Keep Coloring

And Don’t Quit Your Day Job

Last December, a familiar ancient panic arose in me. Back-to-back financial disasters drained me fiscally and emotionally. Lockdown insanity—namely psycho bridezillas—had prompted me months prior to reactively shut down my previously lucrative wedding business. Unready and unwilling yet to reopen, the only solution I could see was to get a job. On the cusp of 59 and self-employed since 2006, I knew my prospects were slim. My age and peculiar skill sets did not lend themselves well to conventional employment. Still, I futilely scoured Indeed.com, sending out endless applications into a vast canyon of non-response. 

Then one day, I spotted a City of Austin gig at Oakwood Cemetery. I love cemeteries. I especially love Oakwood Cemetery. As it happened, I had performed the wedding of the woman in charge of the place. I followed up my application with a personal email to her. She replied that the listing was incorrect, the job didn’t exist, but she knew of a docent opening at the O. Henry Museum and suggested I apply. 

This is how I found myself in what often feels like The Most Suitable Job I Have Ever Had. I still get giddy when I think about how perfect it is for me. To be clear, the job did not, and never will, solve my financial challenges. But it has gotten me to a place of delighted calm that is allowing me to slowly resume my more lucrative gigs—hosting and performing weddings and funerals. 

Most often I simply allow myself to enjoy being a docent. Sometimes I inventory why this work has proven so helpful to my mental health. One goal I had in taking the position was to train myself to stop being an angry asshole, which I had become during lockdown, eventually responding to unreasonable brides that they could go fuck themselves, that their frustration with Covid’s havoc-wreaking on their planning was not my fucking fault.

I understood that taking a position with the city meant committing to never saying Fuck You to a visitor, no matter what. I needed to retrain myself to be pleasant. I felt strongly—and, as time has proved, correctly—that the museum would be an easy place to do this because most people visiting museums are on holiday, enthusiastic about history and art, and not spoiling for a fight. On the extremely rare occasions I encounter someone who makes some racist or sexist or otherwise stupid and inappropriate comment, I simply divert them and give thanks they will be gone soon.

I also suspected—correctly—that I would meet people from around the world and that this would scratch an itch I’d had since I stopped traveling in 2020. Prior to lockdown, I was a globetrotter, my life enhanced by meeting people from all walks and cultures. During lockdown, I adopted a lot of animals, many of them very large. The menagerie, combined with dwindling funds, put the kibosh on my previous ability to take off for a week or two to London or Mexico or Maine—three places I used to visit regularly—let alone anywhere else. If I could no longer go out and see the world, I knew at the museum the world would come to me. 

I had not anticipated the plethora of other joys that this little job would bring to me. The staff is tiny and everyone is kind and funny and smart. This was not the case other times in my life when I occasionally took office work to augment my income. Always in those other jobs there would be tension, like those women in the research department of LIVESTRONG who made no secret of their disdain for me and insisted on signing inter-office memos with their credentials, unsuccessfully trying to intimidate me with the letters PhD, sneering down at me from their perches of higher education and discontent, offended by my refusal to be a well-behaved office lady. 

But it is the rhythm of the place that serves me best. Four days per week I know exactly where I will be and for how long. And I know that while I am there, barring a full-on true emergency, whatever is going on at the ranch can wait. Which is to say my job provides steady respite from my bigger responsibilities. I love the ranch. The ranch is also a source of backbreaking work both physically and emotionally. I am caretaker of animals, housekeeping department for my AirBnB units, landlady to my roommates, and responsible for every hiccup large and small.

At the museum, I am a docent. Period. I show up. I give tours. I (sometimes overzealously) engage visitors in deep conversation. At the end of my shift I return home. I do not take work with me. Occasionally I am offered extra duties, like leading outreach programs in elementary schools, which only adds to my joy, getting to spend a few hours with boisterous kids eager to pounce on history swag and learn about how folks did things in the olden, pre-screen days. 

There is something else, too. The museum was originally just a house. A house built in 1886. A much smaller version of that old whorehouse I briefly owned in Shitville, which was built in 1892, and which I loved with all my heart. You can’t spend time in old houses like that without something very cool rubbing off on you. 

Both places, the one I once lived in and now the one I work in, slow(ed) me down. Slow has always been a foreign concept to me. I am not a slow person. Even when I am sitting perfectly still during my daily meditation, my mind is often racing. But spending hours upon hours in structures erected when there was no electricity or plumbing let alone the kind of technology readily available today, convinces me it is okay to be still. 

I have been making the same joke for a very long time, about how I am searching for a time machine to take me back to the ‘80s. I know in the actual ‘80s I was a wreck, a teenage alcoholic, a furious young woman with so much work to do to unwreck myself, get sober, and learn to temper my temper. But the ‘80s I long for, the one in my nostalgic imagination, skip over those parts and present in my memory as an era of freedom, fantastic punk and new wave music, and the wonders of coming of age.

