Adventures of a Domestic Engineer

I've moved

2008-04-25T20:34:00.002-04:00

You'll be redirected to my new site in a matter of seconds, probably before you can finish reading this sentence.

Hey

2007-02-10T07:47:00.000-05:00

This site has moved. You'll be redirected in a moment.

keeping a readable pulse

2007-01-30T16:18:00.000-05:00

It's funny how things work. I started this blog on August 19, 2004 almost as a joke. I came up with the title in about five seconds while talking to a friend on the phone. Here I am, the working mom turned SAHM, trying to find a way to still publish my writing on a daily basis the way I used to when I was a reporter. How about....Adventures of a Domestic Engineer? That'll work as well as anything.

I sat right down and started writing a post about registering my second son for preschool:

I believe miracles can happen to anyone if the expectations are low.

A penny in the street is a miracle if you're willing to be grateful for the happenstance of cheap currency. These are the tenets on which I build my faith and hope in humanity. If I go to the grocery store and my youngest son doesn't do a strip tease in the canned goods aisle, throwing his tank top into the face of a random shopper, I find myself relieved and grateful.

I am a mom. I wasn't always a mother. I was once a creative, inspired person who slept in until 10 a.m. and radiated beatific peace and joy to all who knew me...

I got my first comment on my third post by a person who spoke English as a second language. I couldn't believe anyone was even reading it.

And thus was Adventures of A Domestic Engineer born.

I found that writing a blog is a lot like falling in love. For a while it's an exhilarating sense of connection. It consumes your attention and the excitement is almost enough to bounce upon when you walk down the street. You feel enraptured; liberated; you want to talk about anything, everything! It's as if doors open and the world gets even bigger.

It's fun. It's new and it's fun.

I found that writing a blog is frightening and painful. I started reading other blogs and re-examining my own with a twinge of awkward self-consciousness. I'd measure myself with a brutally unforgiving yardstick and come up far short of the ideal. The day I found Woulda Shoulda I had an overwhelming temptation to plunge into the dashboard and hit the Delete Blog button fast before I embarassed myself any further. Because I was totally intimidated by what was already out there. What did I think I was doing?

Who crawls into the new millenium without even knowing what blogs are, anyway?
(Me.)

I got hate mail, too. That was suprising. Not a lot of it, not a great amount, but just like in reporting, there is always that element of the population that will find you repulsive on every level. The praise was more palatable than the scorn and it was a bitter meal to sit down to, but after a while I had to remind myself that whether you're being paid for your opinion or not, all critical attention has the same flavor after a while. It comes along with putting yourself out there. Having a blog doesn't ensure any more immunity from that than the byline did.

So I had to get on with it.

The more you write the more you get a sense of what it is people want to read about really. Not that it should matter, but we all know it does. People want good writing, they want funny or entertaining writing, they want to laugh or at least think more about something or other.

They don't always want to hear about kids. If any thorn stuck in my side more than another, it was this:

People with children just don't seem to get that people without children aren't necessarily interested in hearing about them.

That came up a lot during the course of the blog, as might be expected for a site with the tagline, "The day-to-day travails of a sleep-deprived mother of three." It came up a whole lot. More than I'd even care to mention.

In fact, it came up once in conversation when I was out and about: someone said to me, "Your writing is so good that I actually find myself wanting to read about someone else's kids," and everyone around burst into appreciative, agreeable laughter, as if reading about someone else's kids is a task akin to measuring the daily fecal output of a tsetse fly.

And I didn't get that. It was like being complimented for injecting sodium pentathol without making anyone scream.

I found that writing a blog is like going into therapy. You start to examine things you'd forgotten all about. Sometimes in the middle of a post I'd chance upon an evident truth and feel like I just found my car keys at the bottom of the toy chest.

I found it a useful medium for scrying my own thoughts.

I made friends -- another unexpected benefit. I certainly didn't look for that going into it. I got to know my own friends and family better, too.

Still, there comes a point when the simple declaration I read your blog can fill the ribcage with inordinate alarm. Oh that. Really? Well? Do you hate it, or what? Why are you telling me this?

In walks paranoia, on high heels and carrying a stiletto with one of those little long brown cigarettes you always see the chic people smoking. I can say that's what paranoia looks like. Because I've seen it. Shook hands with it, even.

Oh, well, the blog. The blog, the blog, the blog blog blog. Then there comes a stage in blogging -- after so much scar tissue-- where you're just jaded and so over it all. You almost feel like you've said everything there is to say, you've met all the new people there are to meet, you don't really need anything more out of it. It's kind of, you know. Yawn. Been there, done that.

And yet, you keep doing it anyway. Just because. You started it. Now it seems cruel to end it, like there's a whole euthanasia issue that has to be addressed. Is this really the kind of person you are? Squeezing the juice out of it as if it's some kind of orange, and then tossing the dehydrated half-moon pulp into the trash can liner?

(You slut. You attention-seeking, egomaniac slut.)

So now I can't kill it. I can't even resign myself to leaving it lie there like an abandoned signpost pointing to the east side of Germany.

I'll just have to let it live. Even though I've started a spanky new blog with a freshly ironed sidebar and about 35 categories ranging from anesthesia to the pimple on my chin.

So you can find me here, or you can find me there. Either way, I'll be around. Older but wiser. Wiser but still blogging. Blogging but in more place than one. I don't die but replicate, like the Tribbles in episode #42.

Remember that.

soon to be relocating

2007-01-29T13:17:00.000-05:00

The move is not entirely complete -- I'm still migrating posts (and images!) over -- but you can visit my new site now. Feel free to stop by and tell me what you think.

I haven't made up my mind what to do with Adventures of a Domestic Engineer. One doesn't like to envision the adventures coming to an end, exactly. I'll certainly leave it around, anyway. It's funny how something that started on a whim could end up being such a part of who and what I am.

Again, here's my new site.

Intentalo again within a little while.

2007-01-27T21:16:00.000-05:00

Blogger finally did it. We were sitting around wondering when they'd arm-wrestle us into going to the New Version, and it seems they've finally done it.

I have another blog on Wordpress, and I may be migrating to it very, very soon. Just because. That'll show them.

You don't know the pain I've felt this evening transferring Adventures of a Domestic Engineer to the new Blogger version. This is because my Mozilla browser is out of whack and insists on reading all Blogger pages in Spanish. I haven't done anything about it because I'm like that. I sort of get used to it and try to convince myself it's a fun way to learn a new language.

It's not so cute when you're being strong-armed into changing your entire modus operandi, I promise you. When you think you've signed into Blogger using your new Google account and it tells you instead:

En estos momentos se está migrando este blog.
Se está migrando este blog a la nueva versión de Blogger. Inténtalo de nuevo dentro de un momento.

Or, as Alta Vista Babel Fish claims (and what would I have done without it?):

At the moment blog is migrating this. Blog to the new version of Blogger is migrating this. Inténtalo again within a little while.

Later Blogger told me, via Babel Fish:

It will be finished in a pair of minutes.

It was kind of like going through the Spanish Inquisition, only everyone is drunk and slightly confused about the general procedure.

Not to mention that I'd just taken two Darvocet to help me get through dinner without violent stomach pain. So I'm dopey, and transferring my blog, in Spanish.

For a perfect evening I really ought to go out now and operate some heavy machinery. In Spanish.

nine keys

2007-01-26T12:53:00.000-05:00

I found a ring of nine keys this morning in the teenager's bedroom. I know these keys; I just haven't seen them for a while.

They're the keys to our old apartment in San Francisco. To the place we lived in, my ex-husband and I, when we were all still a family together and our son just a winsome toddler with blond swinging hair and blue denim eyes, like a baby doll's.

The keys I used to palm nervously, walking down darkened streets with a gallon of milk from the grocer in my other hand, are now stacked neatly in front of me on the desk. My youngest child is wailing, crawling up onto my lap and wiping his tear-stained cheeks on my gray sweatshirt. He bumps the keys and they fall to the floor with a thud.

I look at them for a moment before leaning over to pick them up. I flick each one in turn around the large heavy silver ring, consideringly.

These are the keys to doors that no longer open.

Elliott Smith is singing "Miss Misery" in the background. It's a pretty song, it's a depressing song, and yet I like listening to it; it takes me to a place I couldn't get to, otherwise, just like the yellow taxis that darted in and out of lanes on Van Ness that I'd see but could never afford to ride in for very long.

Rick Lee is in San Francisco this week. He's started posting pictures from the trip on his site. I keep checking back to see what he's photographed, though at the same time I'm not sure what it is I'm looking for. I guess I want to know if other people see it the way I do. I'm thinking -- probably not.

As for me? It feels like I left so much behind (I lifted my arms one day to pick up my son, and ended up flying away instead) that there'd be something more to look at, even now -- something anyone else could see, as easily as you could, yourself. Nothing too esoteric, even: a signpost, or a tattered remnant of a sweater I used to wear, or maybe even a shadow self, walking around in my old Minnetonka moccasins, pushing a navy blue stroller down to Real Foods on Polk Street in the mornings, swinging a child in Lafayette Park round about 2 p.m.

It took some time to learn that a relationship is like any other kind of vessel: you can glue the pieces back together, but the seam is still there, all the same. It snakes down the side of the vase on your nightstand and every morning when you wake up you still can't help looking at it, tracing your finger lightly over the cracked ceramic and marveling how numb the glue feels to the touch. Like something forced and rubbery and forever after inflexibly altered.

There's that pieced-together place in the vase that's harder and crueler than anywhere else, where the flow of conversation is interrupted with a jagged break and then awkwardly rearranges itself around the shift, not quite working, and you feel like not only can you see it, but everyone else must be able to see it too, and they must talk amongst themselves, and comment privately when you're not in the room.

(Who is this person, with a life that's pieced together instead of whole?)

And then you have to choose whether this is what you want to think about every morning for the rest of your life, and close your eyes to before you sleep at night; or whether it's possible to get up and change it. One thing, something, maybe everything.

These are the keys I clutched in the pocket of my lynx coat when my son and I walked through San Francisco Airport at a quarter to midnight one May evening. I had a feeling I wouldn't be back, yet at the time, they still felt necessary.

And now they sit on my son's bureau, next to the rubble of compact discs and GBA game cartridges, all but eclipsed in the here and the now.

The same keys that closed doors behind me; somehow opened new ones, all on the sheer virtue of decision.

sailboat

2007-01-26T11:39:00.000-05:00

sepia and India ink on 11" x 15" watercolor paper.

it's a meme

2007-01-25T08:03:00.000-05:00

I got this high school meme from my best friend Heather. (Who won't believe I actually did a meme.)

You know I can't answer anything straightforwardly...

Fill this out about your YEARS of high school! The longer ago it was, the more fun the answers will be.

Who was your best friend?
I had friends. But mostly I seemed to just gravitate on the edge of other people's circles. Kind of like the school mascot.

What kind of car did you drive?
I think it was a Schwinn.

It’s Friday night, where were you?
At the football game. Or, reading in my room.

Were you a party animal?
No, that came later.

Were you considered a flirt?
Are you kidding? I wasn’t even considered a female.

Ever skip school?
Yes.

Were you a nerd?
Yes.

Did you get suspended/expelled?
No.

Can you sing the fight song?
Sure. Da-da-da-DAH-DAH, Da-da-da-DAH-DAH, Da-da-da-DAH, DAH, DAH, DAH, DAH….

Who was your favorite teacher?
I liked them all, and even more importantly, they seemed to like me, which no doubt aided the dynamic somewhat.

Favorite class?
Truthfully? I enjoyed all of them. Yearbook, art, gifted English, chemistry, history, medieval tortures, 20th Century Dictators....

What was your school’s full name?
Charles Manson School of Charm.

School mascot?
A buzzard.

Did you go to Prom?
Yes. Alone.

If you could go back and do it over, would you?
I‘m not sure.

What do you remember most about graduation?
That my homemade tassel broke right before we started the march onto the grounds and the boy in front of me made fun of me for being so poor. Good times.

Who was your high school sweetheart?
I didn’t have one. That is, I did, but he wasn't at all aware of our engagement, so I'm not sure it really counts.

Where were you on senior skip day?
I saw “Secret of My Success” at the mall with my sister. The principal called before we left, checking up on me, and we assumed false voices and said Sharon is missing school today because she’s having a really heavy period. He backed off from it immediately, as expected, and then we went off merrily to watch another really bad Michael J. Fox movie.

Did you have a job your Senior year?
I worked for my dad at the roller rink. I got to chalk down the wooden floors so people wouldn't fall and kill themselves. Sometimes it was a temptation not to.

Where did you go most often for lunch?
Into the bowels of hell. The food is good but the atmosphere is a bit stifling.

Have you gained weight since then?
To a most transformative degree.

What did you do after graduation?
Oh, I just haven’t got the strength. Really.

When did you graduate?
1987.

Who was your Senior prom date?
A six-foot invisible rabbit named Harvey. Only male I met who didn't mind dancing in public.

Are you going to your 10yr class reunion?
I went. I served the beer.
No, I didn't.

Who was your home room teacher?
The typing teacher. Her name was Qwerty. Every desk had a typewriter on it. Something to hold my head up on in the mornings.

Who will repost this after you?
No one. It’s all lies. I was really home schooled in Greenland. And if I wasn't, maybe I should have been.

Proof we get better as we get older:

*shudder*

photo album

2007-01-24T18:12:00.000-05:00

The aforementioned igloo. That's Jack Stone, Lego hero, issuing a directive before retiring inside the ice house for the night.

Me when I was ....old enough to stand up without falling over? Which could have been sometime after college, if we're going to be truthful about it at all. Shhh. I don't want to talk about it.

And because most of my family hasn't seen me for a while:

Me now:

Hello.

Here's my dog Max, part Corgi, part mutt:

More to follow.

and so it goes

2007-01-24T15:00:00.000-05:00

I couldn't eat anything at all yesterday. Not one thing. Not until last night when starvation got the better of me and I wolfed down a six-inch Italian sub on white bread (I picked off the banana peppers, because peppers bad). I also picked off the salami and fed it to the dog. And a little bit of the ham because the ham was sliced too thickly for my preference.

Then it seemed like there were too many chopped onions so I scraped most of those off too.

In other words, when I got done with my streamlining there wasn't much left except for the bread, three large coins of pepperoni, a slice of ham and lots of Italian dressing. It was pretty tasty, too.

When I finished that, I threw away the sandwich wrapper and the paper bag it came in, and in such a manner was kitchen cleanup accomplished.

I stirred up three tablespoons of sugar with three cups of water to make shaped ice cubes (I promised the kids I'd show them how to build an igloo). I put the ice trays in the freezer and then I read to them about the Inuits.

I explained how balmy and comfortable the inside of an igloo can be (30 degrees Farenheit). Warmer if the inside walls are lined with sealskin. And how the windows can be made with a block of ice, or a stretched flap of seal intestine. I'm not sure what point it is I'm trying to make here, except for one of my it-could-be-worse lectures (Don't complain when we keep the thermostat at 68).

Then I listened to my mp3 player and sewed up the torn seam in the teenager's overcoat. (Send me your tired, your weary, your mp3's. I'll listen.)

My gastroenterologist fired me, or I fired him. I can't remember; details get so blurry with time. He was always expecting me to show up and I was always disappointing him, so we decided the relationship wasn't working out for either of us and called it quits. You can do that when you're in remission and you're feeling all cocky and so forth.

It's not so conveinent, later, when the flare-up won't end and you have to schedule with a whole new doctor, someone who isn't at all familiar your charming perchant for tardiness or sheer absence in general.

As liberating as that might sound, the penalty is you have to start from scratch and go through the formalities of consults and baseline screenings and etc. all over again. All of which takes time, which is, needless to say, remarkably draining when you can't eat anything and your stomach refuses to be boiled into submission with a series of hot baths and extremely warm heating pads.

The moral to the story is: keep your appointments. Or something like that.

good morning merry sunshine

2007-01-23T08:06:00.000-05:00

To get the children out the door I have to focus on them each by each, like Noah sending the animals up into the Ark. Middle child goes first. He's also the dawdler and the conscientious objector to, oh, everything. So my reserves usually get spent on him before my day even really gets started.

He had this story to read for homework. He had this drawing he was supposed to do after reading the story. Only he forgot all about it until, I kid you not, one minute before the bus comes.

"This is your responsibility," I say angrily, really frustrated. That could have been a fantastic assignment for him -- he's very artistic -- and he blew it.

Then the oldest, the teenager, goes out the door. This is not a difficulty for either of us, but it emerges I didn't sew up a ripped seam in his overcoat and he has to wear another one.

I didn't mend the coat, I didn't supervise the homework; come to think of it, what was I doing with my time yesterday?

(I was fussing because yesterday afternoon my car became the phoenix. It was dead, it emerged from the ashes, it died again. Minus the burst of flame at the end, fortunately.)

Then the youngest one must be roused from his slumber upstairs. When I turn on the lights (all of them) and call his name in a series of attempts that range progressively from gentle to hysterical, he just burrows deeper into the pillows and says comfortably: "Mmm. Not going. You do it."

So. It starts. Already he's learned to delegate. I don't like this.

Of course he eventually rouses himself to a sitting position, but not kindly.

"You're annoying," he says darkly.

"Finally you come to it," I answer. "Good for you."

My father-in-law is driving him to school since my car is non-functional. I lean over the child as he settles himself, stony-faced and unwilling, in his grandfather's car.

"I love you," I say sweetly, even as he clenches his jaw and suffers himself to be kissed.

