9:01pm
(Typing with a couple of fingers with splits at the tips,
near the nails. Every strike of a key is a pain, but I’ve lived with this for
years. Made my living as a ten-key operator for a bank most of the way through
college, fingers often covered with tape wrapped around bandaids holding in
neo-sporin to try to soften and close the cracks. Still works, too, until they
dry out and crack open again. So anyway…)
I come from an era when men started growing their hair
long, to establish a break from their parents, the generation they represented,
the culture they’d created, the war they supported. I still wear my hair past
my shoulders, although what started as a political statement is now an artistic
comb-over. But my younger relatives have only ever seen me like this. I’ve been
told I can’t cut it off, that I wouldn’t be me. It was intended, decades ago,
as a statement, and now it’s apparently my signature. Well, that and my loud
mouth.
The most recent generation still plays with its hair, shaving
it in unusual patterns, asymmetrically, piling it on top of men’s heads, dying
it in shades Nature never created. My generation barely notices. Certainly
doesn’t get the rise our hair styles got out of our parents.
What to do, what to do, to make that break of disdain?
Why, tattoos and piercing, of course.
No, this isn’t going to be a screed of disdain. I have
seen some lovely tattoos, in some lovely places. I have seen high art in a
realistic and correctly placed heart on a pre-med surgeon hopeful, and a disaster
of 8s, Hs, and swastikas on a prison lifer. A friend who doctored at a
university and a local prison at the same time threatened to do a treatise on their comparative
arts of tattoos.
As for piercings, I don’t understand ones through the
tongue, but maybe that’s ‘cause I’m such a talker. And the ones through the
eyebrows give me the heebie-jeebies. Don’t know why. Just do.
But these are permanent, at least the tattoos are. And
they are often installed early, on what appear to my eyes to be children,
although they’re probably well into their twenties. And installed profusely. I
often warn them they’ll run out of space before they run out of the life they’re
trying to memorialize.
But their colors are distinct, unique and permanent, and
as they have kids, these become their signatures. Grandpa’s arm of coy scales,
or back portraying an Iron Maiden cover (I’ve seen both.) Of course there’s Memaw’s
tramp stamp, or the rainbow of feathers that starts at her neck and goes down
her bosom to…well, I’ll leave that to your imagination. But these are just
Gramma and Grampa, colors and all, climbed on by their kids, then attending
those high school graduations, weddings, and another round of births, as the colors
fade, and slide, but always are the signatures of those elders.
What, I wonder, will become of these signatures? Will
they simply disappear into the final box, hidden by a good suit or a dress
appropriate to a grandma? Will they just be memories?
Or will those colors, those designs be memorialized? Should
there be a full-body photo service, to record the artistic efforts or foolish
decisions of a lifetime? Regardless, by the time they are old and pass away,
these folks are just folks, and their colors are just…their colors. Full-body
photos would seem clinical. Individual photos of individual tattoos will seem
disconnected from their context.
Or might we start to allow their removal, if so
authorized in their host’s will, as an inheritance to a loved one or family member?
We allow donation of organs, even while alive, and certainly after death. If
permitted by the Last Will and Testament, why not the tattoos? A whole new
industry, a new service from your local mortuary, including mounting and
framing. Maybe contoured to match the body as it was when the tatt was first
inked, before age and experience had wrinkled and sagged it into another shape.
Why not? A little something for each of the kids to
remember Mom by. Of course there would be arguments at the hotel down the road
from the hospital, where she lay fading away, as the siblings argued over their
favorite tatts. They may be all she has to leave them. Those and their memories
of her. So why not?
I’ve still got the two foot-long pony-tails I’ve had cut off
over the years, once for employment, once for a girl. I’m going to leave them
to someone. I haven’t got any ink to leave behind but the ink you’re reading by
me.
But if I did, I’d be fine with offering to leave a tatt
behind to a relative that said they’d like a memento of me.
Why not?
9:50pm
9:55pm
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