© Another Day in the Country
For my sister’s birthday, we took off on a road trip. It was just going to be the two of us and then I thought of our cousin Becky who had been itching to go on an adventure and I said, “Let’s call Beck and see if she wants to go, too.”
Spur-of-the-moment things are one of the relative luxuries of our current lifestyle and we wondered if anyone else was crazy enough to say, “Let’s go on a road trip,” one day and leave on that trip the very next. That’s fast turnaround for grown-up, responsible, adult-type people.
But we did it. And she did it! So the three of us set off on I-70, going west. Conversation was constant, as we tooled down the highway. Laughter filled the air. We were just a wee bit giddy with our freedom from everyday life.
“Lucas,” read a sign along the road. “Home of the Grassroots Art Center.”
“What is it?” Becky asked.
“You know I’ve always wanted to see it,” I said.
“Let’s do it,” said my sister, as she veered right.
There was silence in the car for half a second.
“We’ve only been on the road for a couple of hours and already we’re off on a tangent,” I laughed. “That certainly isn’t normal.”
“Heck, normal is just a setting on the dryer,” my normally level-headed, taciturn cousin said in the back seat.
I went scrambling for a scrap of paper to write that down, “Normal is just a setting on the dryer.” I loved that thought! “I’ve got to write about that,” I announced.
When we got to the Grassroots Art Center, we discovered all kinds of self-taught artists doing all kinds of self-expression that definitely did not fall into the “normal” category. What a hoot.
We saw cameos, delicate lovely seashell-shaded works of art made from chewing gum (yes that had been chewed already). We saw old Barbie dolls turned into mystical, exotic creatures to grace walls by an artist who called them Re-Barbs. We took our photograph beside a full-scale motorcycle made only from pull-tabs off beer cans.
The only normal thing about these displays was that God-given urge to create which was exhibited in a myriad of abnormal ways.
“We’ve only got 15 minutes,” my cousin said to the museum guide with her usual straightforward clarity. “So give us the abbreviated tour.”
Forty minutes later, we were still mesmerized by the variety of creativity and we hadn’t even seen “The Garden of Eden” yet, just down the street.
“Oh, it took 80 years for people in town to accept that work of art,” chuckled the museum curator. “Imagine having a neighbor in the 1920s creating his own mausoleum in his backyard out of concrete and a bigger-than-life-size Adam and Eve complete with the serpent, welcoming you into the yard.”
We worked on imagining someone like this in our neck of the woods and agreed that he definitely wouldn’t be considered normal.
Then again, normal is just a setting on the dryer. Maybe today, when it’s just another day in the country, you should consider stepping out of your comfort zone and doing something other than what’s normal.