Dancing Fancies

I had not given much thought to how an onion grows. Descended from homesteaders, farmers, and missionaries, there is earth to be found under my ancestral fingernails. But none under mine, my hands are smudged instead with ink. The daughter of scholars, though my mother is often found pulling weeds at the weekends. She grows flowers, in memory of her mothers mothers, who left forest and ocean for the harsh Western desert of another land entirely, in the service of a faith we no longer have in common. We are so far from them, my mother and I. But she plants flowers, in memory. Beautiful, but eating the flower and stalk of an iris might actually kill you, and I have never been tempted besides. I have never grown anything to feed myself, and I have never given much thought to how an onion grows.

I bought one for a recipe that I never got around to making, and left it in a red bowl on the table. Turns out an onion grows from...an onion. Left to its own devices, it sends out green tendrils that shock against the red, pungent skin. The outside grows softer as the insides liquefy into a primordial soup of nutrients so powerful that it requires neither sun nor water. Forgotten, it is entirely self-reliant; seed, and plant, and garden in a bowl in my kitchen. I wonder, will it flower? And if I smell them, will I weep?

It is a common misconception that our experiences, added on to the core of our self, make us who we are. Like a recipe, you add this and that until it's delicious, and then you throw a party. It's subtraction, really. It's all about subtraction.

We are all of us model human beings, the life of the party, the little black dress, the great American novel, the long poem that puts long poems back on the map, the monkey that changes the language on the television and all we can do is laugh, the song that makes you pull over because all your hair is standing on end and your eyes keep filling up with tears. We are scarred by bad childhoods, awkward adolescences, too much on the midsection, too little on top, appreciation both under and over, breaks, and aches, and the terminal silence of a lonely 3 a.m. in a city that isn't silent unless you want it to be. Digging your way out of all of that? A Sisyphean task for sure. There's more every day. But stand in the shadow of Big Ben, the Globe, the Bethlehem Chapel, the house in which Anne Frank hid until the day she hid no longer, the Courtyard Theatre on the banks of the Avon, the East Side Gallery with all its hopes and dreams, the Eiffel Tower, the great big blue sea after a lifetime of sand and red rock. Stand in the shadow, and I defy you not to unabashedly be. That is the true magic of experience. Greatness strips you, digs you out of not-you, and scrawls it all over your face.

So slough it off. Like a snake, weasel out of it and leave it behind you. All that's bad, all that once did or will make you sad. Leave the dirt and the grime to poor Yorick, who doesn't mind. He once laughed as he breathed, lived as he liked, and made a young prince laugh out of turn for once. Peel it back, peel it all back, and show your newly upchurned face to the sky.