Living. Rolling. Writing.

THE TAO OF TEEJ

By TJ Kelly

(Fall 2008)

What is a TJ anyway?  This is hard for me to figure out, as I’ve always been certain there are a few different people taking up space in my brain.  I, Theresa June, was a little girl once, and then a teenager, a tomboy, a hippie, a gypsy, and a hopeless romantic.  From the age of twelve to the age of twenty, I drowned in self-reflection and tried to figure out which was the real me.  I’ve since decided I’m not going to pick one—I’m just going to be all of them—and I have rock and roll to thank for that decision.  It’s the one constant thing that I have never grown tired of in my life, and surely if rock music rebels against the norm and differs widely in its styles, I’m allowed to do the same. 

Moons and Junes and Ferris wheels,
The dizzy dancing way you feel,
As every fairy tale comes real.
-- Both Sides Now, Joni Mitchell.

********

“Mom, why would they put such a funny looking woman on the cover of a magazine?”  I am only twelve, and suddenly beauty—how to get it, how to perfect it, and whether or not I even possess it—are all I can think about.  This is the peer pressure present in the seventh grade.

“That’s Joni Mitchell.  She’s an old folk singer, and she has an interesting face.  So full of character.”  My mother has always described things as being “full of character”.

“Well I think she’s ugly,” I said.  I just couldn’t figure out how someone that wasn’t a perfect model could end up on a magazine.

“Theresa, did you ever think that someone might be considered beautiful because their face is interesting?  Or because they’re talented?  She catches the eye even though she isn’t perfect.  That’s why she’s on the cover.”  It would take me another ten years of looking in the mirror before I remembered this conversation and really appreciated what my mother had said.  There is, after all, some beauty inside an interesting face.  A kind of character even when perfection isn’t there.  I enjoy being Joni Mitchell-pretty.  I’m just waiting for the artistic talent now. 

********

Who could hang a name on you?
When you change with every new day…
-- Ruby Tuesday, The Rolling Stones.

I was horribly confused—and barely into my teen years— the first time I let Ruby Tuesday wrap itself around me.  It was a beautiful song, but I wasn’t supposed to like it.  It struck me somewhere deep in my stomach like a nervous twitch, but it was already thirty-one years old.  It wasn’t new.  It had no thumping bass beat.  It was slow and sad, and it sounded like flute music peppering the background melody.  I sat in my old pink bedroom listening to bad FM radio through an old set of headphones.  It was the middle of the night and I was totally alone, and even though the music was awful it still felt rebellious to be awake and doing something besides sleeping.  I sat in the dim pool of light coming from my hideous bedside lamp and listened to music that I can’t really remember—probably a mixture of easy listening and electro-pop from the eighties.  (Stale old songs like My Girl by Chilliwack and Sunglasses At Night by Corey Hart are always lurking late at night on even the best radio stations).  Ruby Tuesday was written as a farewell to a woman.  A woman who wanted her freedom (which I could identify with).  A woman who had the freedom to come and go as she chose (which I desperately wanted).  A woman who had loved Keith Richards and then left him.  Ruby unhinged me a little bit; the self-control of my early childhood just slipped away and rebellion was all I could think about.

Don’t question why she needs to be so free,
She’ll tell you it’s the only way to be.
She just can’t be chained,
To a life where nothing’s gained.
-- Ruby Tuesday, The Rolling Stones.

                                                ********

These have probably been some of the darkest days of my father’s life as a parent.  In a span of three days I have shocked him three times.  I am eighteen and my revolution has begun—a rebellion during which I hope to prove that I can make my own decisions.  On the first of the dark days that—in my mind—mark my independence from my parents, I come home from work and tell my father I have been fired.  I can’t sort empty pop cans fast enough at the recycling depot and the owner has politely told me not to come back.  I’m not bothered by this in the least because it’s a mind-numbingly boring job, but my dad is disappointed in me.  I have always gotten good grades and,as a child, had always been praised by teachers and placed on the honor roll.  He had always been so proud of me, and now I have failed at something.  Now he is wondering if I will end up asking him for money.

On the second (and slightly darker) day, I come home from school (my first year of university) and find my father in the kitchen opening his mail.  Once again, he has not won the prize from Publisher’s Clearing House, and I take deep breaths to calm my nerves as he skims through the rest of his letters.

“Dad?” I stutter.

“Yes?” he answers without looking up.

“I have something to tell you.  I’m only telling you this because I really don’t want to hide it any more.  I want to go back to wearing tank tops at home.”  He looks up slowly, not understanding what I’m talking about.

