Inventions

I was at Uptown Pubhouse saying goodbye to Margarita Cruz who has been the driver for so many amazing art events and art communities in Flagstaff. From Poet’s Brews to the Northern Arizona Book Fest, she brings in writers, schedules venues, orders books, promotes the heck out of events, and draws audiences from all kinds of backgrounds. She’s leaving for a job that will pay her to do the stuff she volunteers to do here. Writers and Artists and pretty much everyone in Eugene is lucky to have her and we in Flagstaff are truly the poorer for her leaving.

At Margarita’s goodbye event, I met my soul mate, Carson, Flagstaff’s Youth Poet Laureate. She is twenty-something with great skin and a septum piercing. She wanted to go to Antarctica. I wanted to go to Antarctica. Now, I’m trying to write a grant to make that happen. But after we were done toddled around Uptown like penguins, we started to share our deepest secret: we are both would-be inventors. Carson invented bikes with spikes so we could ride them across the ice. That reminded me of the stroller I wanted to invent that slid on skis so I could take babies cross-county skiing with me. Perhaps we are snow mates more than soul mates.

This reminded me of my other stellar invention ideas. The best? A towel that exudes lotion so you can moisturize your back just by rubbing against it.. Another best? To make money using the internet, every click cost a cent! (I think in some complicated ways, that is vaguely how it works?). And, I have two more but I can’t remember the fourth. But the fifth and truly the best is one I had right after college. I worked at the Oregon Humane Society as the computer manager, but the computers mostly maintained themselves, so I spent a lot of time reading about Mt. Everest. (This is not a part of the invention—it is just connective tissue about ice). I also worried a lot about climate change even back then. A group of friends and I speculated about wiring up a playground to create energy from swings and merry-go-rounds. But along those lines, I imagined these wheel-driven wires that rolled back and forth with the waves of the sea. As the picture above suggests, renewable energy makers have stolen my idea and have run with it. I’m glad they did it because just like the towel that exudes lotion, I couldn’t quite figure out how to make the moveable grid be safe for fish and kids alike.

My point is this. I’m not really an inventor but then no one really is. We all cook up ideas thanks to conversations about penguins, the energy of children, the motion of waves. I’m grateful to Margarita for not only bringing my snow mate and I together, but for her collaborative spirit, which is why we host things like book festivals and why we write and how we build things that are bigger and better than us. It’s collaboration that helps us work out the kinks so we don’t filet fish while we draw energy from the ocean. Margarita didn’t invent collaboration or literary community, but she made both so much bigger.