"I don't love you," he mutters.
"I know you don't, you're so sweet when you're maaaad at me!" I trill back, waggling my fingers at him as I close the door firmly and walk away.

The snow is crunchy under my feet from where it melted and hardened again overnight, and my feet are bare inside my mules because I didn't have time to hunt up a thick pair of socks before I rushed out the door.

My feelings aren't hurt. All my children have done this -- disavowed me in the rush of fury. I'm used to it. That's my gift to them, in fact: I don't take it seriously.

I slip off the mules just inside the door, shake my hair out of its ponytail, fix a fresh cup of decaf coffee. It might snow some more. I almost hope it does. I'd like some more snow to look at.

I was supposed to get my pacemaker interrogated this afternoon, but I can't do that now.

There's something comfortable about this situation. Can't go anywhere; don't need to, either. I'll do what I can and the rest will just have to wait. I like the sound of that.

what I've been working on today

2007-01-22T15:39:00.000-05:00

acrylic on stretched canvas, 16" x 20"

watercolor on watercolor paper

I know

2007-01-20T09:23:00.000-05:00

Since Christmas my stomach has been swelling as if I'm entertaining some kind of bizarre, uterusless mini-pregnancy. And now we know why.

The CT scan showed in detail how much my ulcerative colitis has gotten worse.

My doctor prescribed antibiotics to combat any infection that might have taken hold there. I'd say it's working, but I still can't keep food down for long. In the morning I pat foundation under my eyes to hide the grey half-moons there.

At the same time, the family's learned that my grandma has colon cancer. Sort of has a tendency to appear to the females in this family, it seems. My grandma has it, my great-grandma Margaret Mary had it.

My grandma has ulcerative colitis too. I didn't know that until I was diagnosed with it myself in 1994. That's because sometimes being in a family is like attending a support group: someone else has to stand up first and speak before anyone else will second it.

Her husband, my grandfather, died of a heart attack when I was just a little kid. Like most of my childhood memories, I can't remember what grade I was in or how old I was. It was a primary grade, second or third at the outside. I don't remember it because that's not what mattered at the time.

What I remember is that I was riding home from school on the bus one winter afternoon and all of a sudden I had this bad, dark feeling that something was about to go very, very wrong. Something that couldn't be fixed. It was such a heavy uneasy feeling that I leapt to my feet before the bus even came to a complete stop and ran toward home half-crying already. I ran up the front steps and flung open the front door calling frantically for my mother.

She was already there, waiting for me, tears rolling down her face. I knew.

"Who?" in that empathic shorthand females use.
"My father," she cried, "He died this morning."
"I know," I said.

I threw my arms around her waist and sobbed in earnest. We cried together.

I've avoided going in through the front door ever after. I won't even do it in my own house if I can avoid it. I take the long way around and use the side door, if I can. Because taking the direct route would be irreversibly equated with profound sorrow and loss.

I'm 37 now, if that illustrates how much longer my grandma's had to go on without him. And also to point out just how long it's been that she's been my only grandparent on my mother's side.

I think of her and I think of her dark hair and Irish blue eyes, her hands floating over the old painted piano in her living room, the way she set her mouth sometimes when she was deciding about something, the dolls she sewed for me and my sister when we were little (my doll had black hair, my sister's, yellow).

I learned to play the piano from watching her and the morning I played "Five Foot Two, Eyes of Blue" for her, it was her turn to sit back in my grandfather's place by the window and nod mistily.

"Ed used to sing that to me when we were courting," she said.
"I know," I said.

My grandma cooked bacon on Sunday mornings and took me to Methodist church services later, nodding in approval as my cousin and I sang gleefully trying to outdo each other in tempo and volume:

I've got the joy, JOY, JOY, JOY, down in my heart. WHERE? Down in my heart...

I don't just love my grandmother; I get her. I understand her reserve and her thrifty nature and her way of saying "likely" when she means "Of course" ("Likely you'll want to spend the night, so you can start out fresh in the morning.")

So one of my aunts called me yesterday afternoon and we didn't talk too much about Grandma, because it was too close to the nerve almost, we were all too close to it, but she did ask me about my CT scan and what did it show and what are they going to do about it? Why don't they have you in the hospital so you can build up your strength again, Sharon? You need to keep an eye on that.

I understood what she wanted to say. The roundabout is a pattern I've learned by heart, as an ice skater knows the figure eight.

So I just said, "I know."

electricity and I don't mix

2007-01-18T11:54:00.000-05:00

My car died yesterday. Cars and wristwatches always die an electrical death in my presence. I don't think it's coincidental that I have a pacemaker because it's the electrical pathways that are awry in my heart, either.

Electricity and I just don't mix.

There I was, driving down the road toward the preschool. Suddenly there's a click and a flash and then the dashboard is blinking crazily. Numbers flying up and down in kilometers and miles, alternately. A trip odometer sprung to life, a feature I've never seen before until that very minute. Of course, these are blips I can live with.

Then the anti-lock brake light came on, another click, and I lost the steering too. It's an odd feeling driving a car that's given up the ghost while still in motion. I put my whole body into grinding the wheel to the right so I could park it somewhere near a curb and out of the flow of traffic.

Meanwhile, people are driving up streets the wrong way and jumping out of cars and running in front of me, for no other apparent reason than to test my reflexes and driving skills in general. Like driving is something I'm so good at under the best of circumstances. Let alone with no brakes, no steering, no power, and no muscles to speak of.

Well, I thought, this isn't good.

I took the key out of the ignition and put it back in again and tried to restart it. Because sometimes you can fool the car into compliance.

(click-click-click)

Come on, turn over for me. Pretend you know who I am.

(click-click-click)

I really didn't feel like walking the rest of the way to the school to get my kid.
I didn't really feel like putting him in the car now, either, but first things first.

One more time.

This time, the engine turned over.

It was as if the car spontaenously had a psychotic episode.

I pointed that out to the mechanic after I coasted the car nervously into the service station. He didn't seem to accept my reasoning.

My little son wasn't terribly pleased with me when I told him we couldn't drive home in the car. Like the mechanic, he too seemed unwilling to accept my reasoning.

When his grandfather showed up to give us a ride, my son climbed in and thrust his arms out to bar my entrance. "You can't come. You're not allowed."

(I have given up being appreciated here on earth. If I were to seek only that, I would be no better than the chickens who drown themselves by looking up into the skies with their beaks open when it rains.)

I spoke with the mechanic today. He has not yet had a chance to look at the vehicle. But he feels certain it's something electrical.

So doubtless something expensive and time-consuming and electrical.

knee-walkin'

2007-01-17T08:07:00.000-05:00

I've been knee-walkin' in words.

Writing this book is -- I'm finding -- not unlike putting together a jigsaw puzzle. The kind of puzzle where all the pieces are identically shaped; it's the minute splotches of color you have to match up instead.

I had a CT scan yesterday of my abdomen because it won't stop hurting and it's so difficult to eat. Yet when I get back to writing, I don't mind because I don't really need to eat, or drink, or even sleep. I just want to write and tell the story. And while I'm doing that, time leaks into some liquid place that evaporates far too quickly.

I've written the beginning and the end. The middle is already there but it needs shaping. In a good landscape, sometimes you have to leave some details out. The eye can only focus on so many at a time.

I'm still alive, is what I'm trying to say.

nourishment

2007-01-14T10:27:00.000-05:00

Because my stomach has been so unsettled, I'm making my way slowly through a bowl of homemade rice soup. I love my rice soup. It's full of healthful things like celery and carrots and almonds and onion diced up finely into the rich cream broth.

I've crumbled one of my homemade rolls over the bowl so the hearty crumbs can soften and soak into the soup.

Even though my right side aches sharply, I'm still very hungry. So I have to make foods that are tasty yet also soft and digestible. My rice soup would qualify here.

My physical discomfort makes me dwell more strongly on thoughts of hunger. Anyone who has ever been hungry knows it is not an experience ever forgotten. Not hungry in the sense that you've missed a meal, or have a craving for Thai cuisine tonight.

Hungry meaning: you truly don't know where the next meal is coming from. And even if you did, someone else must eat it first and you can have what's left over.

I hear people say this all the time: There's no starving in this country. No one in this room has ever gone hungry or wanted for food.

And that is simply not true.

I can say that because I have been hungry.

Not that you would know it to look at me now.
For that matter, not that you would have known it to look at me then. I was pretty good at keeping up appearances.

I was a young mother in California once, with an infant son, working full time, overtime, and still not making enough money for both food and rent. I often sold my books and clothes and compact discs to find the next meal.

I learned to look vague and disinterested as I slung my belongings across the counter, acting as if I couldn't care less if they bought my items or not. Shifting my backpack more noisily than necessary, to hide the growling in my stomach.

Sometimes I had no choice but to go to churches and ask for food.

A person compromised soon learns the difference between gifts of demonstration and gifts from the heart. Because your choices are few, you're glad to get either -- but the latter kind lasts longer. Their generosity, in turn, somehow magnifies your own view. I can't explain it.

I had to knock on their doors and remember not to slouch, even when the women sometimes wrinkled their noses at me distastefully as they handed me boxes of stale pastries from the supermarket and dry formula to let me know that they truly considered me as a failure -- as mother, citizen, and a Christian.

I will always praise the Roman Catholic women who put extra formula in my box without complaint, talking to me cheerfully about the weather. "I feel so guilty taking food from you," I blurted. "I'm not even Catholic."

"God gives," the woman said, kindly.

I remember answering a telephone survey one winter afternoon as my young son chortled and played with building blocks: the sunlight pouring through the big front room window, and me drinking in an almost liquid nourishment from the light and the joy on my child's face. The person on the telephone said: We're doing a survey on hunger in America. Can you answer some questions for us?

Of course, I said. Feeling most qualified.
Has anyone in your household ever had to miss a meal because there wasn't enough food?

Yes, I said, and my voice broke over the lumpy admission. I started crying into the phone: I have. I do, every day. Can't you do something about it? Do you realize how much diapers cost? Isn't there anywhere I can go?

His voice seemed to break in sympathy. Call the United Way, he said sadly. I don't know what else to tell you. I'm so sorry.

I was a young mother in California once, standing alone, starving, with empty pockets, blocks from my apartment. Standing on a curb in Chinatown with paycheck stubs in hand to claim government food rations from the United Way. A harsh-faced man threw six or seven cardboard boxes full of cans and dried staples out of a truck and told me to get them off the sidewalk now or he'd have me arrested for abandoning government property.

I stacked them up vertically and tried to carry them all, sweating and staggering up San Francisco's fantastically angled streets, while the Chinese grandmas sniggered and pointed. I made it two blocks before I tripped and crashed to the dirty sidewalk.

The boxes fell on top of me. I knew my cheek was scraped and that I was probably hurt, but the weakness and the exhaustion had a kind of numbing effect. I simply couldn't move, not even enough to budge the boxes away from me.

I watched feet walking past me, not slowing, not stopping. I had the hysterical thought: this is how I'm going to die.

Dear God, I can't die like this.
But there's no one to help.
I'm all alone.

Someone did stop. Someone carefully picked the boxes off of me and extended a calloused black hand to help me to my feet. I don't know who he was. He appeared out of nowhere and had three pairs of pants tied in a knot in his hand. He told me that if I carried his clothes, he'd carry my boxes. A deal was struck and we traveled together.

He told me that I had to take care of myself if I was to take care of my son. (I hadn't told him I had a son. We'd just met.) He said I'd been taking on too much and couldn't continue the way I had been. That the most important thing, right now, was to take care of myself and then I could set things in order.

Then we were on the corner by my apartment and he said, "You should be all right now; this is where I stop. You can make it from here." He asked me if I'd remember what he'd told me. I said I was, thank you, and I would.

But before I remembered to thank him, I turned back and he was gone. Just plain vanished, as abruptly as he'd appeared.

I am somewhere else now. I am very fortunate and blessed with a family and a home that's full to bursting with food and comfort. But there will always be that part of me that remembers what it was to starve.

I went out that day looking only for food for my son. I came home with nourishment for my soul -- nourishment that feeds me to this day, when I'm in pain yet still hungry.

God gives.

Another street in Thun, Switzerland

2007-01-12T20:14:00.000-05:00

I started this out with the lightest of watercolor washes:

And then, layer by layer, it gradually got heavier and deeper until I reached this effect:

watercolor on Arches watercolor paper, 18" x 24".

Why is it that I do this? I push the image too far and then it loses its translucence and delicacy. I liked it better, in a way, when the washes were still trembly and somewhat unrealized. Now all the mystery is lost.

I have two bottles of barium sitting in the refrigerator this weekend: I've succumbed to that old tormentor, the abdominal cramp, and am going in for a CT scan Tuesday morning. I've had this pain in my side for a while. I just don't like talking about it. Because I treat my gastroenterologist like the undertaker.

And also because I believe in the power of positive thinking. Though at this point I don't think even Gandhi could help me.

I'm supposed to be on the BRAT diet right now: bananas, rice, applesauce and toast. Only I can't stand bananas, ever since I broke my leg in the first grade and someone gave me sliced bananas before we went to the ER. I threw up the bananas on the X-ray table.

Therefore, bananas remind me of broken legs.

So, it's the RAT diet.

Yum-smacky.

Ordinarily I'd want to write about someone I saw in the lobby, or something I noticed while waiting for the doctor this afternoon, but found that, in the dismal gray rain of Friday and the sharp nagging pain in my right side, I'm all out of perception. I just sat there pushing my right hand into my side and holding it there with my left (because that helps) thinking doggedly that patience is a virtue. And so is silence. No one likes a whiner.

Some guy was ahead of me in the queue filling out forms and talking in a voice I found much too loud about how he broke both legs and still got in his bulldozer a month later, to work. He just got comfortable and kept his feet up, he said proudly. Didn't have to use his feet to drive the dozer. And it was good for him, too, because he was up and moving around that much faster.

Good for you, I wanted to say wearily. You're the American work ethic. We're all grateful. Now shut up and sign your forms so I can be next.

He needed a shower, too. His jeans looked smoky-saggy and his flannel shirt gave off this sort of harsh dirt smell when he shifted from foot to foot. Guess showering requires the use of both feet. Maybe that explains it.

Snarky. (I know. I'm sorry. I hurt.) But he kept interrupting my progress toward the cessation of all pain. It was difficult not to harbor a resentment against him. Even when he showed up again, later, and started pestering the nurse outside in the hall as she was making her way back to my room to give me my lab orders.

He kept pulling on her hair and saying in a jokey way, "Working hard or hardly working? Huh?" (They must know each other outside the office).

I just glared at him coldly as I lay curled up in a C shape on the exam table, still holding my side and watching them, thinking dark thoughts.

The doctor prescribed antibiotics and made me promise I'd go to the ER if my fever got higher or the pain got worse.

I'm looking forward to sleep. It's easy to sleep when it rains like this. It might be just a weekend of rest and relaxation -- and drawing streets in Switzerland.

a street in Thun, Switzerland

2007-01-11T16:21:00.000-05:00

sepia ink on Arches paper, 12" x 18".

I put a sunspot in it with the computer. Just to figure out if I want it on the original as well.

the storytellers

2007-01-10T17:34:00.000-05:00

At the beginning of the school year, my mother would buy me two or three spiral notebooks. By the end of the first week I'd have used up the first one with drawings of girls. I always drew girls. I refused to draw boys. Wouldn't even try. Apparently, they didn't exist.

I drew all the girls the same way. I'd draw a U for the face and a J in the middle for the nose. Their hair would always be long and they'd smile in a closed kind of way, as if they knew secrets but wouldn't tell them.

I filled those notebooks with crowds and crowds of beautiful women, serene but silent. I drew them incessantly. It was sort of a mania with me. I left them everywhere, even in the backs of books I'd read. I'd imagine they were my friends, people I'd meet now and again along my travels.

When I didn't draw girls, I imagined myself the star in a feature film. I practiced walking up and down the front staircase with my right hand trailing behind me grandly, my chin bravely aloft. I'd imagine the cameramen cueing me from right and left.

Someone with a deep, strong voice would be narrating my life in a knowing, understanding way, illuminating at last with complete and total empathy my heartfelt feeling and touching courage.

"She looked out the window, grim with determination," the narrator would explain.

I'd blink bravely and draw the curtain back, eyes shimmering with emotion.

I lived in an imaginary world.

If something lacked I embellished to make it fit, as manicurists will add filler to make a fingernail look smoother and longer.

I told my classmates that my house was not haunted -- as was rumored -- but enchanted. I told them that the mirror in my bedroom not only showed my reflection, but took me into the future and showed me what I'd look like when I grew up.

(In the future, I assured them, I wasn't so skinny that a notched bone showed through my skin in the middle of my ribcage. My hair was long and beautiful, and my eyes were long-lashed and luminous.)

Well, the not-skinny part came out true, at least.

Most of all I loved telling stories to make people laugh. When we huddled together on class projects and someone told something funny that happened to them, I had to think up one that would be twice as good.

After I said my prayers and crawled into bed that night, I'd feel a spreading rush of guilt for my lies -- the heavy, sinking aftertaste of boasting. But I meant well, I'd whisper as a postscript to God. I just wanted them to laugh. It's not really a lie if it's entertainment.

When I meet other storytellers I feel both a spark of empathy and a twinge of sadness. I wonder if they ever made up worlds to live in when the real one got too wearing, like I did. And if they ever felt ashamed, like me, for getting lost there sometimes when the allure of kinship became irresistible.

