food stains are the new tattoos

I spilled coffee (not, by any means, a new phenomenon) on my t-shirt this morning, while I was writing. Today it’s a public television shirt with big bold yellow and red logos, meant to evoke a thrift-store-esque devotion to someone else’s donation / passion / life, recycled and reused in my incarnation.

So coffee, I suppose, only enhances the illusion, right? It’s like a value-added mark of authenticity.

Last night we were noticing that the purple berries we call mulberries which drop off of the spindly tree next to the driveway and stain the soles of your shoes with their juice in the next two weeks as they ripen – had just started to fall. Lynn reminded Jaelyn that native peoples use exactly this juice to dye their garments. “They stain their clothes with these berries like we dyed our shirts yellow.”

It was a few moments later, partway into our nightly walk around our circle when Jaelyn inquired: Mommy, do the native Americans have to wash the stains off of their clothes?

Lynn explained that these colors were intentional like the bright trendy turquoise of jaelyn’s pedal pushers, but Jaelyn was fixated on the stain. How do they get those stains off?

And suddenly, I’m thinking – why are we always trying to pretend that we don’t have stains….why not treat them with a bit more honor? After all, its not like clean shirts = no eating. Not like we’re embarrassed that we eat the food that makes the stains, or drink the coffee that dripped on our shirts. The food and the drink are not secrets that we’re trying to hide as if we were, say, engaging in liposuction or bulemic purging…

And I’ve always said that I liked scars because they’re like bookmarks or hyperlinks on our bodies that assure us that our past genuinely happened to us – was not actually a dream – and that we are in a really concrete way connected to our otherwise unbelievable pasts.

And if you think about it – scars are just a more naturally occurring case of the same thing that tattoos accomplish.

Someone decides to get a tattoo in order to translate NOW into ALWAYS. They’re kind of like an F-U to mortality. Right? Because they’re only a good financial risk if they’re going to stay around for a long time. And they’re bound to stay around for a long time if you stay around. And they assert that whatever it is you’re feeling or being or loving NOW is something you’re going to feel or love or be THEN. No matter what THEN brings (eg. “I love Billy Bob” turns out to be a bad gamble more often than not). Which is admirable in a world of avatars and fleeting chimeras – someone who actually IS something so completely that they can afford to translate there is-ness to their skin so that people can actually read how is they actually are.

And lets face it – tattoos are pervasive enough now, that we all know that they are SO over.

And scars do seem like a very hip, edgy alternative, but intentional scarring seems a bit – well – inconvenient -- to me right now.

So it seems like stains are the PERFECT way to go. All the permanence and expressive value of a tattoo, sans risk and commitment.

That’s why I’m leaving my coffee stain on my shirt this morning…