A Gutsy Guide to Getting Your Mojo Back

Hiya Pinkies! Introducing Marcia Camino, a Pink yogi and business owner (see Pink Links for her Yoga studio’s website). As you’ll see, Marcia is also an awesome and totally engaging writer. Talk about Owning Creativity! Enjoy reading her tale of Owning Pink … we certainly did. Major thanks and Pink love to Marcia … hit it, girl!

Pinktroduction

Greetings, Pinkies.  I am so happy to be a guest blogger at Owning Pink. I have been Owning Pink for a long time; however, writing about Owning Pink is new to me. Although everyone who knows me knows that the way to my heart is to place something pink before my eyes—anything will do, really: flower, can opener, cotton candy, pen—writing about Owning Pink means, for me, rising to the challenge of creating a Pinkification History.  Here is mine: I began to Own Pink literally by owning pink.

Covered in Paint

It all started in college, when I became friends with a painting major who would often say funny-punny things to me like,  ‘I love hue.‘ And, ‘How are Hue today?’  To all her hue/you puns I would gustily reply, ‘You Hue, too!’ Or the elongated version, ‘Youuuuu Huuuuuue!’ as though I were calling out to her across the colorific setting-sun landscape to get her attention, to draw her home like a girly verbal dinner bell, to let her know, as though we were light-bedazzled cowgirls reining in the horses to the barn before nightfall, that I had indeed caught her punny-ness, that I had indeed witnessed her lighting it up on the color plain, that I’d heard her, and understood her.  I was an English major, after all.  I understood, if nothing else, words.

My friend was light and color: fuchsia lipstick and melon skirt, lime green walls and flame red pillows. I was bookwormish bland:  white paper, black ink, and classic novel book covers of hunter green, burgundy, and brown.

I have a photo of my friend from those days.  She is in the painting studio on campus late at night contemplating one of her works on an easel.  Her oversized painter’s shirt, jeans, the floor, her workspace, and even her hands, forearms and face are dotted, splattered, smeared with paints of many colors.

What a mess, I used to think when I’d see her like this.

I see now, though, that she was a portal for my eventual crossing, to Owning Pink. My friend ate, drank, created, thought, felt, expressed, explored, and dipped herself in the world of color.  She owned color, more than anyone I’ve ever known.  She owned all color.

Me? I own one color. I own pink.  That’s all I need.  Here’s how it came to be.

That’s It?  Only Two Dollars?

It was at a porch sale five years after having seen my friend for the last time when IT took hold, my first dip into Pinkdom.  Of all the unglamorous, unspiritual, unassuming, unartistic, and unsophisticated places for an initiation into Owning Pink to occur.  But, just like how a person need not climb the rugged snow-capped mountains to find a guru to guide one to inner realms of peace, one does not need to begin Owning Pink by being immersed in a completely pink, powerful, oceanic bath of transformation.  Some things come to us in small measure; that does not mean the impact is small.

The porch sale I went to that particular day offered the usual suspects of goods: boxes and tabletops filled with kitchen gadgets, dusty candles, glassware, garden tools, unfashionable scarves, toys, and sewing things. Stacks of clothing.  Shoes on a rack. Garage junk. Books.

Books were the reason I went to so many porch/yard/garage sales in those days.  As a bookworm, actually, books were the reason I did most things.

Interestingly, this particular porch sale was potential Book Heaven because one entire corner of the porch was dedicated to them: box after box of books on the floor, and one short wooden bookcase holding small books, probably poetry collections.  I was thrilled.  I loved poetry.

Gazing at the book corner from across the porch, though, I noticed it housed more than books.  In the bookcase were more than just a few misfit items:  antique glass vases, plastic and silk flowers, a pair of tall wooden salt and pepper shakers, macramé art, and something that until I got up close looked like a large, pink and gray box with short, pink legs.

It was, in a word, a pink box.  It was a radio.  A pink plastic Zenith AM clock radio, model Z519-V.

I took a long look at it.  This radio was an antique (circa 1956, I would later learn) and had a masking tape price tag on top with squiggly writing in blue ink: “Works.  $2.00”.