But I never ask.

random thoughts

2007-01-09T09:11:00.000-05:00

It's snowing here, snow like granulated sugar that packs easily into balls and crunches when you walk on it. It doesn't quite stick, melting and accumulating, advancing and receding, a hesitant tide that nonetheless leaves a film, as milk will coat a glass long after it's been drunk.

(January is such a flurry of to-do's. Collecting W-2's and making appointments with the accountant and organizing for the year ahead.)

There's something about watching a gentle snowfall that makes a person feel safe. I don't know what that is.

Last weekend the bank teller at the drive-thru handed us yellow lollipops after I'd cashed my check. As the boys bit into them the smell of Pine-Sol unexpectedly flooded the inside of the car. Yellow lollipops smell like Pine-Sol. I hadn't noticed before. What memory is stored in our DNA to associate lemon with clean, I wonder.

Once you're grown, you can no longer blame your irritability on teething. Pity.

The snow is starting to fall in thicker clumps. The empty glass is refilling after all. But then, it always does. I can't think why I doubt it.

que pasa?

2007-01-08T11:06:00.000-05:00

Either that tequila I drank in 1990 has a very long half life; or I've erred egregiously with the powers that be.

Every Blogger page I read is now in Spanish. I checked Blogger's Known Issues page and got this:

Problemas conocidos

A continuación le ofrecemos la lista de problemas y errores del sistema conocidos de Blogger con las soluciones correspondientes, si las hay. Nuestro deseo es corregirlos puntualmente. Gracias por su paciencia.

Errores de Blogger:

La funcionalidad de recopilación de estadísticas se ha desactivado temporalmente, por lo que no verá su recuento de entradas ni las últimas entradas en el escritorio o perfil. Esperamos poder restaurarla en breve, pero por el momento debemos mantenerla desactivada para estabilizar los servidores de nuestra base de datos. Cuando el problema esté resuelto, estos elementos se actualizarán con normalidad de forma automática.

Riiiiiight.

something special*

2007-01-07T16:13:00.000-05:00

*this is a sample from a chapter of the book I've been working on.

My sister was the dancer. I was the musician.

When she tried on her recital costumes -- lime green satin numbers with silver spangles, purple unitards with fringes sewn in -- I watched on propped elbows, admiring. Her delicate feet knew instinctive rhythms I could never imitate.

After her recitals we ate at a restaurant to celebrate, a treat. Her father smoked and smiled, all teeth and congeniality, tapping the cigarette into a small black plastic ashtray to punctuate the ends of his sentences.

After her recitals she let me hold the costumes she'd worn. I'd lay them across my lap, stroking them lovingly -- as if they were something alive.

I'd crawl into her bed at night when I had bad dreams and lie awake, still watching her. How did she go to sleep so easily? How did she go through life so...unruffled? How could I learn to be more like her and less like....well...me?

When I could get away with it, I'd push toilet paper into the toes of her ballerina flats and arch my feet pointedly, feeling my way however blunted into her world of grace and glitter.

Sometimes it seems other people get to live in a world that's full of something special. The rest of us have to go look for it. If it meant wearing her shoes stuffed with Charmin, I'd do it.

I had no recitals, having no private lessons in anything at all. I would instead play the boxy blue electric chord organ on my knees on the floor of my bedroom. It bellowed and pumped wheezily, a reedy facsimile of much greater instruments.

There came a day when someone kicked in one side of the plastic organ in a rage; though the culprit taped the hole shut again, the music was, after that, forever weaker -- asthmatic, failing.

We had no money for a piano. We made do with the octave and a half, or whatever it was. My mother wrote the names of each note on the white plastic keys with Magic Marker so she couldn't forget them.

Somewhere she'd found Easy-Play sheet music with the notes interpreted. Hymns, mostly -- Bringing in the Sheaves, Whispering Hope.

She'd play them, and then I would, and she'd listen, humming along under her breath. I knew I'd played well when I made her sing. It lifted my heart to make her sing.

She'd once been a beautiful singer until a terrible car wreck destroyed her one of her vocal cords. She always apologized her voice away when she spoke to someone for the first time, assuring them she hadn't always sounded this way.

I loved her voice (husky, throaty). I wanted to make her forget it, so she would let me hear it more often.

"You're so much better than me," she'd assure me every time I played for her. "It's so much easier for you." And I'd almost believe it.

When the music teacher asked us one day to play an instrument for the class, I carried the organ to school, desperate to show everyone my own specialness. I couldn't tap dance, I couldn't sing. But I could play a chord organ -- see?

It made an awkward bundle in my arms, on the bus. The fat black electric cord kept uncoiling and falling to the side in an ungainly sprawl, and that was tiring. Setup in the classroom proved problematic; the cord wasn't long enough to reach and I had to perch the organ carefully on the teacher's desk, as if it were a bird.

My fingers shook with self-consciousness as I pushed the frail accordion-like keys into some semblance of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic".

I knew, when I finished, that I'd misstepped. The music sounded so elderly in the classroom, for one. This was not dancing. People do not come in droves to listen to a girl play hymns on a chord organ. Especially an ancient plastic chord organ with the notes scrawled on the keys and one side of the box busted out. It may have been special, but it was only special to me. I hadn't a hope in this world of expecting anyone else to get it.

"That's kind of dorky, you know," someone said as I took my seat. I just nodded. I couldn't argue it.

I took so long managing the chord organ and my books, at the end of the day, that I missed my bus. I left the books and carried the organ with me to the home of a woman I'd known my mother to visit, now and then. I knocked on her door, shaking with exhaustion and fear. (This was something unexpected. I didn't know where else to go.)

She was kind, the lady. She fed me baked beans while she called my mother. Though I was hungry, the baked beans tasted terrible. They weren't cooked with mustard and ketchup and a little bit of brown sugar, the way my mother made them.

Later, when I mentioned this to my mother, she laughed and explained that her friend must have cooked them straight out of the can. I couldn't for the life of me imagine anyone voluntarily eating baked beans that way.

My father had to pick me up after he got home from work. He picked me up after he ate his dinner, and I rode home in his great jostling truck holding on to the chord organ wearily. All this seemed like far too much work.

"How'd it go?" he asked me in his big, jovial voice. "Did you make a big hit?"

I told him yes as I looked away, out the window, at mud-caked roads and a trembly, meandering creek snaking persistently alongside.

I didn't want to explain; I didn't want to tell the truth. I just wanted to believe, for one day, that I too knew how to do something special.

I'm a writer

2007-01-06T07:38:00.000-05:00

Twenty-seven years ago. Fifth grade, 1980. Sweaty, panting schoolchildren shuffled into their seats after recess for the high discipline of fifth grade math class. My beloved teacher (I loved him, we all did) opened a folder and began roll call. Name, assignment. Check. Check.

"Sharon, your math homework?"

"I didn't do it," I said airily. Boldly, even. My heart beat faster in my throat.

"But I saw you working on something all through recess."

"Oh! I've been writing a book instead." I looked around the room at blank, uncomprehending faces: this announcement didn't seem to have the impact I'd anticipated.

"I'm going to be a writer," I explained. "I don't need math."

"In my class you do." His dark brown eyes flicked at me gravely as he penciled in a zero next to my name in the grade book. "You'll get out your math book and join the rest of us. Now."

"I'm disappointed in you," he said. The death knell of pronouncements.

You won't be when I'm famous, I whispered darkly, chin tucked into my chest, opening the math book with resolute dignity.

Ah, rebellion tastes so bitter. It's not as if I'd truly expected a different outcome. I didn't really believe I'd chanced upon the hidden escape clause that all the teachers already knew but couldn't by law tell us about: just publicly renounce math for fame and all will be forgiven.

I knew I'd shirked my responsibility. Okay, I was wrong! It's just that thirty minutes before I'd been seized with this idea: the idea of a story about a man foundering in depression, a man who seizes upon a hope -- "as a man adrift clings to flotsam," I scribbled in the margin feverishly.

But what kind of hope? A vain one? I'd had a half hour to go before the math assignment was due, but it seemed to me I'd read the phrase "Tis a hope, but a vain one" somewhere before. No, that wasn't original. I could do better.

I put aside the monochrome grey and white math page with watery blue lines ordering listless numbers on into infinity, and wrote furiously on a fresh sheet of paper, arms crooked and head bent to perpetuate a force field around me. Don't interrupt me, I'm hot right now.

So I had a good start on the story when math class started, but no assignment. I didn't mean to forsake my math assignment -- well, not exactly. The story I wanted to tell was just, somehow, so much more provocative than long division. (What truth can bring a man hope, what sorrows can pin him ever down?)

I began my math assignment over in earnest, covered in humility. But I couldn't help peering, piqued, at the teacher over the pages of my book.

Was it truly sorrow that deepened the corners of his eyes like that? Or was it....amusement?

I finished the story in Mrs. Dumars' reading class. I let the man drown. Strike a tally in the favor of public education's little hells, the most muscular being fifth-grade math and order above all things.

****

I woke up this morning and turned on my computer. Blinked and squinted into the sudden blue light a computer makes when it warms to a human.

Signed in to my email and read this message:

Your post earlier today seals it for me. Here's what needs to be done. Either you do it or I'm going to do it for you:

Copy out your longer blog entries and paste them into book form. Use Lulu or some other online publisher and get a book in print. Call it "Sharon's Life" or "Confessions of a Domestic Engineer" or something. It won't require much editing, just enough to make it read like a book instead of a blog. You can even illustrate it.

I will buy one. I'll buy two if that's what it takes to entice you forward.

No more delays. Your public is waiting.

I grinned.

I sat back in my desk chair and folded my hands across my stomach and just grinned.

I'll be thanking you, in my reply email, for waking me up with such an incredible compliment.
But I'm also thanking you now.

self portrait, this one in acrylic

2007-01-05T16:48:00.000-05:00

Rick Lee took this photo of me at a CAB meeting in Taylor Books last May.

I made this painting from looking at that photo:

12" x 12", acrylic paint on stretched canvas

aren't we all in Appalachia?

2007-01-05T10:42:00.000-05:00

A ball stretched with pink and blue and yellow streaks bounces in front of my car and I brake gently, a reflex.

Sure enough, a towheaded child with grimy cheeks scrambles after it as another little boy with swinging straight hair jams his fists into his jacket pockets, studying the ball's progress grimly.

I stop the car completely, shifting into Park and opening my door. My mules that look like cowboy boots at the toes make a clopping sound like horses as I unfold from the driver's seat and go after the ball.

I palm it easily, the ball. It's the kind of ball you buy for a dollar at the supermarket, the kind they stack in wire bins with a square hole at the bottom so shorter people can tease and dribble them out. Once extricated, it's difficult to return the bouncy balls back into the cage, and they only cost a dollar, so the parents usually buy them. Inventive marketing ploy. I'd do the same, if I could make my artwork flexible to movement and appealing to small children.

I walk the ball back across the street, rather than toss it genially, which was my first impulse. A tense and distracted woman rushes out with a telephone cradled between ear and chin; she grabs the arm of the child closest to the curb, and thanks me in an aside from the conversation already in progress.

The small boys roll their eyes up at me, consideringly.

I get back into my car. The radio is still playing, undistracted. A man has called in to complain about his next-door neighbor who wears a mullet and is probably from West Virginia.

"Now, we can't stereotype," the talk show host says plaintively. "We know that we could find people with mullets just about anywhere, say, California, and we can't judge people by a geographic location or we'll be flooded with emails after the show from people from West Virginia. So let's just say this now. Just because the man has a mullet doesn't mean he's from West Virginia."

"Well, it would certainly seem to indicate an Appalachian region," the caller insists stubbornly.

I'm tilting my head, listening intently. A few years ago a woman came to my door collecting funds for sundries to benefit disadvantaged Appalachian women.

I was digging through the bottom of my purse for change when it occurred to me: aren't we in Appalachia*? I asked the woman collecting the money.

She didn't know. We had to go look it up, in fact.
Appalachia is a false economic construct.

On the radio show, someone cues in the theme song to "O Brother, Where Art Thou" (Man of Constant Sorrows).

"Why don't you say, instead of West Virginia, why don't you say hillbilly," the host suggests.

Yes, that's so much better. Thanks.
I sigh, a little, flicking my turn signal left.

"Tell me what this man did to you," the host prompts.
"He has a rusted-out old Ford, and he parks it in my yard. Also he has a fishing boat that he's nailed down kitchen chairs into."

See, to me that's just funny. I mean the part about the boat.
But I turn off the radio. I don't want to hear any more. I love my state. We're not all like that. And if we are, so what?

The half-hearted rain starts to patter down harder and I turn the dial up on the wipers.

I'm looking for my dog. My dog ran away when I took him out for a walk. Something caught his attention and he bounded after it, snapping the leash instantly from the catch at his throat. He's a strong, sturdy dog. Stronger in body than he is long in leg. Something like a muscular daschund on steroids.

So instead of tracking him on foot, I just gave up and started driving my car around.

I find him in a trailer park. I stop the car again and get out with my arms open, calling brightly so as not to frighten Max away with my hopeful longing (get your filthy carcass in my car, right now).

And me without an Oscar Meyer hot dog, fresh out of the thin plastic wrapper, to lure him into it. Shoot.

Max is sniffing a pile in the narrow strip of barren land between a gray trailer and an orange and white one. To his right, a greyed old man is stooped over a pile of twigs in front of the orange and white trailer.

I know my dog hears me, but he's not going to approach. He's going to make me work for it. I want to walk up into the property, but I'm afraid to without permission.

I call to the old man: "Can I walk up into your yard to get my dog?"

The old man straightens, pushing his dark gray toboggan back from his forehead.

He spits on the ground and glares: "I don't give a rat's ass. It's not my yard."

I take a few more steps forward and whistle up the dog: this time, he comes. I open up the passenger door and he jumps into the car, doing a little muddy dance on the passenger seat. I close the door behind him and circle around the back to get in on my side. I know the dog won't run out the other door. He's had enough.

This is my home. Always has been. If you haven't been here, you don't know what it is and I'm not sure I feel like explaining it. Growing up, my sister and I -- transplanted West Virginians -- used to lie awake playing what-if games: what if we hadn't moved here, in 1972? What if we'd grown up somewhere else (and it could have happened so easily!)? What kind of people would we have become, then?

And we'd shudder at the very thought.

*There are several states included in Appalachia. West Virginia is just the one state completely within it is all.

welcome to my webcam

2007-01-04T09:07:00.000-05:00

Self portrait, manipulated photograph.

(when I say manipulated, I mean that I used the oil paint filter because I've just figured out what that is. I'm a slow learner. A slow mover, too.)

I took the picture with the webcam Heather sent me for Christmas. In the picture, I'm wearing the brilliant multicolored scarf that Melonie knitted me for Christmas. Melonie got a webcam from Heather, too (and Heather got a scarf from Melonie).

When Melonie got her present from Heather, she opened it right away. Then Melonie called me and urged me to open mine as well, though I kept insisting I had to wait -- no opening presents until Xmas, that's the rule.

We got the same thing, Melonie said. But now I can't talk to you about what I got. So just open it already so you can play with it!

I had no idea what she was on about.

So then Melonie told me all manner of inventive advice to throw me off the scent. "If you're going to wait that long, you'd better put that in the refrigerator. Seriously."
And: "It's a particular kind of mammal."
"What kind of mammal lives in the refrigerator?"
"Never mind, Sharon."

Then I finally gave in and opened it and we were all beside ourselves. We can video conference! We can stay connected! The interstate time differential now means nothing -- and all thanks to Heather. Woot!

I have fantastic friends.

Melonie, despite a crunching schedule and raising six children, pulled off another dang-near-perfect GPA last semester. She's already got a degree and she's going back for another one in education so she can teach. You won't hear her talking about it -- how demanding it is or how well she's done, either one. But I'm saying it -- as usual, she did a tremendous job.

And Heather? Heather is the answer to my prayers. We've laughed more than once over the fact that we've apparently been separated at birth. Heather is like my fraternal twin. Okay, maybe a twin born seven years later, but a twin nonetheless. Only sometimes I imagine that Heather is who I could have been, if I'd been confident enough to study medicine too.

What I wouldn't give to be able to fix people the way Heather can! But instead I mope around hardware stores waxing poetic about how there's a practical solution for every problem - I just don't know what it is. Because that's the kind of wacky, goofball thing I do. (I worry about myself sometimes.)

So sometimes I envy Heather a little bit.

And Laura, when I saw her before New Year's Eve, came over and kissed the top of my head lightly before taking her seat at the table with me and Melonie (we had Heather on the phone). It was such a tactful gesture -- considering how much distance I seem to put between myself and everyone else. (I don't hug. I don't do the social kissing of cheeks. I'd prefer to not even shake hands, but merely nod formally from across the room.) I wanted to say thank you for that, but instead just gulped and looked down at the table.

I don't know what kind of friend I am for them. Probably something on the order of Ralph Kramden, I'm guessing.

I'm spending the morning working at home today -- uploading artwork on my art gallery (not my online store; this is something entirely different) and figuring out how to register my new online gallery for tax purposes. (This is still very confusing for me.)

So naturally I was looking at my webcam instead, and wrapping and re-wrapping the scarf around my neck and thinking about what good friends I have. And how grateful I am to have them.

