Art with a Story
Dear soon-to-be owner of my 1964 Ford Jeep, colored purple with a black chalk-board hood. I have owned this car since the day I turned 17 with my brand new drivers’ license back in 2009. You may not be interested in my history with this jeep, but I felt obligated to tell you at least the name for my sweet darling of a car. Normally, a female car owner wants to name their car Butch or some other mainly masculine name, but not everyone is the same. This once-red sparkle-embedded jeep was painted a smooth shade of purple, and I named her Gypsy. In truth, the jeep has never been owned by me on paper, but my dad and I agree this was my car. After this unofficial exchange of ownership, the paint color needed to be changed. Fresh start always means a fresh coat of paint.
In case you do not know the history of gypsies, they were a people who migrated from India to Europe but no one seems to remember their real history. Today they are known mainly as travelers whose lives are simple. They were accused of witchcraft, black magic, and a slew of diseases across the lands they traveled. Not a pleasant, life if you ask me. So why name a car after this type of person, you ask? Well, here’s the reason.
Owning a stick shift car is odd, and I tend to be an odd person. Gypsies are misunderstood and treated wrong. This was me in high school: misunderstood and treated in unfair and sometimes unnatural ways. Without going into details about my being the school outcast leader, I can proudly say I was unique. I understood ways into the life of others that many people forget to notice and refuse to understand. Over the years I have truly grasped the idea and famous admonition of Edwin Rolfe, “Don’t judge a book by its cover.”
Now, dear new owner of my beat up 1964 Ford jeep, treat her well for she will become a symbol in your life that you have not yet had the chance to understand.
Just a touch of color in a world where the dead appear in every direction you turn. Even with the fear that dares me to turn and run from this place, a place of long forgotten death and of death that has just started to decompose, I could not help but stop. Funny idea about me is I am not afraid to die, but I am afraid to stand where death can talk. The silence is what is talking to me now. I cannot tell you what is always telling me to leave such a place but just a moment such as this picture is what pushes me to return.
The more I walk with him (the boyfriend) through this place, the more I can appreciate the peace these people feel once their heart stops and their eyes close. Not everyone is as lucky as I where I have a family to go home to with or a dog that jumps all over me when I come return from a school semester. Some people find their peace only once they are placed here, here with their name trimmed into a stone face and their body cushioned in a wooden coffin. Most people are afraid to die, and the more I sit among the people who are dead and buried around me I create lives for them all. Some are rich corporate leaders who felt stress going into work every day but who had loving families – only most families come with their own forms of stress. A woman I found her buried lived a good long time and died in 2011. To her I gave a couple of bratty children, a dog, and the ‘American Dream’ – but I gave her an abusive husband.
Think about this when you see homeless people on the street. They may have had the demanding life that most people are able to suffer through or they were soldiers or in other cases someone who went down the wrong path after high school. Once these people’s lives are on the street, they become forgotten – they are already a form of dead. After hard, long, unforgiving live,; these people find peace once they die.
Don’t judge a book by its cover for once our hearts stop and our eyes close forever we are all nothing but dead stiff bodies decomposing in the ground. In truth in the end we are all the same. A personality no longer exists, looks deteriorate minute by minute, our way of living no longer matters – to the one dead – and if our religion permits it, we get to start a new life again.