“Okay…” he says as he meets my eyes.

“I got a tattoo.”  There!  I said it.  I wait for a reaction.  Outwardly calm and inwardly bracing for a verbal assault at top volume.  He looks at me with disbelief and then laughs.  He thinks I’m kidding.

“No.  Really.”  I say.  “I got it a few weeks ago.”  He looks stricken, as if I’ve just tried to hit him.  He doesn’t speak to me until much later that evening when he finally comes downstairs to ask what the tattoo is of.  I pull down my shirt, revealing my right shoulder, and show him a devil.

On the final, and darkest, day I come home midway through the morning and find my mother in the kitchen; alone at the breakfast table near the window.  Sunlight is illuminating her from behind and she is reading the newspaper and playing with her cereal.  She looks up at me with surprise as I come in the front door.  I usually sleep until way past noon, and it’s only ten o’clock.  I had made sure to leave the house early before she woke up.  I didn’t want her asking any questions until it was too late.

“Why are you up so early?” she asks.  “I heard you leave this morning.  Where were you off to?”

“I went out a friend to buy something,” I answer vaguely.  I am struggling to open my backpack in front of her; grappling with the slippery item inside it that’s wrapped in sheer plastic.

“Can you give me a ride downtown?” I ask suddenly.  She’s stopped eating her cereal and she’s watching me with a look of confusion.

“What for?”

“I have to go and pick up my new car!” I say with glee.  I hold a package of license plates triumphantly above my head like a prize.  “I am 8-5-7 EAM!”

“What?”  She has put down her spoon.  “But you didn’t even tell us!”

“Well, if I told you, you might have said no,” I explained.  “And I really wanted Colin’s car.  You know that.  I’ve always loved it.”

“Your father is going to be livid,” she says worriedly.  “You should probably call him at work and tell him now so that he can calm down before he comes home tonight.  If he flips his lid now, he’ll be less likely to kill you later.”

“Okay.”  I call him at his antique store and explain that I’ve purchased the old car of my dreams and that it wasn’t that expensive and that I’ve already got the plates and the insurance and it’s now in my name.  He’s quiet while I’m talking and then casually says that he’ll see me at home later.  By the time he gets home that evening, he is so angry at me that he’s actually smiling—but it’s not a nice smile.  It’s a helpless smile.  A smile that painfully splits his face because he’s too angry to yell and too late to stop me from doing what I’ve done. 

“Do you want to go out and see Theresa’s car?” My mother asks timidly.

“No,” my dad answers, grinning like an angry lunatic.  “I want her to take me for a ride in it!”  We head outside and I open his door for him, realizing that the interior of a small car is a very unsafe place to be alone with someone.  But even though he’s angry now, my father is the one that gave me a piece of advice that I still carry with me today:  It’s much easier to get forgiveness than it is to get permission.

Old man look at my life,
Twenty four and there's so much more…
Old man look at my life,
I'm a lot like you were.
-- Old Man, Neil Young.

                                                ********

As a teenage girl that didn’t entirely grow out of her tomboy phase, I alternated wildly between wanting to be pretty, and wanting to be proficient with a socket wrench.  I liked cute shoes, cosmetics and un-chipped toe-nail polish—but I also liked old muscle cars, big engines, and the intricacies of just what went on under a car’s hood.  True adolescent rebellion began around the time that I bought my first old car at the age of eighteen.  After that, I bought another and another until I had three old cars registered in my name.  I intended to gradually fix them all up, no matter the cost, and later found out that besides being a lot like my father was at that age (he had multiple Edsels—the earlier unpopular Ford equivalent to my unpopular Chrysler cars) I was a lot like one of my favourite musicians—Neil Young.  In his youth he restored and drove around in a ’54 Cadillac named Pearl, and I partially restored and drove around in a ’76 Plymouth named Blondie until I was twenty-two.  I’m happy when oil and grime taking root under my fingernails, and I still have two of those three old cars.  Some day, after I’m through with my hippie-in-a-van phase and I’ve settled down somewhere, I’ll probably finish restoring them both.

********

I might have been born in the wrong decade.  I’ve always had a soft spot for black and white movies, a love of fashion from the forties and fifties, and an epic crush on John Lennon.  I’ve been told before that I must be an old soul in a young body.  I’ve put a lot of thought into that idea, and I think that I was supposed to be born around the same time as my mother was.  If I had been born at the dawn of the fifties, I would have been eighteen during the summer of love, and twenty years old when I attended Woodstock (and I would have attended, most certainly).  I would have been only twenty-five when the Ramones burst onto the punk scene and practically invented the genre, and I would have been young enough to see the “disco era” in full swing. 

