary, condemning me to declining health and increasing pain. Suddenly, it was the guardian that had shielded me from even more weight, more illness, and, thankfully, more cancer. It was the body I had been blessed with, not the body I had been condemned to. And, in that revelation, I came to a place where I could begin to accept "it" as me.

I decided to put an end to the war I'd had with myself and be grateful. For years I had toyed with the idea of getting a tattoo - I have no idea why. But, when the dogwoods bloomed last spring at the same time that new appreciation blossomed in my mind, I knew exactly what I was going to do.One of the nurses in my doctor's office had tattoos, so I asked her where she had gotten them. (I wasn't about to just go anywhere; the laws allowing tattoo artists in South Carolina were brand new and I wanted a medical "referral" for my body art.)

I emailed my closest friends and family to warn them of what I was about to do. OK, the truth is, I was breaking the news to my 79 year old mother. I knew what her reaction would be and I knew she was entitled to it. I remembered my reaction to our oldest son's tattoo at age 19. I'm certainly not proud of the way that I handled that, but at least HE acted like an adult.

My birthday is in April and dogwoods are always in bloom. Those of us lucky enough to be born in April are blessed to have nature celebrate our birthdays. Dogwoods in bloom are one of my favorite things, maybe my very favorite. I collected photos and drawings of dogwoods, anything I could find to create the art that I would wear the rest of my life. And, I was careful to select images of native Southern Appalachian white flowering dogwoods. No pink hybrids for me. I wanted to embrace the certainty that nature knows best, with dogwoods and with human beings.

The story of getting the tattoo can be told another day, but the experience alone was worth it. I've always believed you should try most things in life at least once and that day was just reaffirming enough.

My dogwood tattoo is just over 2 inches by 2 inches, in full color, on my right calf. I wanted where I could see it and be reminded to be thankful. Sometimes I forget it's there and am pleasantly surprised when I rediscover it. It feels like I've always had it and I've never worried about hiding it. I've tried to rediscover myself in the last year and open myself up to the opportunities around me.

Sometimes I think about adding a few more small images around my dogwood - a dragonfly to represent my husband, a Monarch butterfly for my migratory oldest son, a feisty hummingbird for my youngest. But I'm not going to do it. They don't need me to select their images for them. They'll do just fine choosing their own.

A Year for Me

When I first retired, I stumbled across The Gift of a Year: How to Give Yourself the Most Meaningful Pleasurable Satisfying Year of Your Life by Mira Kirshenbaum. When I finished reading it, I set my goal for the next year to get the house organized after thirty years of working, raising children, and everything else that comes with a woman’s adult life. At first, it seemed impossible to consider clearing every closet, drawer, and shelf. But, after I slept for the better part of six months, I did begin to get thing under control. It took almost two years to complete, but, by the end of that time, the house was cleared of much of its clutter, repairs had been made, walls and floors were renewed, and our family could fully enjoy every space in the house. We were even confident enough to consider adding an addition to the house with the help of a contractor friend.

What we didn’t see coming was a new, old house. We stumbled across an empty foreclosure with two wooded acres in an area where we never even considered living. It needed to be stripped to the studs to begin the work to bring the house back to a state where it could be lived in. On our first visit, we laughed all the way through, saying, “Not us, not us!” But, somehow, we managed to find ourselves back inside with our good contractor friend whose specialty just happened to be bringing disastrous messes of houses back to life. After that visit, we saw it only as the retirement house of our dreams, designed and built to make the rest of our lives better.

Now, a year and a half after moving in, I realize how much our lives have improved and how this has become a new family home for our children, for my sister and her children, even for my mother who will move into a retirement center nearby next year. In this short time, we’ve had more family members visit than we have ever had in thirty-five years of marriage. We’ve used our dining room table more often than we have in the last twenty years. We’ve had more diverse and more interesting collections of people drink a glass of wine on the screened porch, enjoy a fire in the living room, and always laugh around the kitchen counter than we’ve ever had in our lives. And, despite my arthritis and bad knees, I’ve discovered ways to make it enjoyable for me to entertain large parties, small groups of friends, or family as often as we like.