Given the long-distance between us all, I'm sure Verizon is grateful, too -- but not as much as I am.

stage fright

2007-01-03T12:37:00.000-05:00

Before the faceless darkened sea
Equilibrium is only a balance
Between the mirror
And the stage

11" x 14", watercolor and watercolor pencils on cold press

it ain't me, babe

2007-01-02T13:50:00.000-05:00

It's not as if I've never been confused for someone else. There was that one day in the late Eighties when I walked out of a Charleston Fas-Chek and someone screamed, "Oh my gosh! It's her! It's her!"

I didn't know what to say. I didn't see the resemblance. I couldn't guess, first off, what Molly Ringwald would be doing shopping at a Fas-Chek.

This morning I ran into an old high school classmate in the sewing aisle at Wal-Mart. She stopped me and said, "Can I ask you a question?"

"Always," I say, bracing myself for the worst.

"Are you the girl on the WVAccess page?"

"I certainly hope not," I said, laughing.

It's true I've done a few endorsements. I saw my own Stern Man boxers on Yahoo! Mail for a day (with the message: Need a Place to Store That Intergalactic Mail?) and I've been an enthusiastic spokesperson for Guidant.

Yet I can't imagine my marketing campaign has spread quite that far. I mean to have a supply of stock images out there in the public domain that just anyone could use (as if they'd want to).

"Every time I go to this website ," she continued, "I see this picture of a girl typing at a computer and I'm almost positive it's you."

So of course I had to go home and look it up. And though I guess maybe I see a resemblance, the primary response for me was one of delight: because that girl, whoever she is, is really skinny.

I know this is bad to admit, but it completely made my day.

leftover Christmas pix

2007-01-02T08:24:00.000-05:00

The cover of my first album.

And here, I was just playing around with the special effects on the camera I'm still learning how to use.

I'm at my desk, transcribing meeting notes this morning. They're two weeks late and I'm still not finished with them. I just put them away somewhere and today they floated rudely back into the parameters of my consciousness. Hello. Remember us? We're still due.

Great.

The kids went back to school today. Not gladly, not willingly, but they went. Suprisingly enough, after nearly three weeks at home with them (they were sick the week before Christmas), I felt a pang of sorrow watching them go.

When I'd safely deposited the youngest at his preschool I walked away feeling a touch of the melancholy -- with a sense of something missing. Even though he'd barred the gate just ten minutes before, when I had to almost drag him out the back door of the house to get him into the car. Even though he'd kept swatting me about the head with his mittened hands, singing, "Silly, silly, you're a sillyhead."

They (often) make me nuts. I had to go into whole other rooms sometimes over the vacation to get five minutes breathing space from them. And then I miss them like anything when they're gone. They're so lively and so funny.

I know probably every parent feels that about their offspring. But I just admire them so much. Their cleverness, their strong wills, their keen sense of justice. Sometimes I scold them and then I have to leave the room so I can laugh -- they can amuse me so much, even in their mischief.

Well, this isn't getting my work done.

I was just feeling a rush of gratitude for them. I had to write it out.

Now, back to work.

the light bearer

2007-01-01T10:05:00.000-05:00

9" x 12", watercolor pencils on cold press.

I saw an advertisement in a magazine that showed a little girl carrying a lantern. I very much liked the pose, so I drew it -- altering it, of course, to suit.

I've long been ashamed that I can't invent images from my head, any more than I can compose my own music when I play it. There are moments when I feel no better than a sponge -- absorbing what's around me, and feeding something back out again.

Example. I can read music; I took private lessons to learn how. But truly, no matter how diligently I might practice it feels mechanical and stilted until I hear someone else play the same score. Only then do I have a feel of how it should really be, and I can intuit the rest, imbuing the rhythm and the accentation where I trust it to sound best.

Some might say this is a gift. I tend to just feel like a mime, instead.

Writing has a rhythm too. Writing is like playing the piano for me. When I read someone else's writing I'm feeling it out for cadence. Not the words. I don't mean the words. I mean the flow of it -- storytellers and musicians are very nearly the same to me. When it's good, you grow alert and start humming along.

The editors would call it suspension of disbelief.
I would call it synchronization of minds.

With my art, it works like this: when I find an image that's particularly arresting, when I find a color I'm taken with, I save it. I'm one to tear pages from magazines in doctor's offices, or ask clerks for fabric samples to take home. I lie and say I have to match it up with my decor and see if it works. Really I just want the color. The color, or the texture.

And I use my camera shamelessly to save the visions I can't preserve any other way.

"Go ahead. Live in your rose-colored world," someone said to me last week. I almost said: It isn't rose-colored at all. It's tacked up with scraps of other people's lives. It's a kaleidoscope of a world I live in.

I can't imagine up a better world than the one that already exists. It just happens to exist in pieces.

It doesn't mean my interpretation of the world will necessarily be the right one.
But it will mean the possibilities are going to be endless.

the want of a larger view

2006-12-31T22:15:00.000-05:00

I can't remember what my New Year's resolutions were for 2006. Whatever they might have been, I'm certain I surpassed them. 2006 was a very good year for me.

Twenty years ago, I was a senior in high school. My resolutions probably involved passing Chemistry and getting that last science credit so I could graduate (something I still have nightmares about!), deciding on a college and a major, and then -- finding a way to afford it once I got there.

Ten years ago, as a single mother who'd just remarried and landed her dream job as a reporter for a newspaper, my resolutions were all about succeeding on that new path. I longed to win an award from the Associated Press in 1997 (and I did!). I also resolved to see my work published somewhere other than the newspaper. I aspired to be published in a magazine, or better yet, to finish my novel, and see that published (and I didn't).

Going into 2007 my resolutions are a little different.

New Year's Eve traditionally seems to be a holiday for taking inventory. I've never really been one to get up and go out, on New Year's. I did in college, but even then, while I was out, I always felt less of the celebratory and a little more of the pensive and reflective. Another year gone, a new one dawning; what will happen in it?

No one ever, really, knows.

But I do know this. Last night we went to the movies -- we saw Night at the Museum (it was much better than I expected). A teenage girl and her mother seemed to be having words in the parking lot; we walked past them blithely, pretending not to hear.

"I'm not going to wait outside for you forever," the teenager said smartly. Her very posture seemed tense with bitterness and resentment.

The mother sighed heavily, making a swatting motion toward her cheek that could have been meant for a strand of hair -- or an unchecked tear.

We paid for our tickets and popcorn. We found our seats. A few moments later, the angry teenage daughter and the blank-faced, resigned mother chose seats near us, across the aisle. The mother sat at the end, nearest me. The daughter stalked pointedly to the other end, taking the seat nearest the wall.

The mother rummaged in her purse, either feigning disinterest or looking for Kleenex. The daughter crossed her legs and held her right hand up to her face like some sort of shield, disassociating herself from her mother's acquaintance entirely.

As soon as the movie started, the stomachache that tormenting me all day intensified and I had to excuse myself to the restroom. I was splashing cool water on my face and washing my hands in the sink when the wan, battle-weary mother walked past, her red-rimmed eyes not seeing me.

My eyes followed her in the mirror as she slipped quietly into the middle stall and latched it behind her. I heard the telltale rattle of the toilet paper spindle. The sharp, subtractive barks of sniffles echoed in the tiled bathroom silence.

I seem to spend a lot of time observing other people -- the things they say, the things they do. In fact, when I was a reporter, that was my job.

Yet I listened to a crying woman in a bathroom stall as I went on lathering my hands with translucent pink liquid soap, absently. And though I wanted to say something, anything to her, I didn't know what exactly that would be. I honestly couldn't think of a single thing to say.

I looked at my reflection in the mirror and knew the want of a larger view.

So this year, no resolutions to lose ten pounds or get promoted or see my name published somewhere else. No goals to get ahead, or run a marathon, or learn another language.

Better I should stretch a little and learn how to hug someone when they're crying in public; to speak my compliments to others out loud instead of just thinking them; and to extend my hand, instead of looking away politely.

That's what I've been thinking.

Christmas kid

2006-12-28T15:48:00.000-05:00

9" x 12", watercolor pencils and watercolor, on cold press

The rug feels clumsy, I know Christmas is past, but I drew her anyway, and I really like this kid, the way she showed up.

thinking

2006-12-28T13:39:00.000-05:00

9" x 12", watercolor and watercolor pencils on cold press

rose fairy

2006-12-27T08:08:00.000-05:00

9" x 12" cold press, watercolors and watercolor pencil

dandelion dream

2006-12-26T09:25:00.000-05:00

I got quite a lot of watercolor paper for Christmas. And watercolors, and watercolor pencils. So I did a wash in Pthalo Blue last night, and weeded out these dandelions from it.

Close up of the most finely detailed one: click on the image to see it magnified.

Outside the skies are grey; it might snow. I have to pick up my work from the gallery in an hour, since it's closing for the rest of the season.

it's beginning to look a lot like...

2006-12-23T20:02:00.000-05:00

The success of your own personal Christmas is incumbent upon many variant factors. One, the goodwill and cheer of those around you. Two, the number of responsibilities assigned to you in order to better orchestrate the parade which is our yuletide season. Three, the viability of your town's water and septic system.

You heard me.

The day before Christmas Eve is not a good day for the water to start coming out of your kitchen sink in a vaguely disturbing shade of tan.

This means:

1. No showers.
2. No running of the dishwasher.

~~3. No touching of the historical artifacts.~~

(No, that's only in The Chronicles of Narnia. Back up.)

3. You have to go out and buy lots and lots of distilled water.

This is after you go downstairs and root through the pantry and find that you do not actually have a great quantity of unflavored distilled water. You have a fair amount of strawberry-kiwi water, but that doesn't mean you'd want to wash your hands in it.

And you couldn't in good conscience give flavored distilled water to the dog, any more than you could give the new brown water coming out of the faucet to the dog, so you give the dog just plain old distilled water, which in its purity and refreshing coolness startles him so much that he regurgitates Kibbles and Bits all over the newly mopped kitchen flooring.

And the stupid beast can't just stand in one place and upchuck; he has to run away from you as you call frantically trying to herd him off at the pass, his flappy jowls hurling half-digested dog chow in a wide, swinging arc.

And, of course you're out of Swiffers, too, because the five-year-old child in the house just helpfully finished waxing two inches of the dining room floor with the last half of the box.

Not to mention that this unexpected reaction to the bottled water gives one pause to what immunities one might have acquired against the stuff we've been using and drinking without a care on a daily basis.

Okay...water and Swiffers. Maybe milk, too, but you can't buy too much, you remember, because the trunk of the car is already packed full with presents you've not had time to wrap yet. And though it may improve your posture, people tend to frown on it when you carry milk jugs home on your head.

Outside in the streets, as you drive to the supermarket, you observe a mighty river that flows in the gutters -- ah, a line has broken -- and the cars just drive around it. Hello. Irrigation at its best.

The supermarket is just crowded with the old people who sigh wearily and say, "I hate to say this, but when you get older Christmas just doesn't mean as much to you."

(If you hate to say it, why are you? What do I look like? Aversion therapy?)

"It's just another day, isn't it?"

Technically? Yes. Actually? No.

"Does it feel like Christmas to you?"

Uh....yeah?
Is this the wrong answer?

Because if I grip my shopping cart more tightly and lean into the handle to deliver the rest of my stunningly forceful speech:

"Yes, it feels like Christmas! Why shouldn't it? My children have been sick all week, I've cleaned up puke and snotty tissues and played Parcheesi and Sorry and Boggle, everyone wants me to be somewhere right now and where am I? I'm at the supermarket buying bottled water because a water line broke somewhere and I started washing dishes in water that looked like coffee! Of course it feels like Christmas! Where in the hell have you been?"

...They're going to feel like they've missed out on something, and I wouldn't want to be responsible for that.

Southwest landscape

2006-12-22T19:26:00.000-05:00

Because I like doing landscapes once in a while.

the chaos ensues

2006-12-22T13:28:00.000-05:00

All week long I've been taking care of sick kids. Now it's Friday, the Christmas holiday is upon us, and I'm the one who's puny. That's what I've heard people say: "I've got a case of the punies."

I had delirious dreams all night long: I don't know what to blame them on -- the apple-cinnamon TheraFlu I drank before going to sleep, or the drill-shaped upper respiratory virus boring a tighter and tighter hole into the center of my skull. Maybe both.

I dreamed I was at Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, and this guy who blackmailed me, in the first grade, into giving him my Snoopy pencil eraser followed me around asking me questions. I felt so annoyed! All I wanted to do was paint, matching up sand tones with yellow ochre, cad white and a little bit of cad red.

I dreamed I was in high school again and I kept skipping the science and math classes (I have that dream a lot) and the principal told me I could make it up by taking an extra piano class. Only I couldn't play an actual piano (another recurring theme); I had to stand in front of a closet and slam coat hangers into a sort of xylophone attachment bolted horizontally across the back wall. It gave a whole new dimension to the idea of percussion.

I woke up sweating from both dreams. Sweating and shivering and pulling at my hair, which fortunately I'd braided tightly before going to sleep; so I couldn't tear much out.

Now I just shake. I feel all trembly, like I've got stage fright, only there's no stage; just the house and the kids to take care of, and a lot of laundry to finish before Christmas.

Dear Santa

2006-12-20T17:57:00.000-05:00

Real letters to Santa from second-graders:

Dear Santa,

What I want for Christmas is Baby Alive. You get to feed her and she make a stinky.
You get to change her diper.

Your friend,
Katelyn

Dear Santa,

I love you.
I will not hate you.
You route.
I lick you.
You are a good friend.
Kole hates you.
But I don't will you bring me a Xbox 360 will you bring me a 360 troller

Joey

Dear Santa,

I wish Cristmas Eve would never stop. I wish for Cristmas Eve I get a happy family.

Sierra

Dear Santa,

I'm into 12 dancing princess and 1 of the babys that poops and peas. and Drinks milk and eats for relay, and a rubber Mom 6 feet tall.

Your friend,
Shelly

There were more in the paper, but those stood out the most for me. Funny what kids ask for: one kid asked for a door. It seems to me -- I don't know any of these kids, so I can't back it up -- that the ones who ask for a boatload of things probably have an abundance of possessions to begin with.

I think it's the ones who don't have much: who don't ask for much.

It's as if they've already learned to keep their expectations low. Or maybe it's because they'd just be content with so little.

That kid who just wants a happy family -- that breaks my heart.

paper bag bird

2006-12-20T11:29:00.000-05:00

I sketched this on the front of a paper bag that came home with me from a greeting card store.

it was good

2006-12-18T19:59:00.000-05:00

If I could make an amalgam of all the Christmas memories I ever had from childhood, it would be this: driving past someone else's house that's been strung with lights, a brilliant festive tree standing smugly dead center in a boastful, uncurtained living room window.

If I could point out one person who taught me the meaning of Christmas, it would be my fifth-grade teacher, the one who took me aside after I'd made my classmates cry when I told them with disgust: There's no Santa Claus; you're all a bunch of fools.

Just because you don't have Christmas, he said to me gently, doesn't mean you can't be tactful with those of us who do. This isn't about focusing on what it is you don't have, or what you believe and what other people don't. It's about giving people what you can, even if it's just kindness and respect.

I'd never seen it that way. I felt so ashamed of myself.

Come to think of it, that teacher helped me with my speech, too, because I used to lisp -- I couldn't say the "th" sound, like bath, Thursday, father. I used the "ff" sound instead. People found this no end of irritating. I really tried hard to avoid using any of those words. Unfortunately I wore a size three shoe, everyone always wanted to know what day it was on Thursday, I couldn't get away with taking a shower instead. The th sound is everywhere.

I couldn't get speech therapy. (It's a long story. Don't ask.) So this teacher coached me privately for I don't even know how long, helping me repeat sentences over and over until I captured the enunciation: "My father takes a bath on Thursdays." "The thimble thinks of things three times." The sentences were so ridiculous that they made me laugh, which also helped with my stuttering.

Did I mention I stuttered? But I doubt most people know that about me.

Since then I've spoken fairly fluently. I only lisp and/or stutter if I'm very upset (and when I'm very upset I'm more likely to clam up entirely lest I do either one). What I aim for (what I always aim for) is a smooth, modulated control.

I had no way, then, to say thank you -- until a few weeks ago when I tracked down an address.

I sat down and wrote that teacher a letter today.

The moment I pulled out a blank page the words tumbled out: you helped me at Christmas time and I always appreciated it --

I wrote the letter but there was no way to put this into words really -- what it meant to be able to say, Thank you. You changed my life. Christmas was always bearable, after that. Did you know? And so was speaking in public.

I couldn't wait to mail the letter. I had to wait until my husband came home from work to mail the letter because all three boys were home today, sick. And then I practically ran out the door with his dinner still on the table ("I'll be right back, it'll just take a minute," I called over my shoulder, hurrying away).

The post office, so bustling and lively during the day, is eerily quiet at night. I walked the letter inside and studied it again -- as if saying goodbye to a friend -- before dropping it in the OUT OF TOWN slot.

I got back in the car, put the key in the ignition, swung away from the curb. I should have circled the block and turned back toward home, but instead I went on driving, slowly, up and down every street in town, looking at all the houses with their Christmas lights, gliding smoothly past the bold twinkly fir trees in the windows and the bristly wreaths hanging on the doors.

For how it felt, I could have been nine years old again, looking out the car windows dreamily at everyone else's lives.

Some people hang clear lights only, and it looks so dressy. Others hang multicolored strings, or only blues. I always favored the blue ones. Not as flashy, not as bright, but calmly lovely -- that's what the blue lights are.

Our house has blue lights, and green lights, and a string or two of multicolored lights thrown in for fun. I had to admire them before I parked in the driveway.

