Fiction Friday: Red Gloves: An Inspiration, and A Fond Rememberance
Red Gloves hide my pain.
Red Gloves hide my shame.
Red Gloves I shed.
I choose to love myself instead.
In NYC there are stories everywhere! I was in the JP Morgan Museum and I saw lying on an empty couch a pair of red leather gloves...a poem followed.
One of the things I love most about living in Manhattan is there are stories everywhere. It made me think of the opening to the old TV show “The Naked City,” where in the opening credits, the narrator says, “There are eight million stories in the Naked City; this has been one of them.”
I was in the JP Morgan Museum on Tuesday morning last week, wandering around, when I came across an abandoned pair of red leather gloves on the couches near the bathrooms. It had been years since I had been in JP’s house and library, and it holds a special place for me since it was the last museum my beloved Grandmother Genevieve Celio and I ever visited together. Even as an energetic twenty-something, I always had difficulty keeping up with my Grandmother when we visited museums together: her pace and our shared enthusiasm for art, history, and travel kept her moving as if all her little aches and pains disappeared. From the time I was a boy, every year, I wrote her a card for her birthday, and it was always a trip to a museum of her choice. It was our special time together. But it could have just as easily been a gift she gave to me as I had the privilege of spending precious time with one of the most incredible souls I have ever encountered in this life.
It was Grandma Genevieve who gifted me my wanderlust. She traveled the world, but not with my Italian Grandfather. He was content at home, playing piano and bridge, reading the Wall Street Journal, and watching his beloved New York Yankees. So she and her group of senior ladies saw the world. When she returned from her adventures with pictures and stories of far-away lands, I was riveted, my imagination showing me the mind-movie of the pyramids of Egypt, the winding streets of Paris, the Midevel Castles of England, and the Collusiem and Forums of Rome.
Atrium of the JP Morgan Library and Museum
When we last visited the JP Morgan Museum, we saw the collection of illuminated books, Bibles with pictures, and art as beautiful and majestic as any paintings I’ve seen. But that day, I knew something was wrong with Grandma. She was content to sit in the atrium, and as we sat under a tree growing through the floor and extending up to the glass ceiling above, she said something that shook me to my soul, “I did not think I was going to ever see this museum.”
Never had I ever heard such fatalism from Grandma. I knew something was wrong. And there was. She passed away a few months later from cancer. The woman who read me stories of King Arthur told me tales of King Tut, and who taught me how to plan my backpacking trip through Europe (I stuck to her itinerary almost to the letter), was gone. Grandma’s nickname for me as a boy was Christopher Columbus because I was always on an adventure in my imagination: fighting fire-breathing dragons, flying a spaceship, or discovering a pirate’s buried treasure. She let me be me in a house where my grandfather’s rules and draconian strictness left very little for a rambunctious little boy who thought turning a couch into a trampoline was a fundamental human right. To this day, the highest compliment I can give anyone is they remind me of Grandma.
May you all have someone in your life as precious as my Grandma Genevieve.
Seeing stories in the mundane is one of my favorite things in life, and with so much to see, hear, smell, and feel in New York City, all those 8,000,000 stories (almost 9,000,000 now) come to life. When I came across these red gloves, abandoned on a couch with no one nearby, in a flash, a story hit me, but unusually enough, it came to me in a brief poem.
Red Gloves hide my pain.
Red Gloves hide my shame.
Red Gloves I shed.
I choose to love myself instead.
Now, I do not write poetry. If you have read my writing, I tend to be more verbose, although I am working on trying to be concise. And the funny thing is, I didn’t even realize the stanzas rhymed. It was a total accident, but those were the words that came to me.
In these abandoned and neatly laid red gloves, I saw the story of a woman. A beautiful, sophisticated, intelligent, and elegant woman with some deformity or badly burned hands. So she covered up her hands with her red gloves. As she went through life, trying desperately to hide her “flaw,” she lived an unhappy life.
Being the wonderful woman she was, she had many decent men approach her and court her. However, whenever someone got close to her, she pushed them away, for even though she thought the man was attractive, kind, intelligent, and respectful, she would have to reveal her hands at some point. And she had the nagging and recurring thought, “Who could possibly love me with hands like these?”
As she lived her quiet life of desperation, at some point, she realized that before she could accept love from someone else, she had to accept love from herself. She had to love herself, with her flaws, all of them, not just her hands. Then, at some point in the story, she learns self-love, and in a moment of true self-acceptance, she says, “I’m okay, and I love myself just the way I am.”
