I come from a long line of artists

who didn’t get to be artists, except

in the corners of their lives.

For some, it wasn’t even that

much. There was survival. There was

a role you had to play to put food on the table.

There were internal and external battles to keep

your own voice. To find it.

And an artist is their voice. You want to grind the artist

down out of someone, bury their voice. Or distort it.

Or make the world question that it even exists.

A voice that isn’t heard dies. A voice

that isn’t reflected, yes, in a global way,

but also in a personal way, vanishes.

And the artist that carried it, inside the

person that carried it, gets buried and never

comes back up.

And so you have all these people walking

around with an artist inside them that was once alive.

Music. Radio. Writing. Theater. Dance. Movies. Television.

Love of books, stories, comics, series, spoken art, drawn art,

written art, sewn art, preached art, built art, culinary art,

moving art, all the art.

In some way or another, my household, my family, my neighbors,

they were loving, and needing, the art that touched their lives,

the art they were reaching for, the art that made them feel alive.

I used to feel exposed. The lone artist in line of people

who did much more sensible things for work.

But then I remembered the piles of albums featured

right in the heart of the apartment,

as a kid. A pile climbing up beside the small television, and

then tumbling down next to that because there were

so many; and people were always pulling records

from the bottom, or the middle of the stack, and

leaving it standing in a wobbly, jagged twist. I

don’t remember the names of all the albums. But

I remember the images.

I remember the ways they made people feel.

The way they changed moments, and days.

I remember the guitar that was always in the house.

And the static, that burst forth from the radio.

And the cool silver knobs, plastic red needle,

and precise numbered lines, at the bottom of

the little window, that took you to a particular world

of sounds and stories.

And, of course, the three foot tall speakers, you

could set your cereal down on, or your cold ice water,

with the concentric radiating circles, plastic wires

running to the back, and spongy black netting across the front.

I remember the afternoon stories that gave the

women, in the family, and neighborhood, time to

rest, laugh, and chat; and admire the handsome

actors at the center of all the twisting, turning,

soapy, sagas that somehow went back to the

beginning of time, and felt like they would go

on until the end of it.

I remember all the books. And feeling

bigger when I opened them. Like a giant

visiting a world captured in time only for the reader.

I remember hearing singing in the living room on Saturdays.

Seeing dancing in the kitchen on Sundays.

I remember making dinner sometimes, and

ending it by making caramel crunch from scratch.

And how fun it was to layer the toffee and

peanuts on wax paper, and wait for it to form.

I remember cutting up my dresses, and sewing

little alterations in them.

And gluing wrapping paper to the outside of a book.

And then filling it with handwritten stories and

poems, on unlined pages,

where the horizontal strings of words

didn’t quite make it neatly

across from one side to the other.

And all those hours of seeing more life, and new worlds,

and different futures through the television screen.

Sitting crossed-legged in the preschool staring up

as new books, and places, and ideas filled my mind.

Art was everywhere.

And it was everything.

It was weaving in, around, and through, all the beautiful,

and difficult, and wondrous and scary, and forever parts, of life.

I remember being a Nielsen family, and wondering what

the black box, with the lights, and the large white numbers,

boxed in by grey, would really tell them about

our family, our interests, and our lives.

Art was everywhere.

And it was everything.

And even for the artists who didn’t get to be artists, they were, still.

Even when they didn’t know it.

Even when the world didn’t know it.

Art was affecting those everyday moments.

It was changing how they felt about life, and each other.

Art was everywhere.

And it was everything.

And, all this art, it was keeping something inside us alive.

~ Nika Patrice.

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