Member-only story
Why You Should Have Glitter Boots
Listen to the podcast version of this at You’re Already Ready or on any podcatcher feed.
When I was a young woman, I loved the wearing purple poem. You probably know the one. In the nineties, it was everywhere — there was a collection of stories made into a book we couldn’t keep on the bookstore shelves. There were posters. The Red Hat Society came about because of it. It was the Mary Englebreit of aging gracefully or, really, with joy.
In case you don’t know it, here it is.
I’ve been wearing purple, metaphorically, all my life, but sometimes it was hidden. I made sure that I could see those bright flashes of myself, but I didn’t trust very many others to understand.
During the time of hiding my purple, I dated a man for a while who lived on the other side of a tunnel from me.
On my side of the tunnel was a whole world in all its many flavors. Where I lived, there were taco trucks and cars with bumpers secured with bungee cords and punks who squatted with other punks who loved metal-bluegrass and families with young children who painted with chalk that left the sidewalks and brought their flowers and rainbows onto the streets themselves.
On my side of the tunnel were people shouting and rejoicing out open windows. I could hear three different kinds of music in my backyard, strains of mariachi mingling with soul mixed with a touch of opera. People drove Jaguars and fixies and scrapers and longboards and shopping carts and Ford Pintos.
On his side of the tunnel were gates. Gated communities, he said, were safe. The walls were all gray (except he called them eggshell and pewter and smoke).
If safety felt like the color gray, I wanted red and yellow and orange and blue and the muddy mix they make when it rains.
I broke up with him because of that tunnel, because of the way I lost myself when I went through it. He wanted to put me behind a gate, to keep me safe.
But I wanted to leap. To stretch my arms for things out of my reach. Even if I couldn’t pull what I wanted off the shelf, I wanted the item I desired to tremble as my fingertips brushed it-I’d get there one day. I’d pull it down eventually.