I'd been crying, it seemed, while driving through town. I felt so peaceful, too. Like I'd just said a perfect sentence, without missing a single syllable, and it was kind, and it was...good.

hmmm

2006-12-18T16:35:00.000-05:00

I decided to separate the two fairies in this watercolor, finally. The smaller of the two is now matted and framed in a 5" x 7" space all its own.

I don't think I could ever sell her; she was so accidental. But once I found her I had to have her. And so she stays, pinned in mid-flight for ever.

Yet when I did this, everyone in the family asked the same thing: You didn't cut up the other fairy in the picture, did you?

As if I would. (Obviously, they're not certain.)

cyclamen fairy

2006-12-17T12:31:00.000-05:00

I brought some cyclamen home from the grocery store -- the folds of the foliage (and the delicate teardrop petals) just implored to be drawn. I feel like I really captured the leaves, at least.

Afterward, I brushed in the flower fairy, though you can't really see her well unless you click on the image. I deliberately left the features blurry. I'd keep "fixing" her, but the piece already feels overworked.

the sounds of other people's thoughts

2006-12-16T07:30:00.000-05:00

We went shopping after our dinner in the Italian restaurant. We'd had an ounce of wine each (the house wine, complimentary). Neither of us had been to the mall in a while. I only wanted the mall for its bookstore. Nothing else is entirely worthwhile.

A little girl with impossibly curly light brown hair stood in the doorway of a clothing store, mouthing an urgent plea almost voicelessly: "Mommy, Mommy, I want my Mom." No one seemed to notice her. I stopped, studying her, and inclined my head in her direction, not stooping, anymore than I'd kneel to hear a short adult better; I always hated it when adults did that to me.

"Have you lost your Mom?"

She pointed past me, a quirky smile on her face and her eyes trained on someone behind me. I followed her gaze to a young bespectacled woman examining jewelry at a kiosk. The woman had seen us and had an embarrassed smile on her face. She spoke in a low, firm voice I recognize all too well.

"Madison, come over here right now."

"Can't," the girl said confidently, pointing one toe in delicately, hands behind her back. "There are all these people in the way."

My husband laughed, and we moved on, leaving them to it.

Being in a bookstore is a luxury for me. Always has been. The smell of printers' ink on new pages. You can hear the whispers of someone else's thoughts when a thumb turns a page: an audible rustle, a readjustment of thought. Ideas make noise. A shuffling noise; they must be listened for.

They soothe me.

I bought a 2007 day planner at the bookstore -- the kind with a full page for each day, only I have no use for the times printed faintly in the left hand margin (8:00, 9:00, 10:00....).

I want to get back to writing the kind of journal I wrote in college -- one observation a day, a page of descriptive writing -- one page only -- about one single event seen or experienced on that particular date in time. Not a diary, not He-said-this and I-did-that or even I-dreamed-I-could-fly; but instead, only glimpses of a passing view.

Two old men coughing into their steaming coffee at a back table in the diner. A white-haired crossing guard flinging her arms out in traffic, the crimson heart-shaped smear of lipstick across her mouth the bravest thing about her. That kind of writing.

Because people-watching is one of my favorite things. It makes me love them -- how they keep going and trying and doing. Even though they're scarred, or over-armored, and full of fear.

A coffee-table book of San Francisco: Aerial Views of the City by the Bay pulled me nearer. I had to pick it up and leaf through it, even though it filled me with a seeping kind of sadness, the kind of liquid sorrow that keeps filtering through like blood from a hasty scratch. All those pastel rowhouses. The Transamerica pyramid. I know it all too well.

I closed the book with a firm snap: what need have I of this? I was there. I can Google Map the 1700 block of Jackson Street any time I want and see it for myself.

I bought the day planner. The clerk behind the counter had olive green sort of cat-eye glasses that were popular back when my sister and I were little girls. "Find everything you needed?" she asked without looking up. "Yes," I said, waiting for her to make eye contact with me, but she never did. Eyes averted, head down, like a commuter in a crowd struggling to get somewhere else. It made me sorry for her. I can't explain why.

a day out

2006-12-15T17:12:00.000-05:00

In the restaurant today over lunch, there were three couples seated to the right of us at a big round table in the corner: retired people, white-haired, well-dressed. On our left, two young mothers with children young enough to be carried around in those complicated-looking infant car seats that double as baby carriers.

I don't know which group made me sadder: the young mothers raptly discussing cereals and the safest kind of highchair, or the stiffly seated grandparents conversing about titanium knees and cholesterol levels.

The mother with the older baby clearly dominated the friendship. She sat very straight, sliding her eyes pridefully over to her child (whose plump dimpled hands kept waving gracefully in and out of the carrier seat as she spooned him something green from a jar), delivering firm -- I would say strident -- opinions on feeding and sleeping.

The newer mother would nod and swallow, listening hard, as if she longed to take notes.

Unexpectedly, I recalled a time twelve and a half years ago when I'd carried my infant son into a restaurant in San Francisco, gritting my teeth with self-consciousness any time he cried out or turned red in the face (signaling an impending bowel movement).

Really, I thought, I hadn't enjoyed my children's infancies much, especially with my oldest. It seemed there was always so much to worry about, then -- I had far too much anxiety over their infancies to find much joy in the actual experience.

This realization brings sorrow: as if something valuable has been carelessly squandered.

I studied the young women over my wine glass and envied them their aplomb, doubtless forgetting that I'd probably carried myself much the same way (how secure could they be, if all they can discuss is the children?).

My parents didn't come to California to visit. I brought the child back to them (my son squirming and angry, throwing his sippy cup in a fury at the back of another traveler's head. I was the harried parent no one wants to sit near on an airplane).

I felt so alone in the world, in my twenties. I felt blank and little, as if still absorbing knowledge from each person who came into my periphery. I'd wonder why other adults ignored me at parties, knowing all the while that I had nothing of value to offer anyway: I had no assurance or certification to make my insight valid. What does a twentysomething know?

"When we last visited the grandchildren, we stopped in Michigan," one of the older women at the other table said confidently, as if delivering a well-rehearsed speech. "We so enjoy traveling now. It's so easy to do."

Everyone else nodded, but I sensed a hollow ring to her voice -- a sort of false bravado. She wasn't saying, They don't come to us; we have to go to them, and it's so awkward being in their house and not wanting to offend them by asking too many questions or giving too much advice. But I heard it anyway.

I watched the new mothers. I listened to the grandparents. A woman across the room also having lunch with her husband caught my eye: she was looking down at the table between them, the corners of her mouth pulled down. She wore a white turtleneck with candy canes and Christmas trees patterned on it. It looked too prim and smug, somehow.

I always feel anxiety when I go out in public and realize how other people have dressed. It always seems that whatever it is I've chosen, it's just slightly wrong. (In this case, a powder blue sport shirt that my father in law used to wear when he painted the house. I just tucked it into my blue jeans to hide the paint smudges, thinking no one would notice. Now in the restaurant, I realized how arrogant and careless that was of me.)

For that matter, I barely recognized my reflection in the mirrored wall on the other side of the room: long, thin, flat hair, full round face. In fact, I reminded myself of the kind of mother I'd see around when I was growing up; the ones in their late thirties and early forties, identifiable by the quietly stunned expressions they'd wear in an unguarded moment -- the expression you have when you realize you've lost something.

(I've had a hysterectomy. I'll never have another infant of my own again.)

These girls with their first babies. Everything is monumental to them; because it's so new. There's this part of you that wants to lean over and say confidentially, if a little cruelly, "Oh, for Heaven's sake. Let the boy sleep through your meal; you can feed him later. You don't have to give him his peas before your own dinner just because you sat down. And it doesn't matter what highchair you get, or what kind of spoon you buy. They grow up no matter what you do." But then you don't say that, because it's kind of touching, in a way, their firm-jawed determination in doing it right (whatever that is).

"Personally," one of the grandmothers said, "I've been finding that dyeing your hair blond doesn't always work well. It's so easy to get that false color! And after a certain point dyeing your hair dark seems to age you more than anything else. I think it's wise to try tinting your hair a reddish color."

I didn't look up, but I could feel their gaze swiveling in my direction as I toyed with my salad.

I tried not to smile.

"Let's have a toast," my husband said suddenly, and I lifted my glass to his, obligingly.
"But what do we toast to?" he asked me.
"To getting better as we get older," I said very definitely.

We drank to it.
And I felt such gratitude.

another figure study

2006-12-14T17:00:00.000-05:00

no doctors please

2006-12-14T10:53:00.000-05:00

If I ever decide to quit the day job and do stand-up instead, I don't want my audience to have any emergency room technicians in it. That would have to be the toughest crowd you could get. You can't shock them; they've seen everything. You can't make them laugh; they're too busy.

And no wonder they can't be shocked: the people you see in ER waiting rooms! Some guy wandered in off the street with a lab order in his hand and what looked like a duck feather swooping grandly out of his hand-knitted beanie hat. He wore dirty blue jeans rolled up to mid-calf and big slopping work boots that coughed when he walked.

The focal point, though, was that duck feather. You knew he had to have sewn it in there. What you didn't know was why. I thought feathers were only worn in caps at certain altitudes, i.e., the Matterhorn or similar. Apparently I'm wrong.

I got there first, so the duck-feather guy gave me a long, mean, go-to-Hell look when I got called back before him. Bluntly put, I was glad to be getting out of there.

The attending doctor was round and bespectacled, like Santa Claus but beardless and much younger. The triage nurse had already told everyone else my story ("This is the one who fell under a delivery truck!") and what they wanted to know was: Which was it, Fed Ex or Ups?

I felt a bit piqued by their priorities, but whatever.

I had to explain while laughing and telling jokes, because I felt entirely too ridiculous otherwise. Rule #1: When in doubt, use self-deprecation like so much social K-Y. (It works.)

They took X-rays of my right foot, and my right knee too. Nothing broken; just a hard wrench and a yukky sprain. That's a technical term. Feel free to use it.

The nurse wrapped the ankle in an Ace bandage and closed an air cast around it all to brace it up firmly. "This is great," I said admiringly. "Something for my children to respect."

(This is where everyone looks at me blankly. Don't they know this is what children do if you're not tagged like a deer? They jump on the injured limb and beg to bounced upon it until the limb falls off. It's a fact.)

"Is there anything I can prescribe for you to make you feel better?" The doctor asked me, pen poised over the prescription pad.

"A wife?" I said hopefully.

He rolled his eyes and made this long hissing exhalation in a manner that clearly stated, Lord, I do not suffer these fools gladly; why do You send them to me?

He made angry diagonal slashes across both open scripts instead.

So, no painkillers.
Doctors have such a keen interest in discipline. When will I learn?

He scrawled across the bottom:

ice
elevate
Motrin, etc
use air cast while up on leg (as if I only have one leg. Now I have this image of myself as a flamingo)
right ankle sprain

I drove myself back home, of course. I felt like a football player with my ankle all taped up. Driving was an interesting experience. Try finding the brake with your left foot sometime. (No, don't. I was only kidding.) I found that the brake, when felt out with the left foot, isn't where you'd think it is. It's as if, in the subtle shift from right to left, space makes this massive readjustment and the brake disappears completely.

So I drove home like a hopped-up monkey who's too short to reach the pedals and just knows how to steer.

(Though that might be normal.)

illustration for a story I never wrote

2006-12-14T07:39:00.000-05:00

Some time ago when two of my nieces were little they crawled up in my lap for a silly picture. I did this watercolor last night from the photograph. I was going to give us fairy wings, but then I liked it just the way it was. It reminds me of an illustration to a story.

I'm off now to go find someone who can X-ray my ankle. The top of my foot turned a pale green color -- the same color of that one potato chip at the bottom of the bag. And I still can't move it around much.

It's so much fun being me.

a little guy

2006-12-13T06:28:00.000-05:00

This little guy showed up out of nowhere. I sat up last night just doodling with pastels (I couldn't find my watercolor pencils, and my ankles hurt too much to go hunt them up) and he emerged onto the page.

I especially like how confident he looks -- like he's ready to take on anything.

another exercise in brilliance

2006-12-12T15:37:00.000-05:00

Maybe I shouldn't be left unsupervised.

The delivery person left a pretty large package on my porch this afternoon and rang the doorbell to let me know it was there. Like the prompt respondent that I am I ran outdoors and inspected it: I wasn't expecting anything, I hadn't made any orders recently.

A cursory glance at the shipping label informed me that indeed the package did not belong to me. It belonged at a similar address two streets over. The delivery girl had just gotten back into the company truck. I raced down the stairs, calling and waving frantically so as to avert her from driving away and leaving me with a largish parcel I'd doubtless have to re-deliver myself.

I got as far as the passenger side window. I hit it with the palm of my hand to get her attention.

Then I either tripped, or experienced that lovely lifting and tilting of the ground that I have from time to time when I've either been standing too long or changed positions far too quickly.*

I rolled and ended up underneath the delivery truck.

The driver slammed on the brakes and made an exclamation, a not very intelligible one, but a very loud one nonetheless.

She jumped out of the truck, leaving the door open, and came around to help me out. Because, I found, I couldn't get out on my own. I appeared to be somewhat stuck in a very awkward position between the front and back tires. My cheek was scraped roughly against the asphalt, I appeared to be dusted with minute but harsh particles of sand and pebble, and my right ankle had started to throb like anything.

She took me by the hand and pulled me to my feet.

"What?" she kept asking me, horrified. "What, what, what?"

I took a deep breath.

"You're at the wrong house."

"What!" Her mouth dropped open. "All that? For a package?"

"I'm not delivering it," I said, a bit sullenly. (I felt so foolish).

She helped me up the stairs back to the porch. I hobbled away from her still muttering ("Nothing like falling under a truck to make your day more interesting") and realized, when I got inside, that not just my right ankle hurts. My left ankle hurts too. And I have a long vertical scrape down my left leg. And now my shoulders and elbows don't feel so special, either.

Is my life just not interesting enough? Or what?

*Of course, this had nothing to do with the fact that I forgot to take my ~~not-falling-down pills~~ Florinef today. Nothing at all, nope, no indeedy.

art auction

2006-12-12T08:08:00.000-05:00

I donated a painting to a charity art auction for a children's theatre in Savannah.

Suzanne has kindly posted about the results.

in the garden

2006-12-11T08:26:00.000-05:00

8" x 10",watercolor and watercolor pencil with ink on cold-pressed watercolor paper.

a new day

2006-12-09T11:39:00.000-05:00

I'm feeling much better today. These temporary lapses only season the course like so much salt.

My determination is renewed -- I can do this, and I am always learning how to do it better. Of course!

I have big plans for 2007.

This was a very good year.
Next year -- will be even better.

figure study

2006-12-08T18:51:00.000-05:00

rejection

2006-12-08T12:20:00.000-05:00

It is not always enjoyable being a studio artist. Sometimes, in fact, it is a grisly business. The part which involves actually interacting with other human beings. That is the part whereof I speak.

Time and again you even get rejection letters, to wit:

Dear Sharon,

Thank you for your recent submission.

[Though we didn't ask for it, so the girls and I had a good laugh over it when it came across the desk.]

At the moment, we are booked for quite some time.

[Possibly, into infinity. The homeless man down the block has a better chance than you of being hired, and all he has to do is stand there with his hand out in a dramatic expression of neo-con oppression.]

If you would like to submit more images, artist resume & statement, we would be happy to review it & keep on file.

[We need more material; that last thing you sent in was hysterical.]

There are a number of other quality galleries you might want to consider in the future.

[Just don't come back and bother us.]

Signed,
Person in Charge

*sigh*
I'd really prefer it if they just said: "No."

more ink washes

2006-12-07T18:36:00.000-05:00

The woman unwrapping layers of herself and becoming more vulnerable.

Although what I thought of, when I did this, was the time in college when a classmate photographed me wearing a bikini as I wrapped myself in Christmas lights. My lifelong fascination with the twinkly-bright bulbs of color translated into slide photography (in elapsed motion, so the lights blurred in long, swerving streams behind me) of my interpretive dance across an otherwise empty studio.

She knew how much I loved the lights; it was her idea, that project. For a few hours, I got to be the lights. It was great (but a little warm, I must admit).

Then I wanted to do just a simple brown-and-white figure study. A woman, brushing her hair. Which I think always looks graceful and mysterious, unless I'm the one doing it (I brush my hair too fast and too hard, and pull great strands of it out in my merciless vigor).

Brown and white has a nice appeal all its own. I forgot how much I enjoy the brushwork of ink on paper.

ink and wash

2006-12-07T13:44:00.000-05:00

Sometimes it's relaxing just to do an ink wash.

I didn't draw anything for her to sit on. She's just sort of floating. I'm not certain that she's even finished. But I like her anyway.

I bought a CD of Forties music at the dollar store. Marlene Dietrich sings "You Do Something to Me" and I melt. That era of music is so beautiful. Every time the tinny piano launches in I feel transported. The music was truer and purer then. I can't explain it.

It keeps trying to snow, outside. The wind slaps you bitterly in the face when you step outside. I've worn a knitted scarf all day, even inside the house. It's that kind of a day. The ordinary armor isn't enough.

there's always manana

2006-12-06T07:48:00.000-05:00

We all overslept this morning. I forgot to warm up the car before we left the house and we were running so behind that I didn't have time to let the windshield defrost properly. I scraped the ice off the front and back windows the best I could, then ran the wiper fluid over and over so I could drive and keep clearing a view for myself at the same time. (I know it's a stupid thing to do. I did it anyway. Hey, I was late.)

