The Story
I got a call in the middle of the afternoon on a Wednesday in March.
It was a friend who owns a local gallery. “Hey, what are you doing?”
I was checking emails. I hate checking emails.
“The business upstairs is having to close and she’s getting rid of a lot of fabrics. We thought of you and she said she’d be open to you coming to see if you’d like any of it for your art. Some of it has already gone to the dumpster, but there’s so much here. Thought you might be able to use it rather than it all getting thrown out.”
I hopped in my car and drove down. Leslie, like so many, was closing her business due to the strain of the pandemic. It was a business that specialized in custom furniture for office spaces. It was the first time we'd met and she was teary-eyed, though somehow cheerful in the way she imagined a first meeting should be. But I could see the grief that laced this moment. The grief that stuck in her throat. But she was trying to hold it in – and was apologizing for it. "It’s crazy," she said of her sadness over the situation and feeling not quite ready to let things -- anything -- go. "I know it’s just fabric. A bunch of fabric."
I assured her it wasn't crazy to feel any of the things she must have been feeling, to grieve what she was very literally in the middle of parting from: a business she'd built, a livelihood, the life's work she loved. I told her the fabrics were beautiful. And they were. There was something about the color -- especially all of them together -- that looked warm, inviting. There was energy in them.
But still, she apologized for her grief, “I know it’s crazy.”
So many people have spent much time this year grieving, feeling sorrow, and simultaneously trying to convince ourselves that the trauma isn’t so bad. What we've lost isn't as bad as the next person. Someone else certainly has it worse. But it's all real -- these feelings of grief, confusion, sorrow. Some, too, have managed to not feel these things, to not have found themselves with lives turned upside down. That's ok.
I had taken with me a few empty boxes and bags, unsure of how big the textiles and upholstery samples would be or how many she would be interested in donating to me.
As it turned out, she wasn’t ready to part with any of them. And I felt it before any words were even exchanged. This was a tender moment. I told her that if she decided to donate some pieces to me, I’d be thankful to recycle them into art. We exchanged phone numbers and I headed home.
I thought, that night, on the interaction in her office space. And then about the phone call from my friend that had been the initial invitation: “Some of it has already gone to the dumpster.” I thought on that through the night. They’ve already been discarded. All I know how to do right now, it seems, is try to transform trauma into beauty. Early the next morning, I headed to the parking lot of the business and dumpster dove. (Was this ethical? Illegal? I could have asked her first, but she’d already discarded them. And she had plenty on her mind. We’ve all had plenty on our minds.) Honestly, what I found wasn't what I'd expected. I was imagining loose pieces of fabric, not samples glued into pages in a binder. I tossed from the dumpster and into my Kia about nine binders, completely unsure of what I’d do with them, and then unloaded them at my studio.
I thumbed through them. What would I do with these? Certainly there was a reason for all this. I flipped through them for days. What in the world…and then decided I'd keep it simple. Make a thoughtful statement. Start something small that leads to something bigger. Try.
"I want to be remembered as one who tried." -- Dorothy Height