However, along the way, I’ve picked up more clutter by way of morbid obesity and related health problems. And so, I find myself needing a new year to rid my life of those things that keep it from being the most meaningful, pleasurable, and satisfying life that I realize it could be. Just like setting the goal of updating our last house or planning a complete rebuild of our new home, I’m surprised to find that I have already prepared for the job ahead of me. I’ve paid strict attention to all the concerns of my doctors over the last three years. I’ve followed through on every test and screening that they have ordered and researched the underlying issues. Despite diagnosis as a type 2 diabetic three years ago, I’ve discovered through the process that most of my health problems can be significantly improved or eliminated through changes in diet and exercise and awareness and attitude. And for the first time in over twenty years, I don’t feel doomed to failure with regard to managing my weight for myself. I feel energized and ready.

As I write, I look out at the first vegetable garden I’ve ever had and realize that it's a tangible sign of my choice to live better and to contribute to a healthier life for our family and friends. It has taken months of preparation, from finding and ordering growing boxes that allow me to work smarter to learning to reuse kitchen and yard waste as compost, but the green tomatoes that I see on the vine promise that it will be worth it.

The next year holds other promises for me, as well.

Uncle Joe

My uncle Joe always told me that I was his favorite niece. It took me until I was 50to realize that he only had two nieces and that he probably told both us the same thing.

Carrying Coal

Several years ago my sister surprised me with tapes by Michelle Shocked that rapidly became favorites thanks to their bluegrass melodies and the story-like quality of her songs. But, her lyrics about coal cars on the L & N railroad haunt me in a way I struggled to understand for a long time:

“I was born and raised at the mouth of the Hazard holler,
Where the coal cars rolled and rumbled past my door.
But now they stand in a rusty row, all empty,
Because the L & N don’t stop here anymore.”

My family comes from coal country. My father’s father spent his life as a brakeman for the Louisville & Nashville Railroad, carrying coal from the mines to the mills and factories of the South. Coal built the railroads and brought jobs, schools, churches, business, wealth, alcohol, crime, poverty, and illness to the small towns through which it passed.

As a child, I could point out the sites of strip mines from the car window. Seams of coal, glossy sides shining in the sun, lay exposed in hillsides and I was fascinated to find the odd lump of coal lying in the parking lot. I was forbidden to pick it up, dirty, nasty, priceless coal.

Mom was born in a coal mine camp in Tennessee where her father ran the mine commissary. He died of alcoholism when she was 8 and my grandmother moved her children into her family home in Kentucky and found work with the railroads arranging shipments of coal.

My great uncle was the assistant postmaster and was legendary in the area. Folks far back in the mountains and the mine camps knew he could be counted on to make deliveries from town when he brought their mail. Local doctors kept his garage stocked with sample medicines and my uncle distributed them to families who had no way into town and no means to buy the medications they needed. They would send whatever they could back with him as barter, determined to pay their own way for their illness if not for their health.

We visited the town where my mother was born only once with my great uncle. I have a picture of it in my imagination – two dusty dirt roads, company-owned homes set back in the trees, the company commissary that my grandfather ran, and, off to the left, a dark yawning hole – the entrance to the mine itself. But, I never seem to picture the freight cars or the railroad in a tiny mountain clearing that was too small to have paved streets.

I knew the railroads carried my father and his brothers away to war, delivered my great aunts to New York City for vacations, and brought my mother, sister, and me into the mountains from our home in Atlanta on summer breaks. And, although it began its journey in camps too small to command passenger trains to stop, coal was always the railroads’ most important paying customer.

The families of miners heated their homes with coal, as did my mother’s family and all the others who lived in the valley. My sister or I would come down with respiratory problems early in our visits to Kentucky and we would quickly resemble the runny-nosed children we saw on the streets of town. My great uncle would lead us to his garage, unlock the door and pull it open to display shelves and shelves of cold remedies, cough syrups, and allergy medications. Mom would locate the products we normally took, the door would be relocked, and we would go on with our visit, somewhat drowsier but less congested. We never really questioned why this lovely valley triggered our respiratory problems with such regularity.