I asked myself that shopper’s primordial, rhetorical, pre-purchase question: “That’s IT? Only two dollars?”

That’s Not Salmon, Silly

What was I doing pondering the purchase of a pink radio? My inner dialogue took off:

Q: Did someone in my life as a child own one like this?

A: Your memory is too bad to ever know that!

Q: Is it just because it works that I am compelled?

A: You own plenty of broken AND unbroken things and have a preference for neither.

Q: It is because I found it near my comfort zone of books that I think so highly of it?

A: If that were the case, why didn’t you buy the shakers?

I was, in a word, dazed. I looked into the boxes of books but not AT any books in particular. I counted the books on the shelves: at least forty.  Poetry for sure.  Poetry books are hard to come by.  I spied a few thick, hardback books. Long novels.  Michener books are hard to get rid of. I held the radio for awhile.  I loved its boring, brown plug and old-yellowed manufacturer’s label on its underside.

Then the decision came in the form of my turning my back to the book corner. I remember almost shaking as I crossed back over the porch and handed my two dollars to the lady running the sale, wondering why in the world this was happening.  ‘The year is 1990!  Will I even listen to this old thing?’  But I’d bought it.  Book money funds gone toward superfluity.  ‘That’s it,’ I thought.  ‘I’ve crossed over.’

In a classic Owning Pink short story, “The Awakening” by Kate Chopin (total Pinkie), we follow the life of Edna, an independent-minded woman.  She is awash in memory at story’s end, her own passage out, by recalling an obvious summer scene from childhood.  The piece’s final words are our final record of Edna’s world, perceptions, life:  “…the odor of pinks filled the air.”

As I left the porch sale, two Owning Pink phenomena went through my mind like four hands on a piano playing two songs that were supposed to add up to a duet.  One song was about my present situation:  ‘Where will I put this thing? And why is it so beautiful to me?’ Over and over I asked questions, a strange, ever-changing mantra of inquiry.

The other Owning Pink piece running up and down the keyboard of my mind was a sudden remembrance of my friend.  I wondered what color she would call my radio. When this question came to me, it settled in my stomach, and it hurt, and it made me miss her.  ‘Probably Princess Pink.  She’d probably call it Princess Pink,’  was my answer to myself.  I felt sad.  She would have loved my new radio.  She would have said something like, “Tuning in, You Hue. You picked a good station.”

A memory came to me then, as I walked home hugging my radio.

It was seven years ago.  She and I were sunbathing at the local quarry. I was reading, of course, and she was gazing, of course, far out to the center of the water, where people were swimming and windsurfing.  She was sketching. People were walking around on the beach, and one woman in particular caught my ear (she was singing) and then my eye.  She was weaving along in one hand with a sleepy, young child and in the other a large, solid-colored towel trailing through the sand.  “Look at that salmon-colored towel, You Hue,” I turned to my friend and said.

She looked up almost frantically, like some great Victorian crime inspector suddenly being alerted to a piece of clinching evidence worthy of a magnifying glass. She lifted her sunglasses and held them at her forehead, quickly spied the scene, lowered her glasses, and re-focused back out to the windsurfing calm.

“That’s not salmon, silly. That’s persimmon.” She went back to sketching the distance.

I smiled and went back to reading.

Owning Pink

Nineteen years following my radio purchase, I am happy to say I am the proud, pinkified owner of a modest, practical collection of various shades of pink (including both salmon and persimmon) plastic, ceramic, cloth, metal, and glass kitchen items—including kitchen furniture—circa 1930-1960. What I love most about this collection (besides the obvious Pinkdom it creates!) is that the pieces hail almost exclusively from porch/yard/garage sales, friends, family, and flea markets.  Of course, the crowning piece is my WORKING Zenith radio.

It did not take long for the joy of Shopping for Pink to replace my habit of Shopping for Books. I still love books; please don’t get me wrong. But now I mainly borrow them from libraries.

Mainly, like a book, a color tells a story. Part of Owning Pink means, for me, owning the story behind the pink.  And my radio, and the love for my friend who guided me to Pinkification, just by her presence in my life, is the beginning of my story, the threshold of my poem, the light of my being.