SEX BOLTS & CHICKEN LOOP
SEX BOLTS & CHICKEN LOOP
On being bold at 50
My husband picked up furniture building when he was 50. Over the course of six months, he made two tables so beautiful that people offered to buy them for considerable sums. What should I build next? he asks me.
I scan my saved images of modern furniture and zero in on a rare chaise. The word “rare” is actually in the name of the chair. It is a rocking chaise lounge, all undulating lines and curves, evoking water flowing over boulders. It is impossible to imagine how wood can do this, how hands could shape these voluptuous lines, wrench nature into a different form as if some act of alchemy is required. Magic.
The rare chair is listed on 1st dibs for $22,000. “That!” I say, smacking my phone for emphasis. “Make that.” I am not actually serious.
He leans forward and his eyes narrow as he squints at the photo. “Okay,” he says and launches into a Google search for “how to bend wood.” I gave him mission impossible, and he hadn’t flinched. Not a word or self-conscious laugh to convey he was way out of his league.
As I return to my writing in the other room, I try to come up with a comparable Google search for me and my work:
How to write a Man Booker award-winning novel.
How to write like Zadie Smith. Edith Wharton. Colson Whitehead.
How to get an interview with Terry Gross on Fresh Air.
I don’t Google these things. I don’t even think these things. Maybe once upon a time, I might have. But my husband is still that dogged little boy who went to school with blood on his pants from duck hunting at four in the morning, who came home battered after every football game and still went out and set new school records. The little boy that no one ever remembered to tell, Hey, buddy, there are things you can’t just up and do. Things beyond your realm.
“What’re you thinking about?” I ask later as we lie in bed.
“I’m not sure what size sex bolts I’ll need for this project.”
“Seriously? That’s what they’re called?”
“Yeah. There’s a male version and a female version.”
This has the ring of something important, something conclusive, a sense or meaning that I want to test. Bending wood. Mastering a new craft at age 50. What is the difference between me and my husband? Does this difference slot into conventional, binary gender roles? Is my realm of “possible” a narrower and narrower sphere, closing in around me, snug and snugger for an aging woman, an empty nester?
I think of my friend Cheryl and our plans for her 50th celebration. The decorations were a reflection of her vast travels. Mexican garland from Cheryl’s last kite surfing trip, shiny and flashy, brightly colored tissue paper marigolds, that I shaped at my kitchen counter. They were delicate, and I had to slow down peeling back the layers, so they didn’t tear, but they were beautiful, the colors of spices that Cheryl photographed in markets in India and Marrakesh. Photos of our dear friend captured her adventurous spirit over fifty years: Cheryl on horseback, a teenaged Cheryl, tawny and long limbed on the hull of a ship, provocative and yet with a Devil May Care glance over her shoulder. Cheryl flinging a baton high in the air. As a little girl about to dive into a birthday cake. Something about the mischievousness and hint of impetuousness made me smile.
My daring friend who picked up kite surfing at age 40, a sport of finesse, skill, strength and just simple willingness to hurt. The sport has its own vocabulary. I love to hear Cheryl talk about the best sort of mistral wind and the use of the chicken loop, a special rope binding the surfer to her kite. It’s called a “chicken loop,” because the four lines of kite are considered “chicken” by those who favor the traditional two- line system. But the chicken loop is an essential safety device, quickly detaching the kiter in case of emergency. There is real danger in the sport. I’ve heard the stories of surfers being swept miles out to sea. Big, strong guys being hurled into the shore, smashing collar bones and shoulders and ankles. Cheryl comes back a little battered from these trips. There are days, weeks when she can’t work out with me, but then she will get another injection in her back, and she is back on her board, ready to let the wind do its thing.
When I look at these photos of my brave and dear friend, I can’t help wonder: what are the corresponding photos of me. I am so much more cautious in my old age, skiing carefully, always cognizant of a torn ACL, mindfully slowing down to walk instead of run over frozen stretches on the river trail, but isn’t this just sensible at my age?
I send an essay about my college-bound daughter to my best friend from high school. She reads it and tells me what I’ve missed: she recognizes me in the description of my brave and often impulsive daughter. Whaaaat? I write back. Moi? She responds with disbelief. Do I really not remember skinny dipping in the Caribbean during a shark warning?! Rock climbing at night in spite of my fear of heights and leaping when I couldn’t see the black surface of the water far below. Picking up ballet and becoming competent enough to study at the Boston School of Ballet. My first job in a small television station in Northern California, going live as an anchor on day one with no preparation or rehearsal, never hesitating when the teleprompter crashed. No one told me I could. No one told me I couldn’t. But then I was 21. I could be the next Diane Sawyer.
Now I wonder: did something change in me when I “opted out” of the workplace to be a full-time mother? The decision to stay home was a luxury I have never taken for granted. But it also signaled the end of a career. I have come to view my 23 years of mothering as a bold move. But now the nest is empty, the work of daily mothering over. Time to invest in new challenges. New daring.
My children like to tease that I am reckless in the kitchen, flinging knives, and leaving a hazardous obstacle course of open cabinets and drawers. An adrenaline junkie of the kitchen! We laugh about this. But I know the real daring happens quietly, every day, on the page. The discomfort, the risks, the navigation of dark waters, limp winds that leave me stranded sometimes for days. Weeks. Months.
My husband says all my hard work writing will eventually pay off, and it may. And it may not. The daring is choosing to do it anyway. Writing is my way of seeing, of being, of reporting back to myself, of connecting the dots. This is my way forward. It is my chicken loop binding me to myself, my hold on my steady self, my reckless self. The wind doesn’t give a damn about me and why should it? It has oceans and continents and species to rule and ravage. But I hold tight. Bound to myself and battered and maybe even occasionally buoyant into 50 and beyond.
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Category: On Writing
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