Then, filled with self-love, she slowly but elegantly took off her gloves, not in anger, sadness, or even regret, but in acceptance, calm, and grace. She left them neatly on the couch, got up, and walked away with a small, subdued, but brilliant smile of self-love.
The End.
That is the story I saw when I saw the gloves lying on that couch. Perhaps there is a short story in there. I relate to the themes in that story that flashed before me as I’ve had a “not good enough button” that has plagued me. I always strived to move on to the next bigger and better thing. From my sports and entrepreneurial ventures, I have always looked for the next trophy, the next CFO or entrepreneur award or accomplishment to make me feel good enough. It wasn’t until after I sold my company, with no more accolades to pursue, that I started writing every day.
Now, I work daily to reprogram my brain to live in process instead of results. I could always muscle a spreadsheet doing financial analysis and forecasts for twelve hours a day, but I cannot muscle a manuscript, not for a day, not for an hour. Creativity cannot be forced. It can be coerced but not forced. Believe me, I tried it. All that comes of forcing creativity and word count metrics is a wastebasket full of countless redlined words.
I could relate to the Lady with the Red Gloves deep in my psyche. I have always been a people pleaser, and the archetype I chose for myself was that of a “good boy.” After the trouble my siblings seemed to give my parents, I thought the way I could get attention was “to be good.” So I people pleased, I never got in trouble, I went to church on Sundays, I didn’t wait for something to be asked, I just did it. I cooked for myself, did my laundry, stayed out of trouble, studied, played sports, and outworked everyone to compensate for my average athletic skills. I pushed my body to a breaking point on several occasions to try to measure up to my athletically gifted father and brother, who were good at anything they did, while I struggled. Unfortunately, my plan backfired; as the one who was taking care of himself and my younger siblings, I was the one my stressed-out and financially challenged parents did not have to worry about. “Chris can take care of himself.” So, they focused on my siblings, who needed a more “hands-on” approach.
Left to my own, this gave me a fierce independent streak. I paid my way through college. I worked all the time, and at 20, I was hired as the youngest field accountant for an environmental remediation firm, where during the summers and winters, I worked 85-100 hours a week, allowing me to not only pay for college but also send money home to help out my father’s failing business. Luckily, I learned a valuable lesson about the sociopathic nature of large corporations. After they tried to get out of paying me a back-raise and a bonus, I quit, vowing, “I’m glad I learned this lesson at 22 rather than 52,” I promised myself I would never work for a corporation I didn’t own again.
I opened my first company at 23 when the freelance economy did not exist and 23-year-old CEO’s were laughed at. I got thrown out of two banks as they would not open a commercial account with my measly $400. But after many ups and downs, lots of failures and defeats, it all worked out, but that is another story for another day.
Learning self-love is a difficult journey for someone like me who has a “not-good-enough” button and relies on accomplishments to validate myself. My Buddhist contemplation practices helped me uncover these thoughts of self-doubt in the psyche. The twin practices of meditation and mindfulness around monitoring my negative self-talk helped me understand and deconstruct where all this came from. My feeling that I am not lovable unless I am accomplishing something great was an untrue story I told myself. That I am not good enough as I am, that I need to be on the podium, pushing myself harder, being more disciplined, and always finding another gear, and a little pain never hurt anyone were the constant mantras that played in my head as I strove for success.
I often tell people that writing I say is “the best form of therapy I’ve ever had.”
When writing, I must slow down my energizer bunny nature and get to know my characters and how they think, act, feel, and see the world. Their worldview is different from mine, their traumas are different from mine, and their wants and needs are different from mine. I quiet my mind and listen to them as I listen to my friends and people I love. I let my characters tell me their story, and then I try to bring them to life.
The Lady and the Red Gloves captured my imagination. In four lines, she told me who she was, what she was about, and what her journey was. For that lifetime that passed by in a few seconds, she shared her life and pain with me, and I felt it. Her pain was my pain, and my pain was her pain.
I love my mind and my imagination, it always keeps me company in a writer’s world which I find very isolating and lonely. It is so different than my CFO life of 150 emails a day, staff lining up at my door, vendors calling, and partners who were not happy unless I was overwhelmed so I could not question their decisions. My writer’s life is very different from my CFO life...and I am grateful for that.
I always say, “A bad day writing is better than a good day as a CFO.”
The imagination is a beautiful thing, and I love mine. I am fortunate to live in a city where all around me is history, art, architecture, and an incredible diversity of people, each having their own story and giving me endless inspiration.
Today, I invite you to go into the world and find animals in the clouds, a story around every corner, and see in the eyes of the stranger next to you or behind the Starbucks counter the battles every person courageously faces that we know nothing about.
Have a wonderful weekend my friends!
