Julie Guyot Studio

Went for Coffee, Be Right Back.

Julie Guyot

The last few weeks looked like this: Magnificent vacation for a week. Then return to the studio for a week. Then my mom came to visit for a week. And now the unbelievable heat is arriving in North Florida and I’ve lost all momentum and motivation and I’m just supposed to go back into the studio and get to work? Day One was not very productive. Sure, I got started working on a wholesale order and then as I was waiting for things to dry so I could put them away, I started to check Facebook to see how everyone else’s day was going. What new and ridiculous things have our elected officials done this week? Today? In the last 20 minutes? Basically, I’m not using my time in a very productive way.

And then I found the wasps nest in my studio bathroom which forced me to use the bathroom at the coffee shop which forced me to purchase an iced mocha because I can’t in good conscious use another business’s bathroom without being a customer, right? So, now I’m really on a break because I have a coffee and I’m just hanging out and it’s hot and I haven’t seen a customer all day.

So, I decide I’ll write a blog post and then my time will be productive. But what to write about? How about how sometimes we just have these kinds of days and I get a do-over tomorrow? Tomorrow I’ll get up at 6:00 a.m. and lift weights and then get into the studio early, break for lunch and work through the afternoon, finishing up this wholesale order (at least stage one of the order) and feeling super accomplished. Yeah. Sure, I’ll still have to battle that wasp in the bathroom but tomorrow I’ll be ready for him. Worst-case scenario, I’ll be ready for another iced mocha. 

-Julie

The Assignment

Julie Guyot

At the beginning of 2017 I decided that I was going to get out my dad’s notebooks from his English teaching days with all of his daily assignments, some typed and some handwritten, all taped down onto the lined paper pages. This is how he spent his summers. We would go on a family vacation for a week, right after the high school graduation and then the rest of his summer was spent doing a bit of relaxing and a lot of reading but always, always planning for the next school year. He would buy the new notebooks and pick some assignments from previous years to copy and tape down again but then there were new assignments to keep things fresh. They were always numbered at the top of the page. In January, I set a goal for myself to complete one of these assignments a day for a year. Out of the few notebooks that I took from his classroom that week in 1997, I chose Rhetoric to work out of and I bought my new notebook to write all of my assignments in, just like I had to do in Dad’s class all those years ago. When I was a teenager I was so excited to go to high school because then I would just be another student in his classroom. He’d have to take me seriously and he’d have to pay attention to me like he did with his students. He would have to grade my papers and I would have to take his advice.

It’s April already and I wish I could say that I followed through on my daily assignments. The truth is that it proved much harder than I had expected. First off, the assignments weren’t easy for a 40-something who has been out of school for a long time. They were really pretty difficult. Secondly, something else happened that I hadn’t anticipated. I realized that I couldn’t get any clarification on the assignments or feedback on my work. This was paralyzing. It was also ironic.

When I was in junior high I didn’t see my dad a lot and when he was home he was often in his basement grading papers in front of a game on t.v. One morning I went to pack my homework in my school bag and I found that he had corrected my math paper. His handwriting was in pencil and it read, “Julie-you might want to check #14.” This made me really angry. He couldn’t be bothered to spend time with me during the day but when I was sleeping he graded my homework and left me a note. I didn’t correct #14 and obviously I got it wrong. Out of spite. So, I showed him.

A couple of years after college I moved to California and wrote these really long letters home to my best friend. She told me that my stories about my adventures were really good and so when I temporarily moved back in with my parents I asked my dad if he would read one. He told me he would right after he finished grading his students’ papers. Needless to say, I never let him read it and that was probably for the best. I wouldn’t have wanted to hear anything constructive that he had to say, I was just looking for validation.

But now, I genuinely would love to get some constructive feedback on his assignments. Am I on the right track with the word replacements in these sentences? Is this what he had in mind when he wrote these questions? A little nudge in the right direction would be helpful. But then I realize that this is the reason I’ll never complete the year-long assignment that I gave myself. Working in the notebooks is just a constant reminder of what I’m missing out on. I’d like to think that if he were still here, he’d be reading my writings and I’d like to think that I’d take another look at #14 but if I’m being honest, I still don't know if I would change the answer.

