Oxymoron Harmony

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By Dr. Neil Weiner

Her mother named Harmony after a dream. The name turned out to be quite an oxymoron. 

Deafening silence filled the hospital room at the exact moment of Harmony Clashton’s birth. Her mother, a firebrand pacifist, named Harmony after her dream where protestors sang strident lullabies. The moniker turned out to be quite an oxymoron. 

oxymoron welder
Photo: Harmony eventually became a welder, among many other things. Alfred T. Palmer, Public Domain.

Harmony came into the world with a serene shriek as if she were both here and not here. The docs welcomed the new baby with a soft slap of cruel kindness.

Harmony was the most clearly misunderstood child in her small Seattle town. She wore combat boots to ballet recitals and read romance novels while denouncing love as an illusion. Teachers labeled her a genius when she failed math by producing her own formulas. They praised her as a dreamer when she aced science fairs with an holo-exhibit of herself in bed. By middle school, she had earned a reputation for being a jumbo shrimp in her clique, small with an expansive presence.

By her twenties, Harmony had mastered the art of passive resistance, especially in her job as a corporate ethicist for a company that sold illegal surveillance tech. She wrote scathing internal memos that no one read and organized staff retreats with meditation and trust falls before recommending layoffs. Her apathetic activism earned respect, and her rebellion looked a lot like compliance. She enjoyed the dance of controlled chaos.

She married a fiercely loyal player, whom she loved with bittersweet ecstasy. Together they traveled the world taking photographs of cultures they didn’t fully understand and adopting pets they refused to train. They spoke of openness while hiding their pasts. Their peaceful fights could shake walls and windows. In contrast, their defiant apologies were like a deluge drizzle. Their honeymoon lasted years, until it became a kind of living death.

In motherhood, Harmony was a model of organized spontaneity. She’d plan scavenger hunts with clues that led nowhere and read bedtime stories that questioned narrative structure. Her children both adored and feared her, for she could turn a school bake sale into a lesson on Marxism, or a grocery run into a sensory deprivation experiment.

Somehow, under her dissonant direction, they grew into fiercely independent dependents, children who lived at home into their forties.

Harmony retired early to become a full-time professional amateur. She took up welding, taxidermy, and Gregorian chanting while writing a memoir called The Autobiography of a Liar. She hosted a podcast where she said nothing, and curated art exhibits of blank canvases titled “Everything I’ve Ever Seen.” She claimed nothing mattered while fiercely defending her search for meaning. She lived by the mantra of planned accidents.

When Harmony died, her funeral was a mandatory option, the kind no one had to attend but everyone felt compelled. Old lovers were old enemies. Her children read spontaneous, heartfelt eulogies Harmony had pre-written and edited. The urn was shaped like a puzzle with a missing piece no one could find. After the final duet between a gospel singer and a punk guitarist, the room settled into an overwhelming peaceful unrest.

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