Seedling Moment

"Renewal", 50 x 28, Mixed Media.

Seedling Moment

Julie could bridge social groups like nobody’s business. 

She could be pithy and admired within the upper echelons of popular kids as easily as she was dark and insightful with the alt group.

Julie introduced me to the song “Live for Today” (not a subtle title), pointing me to pursuing a promising future of depth and meaning. 

I loved Julie for loving that song. 

I felt excruciatingly self-conscious around the mainstream kids, as well as bored. The alt group seemed equally harsh in their judgements. They had LSD notebooks which struck me as equally affected as the mainstream hustle. High school was all too painful. Everyone was trying so hard.

But being with Julie made my inner Bruce Springsteen matter.  

The point was this: How was I ever to be Julie?

***

One February evening I stood in the depths of Eglington subway station waiting for Julie. It well before cellphones, and far later than I ever wanted to be out. My toes and fingertips were biting with brutal cold as I faced the closed metal shutter of the single closed kiosk.No one was around. After an hour of waiting, I knew I could wait all week if I wanted. Julie wasn’t coming around the corner bursting with apologies. 

In that moment I stepped over some threshold; something was over. That our forever friendship wasn’t going to make it to the end of grade ten wasn’t the point. Consciously I knew nothing about “boundaries”; it wasn’t a thing. I’m still learning. I would have to return home, and face my less shiny self, but I vowed I would look after myself. 

***

“Live for Today” came up a few days ago on my playlist, as I was blending dioxazine purple with a cadmium yellow. I smiled at my palette. That era, in which I was much younger than my own kids are now, came swelling back to me. 

Everything seemed epic.

And in a way, it was.

I mused on the different lives Julie and I have lived.

Julie wound up being a Shakespeare scholar at Columbia. For my fragile countenance, a career in academic life would have made the slings and arrows of my teenage years child's play. 

Julie is probably retired by now. Or maybe she is having too much fun.

I would learn many times that Julies or Springsteens cannot be a proxy for me. I will do the work of establishing what is the vital seed they represent in me that needs fuel. We want to find our right mentor outside of ourselves. Concretized. Art is cutting your singular path through the forest, knowing your solo voice (and yes, everyone has an authentic self, begging to be honoured). There are intersections where we run into the folks who fill our hearts and inspire us.

But the bushwhacking belongs to us.