Inhale the...What?

Sometimes my daughter and I head out to one of our favorite sandwich spots one town over, where we’ll order something to split, have it wrapped to go, and take a ride to the sea.  We park, when we can score a space, in one of the four spots available by a cement wall overlooking the ocean.  There, the view rolls out over hunchback waves.  To the south, land curves like a ballet arm, to the north, massive rocks sprout from the sea.  Minot Light flashes 1-4-3 in the distance.

For years, a snippet of graffiti marked the wall in front of where we park, instructions, scrawled in black spray paint to “Inhale the imagery.”  Now, normally I'm not a fan of "street art."  But this was different, the words a reminder to look up, to look out, to make sure the expanse of sea and soul never becomes routine.  The phrase remained on the wall so long; it fused with local culture, fading from an obnoxious tag into a kind of home-grown philosophy.  Someone uses it as a Twitter handle.  It's the title to a local photographer's website.  Bottom line? People liked it.  

 

   

That said, the words became a piece of our family lore for another reason.  Many years ago, our learning-to-read daughter noticed the paint and read out loud, “Inhale the imaginary.”  For years, we giggled when we pulled up to the scene and remembered her slip, the story so much a part of our family DNA that when we arrived one day and discovered someone had washed over the phrase with paint, we turned to each other and cried, “Oh no.” 

We visit that place a lot, and somewhere along the line it occurred to me that while all those years ago, our daughter misread the line, as a would be fiction writer, the one she came up with was equally as important.  Not only do I need to open myself to the imagery, to what is beautiful in every day life, but to whimsy and fantasy, too--to inhale the imaginary. But I've come to realize it takes one to feed the other.  Paying attention to what's in front of me makes me cognizant of detail and nuance and helps to make the fiction more real.  

I laugh when I think that someone sporting a can of black spray paint could have had such a positive influence on me, but I'm not the only one. 

The next time we visited after the "paint-over" discovery, the words were back.  This time, spray painted white.

Go ahead.  Take a deep breath...