Then when I got back I could hear the phone ringing inside as I turned the key in the lock to the front door. I struggled with the catch (it has a tendency to stick) and hurried into the room to answer it.

"Hello." There's always a pause when I say hello into my phone, making me think I either spoke too softly or the person on the other end wasn't expecting me to reply. I repeat myself, as usual (I'm always saying hello, twice).

"Hello."

"What's the matter?" my mother's voice is rapidly attentive.
"I just... walked in... the door."
"I'm going to tell you something. You shouldn't be running around like that. You sound like you can't breathe."
"I'm okay." I'm shrugging off my coat, looking around making a mental inventory of the place. The Christmas tree is still standing; the dog didn't eat it while I was gone. Good.

"And here's another thing. When you wake up in the morning, don't jump out of bed like you do. Sit there and dangle your feet first. What's your hurry? You always rush around. The kids can wait! We had a next door neighbor when we lived in Freeport. Dorothy. You wouldn't remember -- you're too young. She jumped out of bed to turn off the alarm clock and died instantly of a heart attack. To turn off an alarm clock! You don't want to be like Dorothy."

I've heard this before.

"No, I don't. You're right, I know you're right."

What is my hurry? I don't really have one.

"Oh, you say that. But will you listen? You push yourself too hard. You do too much."

I'm laughing at that, quietly, to myself.
I don't do enough.

Yesterday was Picture Day for the youngest! Did I remember? No, I thought it was today. So I got him to the school -- and that's never an easy task -- and realized I'm, alas! the only parent unprepared for this occasion. I also forgot the kid's lunch. (The lunchbox was still sitting on the hutch, where I'd packed and left it, when I went back to the house to replace the slightly oversized, careworn San Francisco 49ers sweatshirt for a spotless white hooded sweatshirt, instead.)

And then when I took the lunchbox and the new shirt back to the preschool, I turned around and realized the sash to my overcoat was dragging behind me in the dirt. I looked like a schlepper.

Okay! I admit it. I seem to be having a hard time. Or, more to the point, everyone else seems to be doing this much more easily than I am.

(Last night: the teenager is telling me enthusiastically how his teacher claims Scrooge from Dickens' Christmas Carol is the most dynamic character in English literature.
I scowl: "Then your teacher needs to read more books."

"What's wrong with Dickens?" He's indignant.
"Wait till you get Great Expectations with old Pip and Miss Haversham and then we'll have this conversation again about how great Dickens is."

You'd think no one ever insulted Dickens before. The family rose up as one and accused me of having a psychotic episode. Hey, I had to read Great Expectations in the ninth grade. I thought it was creepy. That old woman going around in her selfsame wedding dress. I ask this: after all those years, how did she still get it to fit? My wedding dress would only fit on a garden rake.)

But never mind that. I digress.

I just can't seem to keep up.

I feel like the guy in the old Bob Hope joke: his roof is leaking, but he can't fix the roof when it's raining because it's raining out. And when it's sunny he doesn't need to fix the roof anymore, because it's not raining. There's always manana.

That's me.

opporknockity tunes in*

2006-12-05T16:40:00.000-05:00

You know? I keep reading about these writers who say in interviews how they sit down to the blank page and certain characters just show up. I never understood that. What do they mean, show up? You mean they knock on the door and introduce themselves? And tell you what they want to do next?

What kind of mess is that?

But then every morning I get up and get the kids off to school, and then I have a cup of coffee and tape down a few sheets of watercolor paper to wet down and size. I lay in a few washes and then start working with the forms that appear. And certain images do have a way of just sort of materializing and then hanging out a while.

And I didn't plan that. But I enjoy it. It's like opening a window and letting serendipity skate around the page a little.

I finally get it -- what my art school teachers used to talk about. How I should jump into the picture and just let things happen. How not everything can be controlled and how you have to be ready to push the edge just a little bit further than you're ready for. That if you got this far once, you can get there again -- messing up is not really possible.

That there is no perfect state of being, in life or on paper. It's only ever just a sort of loose manipulation of what you've already got to work with. It's not ever irretrievably lost or absolutely perfect; it's just a matter of degrees in any given direction.

This imaginative realm is starting to get to me, though. I drove past a field with a white horse kneeling in it the other day and I could have sworn what I saw was a unicorn. No kidding. I had to look twice to make sure.

Whatever medicine I'm on, it's clear that I need more of it. Or, um, less.

And then this afternoon, I was out shopping and a woman in the next aisle turned to me and started to speak. "Do you think...." she said loudly. Then her voice faltered and broke off and she stood there, awkwardly.

She cleared her throat. "I thought you were my friend, see," she admitted. "But then I looked at you and realized you're not."

I smiled politely to ease her embarassment: "That's okay." But it felt slightly hurtful anyway. Run the sentence over in your head and you realize it's something you never want to hear someone say to you. I thought you were my friend, but now I realize you're not.

I left the store feeling thoughtful, a paragraph of text or two running in my head toward a story I might never write.

*Heinlein

self portrait with small children

2006-12-04T19:39:00.000-05:00

I had it in mind to use only red and blue and yellow ochre, but then the colors started blending and I ended up with this, instead.

The white flurry of wings/flowers/snowflakes on the left? That's from a sprinkle of salt.

disenchantment

2006-12-04T15:06:00.000-05:00

It's a little different, I know.

What does it look like when a fairy dies?

This is just a pen and ink wash. But appropriately stark.

washed up

2006-12-02T10:57:00.000-05:00

I set this page up by pouring a cup of coffee over it. I have a dread fear of the blank white sheet of paper. But if I spill something on it, it's not blank anymore and I don't have to feel so intimidated.

The fins on the mermaid presented themselves immediately.

She feels so alone.

She washed up on the surf by herself. She didn't mean to. (The tides can carry you to the most unexpected places.)

my name is Darlene. get used to it.

2006-12-02T08:27:00.000-05:00

Apparently my name is still Darlene. I can't stop answering to it because I still find it very amusing that my son has invented this new name for me. It fascinates me.

When my nephew was very young he used to call me Mimi. I loved this, but relatives discouraged it. "Make him call you by your real name, Sharon." Try as he would, he couldn't pronounce Sharon and called me Tin-tin.

I said it then, I'll say it now: I miss the days when I was Mimi.

What difference does it make? If a kid wants to make up a new name for you, what harm is in it? Who's to say their version isn't truer? Maybe I do look like a Darlene.

Maybe that's what it is: it's the different perspective that intrigues me. The worst thing about being a child myself was this adult insistence on their version being the right one. I promised myself that if I ever grew up (I had my doubts!) I'd remember what this felt like, this suffocating, claustrophobic littleness grown-up people always wanted to force you into. (What do you know about it? You're just a kid. This is just the way it is.)

It's true I can't live on imagination. But there's no reason I have to give up all of it.

So much is made up anyway, even in the grown up world. Blogging is a form of make believe.

But so what?

A grown up person would look at a watercolor wash I'd just done and see this:

I looked at it and saw this instead:

It doesn't matter if my name is Darlene or Mimi or Sharon. It just matters that I don't stop seeing the world with new eyes.

(matters to who?)
(matters to me.)

wash

2006-12-01T12:53:00.000-05:00

fairy at night

2006-11-30T17:15:00.000-05:00

And I especially like this little person:

Because when I put down the very loose wet-on-wet washes, this was just a serendipitous blob that intrigued me. I went back into it and started sketching in shapes with sepia ink, fleshing out what would become a tiny fairy of a particular shape.

With these wet-on-wet washes, what I enjoy the most is the happenstance nature of composition. It's almost impossible to mess it up because of this. I've told my students, if this process seems daunting, to look at it like they're seeking out forms in clouds in the sky.

In such a manner can a story be told. Almost without trying.

It makes a strange arrangement on the page -- one minute fairy flying away; the other, larger (older?) fairy gazing pensively in another direction. There were enough ambiguous spaces left that I could have drawn in more fairies to join them, but I chose not to. I liked the dynamic just as it was -- each apparently unaware of the other.

Most importantly, keep in mind I painted most of this while being shackled in toy handcuffs by a belligerent five-year-old who kept insisting I was 1) under arrest and 2) that my name is really Darlene. This might sound amusing. (It wasn't really.)

updated

2006-11-30T08:57:00.000-05:00

The fairy calendar has been redone. And it's on sale until 12/03.

where I've been

2006-11-29T14:24:00.000-05:00

Hard to say where I've been lately.

When I get up in the morning to get the kids ready for school, my attention is totally focused on that.

Then after they're all out the door, I just sort of do this collapse thing for an hour.

Or two.
Or three.

It's as if I need this space, this margin, this comfortable cushion of time in which no one asks me for anything and I speak to no one whatsoever. Because before I know it, it will be 2:00 p.m. again and I'll have to be in Function Mode once more. It will be, "What's for snacks?", and "What's for dinner?" and "Did you wash my jeans for school tomorrow?" and, "Can you sign this paper?" or "Can you help me make a 2' x 4' papier mache pinata tonight for my class, because I said you would?"

I tell myself that the zone-out time in the weekday morning is another form of working. That while I'm productive and diligent the rest of the day, this is my time to just regroup and refocus. In rest there is a recharging of energies. Bla, bla, bla.

But when you're sitting there all morning with a robe over your day clothes, wearing your son's socks because you can't find a matching pair of your own, wrapped up in an old white coverlet on the couch watching Superman Returns on DVD for the third time instead of folding laundry and planning dinner, all those claims seem like a sorry self-justification for slothfulness.

Then I got up and put a few washes over this drawing I did last week or so, and felt a little more productive.

But a household can't run on art alone. So I went out around one to pick up the mail and get some groceries for dinner. Just because. People still need to eat. Etc., etc.

I returned the Superman Returns DVD, too, before I got hooked into watching it just one more time.

I stood in line at the video return counter next to some old man with mussy long white hair, in a greyed camo jacket. He smelled. I mean he really smelled -- it drifted downward to me, the smell of stale cigarettes and unbrushed teeth and unwashed hair and sleeping in your day clothes and then not changing them the next day. That kind of smell. There wasn't a clerk in sight.

"They're hiding," he said to me, with a sidelong glance.

I can see why, I almost said meanly. Because I'm not feeling very tolerant today. But I bit that back and just smiled instead.

"What day is it?" he asked. He had a check out and his hand poised over it.

"The 29th," I muttered.
"What's that you say?"
"The 29th."
"No, it's not," he contradicted loudly. "It's the 28th."
"Okay," I said. (What do I care? I don't need to be right. I've got problems of my own right now.)
"It is."
"O-kay."

People are always asking you questions they don't really want you to answer. What did he ask me for, if he wanted it to be the 28th all along?

He wrote down November 28 with a flourish and then said, like he was conceding a point, "Well, it's close to the 28th, anyway. It's somewhere around there."

I want to scream, Buddy, would you drop it already! A miss is as good as a mile, except in horseshoes and....something else. How does that saying go?

Oh, well. I just return the video and shuffle away, mumbling to myself about what I can't leave the store without (sandwich bags; a gallon of milk).

I push through the days and the blog sits somewhat neglected.
The truth: I'd rather draw than write these days.

I still watch what's going on around me, taking mental notes. I just feel less like writing about it. As if, in writing it down and sharing it, I dilute it somehow, however accidentally.

Or maybe it's a natural evolution of blogging that, after a while, you start feeling like no matter what you do people are still going to trod upon it, and you start reverting back into a shell again, where it's safe.

And I fight that, but still.
That's where I've been.

she seems to be saying, "I lost one of my contact lens"

2006-11-29T10:31:00.000-05:00

untitled

2006-11-27T16:00:00.000-05:00

watercolor and India ink, on cold-press 11" x 14" watercolor paper.
double-click to enlarge image.

sisters

2006-11-26T08:20:00.000-05:00

pixie dust

2006-11-25T17:48:00.000-05:00

watercolor and India ink on 11" x 14" watercolor paper.

I tried a different technique with this one. I did a series of washes and laid down some color, then brushed in more water and let it blend where it may. I made the wings by blotting the paint back out with triangles of tissue.

Then, after all that dried, I went in with India ink and stippled in various values.

I liked the washes. They brought in a rich depth of color I haven't seen yet in the watercolors. When I went back in with the India ink, I tried creating new shapes out of the white spaces (like the flower petals, and the opening to the mound on the left). It forced me to think more openly. I liked that.

On a completely separate note, I picked up the Beatles' Love CD this afternoon. It's fantastic. So many of the songs are intertwined, sparsely at first then meshing gears and running in an almost-discordant countermelody until the sound becomes this polyphonic, three-dimensional experience. I've truly never heard anything like it. And track 25 (after "Hey, Jude") is definitely the best. Very good music to work by.

waiting for something wonderful

2006-11-24T18:05:00.000-05:00

Every year at Thanksgiving time I get sort of morose. I never really know why it happens. I enjoy Thanksgiving. In fact, it's even one of my favorite holidays. But then I also get this dark, foreboding feeling too. Somewhere between after the Thanksgiving dinner and before the 5 a.m. Friday shopping spree it hits me. An anticipatory, closed-in kind of mood bearing down on me, an actual weight that reminds me, however subtly, of some very old, unspoken sadness.

You'd have to really know me, would have had to be me, in fact, to get why it is I associate after-Thanksgiving with everything that's glum. And I know I'm 37, and it's high time I get over it, but the fact is, I didn't have the Christmas experience that everyone else seemed to have.

Whatever that was, which from my viewpoint is: a string of blue lights hung out on your porch. A great green tree poking every which way in green and red and orange and yellow in your living room. Singing Christmas carols at the top of your lungs in school choir. That's Christmas.

From where I'd seen it, this is what Christmas, as a truly devout and religious person, should be: abstention from all worldly celebration of a wildly erroneous, even randomly chosen, birth date. A refusal to participate in school functions honoring or even making mention of the same. A complete withdrawal from all the usual traditional festivities: especially the giving or sending of cards and/or gifts.

When asked by well-meaning adults: What do you want for Christmas? I was well instructed to reply formally: I do not want anything for Christmas. Christmas is a crass, merchant-driven, man-made holiday that in no way honors the sanctity of our Almighty God.

My grandfather faithfully sent us a check every year at Christmastime, funds parceled out for each child individually to spend as he or she saw fit. Some discussion always arose over this -- what to do with the money (usually, ten dollars each).

Ordinarily were someone to proffer us a gift we would be compelled to refuse it; yet in this circumstance, that would hardly be polite. After some discussion my parents would decide it would not be sinning to simply save the money, set aside and spend it for an occasion not at all related to Christmas. In such a manner was this minute ethical dilemma settled.

For me this was especially easy to do, since my birthday three months later in March would also guarantee a similar sum. Coupled with the Christmas money one could indulge almost unimaginable whims at the Toys section of the department store. Of course, I wasn't really supposed to celebrate birthdays either, but on birthdays we tended to fudge a bit (if quietly).

Most of the time I managed to scrape through Christmas without an excess of resentment. I could forego the coloring of Santa Claus mimeographs after the reading lessons, or the writing of letters to Santa Claus to be published in the weekly newspaper, with a feeling of carefully built-up virtuousness. I walked up to the neighbors' house on Christmas morning and watched them opening their presents with my hands in my lap, quietly absorbing their exuberance and delight and making myself not ask to play with their new toys for fear of offending them and causing them to send me back home. These pagans, I'd think wistfully, they really know how to have a good time.

But then there was this one memorable year when I looked through the newspaper ads and saw a Crayola Caddy for $9.97. It was a color advertisement for a collection of crayons and markers and various other sundry creative delights, on a stand that was circular and could spin around to accomodate the feverishly busy artist. This one thing, I wanted it more than anything I'd ever seen or imagined (except for a piano, but that's another story).

I went to my parents and told them to keep my yearly check; I didn't want to save it, I said. If they could just cash it and buy me this Crayola Caddy, I'd never ask for anything again, not ever.

And of course they frowned, but I plunged ahead in a rush before they could tell me this was wrong: It's not for Christmas. I promise it's not for Christmas. It's just on sale now before Christmas; but it's not a toy, it's not a Christmas thing. It's just the handiest thing I've ever seen in my life, and I could make so many pictures with it. Please, buy me this Crayola Caddy. If you don't buy it for me now I'll buy it in January after Christmas, and it won't be as cheap then as it is now and I won't be able to afford it; so please, won't you?

The Almighty Father, they said reprovingly, and His Love far exceeds anything this carnal world could offer you, and His Rewards are so much greater. He gives you Everlasting Life! And you want ...a Crayola Caddy? For this you'd sacrifice our principles? ...For art supplies?

Yes, I said in a little little voice. I would. And I felt overwhelmed with guilt. But it was the truth. I knew it was truth.

The truth -- that I was a carnal, crass lover of Christmas, and I would not only hang blue lights on our house, but I'd festoon myself in them and belt out "Frosty the Snowman" at the top of my lungs if only I could suddenly, mysteriously get abducted by aliens and be the only one to teach them how to sing it. And there would be joy in my heart while I was doing it, too. I wanted to be a celebrater and a gift giver and a present-opener and basically just a greedy, selfish, loud-mouthed, sinner of a kid more than anything. It's all true. I admit it. I am so imperfect as to be almost beyond all hope. I have never been able to live up to the ideal. Not ever.