Working at the museum I’ve revised the joke. I tell people that all those years I spent wishing to return to the ‘80s, I failed to specify the 1980s. And that I wished so very hard that I landed instead in the 1880s. As it turns out, the twisted wish fulfillment has been the best part of all for me. 

Because we are not required to pretend to be busy when there are no visitors, my fellow docents and I are allowed to enjoy the quiet moments as we see fit within reason. My first few months I typically used this downtime to get out my iPad, answer emails, doom scroll, and manage my Airbnb business. Over time and courtesy of osmosis, this has shifted. For one of my co-docents, let’s call him Toro, who has been at the museum for nearly a decade, role modeled a different way of being. 

Watching him read actual books reminded me of my goal to relearn how to read books again, sustained reading having grown impossible for me courtesy of aforementioned doom scrolling and still more weird fallout from lockdown. But like a Montessori kid learning from a peer, I started following Toro’s lead. I’m still very slow at resuming what was once the greatest passion of my life, but I am getting back to books and when I am sitting on the porch where O. Henry once sat, holding a physical book in my hands, I experience a somatic peace I can get no other way. Reading is the most wonderful sort of dissociation, and anything is possible when one is dwelling in the safely contained stories in books.

Sometimes when I am on the porch, Toro is inside, playing the mid 19th century piano that O. Henry’s wife Athol once played. He will belt out tunes by Lucinda Williams, Conor Oberst, the Flaming Lips, Tom Petty, the list goes on. He plays and sings with abandon. I keep reading, stopping only when a particular song strikes a particular chord in my heart and my emotions soar. 

Other times Toro and I sit together and discuss our shared passions for music and literature. Often it feels like we are on a very long, very good road trip, and he is the perfect driving companion, as we easily fall in and out of conversation, as happy to be silent together as we are to talk. 

One day recently, I was sketching with colored pencils when we heard the front door open, the sound of new visitors, time to get to work. Usually we alternate, but this time, though he’d done the last tour, he stood up. “I got it,” he said. “You keep coloring.”

I wept then, which sounds dramatic because it was. Toro did not know that when I was very little my father shredded my coloring book in a rage, demanding I stop and go to bed. It took a lot of work in therapy to understand why this was such a horrible formative moment for me, one impossible to shake. I came to understand it had been proof to my tiny self that this scary grownup screaming at me, this man whose primary job supposedly was to protect me, was actually the greatest danger in my life. That I would never be safe in his presence. 

During lockdown, more than fifty years after I stopped coloring seemingly for good, I had a secular miracle. Tentatively at first, and then with enthusiasm, I began making visual art again. Visual art, it turns out, is one of my favorite pursuits, one I now practice almost daily.

“You keep coloring.” 

Toro’s words healed something, as if they were a magic spell at long last providing a sense of safety that had long eluded me. A most unexpected perk and a reminder that when we spend time in real life around others, genuinely being together, wonderful things can happen. The job forces me out of the solitude I am forever seeking. Joyful connection makes me less afraid of humans. 

All of these good feelings serve as emotional chiropathy. Unlike so many other people who are worn out by their work, I am refreshed by my gig. My attitude has adjusted. This in turn allows me to be more productive when I am performing the hard work of the ranch, air traffic controlling the various tasks I must tend to to keep the place rolling. Because these tasks now feel more manageable, I find myself able to slowly rebuild the business to its pre-pandemic heights, carefully reintroducing weddings and other events. 

So I have a new joke, not yet honed, that hinges on that old saying, proffered to amateurs: Don’t Quit Your Day Job. Though I’m nowhere close to being able to quit this day job—though the income is small it helps—my fear is that the ranch will get so busy again I will be forced one day to leave the museum. 

I can’t afford to do that, not emotionally. There is something so fortifying about the known expectations, the steady beat, and most especially the forged connections of both the strangers who visit that I’ll never see again, and the coworkers with whom I have a solid sense of community. 

This has brought another massive gift, a desire to perform an exercise I do not know if I can actually complete. But I’m excited to try. More on that in the next installment.

Meanwhile, I do like concluding by asking y’all questions. Have you ever taken a job that was far more satisfying than you ever could have predicted? How so? I really want to know.

NOTES:

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My next Experiment in Community is to start up a Ladies’ Club out here. Details coming soon. I’m thinking a monthly gathering full of Crone Shenanigans. If you want to stay in the loop and be part of the group, just shoot me an email and I’ll put you on the list. 

As noted, I am slowly reviving events at the ranch. Small weddings, memorial services, baby showers, graduations, birthday parties, getaway weekends, that sort of thing. Also I am adding back in very cheap writing retreats. If there’s a way time at the ranch will please you, shoot me a note and let’s figure it out. More info at TinyTRanch.com