Meditation on the Dress

Most days I have time for email before I teach my class. Last Friday, I was in the midst of a three-way Facebook conversation with the Mexican writer I translate, who lives in Hungary, and a friend of his in Mexico City, who would pass through Denver on his way to Vail and might be able to drop off books for me. I got on Facebook to see how those arrangements were going. I was just in time to see The Dress.

I looked at it for two seconds, said, “What the hell?” and moved on. But it was a lucky hit because then I went to school to see my adorable 8^th grade Intro to Writing kids, and they finished sharing their poems with fifteen minutes left in class on a snowy Friday, so I said, “you can work on your creative nonfiction assignment.”

I knew work wasn’t happening. Not in fifteen minutes at end of class on Friday. They knew work was not happening. This is an excellent example of the small pretenses we participate in daily and—for our mutual benefit—tacitly agree not to unmask.

So I’m entering grades on my laptop and talking to Britannia about her ballet competition and Taylor about the memoir she’s writing, and telling the boys with the headphones that if I can hear their music from where I’m sitting it’s too loud and they’ll be deaf by the time they’re forty, when the group of girls across the room bursts into shrieking giggles. They’re on their phones and I hear, “it’s gold and white.” “No, no, it’s blue and black.”

I save my grades, close my laptop and charge across the room. “You girls are entirely too loud,” I say sternly, wagging my finger at them. “And I have just one thing to say to you, Natalie: that dress is gold and white.” Natalie screamed and fell out of her chair. It was very satisfying. Galen, who knows a lot about science and such, came over to say he could explain why some saw the dress one way and—but the girls yelled so loud in protest that it blew the poor boy back to his seat. “Galen,” I confided, “there’s no point in trying to explain these things to the girls: they don’t want to know.”

But then this dress thing spiraled out of control, as you know. I stopped for groceries on my way home and the checker and bagger were discussing what color the dress was. Thirteen and fourteen year olds is one thing. But these were adults. I got home and our adult daughter in San Francisco sent a message: what do you think of the dress? That evening, the damn thing was on the news.

Saturday morning at coffee, Diane said, “this dress thing is absurd.” “Bread and circuses,” I said. Isis, I was thinking. Beheadings. Melting polar ice caps. The widening gap between the rich and the rest of us. Fracking and what it’s doing to our ground water. Police and minority issues. A Congress that does nothing but play political games. What happened to “bring back our Nigerian girls,” who we went viral over nine months ago? What happened to our 43 Mexican college students? Young innocents who were never returned, who will never be returned, about whom we’ve forgotten.

Roman emperors gave the rabble bread and circuses and they forget their discontents. Our bread and circuses are in giant sports arenas too, but also on every cell phone screen. With us, it’s llamas on the lam and the color of the dress.

“I beg to differ,” said Phil, who can be counted on to differ. “The dress is a release, an escape, a way to momentarily relax stress.” Considering the litany of ills that was running through my head, I thought he might be right.

Then I remembered my students, and the worry poems they wrote. They worry about people not liking them, about not fitting in, about their grades, about not having enough Instagram followers, about laughing too loud, about grades, about food stuck in their braces, about forgetting everything when it comes time to play the piano piece or take the test, about being accepted, waking up late for school, the test they have today, tomorrow, next week, whether Mom will like the gift they bought, about not getting enough sleep, about being too short, too tall, too heavy, too thin, having hair that won’t behave, about schedules with too many lessons and no fun time, about never getting enough sleep, about the future, about car crashes, plane crashes, about growing up, about not having good enough grades to get into college, about being compared to older siblings, about their parents divorcing and whether they will continue to see their fathers, about slipping down the slide of life and not being able to get back up, about dying, about parents dying, about saying goodbye to those they love.

So yeah. Let those girls have their five minutes of giggling about the color of the dress.