Happy Father's Day

I think parenting is an impossible job. Not having children of my own, I can't imagine the responsibility it carries, and in my particular case, the living up to the familial lineage of love that has come before me from the Mullica side and Pries side, and now the Sturgill side and the Campbell side, and the time and sacrifice and patience it requires every day from the very first. It seems the most important key is time. I don't know of a perfect human being in history, but all any kid wants is a parent who wants to be with them. It seems the deepest longing of the human heart is to be known.

I can't think of a time in my life when my father hasn't pursued time with me. Most recently, in these past five or six years, it's been the mutual pursuit of the breakfast date. I feel privileged as an adult to hear my father ask for my opinion, or share with me something profound that he has experienced, or something small, or anything at all, and tell me I am among his friends.

But there were so many other moments, thousands of early moments, where he read to me before I went to sleep, where we danced together in the living room listening to Tower of Power. He taught me how to play card games like Spite and Malice, and board games like Scrabble. He made me fall in love with day trips and Sunday drives, although I could never share his love for eagles and mountains. If I have the tiniest bit of him in me, the way he hated ATM's for the longest time and didn't want to use them because they took away from human interaction, the way he has always been able to both tell a good story and listen to someone else's story (whether it be good or not), the way his time is never his own but instead an extension to others, if any of these small things that make up Randy Pries could ever begin to take root in me, I would hug everyone I know and never be able to contain my gratitude. Sometimes I feel like I want to keep him to myself like a secret, and in other moments I feel guilty to have him so present and invested in my life, like I am hogging his goodness from the rest of world and all of humanity would benefit from him being scattered around. There are days when I just can't believe I know him. Then again, he's always been there. 

• at 11:38 PM
• Posted by Anne Campbell
• 0 comments

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On Seeing Dionne Warwick

I was the youngest and my mother was the second youngest. Dionne Warwick was playing on a Saturday night at the Swinomish Casino in Anacortes in a room the size of a large conference room. Until about ten minutes before the show, we weren't sure the room would fill up at all. The man sitting beside my mother was already asleep. I was wearing the mint green cropped fur coat I had purchased two years ago for my wedding. The four esteemed male musicians who made up Dionne Warwick's band gathered on the stage in their tuxedos. They started playing the intro to Walk On By.

Would she come up the dark stairs on the side of the stage, or would she appear from behind the curtain? She came up the dark stairs, in her stiletto heels and super luxurious slate grey wide-legged satin pants, her black and white wrap swirling around the stage, flowing behind her, then in front of her, her hair pure white and her teeth just as white, and her cheekbones, oh her cheekbones, were so beautiful that my mother needed to pull a pair of opera glasses from her purse to ensure they were actually quite that sculpted, and to ensure Dionne Warwick's skin was actually as young (it couldn't be) and soft as it seemed.

My mother commented later that evening that it was hard for her to believe her daughter was at a Dionne Warwick show, and even harder to believe that her daughter knew all the words to the songs. She said hearing Dionne Warwick reminded her of where she was living and what she had experienced when the songs were first released in the 1960's, when she had seen performances on television, and when her own mother, my grandmother, had loved both Dionne Warwick and Burt Bacharach, the man who wrote much of her music. My own identification with Dionne Warwick's music came during years in college when I lived alone and gravitated toward powerful women vocalists like Barbra Streisand and Dionne Warwick and Carole King and Joni Mitchell and realized that I wanted a man and didn't need a man at the same time.

Seeing Dionne Warwick on stage was like going to summer camp, or having a spiritual experience, or knowing someone you love is about to move away. It was knowing the experience would never happen again, at least not like that, and when you're there and it's actually happening, you wish you could stay in that room a little bit longer. At some point in the show, somewhere in the middle, the lights went dark and Dionne Warwick started singing Alfie, and everyone applauded like it was what they had been waiting for, such a sad song, and when she sang it you could feel every bit of its sadness, and when I looked over my mother was crying, and we were sitting there in that casino, my mother and I, with this woman who talked about what she had learned from Sammy Davis, Jr., because she was from the time of Sammy Davis Jr., because she was Dionne Warwick, and I suddenly missed my grandmother, and the sun that shone on the carpeting when I heard Anyone Who Had a Heart for the first time, and I knew I could never explain it to anyone.

• at 8:53 PM
• Posted by Anne Campbell
• 1 comments

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Inspiration

Perhaps it comes with the beginnings of June, but suddenly inspiration abounds. Last weekend, the Salvation Army was selling classical vinyls for ten cents a pop, and my time at home (while cleaning and reading and drinking red wine in the evenings) is now set to Giovanni Battista Pergolesi's Bach compositions. Kate Moss is on the cover of Harper's Bazaar wearing brick red nail polish, so I recently ran to Rite Aid for the L'Oreal version. I have been stealing flowers from my neighbor's trees and putting them in little vases. I have been reading Harold Brodkey's final work, This Wild Darkness, and while the book is a memoir covering the story of his death, the heightened awareness of every breath and motion documented in the account of his last days has quickened my own pulse. My husband has been making Amazon orders and ripping through books faster than anything I have ever seen. We saw a show at Western (the college campus) two weeks ago, and everyone in attendance was a good decade younger than us and our eyes could hardly handle the rushes of color and brave fashion choices made by these kids (not all good, but certainly brave) and the throwing of caution to the wind in their loud dress reminded me that there is something to the power of expression and I don't have to fit any mold (ever).

My best friend was in my living room last week and saw my copy of Life Magazine, 1967 with Mia Farrow on the cover (shortly after her marriage to Frank Sinatra) and said, "Can I cut your hair like that right now?" Of course you can.

I am eagerly awaiting the arrival of (my favorite) Wes Anderson's Moonrise Kingdom (come on Bellingham, get with the program), where I am sure to find more visual inspiration than I can contain, but until then, it's important to note that there are still ugly things happening in the world, which must be avoided at all costs, Lord help us all:

• at 11:27 AM
• Posted by Anne Campbell
• 0 comments

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