Moose in the Kitchen

I’m not very good at dreaming. Well, that’s not entirely true. I’m quite accomplished at imagining Paco the cabana boy and all the strawberry daquiris he’s going to bring me as I languish by the hot tub. Every so often he fans me with peacock feathers and asks if I need more guacamole. Jeeves, the errant butler who provides me with sticky toffee pudding and leather bound books, is also a regular feature of a fantasy life that seems to revolve around people bringing me things to snack on.

But I’m not very good at dreaming about things that might actually happen. I can begin the thought: I’d like to [pick one] ride a bike through Vermont as the leaves turn, write a novel about a whiffle bat-wielding dwarf, paint by dipping the soles of my feet in cans of red and yellow and dancing on a sheet of canvas. But I can never quite get to the end of the sentence without my brain snapping back on itself like an errant fifth grader with a rubber band and a grudge. These thoughts often echo “that’s not something I could do.” As if I am less capable than anyone else in this world. I’m not quite sure where this mindset came from, but there it sits.

So I signed up for Mondo Beyondo, an online course by Andrea Scher and Jen Lemen that eases you into dreaming big. Or maybe it dumps you into the deep end of your dreams and waits patiently to see if you can swim. I don’t know, I’m a few classes behind.

One of the first assignments was to think about people who have inspired us. I wrote the below thinking no one else would read it, so I wrote things I might not have written here. We’ll see if it stays or gets quickly deleted to save me embarrassment when I discover all the subject-verb disagreements and family members start pointing out the details I got wrong.
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People Who’ve Inspired Me

My great aunt was a traveler. She was born in 1904 and in her lifetime she rode the Orient Express to Russia, visited Norway, Denmark, roamed all over Europe, and countless other countries. Then she came home to play euchre with her sisters in Wisconsin. When I was young, she’d come to visit and take me on what she called An Adventure. I could hear the capital letters in her voice before I even knew what capital letters were. We’d board the bus and travel the unimaginable distance of ten blocks, where we’d disembark and eat an ice cream cone. When she died, some of her inheritance came to me with instructions that it be used as adventure money. Her legacy bought me my first plane ticket out of the United States and sent me to England, Wales, Ireland, Scotland, France and Italy. I still travel every chance I get.

My mother’s cousin went to medical school in the 1950s. If she could became one of the first female radiologists at a time when women were routinely called “sweetheart” in public, then I can certainly be a writer. Whether or not I succeed, no mustachioed mysogynist has ever called me “sweetheart” and we have women like her to thank.

My boss, an incredible artist and writer, is teaching me to respect my own process and not get mired in the murk of my own head. His glee for the business side of his art is catching, and I hope his bank balance is too.

My mom inspired me to love and accept people as they are. Watching her allow my brother to be the complex, flawed, and often brilliant person he is – even as he resists every social construct invented by Western Civilization (except his car, he likes his car) – and watching him open up to her as a result, in a way he doesn’t with anyone else in the family, has shown me just how valuable that acceptance is. She would never admit this, but I think she’s mastered the art of loving a person exactly as they are in this moment. Even as their disapproval of showering drives her absolutely batty.