Although we moved to Atlanta well before my mother was 30, her life has been plagued with allergies, asthma, and respiratory infections. Last year, she began to have chronic bouts of bronchitis at age 78. When I accompanied her to the pulmonologist for her initial visit, I was stunned to hear him read in medical records provided by her family doctor that she had COPD, Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease. The specialist asked her only two questions about her personal history and the first was answered simply with a “No”:
1. Have you ever smoked?
2. Have you ever lived in a house that was heated by coal?

She did, of course. She was born by coal, fed by coal, warmed by coal, clothed by coal, and educated by coal. Somehow, its black dust has stayed with her, hidden in places where we could not see it or sense its effects. And, after all these years, it demands a price for its travels with her and the life it brought to the mountains and valleys of the southern Appalachians.

And now I know the words of the song are wrong – the coal cars have never been empty. They brought the very air that my mother would breathe from deep within the mines themselves. Now I sense the railroad is moving toward her, snaking its way toward a landscape we cannot anticipate, coal smoke blowing through its open cars, stopping to collect the riders who must pay its fare.

My mother will take passage. She was marked with coal for the journey long ago.

Not in Our Family

I never thought it could happen in our family. I’ve heard about it before. About neighborhood kids being warned not to play with THOSE children because their… About families having to move away because they couldn’t stop it… About the hallucinations and the addiction and the drooling… About trying to pull him away time and time again, all the while knowing that he doesn’t really recognize me or maybe even see me.

It’s happened in our yard, with our baby. Harry, our sweet, people-loving, wonderful Labradoodle, is a toad licker.

At first, I thought it was funny. Then he started to foam at the mouth, slobbering and smacking his lips continuously. I’d read about dogs addicted to toad licking before and know that toads in other parts of the country exude secretions so toxic that dogs can die from licking them. But, apparently, they die happy.

His sister Bess contented herself with chasing a moth under the spotlight. Not Harry. He followed the toad into every dark cranny, lunging to pick it up, over and over again. His mouth must have gotten numb fairly quickly. Thanks to that and Harry’s “soft” Lab mouth, so highly prized in retrievers, the toad escaped unharmed each time. That toad was covered in slime, despite what naturalists tell you about amphibians. Toad suckin’ dogs generate a lot of slime.

I finally got him to take care of business in the grass and pulled him into the house by the collar. Bess followed happily lured by the promise of a cookie. Harry lumbered to the water bowl and refilled it with slobber.

I tell people to check everything on Snopes. I looked. This isn’t on Snopes. But you can Google “dogs that lick toads” and see photos of cane toads and Colorado toads and giant toads and marine toads. All guilty of dealing to dogs.

With a little luck, you won’t see Harry’s picture posted yet. He’s a first offender.

Family History

The stories in my husband’s family come to us as letters and documents dating back to the Revolutionary War. Their tellers include a slave, Revolutionary and Civil War Army officers, members of Aaron Burr’s family, Kit Carson, General William Tecumseh Sherman, General Lew Wallace who wrote the classic Ben Hur, Presidents Andrew Johnson, William McKinley, and Grover Cleveland, and various US Secretaries of State and Secretaries of War. They fill a cardboard box that came from an aunt’s basement to sit on a shelf in our closet.

We’ve been told many times how lucky we are to have these stories. But the truth is that my husband’s family chose to perpetuate the stories of their ancestors rather than live their own. They were crippled by the profound burdens of responsibility and privilege at the stories’ cores. The contradictions they tell are too powerful for us to pass on as legacy to our sons.

My husband and I have decided to put all the family documents up for auction, to let them be studied and shared as they never have been before. Despite the wealth of family history, we find ourselves collaborating by necessity with people who value them for the thousands of dollars they bring. Somehow, we’ll create a new story.