We were quiet again. Then October said, “Come on. Tell me about yourself. Besides your birthday, since I already know that.”
I made it a point not to tell people the pitiful details of my life, and I didn’t think I’d be working there longer than the project would last, so making shit up didn’t seem to matter. When I’d moved to Berkeley as a college freshman, I’d gotten into the asinine habit of telling people the tale of Bob’s childhood as my own, and I’d been doing it ever since.
“I grew up in Spokane. Moved here to go to Berkeley. How about you? Where are you from?”
“Rochester. New York, not Minnesota.”
That surprised me. She seemed too interesting to be from Rochester. “Did you study art there?”
She shook her head. “RISD.”
“How did you end up out here?”
“Got recruited to do graphic design for a tech company in the city.”
“Which one?”
“Ribble.”
“Wow. What did you do for them?”
She looked down and kicked at some rocks. “You know the little logo cartoons on the search engine homepage?”
“The Ribble scribbles?”
She squinted up her face and gave me a quick nod.
“You used to make those?”
She stopped walking, turned her head slightly in my direction, gave me a sharp side-eye, and whispered, “I still make those.”
“Really?” I was genuinely impressed. “That’s cool.”
She nudged me playfully with her elbow, and I remember thinking the gesture felt weirdly intimate, like something you’d do with an old friend, not a virtual stranger.
“It is not cool. It’s mortifyingly corporate. But it pays the bills, if you know what I mean.”
I nodded. I’d heard even the interns made six figures at Ribble. “I liked the one you did for Bob Dylan’s birthday last year, the one where his face was a cake, with the animated harmonica.”
She halted, wide-eyed. “You remember that?”
“Yeah. And the April Fool’s Day one with the spinning kangaroo. That was great.”
She threw her head back and laughed so hard she had to wipe tears from her eyes.
“What?” I mumbled.
She nudged me again, this time a playful push with her palm. “That wasn’t a kangaroo! It was Diego!”
“Ah. Shit.” I laughed too, our eyes met, and right away I felt like I was doing something wrong. To change the subject, I asked her how long she’d been living in Mill Valley.
“About three years. I lived in the city first, but I didn’t like it. Sensory overload. I moved over here as soon as I could afford it.”
We continued hiking uphill, and October spoke mostly to the dog, telling him what a good boy he was, pointing out birds and squirrels for him to see, stopping to give him water every so often. She talked to him like he was a child, and he looked at her with rapt attention anytime she said his name or raised the pitch of her voice.
I remember thinking that perhaps she was testing me, to see if I could be unobtrusive, and I’d been trying not to speak too much unless she spoke to me. But I also didn’t want her to think I wasn’t interested in her work; eventually I got up the nerve to ask her what kind of artist she was.
She bent down to tie her shoelace, looked up at me and, with a chuckle, said, “You took this job without knowing that?”
I shrugged, gestured toward the mountain. “I like redwoods.”
She smiled. “It’s funny; when people ask me what I do for a living and I say, ‘I’m an artist,’ their next question is almost always ‘What kind?’ I suppose they imagine I’m a painter, sculptor, photographer, you know, one specific thing. And I work in all of those media. But if it were up to me, it would be enough to say, ‘I’m an Artist of Life.’” She covered her face with her hands for a moment, as if anticipating a scoff. “I know that might seem vague or, worse, pretentious, but it’s honestly the closest I can get to explaining my career.”
She turned toward me and met my eyes, focused and serious, her hands moving enthusiastically as she spoke, as if my question had opened something up in her. She’d gone from awkwardly quiet to aflame in an instant. “At the core of my work is the belief that everything we do and every moment we live can be a work of art. Every experience can be a thing of beauty or love, sorrow or pain.