My father took the money with a sigh. He promised he'd go to the pharmacy and buy me the Crayola Caddy, yes, the selfsame one. Even though I felt like he was humoring me and nursing a deep disappointment in me, all at once, I ripped the ad out and pushed it onto him, just so he could recognize it on sight and not bring home the wrong thing. I didn't really believe he'd do it, but when he pulled out of the driveway and headed toward town I felt almost sick with euphoria and heady anticipation. Oh yes! I could have this.

And when we all came back to school in January I had serious ambitions to mention it, oh so casually. Not the usual flat "I didn't get anything" when the other kids asked it carelessly: "What'd you get for Christmas?" No! I could say, "I got the Crayola Caddy with markers and crayons in a dozen different colors on a circular base that rotates as you go along." It was going to be really, really great.

I could hardly even sit still. I went upstairs and cleaned my room and moved the furniture around, just so. I knew exactly where the caddy would go. I knew exactly what I would draw, too. Feverishly I envisioned the interminable hours of Christmas vacation very pleasantly engaged.

I watched from the window as he returned, emerging empty-handed from the pickup truck. I told myself it was just a tease -- that he'd left the caddy in the truck, for me to carry out myself.

"They didn't have any more," he'd say, and I'd protest: "No, come on, really! Where is it?" And he'd give in with an indulgent laugh and say, "Go on, now, it's somewhere in the truck. I just forget where I put it." Because he'd be moved by my earnestness, instead of being so serious and diligent all the time -- I'd have jollied him into giving in.

And I'd run past him squealing and ferret it out from wherever he'd hidden it, under the seat or wherever (how did I know how big it really was? It was just a little picture in an advertisement). Isn't that what always happened on the TV shows? Where the world is a different place, not quite recognizable, and children always, somehow, end up getting what they want.

Only it wasn't in the truck. And he didn't tell me to go to look for it. "They just sold the last one, it was all they had, and they're not getting any more," he said, and I knew from the final tone of his voice that he meant it; I wasn't going to be getting a Crayola Caddy, not for Christmas, not ever.

And I would have to accept that, because anyway, the rules are the rules.

Of course it's a little thing. On such things the fate of the world does not depend. Still, it was a little thing that, nonetheless, crushed something down hard in my much-too-longing, nine-year-old soul.

"I'm sorry, Sharon. But you should consider that maybe God is trying to tell you that this is something you shouldn't have and don't really need."

My eyes were big with tears and I blinked them to keep from spilling. I could feel my mouth stretching tautly like a trampoline pulling downward with some invisible weight. If I spoke, I'd cry. So I ran upstairs instead and faced down my room -- a room, it seemed now, pathetically braced for something that would never come. I thought my heart would break with self-pity. One thing. I only wanted one thing, God, and all the other kids get so many every single year and all I wanted my whole life was just this one thing. Why not? Why? How do they get to be so lucky and all I get to do is wait for something wonderful?

I told my husband this over breakfast this morning.

I was making pancakes and it just spilled out because he asked me why I looked so pensive. "I don't know..." I said, waving the spatula in the air languidly. "I just feel so....I don't feel like hurrying into the day. I don't even feel like making a plan. Everyone's out there shopping and I just...I feel kind of fragile, you know? Like if I'm going to be in a good mood I'll have to really cultivate it to get there."

And then I launched into this memory. He didn't say anything much. Just went on eating, and listening.

After breakfast, we put the kids in the car and drove into town. He went a different route this time, parking in front of the art gallery that shows my work, and took the kids inside it, holding their hands. "See if you can find Mommy's work," he told them quietly, and they dashed toward it, looking up and sighing raptly, "Oh, that's you."

Then he walked us down the street, to a store that sells office and art supplies, and guided me to the back where they sell china markers and sketch pads and Berol turquoise pencils and other items I haven't seen since my college days. All I could do was mutter these barely audible oohs.

"I could seriously go nuts here," I said, trying to laugh. "There's so much to look at."
"Go ahead," he said. "Don't just look. Pick some out."
"No, not really," I protested. I picked up one black china marker out of a display of a dozen different colors. I waved it at him, questioningly, as if to say: This one?

"More than that," he insisted. "Get one of each."
"I can't," I said. "I --"
"Do it," he said, and he started handing them to me one by one. And going down the row, piling up more stuff in my hands.

I realized. "I didn't tell you about the caddy so you'd feel like you had to do this. I'm okay. Really. It's what's inside that matters."
"But you love this stuff," he said. "You should get it."

"Now I know it -- why it is I had to wait for something wonderful," I found myself murmuring.

And I could tell, from the look in his eyes, that he knew what I meant.

a butterfly girl

2006-11-24T08:30:00.000-05:00

more sketches, same process

2006-11-22T16:33:00.000-05:00

...And it's easy to see which stage I'm at in each drawing, just by looking.

The middle sketch, that's me and my sister. It's taken from a photograph from 1974, with some details deleted, like my sister's cat-eye glasses and our foster sister in pink hair rollers and our cousin in a halter top and burgundy bell bottom jeans, or how the four of us looked like a ragtag gang of Irish orphans. I even had my arms crossed like Robert DeNiro ("You talkin' to me?")

The scene I drew out is much more serene.

But I'm baking right now. Isn't everybody? Homemade noodles and raisin cream pies and, in the morning, I'll make two or three batches of rolls. Breads and pastries seem to be my specialty, every year.

Everywhere I've gone today people have been saying to me, "You have a happy holiday, now," like this is the first Thanksgiving the country's ever celebrated. I don't remember people saying that to me so pointedly in years past. I just nod and say, "Thanks. You too," with nowhere near enough reciprocal enthusiasm.

I don't know why I feel so tired this time, this year. I just feel unusually exhausted. This whole day it's been all I could do just to stay awake.

trying a new process

2006-11-21T17:29:00.000-05:00

I read about a technique last night for drawing fairies: it involved drawing family members and making them into fairies. That isn't something I'd have thought of on my own.

The process suggested drawing with a very fine, hard lead pencil from a photograph: in this case, a picture of myself holding my youngest son not long after he was born. I elaborated quite a bit on the hair, obviously. And also the thighs, since when you're the one wielding the image it's better than Photoshop. Believe me when I admit I'm not this hot in real life. (In real life I was wearing an oversized V-neck top and grey sweatpants.)

Using subjects from life and flowers from imagination,
I chose freesias, because freesia is one of my favorite flowers.

...And then building the drawing ever so slowly up with delicate, gentle layers of colored pencil:

Erasing some of the color back out for highlights if at any point any part of the image starts to overshadow another. Which, of course, happened.

Then inking in, very carefully, the contours and subtle shadings.

After that, using a sepia wash in watercolor to build up the tone.

Then I built in some blues and greens to make it more three-dimensional. I also added some white blobs on wet to give the appearance of stardust.

Voila.

happy feet

2006-11-21T09:33:00.000-05:00

I took the kids to see Happy Feet yesterday.

Let it be said first that the computer-animated movie thing has been glutted into the ground. Toy Story was neat. Toy Story 2 was also neat. Now every kids' movie is an improvisation on Toy Story. Come on!! An entire population of child actors is starving in Hollywood, here. Feed the children. Give a couple of them a paycheck and some face time in front of the camera again.

The studio mommies will thank you.

And also, I've seen so many kids' movies in the past seven years that I feel utterly exhausted of them. So much so that last week I actually blurted out at the preschool queue, "I'm tired of kids' movies! Why can't I ever get to see some adult films?" and everyone looked at me like I'm some kind of pervert.

No, not adult adult! Just...real people, in regular clothes, doing exciting and impossible things like running across a spray of gunfire without ever getting hit! People with unfathomable credit limits jumping planes to fly to other countries for no apparent reason!

Is it too much to ask?

I probably wouldn't have taken the kids to see Happy Feet were it not for the knowledge that Robin Williams is (somewhere) in it. And I love Robin Williams. Anything he's in I'll pay to see. And he does add everything that's vital to the movie. Were he not in it, my consideration of the movie would be far lower.

Happy Feet is a charming if tiresome eco-musical about individuality and the cessation of marine harvesting, as told through the whimsical bright blue eyes of an irrepressibly optimistic (and slightly birth-injured) penguin.

I love music, I always have music playing somewhere in the background where ever I happen to be if I can help it, and even I got nauseated by the endless SINGING. (I guess I won't be invited to any showings of "Singin' In the Rain" soon.) I didn't get the whole "find your heartsong" thing. I really didn't. Lost me on that one.

But the kids loved it. They kept talking about it on the drive home, even while I almost hit a deer and had to slam on the brakes and come to a complete stop on the highway while the deer blinked and looked at me in a long, fractious moment before turning and running the other way.

Which, by the way -- the kids are out of school, all this week. I didn't mention it?

Maybe I just need a nap.

a day outside myself

2006-11-18T10:54:00.000-05:00

Thanks to my secret sister Melonie I had a photography gig yesterday on-campus. A state college hosted a carnival for kids and it was my job to take pictures that would later be shown in a slideshow during lunchtime.

Was I daunted? A little. I don't know that I've ever worked in that capacity before -- I remain dubious of my photography skills. I'm not Heidi, or Rick Lee -- two people I consider to be experts in the field.

Humble shoeshine girl shuffled off with a very nice (borrowed) Canon PowerShot A610 to do her level best.

I couldn't do it alone. I brought my tech support, Don, who transferred my shots (I think I took around 40) to his laptop and then burned onto a CD for Melonie. Because the really technical stuff is still way beyond me. I just point and shoot. Again, I'm not the expert.

Photography was one of those classes in art school that everyone said, If you're going to take it, be ready to spend some serious money -- it's expensive. And I didn't have serious money. I didn't even have frivolous money. I had imaginary money, which is a horse of a different color altogether. Anyway, though I've always been interested in it I've always operated at the periphery. I worked for a year in a graphics office, taking slides for art history classes. Mounting negatives. Et cetera.

But that's it.

To my surprise everyone seemed to really like the pictures. That's good -- I did too. I enjoyed swooping in from one booth to the next, randomly collecting the more sparkly fragments of a moment and moving on again.

I've thought, more than once, that part of the skill in being a photographer is knowing how to douse for light and color. The same apt timing of the fisherman as he plunges the net into the ocean and pulls up a bountiful catch. I don't have that quicksilver talent -- it's why I paint and draw, instead.

I do know that despite my strictly amateur status I enjoyed myself tremendously. The kids were great and they had a wonderful time. Melonie was there and working, so we didn't get to talk much, but she did a terrific job with the kids and I can tell she'll be an excellent teacher in the very near future.

It felt funny to be introducing myself all day as, "I'm the photographer," but at the same time, I really liked it. I almost wished I could do something like this all the time. But of course, I'm not qualified.

So this weekend I'll go back to writing lesson plans and working up new drawings -- I just wanted to thank Melonie, before I forget how it felt, for giving me the chance to stand outside myself, for a day, and letting me try out something new.

It was sublime.

p.s. Melonie writes about the day.

fields

2006-11-16T16:19:00.000-05:00

I started goofing around with oil pastels on a 16" x 20" canvas. I read somewhere I could use oil pastels, then blend them with linseed oil. So I tried it. (It works).

nature drawings

2006-11-16T10:07:00.000-05:00

I have butcher paper rolled out on the dining room table. I left it out after Monday's drawing lesson, along with a box of pencils.

Throughout the week I've doodled upon it: alas, here presents the rainbow trout.

Here, an owl at night. Stereotypical, not an imaginative composition, but nonetheless.

And a three-legged bear, because those are always fun.

a rainy morning

2006-11-15T12:10:00.000-05:00

I drove my mom to the hospital this morning for a CAT scan. She asked me a week ago if I'd do it and I'd said I would. Then my middle child asked me to sit in on his classroom this morning as part of American Education Week, and I couldn't because I'd already said I'd do this first. So right away the day starts with a shift in the line: first this, then that if there's time for it.

This time my son missed out. My mother and I were in the hospital most of the morning.

The radiologist wouldn't let me come along when they called my mother's name. We had been sitting there in the tiny waiting area, she and I, sandwiched in with twelve other people waiting for more or less the same thing. I didn't even have a chair; I was sort of squatting on the floor next to my mother, having acquiesced so she could have the last available seat.

An old man with an oxygen tube clipped into his nose saw my cell phone and asked me nervously if I'd turned it off. "It'll mess up their computers," he said fretfully. I took the phone out of its case and showed him the blank screen: "No worries. I turned it off when we walked in here."

He nodded. The oxygen tube made a brief gasp every few minutes as we went on waiting. I tried to act like I didn't notice it.

When my mother was led away I followed anyway, as far as the X-ray tech would allow. "It won't take long, right?" I asked, more for my mother's benefit than my own (I had a feeling my mother wouldn't ask, for once). "No, not long," the lady said. Then they rounded a corner and disappeared.

I turned around. A man in an electric blue sport shirt wearing flip-flop sandals with thick hunting socks was lolling in the doorway, smiling and laughing and nodding his head in my direction like he knew me. I frowned a little: there's nothing funny about what I just said.

A nurse walked past and announced: "Those of you here for the drug testing, come with me." Two young men slouching against the wall stood up straight and followed her out. Good luck with your whiz quiz, I wanted to say. But I didn't.

Then I walked out into the hallway too, not wanting to hang around another minute in the crowded little room with pink pinstripe wallpaper. I could feel a claustrophobic episode coming on. I studied a bulletin board under glass that displayed instructions for using the time clock on the right. While I stood there reading another old man tottered past and said loudly, "Can I brush that pretty long hair of yours?" I jumped.

He grinned at me broadly. Some of his teeth were missing and his eyeglasses were the very thick-lensed kind with heavy black frames.

I changed my mind about avoiding the lobby. I went back into the waiting area and took a seat. The man in the electric blue shirt kept looking over at me and grinning. I decided he was probably a drinker.

The wife of the man with the oxygen tube was telling someone how she'd always wanted to be a dancer. "I have a sequined dress at home in the closet," I heard her say. "All these years, I've never worn it. Never had a place to wear it to."

I looked over at her, this white-haired lady wearing a red and green Christmas sweatshirt. She even had a little gold Christmas bell pinned to the lapel of her coat, so unexpectedly festive that it made her look brave, somehow. Or determined, in a cheerful kind of way.

"Thought they said it wouldn't take long," the man in the blue sport shirt said. I looked up. Apparently, he was talking to me.

I smiled politely. This is a phenomenon I've observed more than once in a waiting room. It's like being at the beginning of a high school dance, that stage where no one wants to be the first one to venture out onto the dance floor. At first, everyone is courteously silent, pointedly pretending casual disinterest. Then, as time yawns on, small chit-chat starts bubbling up and before long everyone in the room is engaged in animated conversation. No one escapes it.

"They stuck me pretty good," he said, holding out his arms to show gauze wads taped to the insides of his elbows. "They couldn't get a vein, I guess. Now I'm getting chest X-rays so I can see what twenty years of smoking has done to my lungs."

"Quite a bit, I'd say," I said.

"Oh, I don't smoke that much," he said.
The man with the oxygen tube rolled his eyes.

When my mother re-emerged ("Look at my hair, Sharon! Look what lying on that thing did to my hair. I look wild," she said, exasperated) I told her about the old man wanting to brush my hair, to make her laugh. She did laugh. She, too, showed me the insides of her arms, both of which were taped with awkward mounds of gauze.
They had trouble finding a vein, she said. I nodded (they have the same trouble with me).

"So they gave you a contrast dye," I said. (She'd been worried about having to drink barium.)
"Yes," she said. "I think that's what's making me feel so lightheaded right now."

"Well, you'll know something by Friday," I said. "I asked the nurse when you were dressing."

Something about the whole morning was starting to remind me of that book I used to read to my oldest when he was little -- Love You Forever by Robert Munsch: how the son grows up and comes back to his mother when she's older and rocks her in his arms, instead of the other way around, the way it used to be.

Outside in the parking lot, the skies were grey and gloomy, spitting rain that -- you could tell -- wanted to turn into snow, but couldn't quite do it. I could have said something reassuring -- I wanted to -- but instead I just drove with extra care, as if we can all be soothed just by knowing and not knowing, some nameless lullaby that goes along to the tune of windshield wipers beating time in the rain, some Circadian rhythm.

Mother, daughter. Round and round.

fox

2006-11-14T15:06:00.000-05:00

for example

2006-11-14T10:57:00.000-05:00

...This is a sample of what someone sent me after reading my art lesson yesterday:

This is one of my favorite things -- looking at what other people have drawn. There are some really interesting sections in this doodle. I especially like this part:

This could be a separate artwork in and of itself. It has a lot of energy and intensity.

I'd like to write more lesson plans that anyone would feel ready to tackle. It's funny to me what comments I've gotten already: "I think I could try that." Good -- that was my intention. I think a lot of people shut down to art and music early on when they imagine they haven't an aptitude for it.

I think everyone has a creative side. When people protest, "I can't draw a straight line," "I'm not creative at all," I always think of being in second grade when the main objective was to color inside the lines. That was paramount -- if you could direct the crayon within the thick black parameters, follow the rules, fill in the spaces properly, it implied a certain virtuousness. That you were obedient and dutiful and good.

And there has always been a part of me that has defiantly wanted to not be good. If good means: always following the rules. Rules to me were like concrete poured over a beautiful lawn of grass. We had a neighbor, growing up, who had a beautiful lawn in both texture and color. She had the lawn seeded specially to make it look that way. She told me it was called Kentucky Bluegrass. It was a pleasure to me just to walk barefoot over it. It felt like the most beautiful, velvety carpet under my feet.

