Caution Tape

Thinking about how things land where they do

Years ago, my friend MB was invited to a costume dance but had no idea what to wear. A few days before the event, he got inspiration from a construction zone in his Manhattan neighborhood. Late one night, he crept out onto the street and tore down a big length of “Caution” tape along the sidewalk, his heart beating like mad as he raced back into his building, terrified he would be caught (he had no idea where one bought Caution tape or he would have). The next day he went to a thrift store and found a short pink dress and a blonde wig. Before the dance, he put on the wig, applied lipstick with a trowel, arranged the Caution tape over his dress like a Miss America sash, and voila: Streetwalker Barbie!

I’d love to be that inspired by the detritus of Caution tape outside my apartment building over the past two weeks. The city is completing “emergency repairs” (the notice taped to door said) of the sewer along part of our building past the elementary school. The yellow tape and tall orange barrels prevent parking for now (who put it all there?), the street organized to prepare to dig up a city block to replace perhaps a dozen or more giant concrete barrel-tubes, whatever they are called (how did they get there?), taking up those parking spaces-in-waiting, and I had to wonder, “Emergency repair?” Yikes. But this work is meaningful work. Look at all that equipment, crew, the purpose: I understand the kind of impact this work has. Results you can see, work you can use.

This morning early, I emptied out the corner cabinet in my small apartment kitchen to disgorge it of plastic storage containers. Call it an emergency repair. I don’t know why I live like this, saving every single plastic container that once held takeout shrimp and broccoli from Ten Full around the corner, but I do. I stuff them in, harder and harder, until one late winter morning, usually during Lent, I can’t take it anymore and I go in for the big clean-up and reorganizing. I hate being this all-or-nothing-at-all person. I would like to be a flowingly tidy person, who effortlessly tidies as she goes.

I look at just the surfaces of my place and see 1) a financial packet (I really mean to make that phone call, so it’s on my desk in the living room); a notice from Con Ed (since I have to make sure I schedule the natural gas detector installation, this is taped to the back of my front door); 3) a request for a proxy vote from another financial institution that holds the keys to my retirement (and since I’m not sure what to do, it’s on the kitchen sideboard to think on). Do you place things like this? And why? And for how long? How do these locations gain meaning?

I don’t know about you, but I also tend to be a person who creates in bursts, writing or drawing or making collages daily, for a week or three. And then I seem to crash; my creativity may lie fallow for months at a time. This manic-depressive quality is what drew me to theater, I think, beginning back in middle school, because after you’d rehearsed a show every day for eight or ten weeks, performed it three or four times, and stayed after school the next week (or in college, all night after the final performance) to strike the set, you were done! (The appearance of the final ghost light, literally and figuratively, remains one of the most satisfying feelings I know.) You then spent the next month catching up on all the stuff you’d neglected, like housework, paperwork, grocery shopping, or, when aged 12, cleaning your room and finishing those two big school projects. And after all that, you could dream again.

What has to happen to make this repair an emergency repair? What makes that place the place to put something? What causes inspiration to strike just then?

O park of wondrous flowing green
And more than passing fair,
We wonder if you would mind if we
Walk barefoot through your hair.

~ by Lois Oberdin, a great friend of my mom’s when they were about 16; this poem created and recited in situ while crossing Bayliss Park, Council Bluffs, Iowa, ca. 1950.

I share that poem up there, by my mom’s friend Lois, because when all else fails or seems merely duty-bound and cold, poetry cares (as Naomi Shihab Nye says). Poets feel. Of the poem’s creation, my mom said of Lois, “She’d do things like that all the time.” Mom then told me that her friend, around the age of 18 or 19, was institutionalized for schizophrenia; my mom never saw her again. When I learned that (I was maybe twelve), I made it a point to memorize Lois’s impromptu poem, and I am glad I did, because this beautiful, unusual girl never had a chance to live a full, creative life or grow up to loathe a corporate job, or make her home and papers disorganized, or stare from her stoop at Caution tape along her street. It’s terrible to think about. But we have a poem, at least one poem, a creative act to recall, to celebrate Lois.

And when you stop to think about it—all of us, our habits, our anxieties, our personalities; all the messes in our houses, in our heads, under our streets— maybe everything and everyone should come equipped with a roll of Caution tape, you know? Just throw on a Caution sash as a warning of our own emergency repairs.

Always a work in progress,

Miss O’