When This Minute Is Enough

When This Minute Is Enough

As I wandered my corner of the Tropics I would sometimes come across the same character. Not the same as being an individual, but someone of a type. Slightly off focus, eager to help and assist, and truthfully quite harmless.

These are the ones who stayed a season too long, and that season was a long time ago. They are sun weathered, missing teeth, attired in well used shorts and t-shirts from the 5 for $10 shops. They have that punch drunk presentation and appearance you know doesn’t present an imminent concern, but makes you slightly wary in case the unexpected appears.

I would run into them in bars, or lying on the beach. In one bar he was drawing pictures of the customers, and then selling them for whatever they would pay. The crayon drawings were rough and a bit crude in their execution, but contained enough recognizable imagery as to be somewhat realistic. They were customer caricatures. In the crudity was the appeal, the lack of sophistication being the mark of this artist and his life. In each drawing there was the hope and promise that he could have been better, but in this time and place he couldn’t get beyond selling the picture for $8 because that was all the cash the tourists had. The eight dollars was enough for a couple of beers, and there would always be more tourists.

In some ways I envied him. Somehow this life existed solely in moments of drawing and drinking. Creating and forgetting, then moving on to the next moment. Over and over.

Creating is hard work, especially for those who have an infrastructure to support. Kids, partners, houses, social obligations all add up to time stolen from creating. For those who don’t have those issues, creating is still hard work. Very few people can just sit down and write, or draw, or make music, or dance. Everyone has a process unique to them. Sometimes that process is as simple as being alone; sometimes you have to get past your “self” issues. Sometimes it takes nothing more than the sun streaming through a window on a winter’s day with dust hanging in the light shaft, and some baroque music that happens to be on the stereo as you wipe down the kitchen sink.

The mood has been created, an idea has formed, a plot devised, a character moment needs to coalesce, and you know you have “it”. If you are very lucky you will be able to get most of it down on whatever medium is handy, before the thought gets lost in a thousand other thoughts that you need just for today.

I don’t draw, I don’t make music, and I can’t dance to save my life or anyone else’s. I can write. Not much call for writing in tropical bars to sell to the tourists, though an extraneous thought occurs to me that one could create a business model that might. It would only pay drinking money but it’s better than not getting paid at all.

The Tropics are full of writers, and musicians, and artists of all stripes. Some are fabulous, some aren’t, but they all try. Every day they all try within whatever framework of time, talent, and personal economics they have, to create something better than whatever it was they last created.

For me writing is something I have done for years. I have done it quietly and privately as a way of actually getting to be me. I don’t write for money, or fame. I write because I have to, the same way I have to breathe and eat. And I have no interest in fame. None at all, in fact I shun any kind of attention. The work itself is what I love to do, just as it was when I was gainfully employed, and if other people can enjoy that work then I am happy it’s appreciated.

These were some of the thoughts that passed through my mind on a steamy late November afternoon, as I sat drinking beer in the Elbo Room Bar across the street from the beach in Fort Lauderdale. A couple from somewhere in Middle America was being drawn in crayon by a guy who was sipping a beer across from me. He was quick, and rough, missing teeth, and was slightly unfocussed. It was a look I have seen not just in the Tropics but also on the faces of street people across North America. This guy had been at it longer than most, and to his great credit he had a product to sell that people were willing to shell out for. He was less a street person than an entrepreneurial artist. He didn’t have a story of woe looking for a handout, he wanted to sell you a creation that represented him, and you, and the time you shared in a Tropics bar.

 

And that was where the envy started to creep in. I struggle, some days agonizingly so, to create, and yet here was a guy who in ten minutes had captured atmosphere, character, and color in a drawing he sold for $8. The hourly minimum wage in Florida (for non-tipped occupations) is $7.93 as of January 1, 2014. That’s an increase fourteen cents over 2013. I’ll leave the math to you, but once he had his $8 he leaned over and stashed the paper and crayons behind the bar then took off down the beach. It’s rare to see a grown man skipping like a child.

 

As I looked around the bar his artwork was all over walls and under the cabinets and bar rail. His working studio was a bar, he worked in coloured crayons as he drank his beer, and he worked the uncrowded room like a true entertainer. That he was slightly off centre, missing teeth, and looked like he’d seen a punch or two was mostly irrelevant, his life’s passion shone in his eyes as he worked.

He was part of the beach and the bar. He belonged there in ways I never would. He shared his creativity, rough and crude and honest, with the world at large and he did it willingly and without ego and hubris. He was a beach bar artist, and from what I saw he was quite happy with his life.

I couldn’t say if he knew what day it was, or that the time was mid-afternoon. He was happy drawing, drinking, and living this minute of this day. I doubt he knows if he has a future that might have come and gone. Today is the only day he knows, and he’s happy that it’s enough.