Ann Ferro: Modest and humble

The daffodils are up, almost ready to burst into spring color, their yellow heads dancing against the fence, reminding me that they should have been divided twenty years ago. Yet another failing in a long, long list of stuff that places me in the less than mediocre category. Yes, yes, I know, it is not all about me, but there are so many reminders of things either left undone, or done as “good enough” they pick at my psyche.

My parents encouraged me to be excellent … at something, anything. So far, I haven’t found that something, and the road along the way is littered with examples to my insufficiencies. Take the lump of something in my yard over which I’ve cleverly arranged for sedum to grow. It was supposed to be a hypertufa planter, which, because I unmolded it too soon, became pieces of a hypertufa planter.

I’ve always wanted to speak another language. I had visions of myself fluently conversing abroad, glass of wine in my hand, so sophisticated. Four years of high school Latin left me with the ability to write about storming enemies fortifications and gave me the ability to score well on the English portion of the College Boards. I did accumulate a bit of Latin from church, but unless I find a situation where Dominus vobiscum and et cum spirito tuo is appropriate, I have nothing to say. In college, I took two years of French from Senor Placer who spoke French with a Castilian accent. My facility in Spanish is limited to the words I learned as a child living between Third and Fourth Avenue in Brooklyn. The Alban theater became Teatro Alban and the banana store became a tienda banana. I knew a lot of nouns but no verbs. And as aging continues, my adeptness in English fades with loss of memory.

My sister has just told me that she has finished reupholstering a club chair while I sit here and contemplate how to make a red washcloth into two boo-boo pillows.

Sometime earlier this week I read that a Mr. Perelman won the Millenium prize in mathematics for solving, and I had to look this one up, the Poincare conjecture. Heck I can’t even understand Wikipedia’s explanation of what it is. It apparently has nothing to do with geometry or trig, both of which I took in high school or even the Boolean algebra that I suffered through in college. And I got A’s in those math courses. I am so not excellent.

Mental health is not beyond my grasp though because, I did, while trolling the internet looking for information about the Poincare conjecture, find something that explains what I consider to be my deficiencies. Like my car, it’s Japanese. I copied out this quote, “Wabi-sabi is the quintessential Japanese aesthetic. It is a beauty of things imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete. It is a beauty of things modest and humble.” I will henceforth simply think of myself and think of all those undone and good enough projects as examples of wabi-sabi and the daffodils are as they should be.