By Joni Abilene
Freedom was presented to me in childhood as a commerce, an idea wrapped up with the flag like a striped candy wrapper. Freedom meant society coming together, to celebrate with picnics and fireworks on the Fourth—of beer and fried chicken and sucked-up cigarettes littered along gravel ditches. My mother sewed identical dresses for my sister and me-we two of compete opposition. Little wars in pretty dresses. The forcing of this did not feel like freedom to me. Later on, a music teacher spoke of man and music, of the fool creating sound as a means to entertain himself in our prefabricated, preindustrial world. Lips poised in an O, he or she produced song wherever they wanted: amid a field, a mountain, a forest. The simplicity of this meant true freedom to me. I loved the idea and held onto it like a salve when life turned complex and chaotic. Now I know that true freedom is not the absence of conflict, but the acceptance of it. Life taught me this. Freedom is the ability to be that simplistic music-maker amid the fray. To whistle and have the world scorn, but still whistle because it makes you happy. If every person did this they would know true freedom. Lauren Bacall said it best, “You just put your lips together and blow.”