Advice Giving

I am not sure what is more important: to tell you how I used 
to narrate my life in my mind while I walked the neighborhood
as a child? How I never moved my lips, but somehow 
made more exciting that single horse farm on the corner, 
the one without the palomino I imagined should have been there? 
Or the story about how I was actually a ballerina in training? 
Or sometimes, it was a Covergirl model (except I didn’t know what 
they did in real life, besides exercise, wear makeup, and have
pictures taken). Or should I tell you why I give advice too much,
now that I am closing in on aging? To explain how speaking out loud 
my experience can sometimes help the both of us? Maybe I’ll tell you 

about my grandparents’ driving, how my grandfather on the Sicilian
side got pulled over, was questioned, and how he told the officer, simply,
“I was looking at the clouds.” And that other time we ladies were with 
my grandmother who also got pulled over, and when she said something 
about not deserving a ticket, the officer slammed a fist on the hood 
and bellowed, “Do you know what you are? You’re a typical woman driver!” 
How I asked my mother in a whisper why that man in uniform was so mad, 
and what did it mean to be a typical women driver—or a typical anything— 
because I had never heard the word before, and I still didn’t understand. 

And I think my advice now, as an older woman who watches clouds,
who wanders the world in search of horses and stories better
than ourselves, is to share what you know freely with those
who might need it, but also listen to yourself—not the way demanded
when you’re in a fight with your lover, or some stupid Facebook
troll, or a sexist cop in the early 1970s—but the way you would 
listen to your closest friend, or strain to hear the swish of horsetail 
in the early morning wind, long after the farmland was sold.
And if need be, take out those old pictures, the ones where you smiled 
from the inside out, and remind yourself why you didn’t have to fake it, 
why you ever thought to laugh, what has changed so much now—
if anything—and how you can get back to that place where 
you could imagine walking on your toes without them even hurting, 
or walking through life without ever having to pose—beautiful in whatever 
color you want. Give yourself your own advice. And courage to accept. 

Katherine Mercurio Gotthardt, copyright March 15, 2024, all rights reserved