My Uncle's Shoes

Colored Dots

Tom Froehlich

I once read somewhere about how life is a lot like the illustrations in a comic book.  When you look at a page from reading distance you see Superman leaping tall buildings in a single bound and Batman’s fist connecting with the Jokers jaw and a bubble that says KAPOW!!!. But when you look really, really close all you see are hundreds of tiny little colored dots. It’s only when you hold the comic book further away and the dots almost magically connect that you see the actual picture. The picture that tells us the entire story.  When I think of life like that, it somehow seems to make more sense. 

It’s as if all of life’s experiences, good and bad, are just a colored dot.  Granted, I prefer the happy, joyous, magical dots, but when the tough lesson-filled dots come along I do my best to learn and understand. It’s as if my higher power is saying, “Dammit, you’re not listening again and now I’m going to have to do something really shitty to get your attention cause it’s time to move forward and being nice about it just ain’t workin'!” Yes, my higher power and I share a vulgar vocabulary. It’s just the way we roll.

One day I applied that philosophy to my life and how I ended up in Venice, California. It wasn’t so much about how I drove here or what brought me to making that decision, but more about the seemingly unrelated major events in my life that lead me here.  These are the tiny colored dots that mapped my journey to sunny California.

Twenty years ago I fell in love for the one and only time in my life. I will always remember a night in early November when we had first started dating. We went back to my apartment after seeing a movie.  Simultaneously we looked out the living room window and saw the first snowflakes of the season floating by. They were those big heavy flakes that seem to get caught up in a current and retrace their path, swirling in slow motion just like in the movies.  Burrowing his hands deeper into the pockets of his black leather jacket, he looked me and said, “Honey, would you do something with me and promise not to laugh.”  He looked so brave and vulnerable and if I hadn’t already been in love with him, it would have happened right then and there.

“Sure, whatever you want,” I responded.

Hesitantly he whispered, as if saying it quietly made it not such a great risk, “Would you go for a walk in the snow with me and hold my hand?”

I froze for an imperceptible moment and then left the room because I felt the beginnings of unexpected tears pooling from this unexpected invitation.  When I walked back in he asked, “What? Did I say something wrong? We don’t have to if you don’t want to.”

“No. It’s just I have been waiting my whole life for a guy to ask me that question.” Yes, I know it’s a bit Deborah Kerr and Burt Lancaster in, “From Here To Eternity”, but that’s how it panned out.

I slipped my hand into his and we stepped out onto the sidewalk marking our path in the new fallen snow just as a single tear marked its path on Jason’s cheek, blending with the flakes that had fallen from his golden lashes.

Nauseating, right?  I know, but that’s who we were.  And it was amazing. And it was magic. It was a real life Fairy Tale and yes, the pun was intentional. But to quote, “A Tale of Two Cities”, “they were the best of times, they were the worst of times.” Jason had a problem with his temper and I seemed to be a natural at setting it off.  Like the time he slapped me because I refused to get into the car with him when he wanted to drive drunk. Unreasonable things like that. The end.

There didn’t seem to be enough beer in Milwaukee, the home for the German beer barons, to fill the void inside of me.  I spent the next year getting drunk and sharing my woes with anyone who would listen or who were at least within earshot.

My friends began threatening to deafen themselves with ice picks if the retelling of this romantic tragedy alone didn’t result in them bleeding from their ears. The story was getting old and beginning to bore even me.  So in an effort to heal my heart and save the sanity of my friends I enrolled in pottery classes at the university.  Anyone who knows me would never say I am not obsessive. I threw myself into throwing pots like a mad man.  And I was good at it. Eighteen months later my instructor and now friend, Geralyn, asked me to open up a pottery studio with her, which we did. Murray Hill Pottery Works, became the largest for profit pottery studio in the Midwest and possibly the country.  This wasn’t so much by the virtue of our talents and business acumen, but due to the fact that 95% of the pottery studios in the country were non-profit and received funding because it was very difficult to actually make a profit in that arena.  Hence we were one of the few for profit studios period.

We were the true definition of non-profit and if anyone wanted to take a look at our books they would see just how true that was. Evidence of our lack of business savvy can still be found in Geralyn’s attic.  It is a brown envelope containing receipts from a variety of purchases for the studio, sealed shut and rubber banded, labeled “Petty Cash Problem”. We were never able to wrap our brains around how to write a check to reimburse the studio for purchases when it was the studios money from the studios account we were reimbursing it with. Hence the envelope, the rubber band and Geralyn’s attic.  But it was a great experience. We held classes and art shows and had a small gallery. The studio became an east side social hub.

That was how I met Deb. She was one of my students. She didn’t have a lot of talent, but that didn’t really matter as she was more there for the sociability. Her dream was to open an English garden shop, with imported tools and sculpture and garden antiques and a library where people could come and sit on overstuffed, faded sofas smelling of dust mites and read about gardening.  And then she inherited ten million dollars. Yes, you heard me right. Ten million smackers.  To her it looked like, as it would to many, enough to open that garden shop.  Deb had been to my house and admired my taste.  She respected my knowledge of pottery and needed a buyer. She asked me if I would go to England to do some shopping. These are the kind of invitations in life you just say “Yes,” to. I had a budget of a cool million. I know. Crazy? Right? So off we went to the land of fish and chips and Wellington garden boots.

I bought British garden sheds in soft butterfly colors of dusty blue and pale yellow and abstract soapstone sculptures from Indonesia. I bought lacquered antique Chinese garden stools and baroque Italian urns made in terra cotta standing six feet tall.  I bought anything and everything that was beautiful and whimsical and magical and at times even practical.  I helped her create what came to be known as the finest garden shop in the Midwest.  People traveled from Chicago one hundred fifty miles away just to shop at The Garden Room.

The store opened in the fall and in December we flew to Los Angeles for the annual Home & Garden Show.

.  We stayed at a craftsman bed and breakfast on the beach that had been the summerhouse of, Abbot Kinney, the founder of Venice, California. Standing on the porch I watched as the menagerie of people that make Venice Beach, Venice Beach, walk, bike and skate past.  A man with a crew cut, wearing cut off denim shorts and an orange bikini top bearing the weight of a couple of ample and generous breast implants roller bladed by and I thought, “This is a place you can be whoever you want to be and no one gives a damn. This is a place to reinvent yourself.”  On the way home from dinner that evening we walked past cottages sparkling with Italian lights reflected in the water of the canals Venice is known for. They may have cost $8.99 at Home Depot, but it was magic to me.  I think you find magic whenever you look for it and I am usually looking. Two years later I sold everything I owned, bought a Saab convertible and drove west.

So you see, if twenty years ago I had never fallen in love with Jason and been heart broken I would never have taken pottery classes and opened a pottery studio and met Deb and opened a garden shop with her that took me on a business trip to Venice California.  I’m not saying that I’m happy about having been heart broken, but I am happy about being here and I don’t know that it would have happened with out the heartbreak.  Besides, the falling in love part was pretty great. All of those events and people and experiences are the little colored dots that make up my life and if I remember to take a step back it all seems to make a bit more sense.

Certainly there are those who simply believe that crappy things just happen in life and we have to deal with them. Let them believe that. I prefer to think they happen to push us forward so we can make our dreams come true. Let the cynics think what they will. I don’t have time for that. I’m busy stepping back connecting the dots.