Humphrey Bogart 1945 Papua New Guinea

Julie Guyot

I used to perform on my high school forensics team, mostly in the Original Comedy category. I once competed against Anthony Rapp, of “Rent” fame. I’ll just leave his IMDB profile here. I’m not sure how he was allowed to participate in an amateur high school speech meet after appearing in “Adventures in Babysitting” the previous year. He got first place in that competition. I got third. Obviously, I asked him to autograph the back of my third place ribbon.

Speaking of “A Beautiful Mind”. (see Anthony Rapp’s IMDB profile above) Last Christmas, my mom and my husband and I, were going through a box of my dad’s things. I know it’s been 20 years but there are still some things that need sorting. We found a notebook with what seemed like some kind of list in it. Each item contained the following: the name of a celebrity, a year and the name of a country.

Humphrey Bogart

1945

Papua New Guinea

I know that my dad loved information and statistics but the whole notebook was filled with entries just like this and none of it seemed to make any sense.

Marilyn Monroe

1965

Australia

After a few minutes of trying to figure out what it meant I turned to my mom and said, “What if this is the moment we find out that dad was like that guy in ‘A Beautiful Mind’?” And then I found the corresponding stamp collection album. They were stamps! A stamp with Humphrey Bogart’s face, the year it was issued and the country it was issued in! Ahhhh! So, he wasn’t crazy, just a little bit nerdy.

My dad was a pretty good writer. Good enough to write a few short stories. Good enough to have an article published in a stamp collecting magazine. Good enough to write for the sports page of The Courier when it was still being published in Champaign-Urbana. He also wrote all of the newspaper articles about all of the sports teams that he coached, although I wouldn’t exactly call this creative writing. And then, in a manila envelope inside the box that contained the stamp notebook, I found something else that he had written.

I loved my dad dearly. I know it may seem like I have a lot of resentment toward him but I so loved him. Even though he drove me crazy. Even though I don’t think he spent enough time with his family. I loved him. I idolized him while being aware of his imperfections. I know that he was raised by a mother who spent all of her time as a social worker, helping out everyone and anyone in need but probably didn’t have the skills to nurture her own children properly. I know that when she was a child, her mother died and her father separated the children and sent them away to live with other people because he was a tobacco farmer and couldn’t afford to raise them. I know this history. I know I am cut from the same cloth. It is why I didn't want to have children.

Once when I was home from college my dad took me to the campus of his alma mater and we had pizza at his favorite pizza place, Papa Dels. If you’ve ever eaten Chicago style pizza, you know how long it takes to cook. About 10 minutes into waiting we had run out of conversation and things became a bit awkward. I looked at him and he looked away, painfully aware that we didn’t have anything else to talk about. I felt really sad. It was the first time I had ever gotten a sense that he was aware of the divide between us. Most of the time I just assumed that his time away from us was how he preferred things.

And then last year I found the manila envelope with the yellow lined legal paper folded up inside. I don’t know that my dad ever had one of his short stories published. I know he submitted them but I think that outside of his journalistic efforts, nothing ever made it out into the world. So, as much as he would hate it, I’m going to publish something of his now. It is as if he was answering what I wrote in 2011 even though he wrote this and put it away years earlier. It is sad and it is powerful and it is enough.

He wrote this 36 years ago when I was 10 years old and my sister was 12.

Legacy

What will you leave?

What hollow moments will your daughter glean from the half-started conversations?

Will she cower at the sight of your body-- fat neck constricted by striped tie-- straining to complete the unsaid thought?

Or will she accept the gift of being too much like her father and in tongue-tied silence let the moment serve as legacy?

A small boy taps the wood.

“Quiet, James,” she whispers. “Come away,” she commands the questioning eyes.

                         2/4/81

Written by my dad, James Frederick “Fred” Guyot