3. mary
I want to tell you about Mary. Well, I want to tell you about all the beautiful souls I have uncovered in my life but I’ll start with Mary. Peeling back the layers of another person is my favorite passtime. The strangers, acquaintances, friends and family members I’ve met in this lifetime are the wonders of my world. They fill my mind with such curiosity and possibility. For me, life starts out as a bed of soil to plant your seeds and with every person I meet I dig a little deeper. And I keep digging until I reveal the root of who they are and the root of all things.
So, Mary. I met her at my cousin’s birthday party. My cousin rented out a pottery studio and invited her 20 closest friends. Mary was one of the two workers at the studio that evening. It was her and the shop’s owner, catering to 20 of us. I arrived early with my cousin to set up and was immediately greeted by Mary. Mary was the type of person who doesn’t just welcome you into a place, she greets you at the door. A wide-eyed smile could be seen from the look of her eyes that sat just above her mask. As soon as she greeted us it was as if we were guests in her own home. As anyone who hosts groups of people in their home could relate to, there was an air of nervousness to her. She wanted everything to be perfect for her guests. She wanted to think the things we were going to think before we could think of them so that everything we could possibly need was presented to us before we even knew we needed it.
She cared deeply about her job. She didn’t just want to guide us through pottery. She wanted to create an atmosphere where creativity of any kind could flourish. She wanted the pottery studio to be a safe space for artists, frustrated artists and artists who would never call themselves an artist, to make art. Every creative person knows that creativity is not bound to a few, but that we are all artists. Some of us just haven’t let our art come through yet.
Mary was helping us set up. We had a ton of food and drinks and only gave ourselves 15 minutes to get it ready before other guests would start to arrive. It was an all hands on deck situation and you could tell Mary lived for this type of shit. As do I. Give me a to do list and a time crunch and I hurl myself into beast mode. Mary and I exchanged a few words, a few glances but things were happening fast. We were all a little frantic at first. But once we got settled in Mary took one good look at me and said “I feel like I know you. Have we met before? You look Greek. Are you Greek? I’m Greek. Maybe we met at a Greek thing” All in one fell swoop because Mary talked fast like that. I didn’t know which question to address first so I said, “I’m Italian but I’ve been told I look Greek. When I was in Greece all the locals said I was of Greek decent.”
A bit of chaos interrupted us and we were separated again. But throughout the evening you could feel a tie between us, some sort of connection. I’d hear her give instructions to another set of guests and my eyes would be drawn to her. I’d hear the sound of her voice, the inflections she made with certain words and I too would get the sense we’ve met before. I asked her if she did any random hobbies or side gigs. I explained how I work in advertising so if she’s auditioned to be a background character in a commercial, VO artist, illustrator, etc we may have crossed paths. She said she’s never done any of that but that her daughter works for a TV station. We went on like this, boomeranging back and forth from trying to figure out how we may know eachother and participating in the pottery night. We kept catching each other's eyes, both of us trying to pinpoint how we knew each other. We’d shout ideas to each other across the room as they came to us - “You ever come to Long Island?” “Does your daughter work with ad agencies?” “Do you have any Greek friends” “Did you ever work at American Express? Maybe you know my parents!”
The night went on and we still couldn’t place it. But we could feel it. I knew her energy. I could sense who she was. I could feel that helping people was core to what made Mary happy so I enlisted her to help me every chance I got. I asked for her help when picking a pottery piece, when deciding on paint colors, when choosing a paintbrush. I even asked her if she thought I could pull off the design I’d imagined in under an hour and a half. Her reassuring answer helped my confidence. Mind you 16 out of the other 19 guests all chose one, maybe two colors, to paint their pottery a solid color. No design, no nothing. This made me the most exciting person in the room for Mary to help. I was one of the few people in attendance with a vision for my pottery and so it was easy for her to grasp onto me, and I onto her.
I painted my milk saucer black and white checkered print (not easy to draw by hand and also very time consuming) with a light blue interior. My ambition was to splatter the light blue paint over the black and white checker print as the final touch. But I knew I had to work my ass off if I was going to have enough time to do that. I was stressing the whole time I was painting. My other cousins kept trying to engage with me in conversation and I had to politely tell them to talk to someone else as they were distracting me from my work. Time passed and eventually we started our descent into the evening’s end, with 7 minutes left I knew I had to enlist Mary’s help once again. I needed her on my side for multiple reasons, 1) she worked there so if she was involved with helping me do my splatter, the studio would have to let us go over time 2) I was kind of nervous to do the splatter myself and really wanted someone I could pawn the task off to so that I’d never have to feel personally guilty for fucking up the splatter and 3) which was most important - Mary was a professional. This was her workplace, her profession, what she gets paid to do. I knew she’d done splatter before and could do it again and 4) I knew she’d love to help me do it. So we got the light blue paint, we set ourselves up over the sink in the studio and we did it together. She would throw some paint on there and then I would throw some paint on there. We laughed when we messed it up and we laughed when it looked awesome. I got to stand behind her and cheer her on, giving her confidence to have fun and not take it too seriously, it was afterall just paint splatter on a milk saucer - and she did the same for me. In the end, it didn’t matter to either of us if it came out good or not because doing it together was all the enjoyment we needed from the experience. But it is an added bonus that it also looks good.
Mary was such a warm and sweet soul. I told her if we couldn’t place it in this lifetime that must mean we knew each other in a previous lifetime. I joked, like I do with most people who are older than me, that in a previous lifetime I was probably her mother and she was my daughter. The lessons she inadvertently taught me that evening were the same lessons I taught her in a pervious life. She smiled and contemplated whether or not that could be true.