Self-Assessment

Unfinished Statue... (Written in March of 2010)

It was one of those long days in Antananarive that became one of those nights… I was tired and I went to bed early.  The phone rang, and it was a long lost friend calling from France.  They had no idea that I was already in lala land dreaming about being home, in Spotsylvania.  After we talked, I tried to go back to sleep, but sleep evaded me.  I left my bed; I walked out on the balcony, sat in the cold misty Malagasy air with an Air France blanket wrapped around my body.  I watched the faraway lights, and thinking to myself, "There is life out there", and I wondered what they were doing and what they were thinking.  As I walked back, my reflection in the mirror on the wall knocked my soul out of its socket, and I looked at myself for the first time in forty years, really looked at myself.

I was wearing a white old lace convent-type granny nightgown.  Not only did I look dumpy, frumpy, but my grayish white mane gave me the impression that I had a mop on my head, and that is the best part of it.  I walked closer to the mirror and studied my face and started seeing "things".  A cracked bone from a childhood accident was sticking out of my left jaw.  Freckles made themselves at home all over my face since I was four years old, but I never noticed them before.  My cheekbones pointed toward the ceiling.  My eyes, oh yes, let us talk about my eyes; they always look tired and sleepy with three layers of eyelids covering them.  I am short and I am stout.  My body had been changing shape without shouting to let me be aware.  My breasts were about to touch my knees.  The listing of my imperfections is equal to a Chinese menu.  My flaws are endless.  Some of the stuff I found wrong facing “this body, my body” I am afraid to give it a name.

How would an artist paint my crooked jaw beady little eyes ripe banana freckle-face, and over-the-hill body?

If I were to be a Picasso, I could be beautiful or abstract, and interesting.

If I were to be a Rembrandt, I could be peaceful or plain or too perfect.

If I were to be a Rubens, I could be voluptuous or I could be fat, or "grassouilette" as the French would say.

I truly believe that each individual is an unfinished statue.  Each statue has to be completed in someone else's mind and eyes to become whole and beautiful regardless of how big, how ugly, how fat, how short, how skinny, how unintelligent one is.  We have to see each individual as beautiful and as intelligent, if not for us, each person is beautiful for someone else...

We are, but an unfinished statue...

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