Mosaic-ing in Traffic

I'm part of the way through Broken For You, by Stephanie Kallos. It's delightful, with intriguing characters, and writing that creates wonderful mental pictures. The part that is disturbing to me is the book jacket. Inside the back cover is the requisite photo of the author. There is Ms. Kallos smiling wisely, just the way she did in 1973.

Authors and publishers often keep using the same photo book after book. Sue Grafton got halfway through the alphabet with the same photo, for example. You can't eat as many fresh baked cinnamon rolls and Hungarian dishes as Kinsey Milhone without putting on a pound or two. Let's be honest.

With Stephanie Kallos it is different. This is her first novel. It's unlikely that her publisher, Grove, would select a senior photo from the 1973 Lincoln East High School Epic yearbook.

The novel contains a lot of shattered pieces of porcelain and slivers of glassware. I am hoping the characters rearrange the broken pieces of their lives to create something beautiful in the rest of the book. I love the mosaic metaphor for each of our lives, as I love the collage metaphor for mine in particular.

Collage artists save images, broken parts from small appliances, bits of hardware, scraps of color and texture ripped from magazines, taken out of context. We are reluctant to let go and discard even the most mundane packaging of modern society. Stashed away in drawers, files, and boxes the bits get further disconnected from their origins. Sometimes their ancestry is magnified or illuminated, but usually it is lost forever. None of it is discarded.

At some point the collage artists open the drawers, when we feel brave and lucky. We view the pieces through a lens of personal history, and assign new meanings to them. We take the chance to formally introduce this bit to that odd piece plucked out of all chronology or region, and hope their encounter will form something new entirely. Each of us do that every single day of our lives with all our experiences and hurts, applying them to new circumstances. The gift of the writer, actor, and artist is to do it mindfully. So also, it is the gift of the cook who creates a soup that is part personal history comfort food, part salty tears, and part new sharp foreign flavors.

As you collect the pieces for your mosaic, collage, stew or novel, please be safe in traffic. About the time my marriage was shattering, my oldest son had to make a "special project" for his middle school Texas History class. He wanted to do something about the Alamo. We had rock and shell collections, old ceramic tiles, and a vague plan for making a mosaic of the famous mission facade. We broke the tiles by throwing them on the driveway. We researched the mysteries of grout. The trouble was the sky above the Alamo. That's when Divine Providence and bad teen driving brought us a fender bender just down our street. We rushed to the scene with empty sherbet and sour cream tubs to scoop up the broken glass from the shattered car windows.

Jeff turned in his history project. It weighed nearly as much as he did with all that stone, glass, wood frame, and grout. His team teachers graded it a B and wrote that it was "almost art". They preferred the cannons made out of t.p. tubes. A grade is one thing, but memories and "almost art" are another. I am looking at the Alamo car crash mosaic right now. It's really quite handsome, but like the baggage from our life all grouted together, it's heavy.

What would happen if CollageMama did a confetti dance in the parking lot on a windy night, and let go of all her long-saved scraps and bits? What if she let them swirl away without glue or grout?