I started my cozy on the 14th and wrote 2-3 chapters and then I got sidetracked. The following week lead up to my 65th birthday of February 23. I found myself celebrating the whole week with various friends over long breakfasts, lunches, happy hours at favorite places all culminating with a great Sunday afternoon at my friends’ Daniel Day Gallery-Dream Mecca Studio. Daniel Day and Melody Musik truly are a renaissance couple.
The Gallery is a unique venue of live music (blues); art; sculpture; photography; handcrafted jewelry, clothing, and accessories; vintage clothing; and more than I have space to tell. Every Sunday afternoon from 2-6 there’s a party that overflows in beautiful weather onto the large patio out back. It’s byob and a cover charge of $12 covers the food hot from the grill, and pays the band. This Sunday, the sun came out to shine on all of us and the Jeff Jensen Band from Memphis rocked the house. Melody Musik who plays Clarinet in her band (yes, she’s a musician, too) played a Happy Birthday solo just for me.
My week-long celebration did include a lot of writing just not on my Cozy. I’ve been journaling as if my life depended on it. My journal is the running memoir of my life, and good or bad there is always something to write at any given moment. I remember reading Alice Koller’s 1991 book An Unknown Woman, which is basically her journal during a period of self-examination.
I feel I am at that place in my life now. I’ve toyed with writing my own ‘unknown woman’ memoir tentatively titled A Not-Yet Famous Woman – A Memoir, or considering the content maybe A Not-Yet Infamous Woman – A Memoir.
Being a Pisces, I am two fish. One goes with the flow wherever it goes; one fights its way upstream. I’ve no doubt that for some years now, I’ve taken the easy float with the current style of getting by. But now, I see my mother in her 80’s, and know I may have 20 or more years left to me. It’s not enough to go with the flow anymore. In rereading my old journals and journaling anew I’m exploring that fish that knew when to fight the current – not every day, but when it mattered.
At 65 I’m saying out loud what I’ve always known. It’s not enough to exist. I’ve become a woman of a certain age and I ask myself – Now What?
Perle Champion 