I have always been fascinated by hippies and flower children.  I used to prize my mother’s old bell-bottoms and love beads.  Her embroidered peasant shirt and ancient jeans.  While other teenagers of my generation were listening to hip-hop and wearing baggy jeans, I was listening to Vietnam protest music and wearing fake flowers in my hair.  I’ve seen Haight-Ashbury, the famous hippie district in San Francisco, twice in the last two years.  I’m amazed at how one city street became some sort of Mecca for runaways and hippies in the mid-1960s.  I always wanted to run away to California when I was a teenager, but I waited until I was in university to try it. 

                                                ********

            Made up my mind to make a new start,
Going to California with an aching in my heart.
                                    -- Going to California, Led Zeppelin

            At some point during high school I remember making a pact with my good friend Jen.  We swore to each other that one day we would head for California and live on the beaches for awhile in her van.  She got the old Dodge for free somehow—and even though it was terribly rusty and had duct tape replacing necessary things like the rearview mirror—it ran and had a double bed built out of plywood in the back of it.  The pact started out as more of an innocent daydream, but eventually we did make it to California.  All the way to Santa Cruz, in fact.  We left just as I turned 22, and I consider that trip to have been a mini vision quest.  I didn’t come back a grown-up, but I did come back possessing a van plan of my own.  Besides not having a schedule and not having any rent to pay, I think the beauty of van living can be summed up just in mentioning the ability to sleep wherever one may fall.

            One evening, after an exhausting day of slogging through Oregon in an effort to make it to the Golden State, we pulled the van over to the side of a residential road in Brookings, OR and fell into our sleeping bags without taking much notice of where we were.  During the night, an intense thunder storm rocked the van as if it were being thrown about on choppy ocean waves rather than sitting next to the water on a beach of polished stones.  The noise of rain slashing against the roof was deafening, but the knowledge that we were safe inside a rolling home made of metal was deeply satisfying.  I can still say with confidence today that I have never felt as safe or as comfortable as I did wrapped in that sleeping bag listening to the storm rage on the other side of that thin, rusting roof.  

            I experienced a lot of joy during that first van trip—enough to make me wonder why I didn’t just travel all the time.  It may sound cheesy, but I have to say that I really felt like my ideal self for the first time.  I often wonder why many people only vacation for two weeks each year.  They work their nine-to-fives, and months go by, and they complain about their jobs, and—sometimes—they only find joy for as little as a few moments a day.  I can’t do that to myself.  I’ve decided to commit to a van for awhile.  At the end of this very year I’m giving away most of my furniture and moving into a camper van.  After that, I’m going to go where I please and do what I like—meeting people and chasing adventure and blogging about it every step of the way.  I won’t be a student anymore.  I’ll be the girl in www.girlinavan.com (my domain name…for the next two years at least!).  No bills.  No rent.  No reason to stay in only one place.  I might even head back to California.  I’m going to live out some of my dreams and live on a beach just a little bit longer.

 

California I’m coming home,
Oh will you take me as I am,
Strung out on another man?
California I’m coming home.
-- California, Joni Mitchell.

                                                            ********


I met my soul mate once.  He seemed like an interesting guy—mysterious to say the least.  Lightning struck (just like in those awful fairy tales); right out of the sky and into the restaurant and down to my toes.  I’d never met anyone like him before, but I hope I will again.  He never believed me when I said he was perfect for me.  But he was.  A like mind is a rare thing to come across, and he was very much like me.  In fact, I couldn’t have assembled his blend of qualities better if I had had a machine manufacture him to my exact specifications.  So witty and well-read; so handsome and prone to redheads.  At the same time, I can also personally attest to the truth in the theory that opposite attract—physically at least.  It certainly isn’t every day you see some tattooed girl with rings in her face get crazy over a man wrapped entirely in army green.  I suppose he may be gone for awhile now, but I hope he hasn’t forgotten me.  I’m going to assume there’s more than one soul mate out there for everyone though.  The universe would be terribly cruel if the length of a meal in a restaurant or the moment it takes to pass one another on the street is all that some of us get with that “right” person.  I think I’ll just keep looking; turning into still other people along the way.

One morning I woke up and I knew…
We get along…
Go your way, I'll go mine and
Carry on.
-- Carry On, Crosby, Stills, Nash (And Young).

                                                ********

 

Lose your dreams

And you will lose your mind.

Ain’t life unkind?
-- Ruby Tuesday, The Rolling Stones.

 

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