Creativity Has a Price

and the people who love you are sometimes the ones to pay it

A Renaissance Life looks at all the ways we re-create ourselves. Again and again.

I am currently reviewing old writing, jounals, photos and letters, swimming in a vast sea of something that feels like love and appreciation and tenderness for our precious selves at younger, more innocent, more vulnerable stages of life. Now, what if we bestowed that benevolence to ourselves now - today - at this stage?

It is also clear this thing called living and growing begins right out of the gate and never ever ends. Or is never meant to end. We are creative beings. We were given an imagination for this very reason. It is, for me, my greatest gift and when it lights up like fireworks in me, nothing can stop me. It is a karmic visitation by Aprhodite, with Eros swooping in behind with the energy. Ignore it at my peril.

The world needs our creativity, our imagination. But there is often a price to be paid. Something is left behind, something is left undone, someone is ignored, something is sold or bartered or left to shrivel in the combustion of the creative fire. This must be accepted because creativity calls us to a higher place, our higher Self, might I even say a cloud closer to God or the gods? It is demanding and jealous and relentless. It requires devotion. And sometimes cash.

I wrote this little story about 25 years ago, when I was just seriously beginning to write because I was kind of lost and writing made me feel like I was at least looking for a path, which made me feel less lost.

I hope you enjoy it. It’s about that feeling when you simply must create. And nothing and no one is going to stand in your way! Remember those times? This takes place in 1965.

André Courrèges, photo by Pierre Boulat, 1965.

I am only twelve. I have just gotten my period and that seems really creepy, and I seem to weep a lot. One rainy weekend in our cramped little 800- square-foot brick ranch house filled to the busting with two parents and four children and always a dog, I retreat to the basement to sew.

My family has just relocated to Spencer, Iowa for the beginning of the school year. I am in seventh grade, a painfully difficult time to move, sprouting acne and underarm hair. It’s a town of 10,000 people, but a lot bigger than Winterset, at 2000 people, where we lived for two years and a time for which I claim complete amnesia except for the death of President Kennedy during my fifth grade gym class. And, before that, until I was almost 10, I lived on the small family farm outside Zearing, Iowa, a town populated with only five hundred people. I am a country girl.

I don’t know many kids at school yet. It is so big and so unruly. Is anyone in charge, I wonder? After all the years of staying in one classroom, now I have to walk from class to class, exposed in the hallways, and no one notices me or says hello the first few weeks. There is a girl who has really nice clothes and her name is Sue Barton. I think she is rich (well, in my world) and she is a little edgy, like she walks with a lot of confidence. I can’t tell if she’s popular. She just has really cute clothes.

I want one of her outfits, but I don’t know where she has gotten in or how much it costs. And I can’t ask her. I can’t even talk to her. It’s a white wool jumper, A-line shape and short. Mini skirts are new. The neckline is a deep “U” that plunged almost to the waist in the front and back with narrow straps trimmed in navy blue. She wore it with a navy and white striped wool short sleeved sweater. It is definitely “new” and I must have it. But the idea of buying it is impossible.

So, on a Saturday morning, happy to be released for the weekend from the anguish of a new school for two days, I go with my mom to the best fabric store in town, Winslow’s Department Store, looking for white wool. There it is - creamy white wool flannel. It is perfect. I find a navy blue wool binding for the edge, a pattern that is simply close enough, add some lining for the jumper and she makes the purchase. I head home on this rainy morning with my bag full of fabric and notions, excited to get to work, to escape into my own imagination.

The pattern I have found will do, but not what I really want so I begin my work by remaking the pattern. I am just learning to manipulate patterns to create what I see in my head. I love making beautiful things. It cocoons me from a harsher world. My mother has to remind me to come to the table and do my chores and go to bed I am so lost in the act of creating.

 By Saturday afternoon I have cut out the jumper and I sew the main pieces together. On Sunday morning, I am ready for the navy binding that goes around the big neckline and arm openings, the final step in the construction before the hem. I am stitching it in place when the heavens open with a thundering roar and crack. Lighting strikes and the electricity is out. I sit at the machine, with my knee pressed hard against a worthless control and the basement now dark like a cell. Nature’s illogical timing stuns me. I am in the act of creation!

 I feel my way in the dark around the ping-pong table that is also my cutting table. I climb the stairs to see what is going on. Can’t someone do something!? My frustration is painful and nothing that anyone can say is helpful. Okay. I’ll just have to find my own way. Tenacity strikes like the lightening! I will sew with candlelight and turn the wheel of the machine by hand. Stitch by stitch I will sew the binding. I have to wear this on Monday!

 On Monday morning I put on the jumper with a pair of white leather go-go boots, the kind that the dancers wore on Hullabaloo – and strutted confidently down the hallways that day, claiming my piece of the seventh grade turf.

But, the boots? To get those white leather go-go boots I had to throw a small tantrum in front of Brown’s Shoe store on Grand Avenue at 7:00 in the evening on a Thursday night when the stores stayed open late. There they were in the window, and Sue Barton already had a pair. I could be the second in the class to own them if only my parents would cough up the cash!

They were probably $30, an outrageous amount in 1965 for our family, my father with a tender new job, trying to feed a family of six. At twelve, I had just started babysitting for 50 cents an hour for four brats who lived behind us, and I didn’t have much of my own money yet.

But this was not negotiable. I had to have these boots. And the only power I had at that time was to make a scene, not unlike a two-year-old, powerless in the world altogether except to torment a parent until they give in from utter exhaustion. Apparently that is what I did because I got the boots. Full memory fails me to protect me from the shame of it, I’m sure. My younger sister has never let me live it down.

But I also have never forgotten the sacrifice my parents made for me that night. There was something concrete that was forfeited by my mother or my father or a sibling so that I could have those go-go boots. They relinquished something of value so I could express myself. I knew then that creativity had its price.