To color in a picture perfectly, without a spill of errant color in any direction, would have been like putting in a basketball court over that lawn of Kentucky Bluegrass.

I bought a drawing book by Ed Emberley for my sons last week when they had the day off from school and it was rainy outside. My teenager hesitated: "Is this art?" I answered: Of course it is.

"But...isn't it sort of cheating to just make symbols for things? Isn't it kind of cartoony?"
"So what if it is?"
"Is that art?"
"Who decides what's art and what isn't?" I really wanted to know.

He thought about it.

"God, I guess."

I showed him the cave paintings, like the Lascaux in France. Is that art? Yes? So, then, isn't what you're doing here art? Where is the difference?

Why do we draw? Do we draw to make things real? Or to draw things that we've imagined? Both, isn't that so?

Now more than ever, in fact, could art be considered a valid means of expression. In this modern world of cyberspace and hyper-reality, where time and space take on an added dimension. You email me, I hit reply and send an answer back (in an ideal world, anyway): it's not on paper anywhere, it's just conceptual, paperless, an illusion. Yet still valid, and still real. Just like the creative impulse.

Draw what you want to. Make it real. The chapel ceilings have been painted; Michelangelo removed that burden. We can draw what we like; if you like it, it's good.

It's also art.

drawing lesson

2006-11-13T14:33:00.000-05:00

I started teaching today about line as one of the most basic elements of design. I encouraged the students to just spend half an hour doodling on a page, then filling in the various shapes with dots, dashes, hatching and cross-hatching. The idea was: experiment with as many different kinds of line as possible.

The students' work turned out beautifully.

Here's what mine looked like.

I'm also setting up another site where I'll be posting my lesson plans and resources.

random update or: what you've been missing while I've been away

2006-11-12T13:14:00.000-05:00

I got carded when I tried to buy The Passion of the Christ last week. I'd never seen the movie, I couldn't find it to rent, and I felt it would tie in with my reading right now. So I took it to the counter to pay for it and the clerk said she had to ask me if I was over the age of 18. I just stared at her, because -- come on. It's The Passion of the Christ. It's not like I was buying Mad Dog and a pack of smokes.

************
Roundabout Thursday I woke up with the worst kind of pain in my left lower side. The kind of pain that makes you wonder if your appendix is falling out, if in fact appendixes are located just above your left leg, which they're not. And what that means is: I'm having a flare-up of The Unmentionable Colitis again.

Unmentionable because colitis is synonmous with various unpleasantries of the intestinal tract. Not to be discussed in polite society. Put it this way: when they play the Beatles' "Lucy In the Sky With Diamonds" and people are singing along: "A girl with colitis walks by," I'm the one most definitely not laughing.

I do have ulcerations, and they do bleed from time to time.
This would be one of those times.

I grimaced and winced when the doctor examined me Friday. Yes, my abdomen is tender to the touch. Yes, I have a fever. No, I'm not bleeding now. The bleeding stopped when I started taking my dicyclomine again. Which is good; that's what it's there for.

"I think the dicyclomine saved you this time," my doctor said. "But you're having a flare-up. You have the weekend to get through. If you start bleeding again, you'll be coming back to the ER right away. Right?"

Right.

So I've been eating baby food, and taking my medicine, and waiting for the tenderness to go away.

It's also why I've been quiet.

p.s. On an even lighter note, I got the flu shot Friday afternoon even though I was running a fever. Now I feel like I have a mild case of the flu. It just keeps getting better and better ;)

the difference between a little water and none

2006-11-08T13:07:00.000-05:00

Dear Diary,

I miss you so.

We never talk anymore. What's up with that?

Dearest diary, please understand that reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated. You must not imagine that I'm looking at the ringing telephone and laughing at it as it peals insistently on into defeated silence. Rumors may abound to this effect. But turn your ears aside; it is not so.

It's much more likely that I'm curled up in the fetal position, watching a Harry Potter movie on my DVD player and suffering in advance (which is something at which I excel) under the weight of real and/or imagined assignments. That may or may not include the laundry.

The laundry must be one of the darkest evils of good housekeeping that no one ever tells you about in home ec class. They taught us how to thread an automatic sewing machine and make peanut butter, but no one ever said, You will be in laundry up to your tear ducts and half of it will be either socks worn without shoes in the lawn full of unraked leaves; or outfits your children wore for five minutes and then discarded for something else in the enthusiasm of the moment. It will be your sole (and occasionally manky) responsibility to sort the difference between the two.

No one ever tells you that motherhood requires deep wisdom. That this profound store of knowledge is built on such sound truths as these:

Sunkist and Skittles do not a sound dinner make.
If your brother is playing happily by himself, there is no reason to rile him up and make him cry.
Food is for eating, not playing with.
The time to tell me this was last night, not this morning. (Applicable for homework, parental consent forms, and classroom cookies requests).

(I did learn how to make peanut butter in home ec. I used a blender to save time and sprained the blender instead. The kitchen filled with the unpleasant aroma of burnt engine oil and overheated machinery. People stood around and gawked. It's bad news when a tow truck is required to remove your domestic science efforts.)

I did learn something from that fiasco. I learned to buy peanut butter in a jar.

And now I've turned off the comments. I know I shouldn't have, but it seemed I wanted to check them far too often. I'd feel a great discouragement when I'd look and find none. I'd experience the worst kind of egomaniacal thoughts: Am I not interesting? Thought-provoking? Come on, that was genius! Now you tell me so. Don't hurt yourself. Just do it.

In short, every hedonistic impulse leaps to the footlights and, losing balance, falls over into them (much as I did in seventh grade during the middle school choir's production of the H.M.S. Pinafore. Let us not discuss it). So I took the comments away. This is my own penance, mine alone. I'm selfish, vain and incapable of making peanut butter. What more could one expect of me?

I hope to be a better correspondent in the future. I also hope to improve my posture, learn to play the guitar and speak fluently in a language other than English. I would like to travel to Europe before I die, dye my hair blonde and star in a B movie to celebrate Bastille Day. It's not so much to ask.

I must begin writing something every day, lest my fingers atrophy and fall off from lack of water. Sort of what's going on with those cacti I bought last month at the Harvest Festival. They swear at me each morning upon my waking: We may be cactus, but there's a difference between a little water and none, Sharon. You might want to look into it.

Thanks for your understanding, and for channeling a camel in this my time of deep and profound inarticulation.

Sharon

a gnome

2006-11-07T14:28:00.000-05:00

the stolen child

2006-11-06T17:17:00.000-05:00

Excerpt from The Stolen Child, William Butler Yeats:

Where dips the rocky highland

Of Sleuth Wood in the lake,
There lies a leafy island
Where flapping herons wake
The drowsy water-rats;
There we've hid our faery vats,
Full of berries
And of reddest stolen cherries.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you
can understand...

(One of my favorite poems. I just need to go back and draw in a heron and the picture will be finished.)

mother and child

2006-11-05T08:36:00.000-05:00

I'm working on a new line of Christmas cards with this.

mermaid

2006-11-04T13:05:00.000-05:00

T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock:

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think they will sing to me.

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.

the sketches

2006-11-04T07:50:00.000-05:00

...bearing in mind, they're unfinished.

the cath is clear or: on a clear cath I can see forever.

2006-11-03T15:38:00.000-05:00

Everything turned out fine.

The cath is clear: the doc just increased the dosage on one of my meds by another 25 mg. It all went pretty much like I'd predicted: the volunteers had a little squabble over who'd given out which beeper during registration, another volunteer walked us to the cath lab, they made my husband wait somewhere else for a half hour or so while I changed clothes and got into the gown and put on the (teal) hospital socks.

The cath nurses had trouble with the IV. "Do you have any veins for me?" is how the one nurse put it. I extended my arms dutifully and then both nurses examined them with a critical eye, alternating between smacking my hand sharply and then stroking it kindly, as a cat. Neither method induced an air of cooperation in said veins.

Finally they just combed my left wrist over for the telltale pockmarks of past IV sticks, found one, and mined it with grim determination (and success).

A student aide wheeled me over to radiology for a chest X-ray, parked me in a hallway and said cheerfully, "Let me know if you get cold." Then she walked away from me, round the corner and out of sight. I stared at the wall counting the little white tiles to pass the time.

They took the X-Ray. Profile, turn around, hug the box, take a deep breath, hold it. SNAP, flash. You can breathe now.

The X-Ray tech wheeled me back into the hallway. Not before he wheeled me into the doorway, first. I put my right hand -- the one without the IV -- up and pushed the wheelchair back a little to help correct his aim. Then he parked me facing the other direction. I sat there a while watching people walk past. Then another tech picked me up and took me back to the cath holding area. He hummed atonally while he pushed, walking very fast. It almost sounded like he was a little boy pushing a Hot Wheels car: Vrrrrrrrrooooooooom. Vrrrrrooom-vrroooooom.

"She goes to Curtain #3," the cath nurse called out, and I said: "Sounds like a game show, doesn't it?" The guy pushing the wheelchair just did this grimace-smile. He glanced out the window and said, "Beautiful day out there."

"And here we are inside," I said dramatically.
"I know," he lamented. He sounded pretty sad about it.

Every bed in the holding area has a little TV on a swiveling arm. The husband and I watched Alien on the FX channel while we waited. It's a good movie to watch before going in for a cath. I'd actually never seen it before. (If I did, I don't remember it.) I couldn't figure out why Sigourney Weaver kept dragging the cat along when she's trying to board the shuttle. She even thinks to put it in the pod while she jettisons the alien from the shuttle. That would require, I contend, amazing presence of mind.

Once they wheeled me into the actual cath lab and helped me onto the table, one of the nurses marveled over my arms. "Look at that hyperextension. You must be double-jointed. Not everyone can extend their arms like that." I told them how I play this game with my sons where I "pretend" to stretch my arms out; I just figured everyone can do it. Nope, they said. You're unusually flexible.

The procedure was about what you'd expect.

They used a seal this time, which shortened the recovery period by half. After they got the seal in, the sedatives finally started to take effect. I got quite sleepy and relaxed. I think someone showed me my X Ray with the pacemaker showing and said: "Look! Someone put a radio in you!" I might have smiled. I can't really remember.

The only available bed they had for me upstairs was on the oncology floor. My nurse was extremely attentive and nice; she even walked down with me and sat next to me on the couch in the main lobby while my husband brought the car around. I'd never seen her before yesterday, of course, but she was so friendly she felt like family. She even helped me into the car and said, "Take care of yourself, now."

I'd had a cocktail of sedatives, so I slept most of the way home in the car, which I never do, even when I'm not driving. Then when we got home my husband walked me to the back door (which was locked) and when he instructed me to walk with him around to the side door I just leaned against the wall and slurred, "Can't I just stay here?"

No, he said patiently, because if I leave you here you'll fall into the bush. Walk.

I walked.

I slept really well.

I'm still stained in iodine but I can't shower until tonight. No lifting, straining or strenuous activity for five days; resume activity as tolerated. So, all is well, the cath is clear. I'll be seeing my doc in a couple of weeks for follow up. And I'm drawing a lot, so I'll post some of those sketches....tomorrow.

preface

2006-11-02T07:44:00.000-05:00

You eat a light meal the night before a heart cath. In the morning, even less. I always think it's their way of breaking your spirit before you check into the hospital. It reminds me of my childhood, fasting for Jewish holidays. I get the feeling of atoning for my sins, even if I'm not entirely sure what they are (which is also familiar).

When everyone else in the house is eating but you, every individual aroma declares itself in startling bloom. Fragrance very nearly equates flavor. Somewhere someone pours out buttery maple syrup for waffles and upstairs sorting out the children's socks, I'm salivating.

I sprinkle flake food in the aquarium while I'm thinking about food. The goldfish nibble at it, interested. I watch them eat, then go back to work. I make the kids' beds while I'm upstairs. Lay their pajamas out for later.

I open my own closet and pull out a patchwork prairie skirt that I loved when I bought it, but I've worn it to so many hospital procedures that now I sort of hate it and can't wear it for anything else. It swirls around my ankles. It's also easy to change into after taking off a hospital gown, clumsy with anesthesia and various bandages. I already know that in the car, coming home, I'll curl up in its generous folds as if it's a great, swaddling blanket. That's what it's there for. Utility, economy, conveinence.

Last night I shaved my legs carefully, shaved the top of my right thigh with careful attention so the cath nurse won't have to do anything to me this morning. I felt dutiful, responsible: like the way I do when I put all our plates in the center of the table, when we out together, and wipe up the errant crumbs with my napkin and put the napkin on top of the plates so the waitress will have less to clean up when we leave.

I make the children's lunches, wearing the patchwork skirt and a thin, soft tan cardigan I bought at Goodwill two weeks ago for a dollar. I have No Nonsense white footies on my feet (hospitals are cold; operating rooms are even colder). When I zip up my first-grader's coat I remind him that I won't be home tonight when he gets off the bus; he'll be going to his grandparents', instead. He nods, soberly, letting me know he's paid attention. "I already know this," he tells me. "I know you may not be home until tomorrow. It's okay." He kisses my cheek. "I love you."

"I love you too," I say. He goes out the door with a little smile and a wave. He's fine.

My teenager is already gone, having left the house the night before. The youngest is still coloring pictures in a magazine, on his lap, swinging his feet idly as he waits on the couch for me to take him to school, next. After I take him to school I'll come back for the dog and take the dog to the kennel, to be boarded.

Then we'll leave, after checking that the coffeepot is off and the dishwasher's finished running and that everything is locked up and that it's all, really, taken care of.

And I already know that when we get there, I'll have to check in with some elderly volunteer and wait while she finds my name on the list (her hand trembling over each line, peering to see) and they'll give me a beeper to wait while they put me in the queue. I'll pretend to read a magazine while I wait for some harried woman in an overtiny cubicle to call me back and ask me: am I allergic to latex? any religious preference? if someone calls and asks for you while you're here, can we tell them about you?

Go down the hall, take a left, take another left then a right, give your papers to this person, they'll take you from there. Good luck.

And I already know that the cath lab is professional and efficient and friendly. That they'll be cheerful and do their best to make me feel comfortable and at home, even though I'm going to be nearly naked in limp much-washed hospital linen with my hair in a paper scrunchie cap, stripped of my eyeglasses and whatever jewelry I brought with me, and an IV taped into one or the other of my arms with nothing but my No Nonsense footies to remind me of whatever life I had outside of this one.

You go into the hospital for one of these procedures and the more you feel exposed and drawn out the more you sort of go into yourself more. I retreat further into my head and imagine that if tens of thousands get on airplanes every day all day long, traveling from one place to another with seemingly little effort, couldn't it be possible that tens of millions of us travel somewhere else in our minds and meet, talk, exchange ideas, all in the realm of thought and energy? That communication could be entirely abstract, a whole other realm somewhere slightly above us? And if I could go anywhere, right now, wouldn't it be there? Where I know everyone, and everyone knows me, and we just sit and chat for hours on end with no thought to the time or the place?

Not here, on a narrow table with a blue sheet draped over my stomach so I can't see it when they pierce the femoral artery, and a doctor making jokes to keep me relaxed and at ease, and a nurse watching my face the whole time to make sure I'm OK.

2006-11-01T18:38:00.000-05:00

now it's the first of November

2006-11-01T12:22:00.000-05:00

It rained on the trick or treaters last night. The added impedence of the rain (slogging through puddles on the sidewalk, tottering underneath umbrellas) gave everyone a sort of stumbling appearance, but also a determined, purposeful one -- we will enjoy this, or else.

And after some time the trick-or-treaters (slicked and dampened down with raindrops, their costumes gleaming in the porch black lights) even seemed to take on an extra layer of gloss -- brilliant, reveling, indomitable.

"Happy Halloween, Mrs. Dude," a round-faced boy in a football uniform shouted out joyfully, pocketing three pieces of candy. I laughed and laughed. Mrs. Dude. That's a new one.

The teenager handed out candy and I sat beside the big tin bucket, just watching (and eating bite-size Almond Joys out of it as he scolded: "Don't! Those are for the kids!").

I watched him distribute the candy to each trick or treater. It was, in a way, like we'd just met. I can't explain why -- he's just gotten so much older, somehow. It sounds so cliche, but it really was just like yesterday when he was an infant in my arms. Sometimes it's like a trick of light -- you look again and the child's grown. I don't know how it happens. I really don't.

He caught me looking at him. "What? What?"

"Nothing...." I paused, hesitant to elaborate (anticipating his embarassed response). "I was just thinking about when you were a baby."

"Oh, great." He rolled his eyes and exhaled upward, all at the same time. "Another one of your mom stories."

"No...." I looked away. "I'll spare you, just this once. Because it's a holiday," I tried to joke.

"Good," I heard him say under his breath, digging into the bucket for a Hershey's bar and a Kit Kat (at least he listened to me when I told him not to give M & M's or Milk Duds to the smaller children, because they might choke on it).

This morning no one wanted to get up for school. Too much trick or treating the night before; too much fun and excitement. They all protested: "Five more minutes!" It seemed they all left the house more or less crossly, without looking backward. I was sitting at the kitchen table, immersed in my own thoughts: last night after the children went to bed, I'd gotten out my New Living translation of the Bible and read the different accounts by the apostles of Jesus' crucifixion. Just to compare and contrast.

I don't know why, really. It just seemed to me, all of a sudden, like I always skip over those chapters and it would be a good time to really read them all the way through. I felt struck by the way everyone denied him at the end: how they insisted, when Jesus told them he'd be betrayed, that they wouldn't deny him, especially Peter, and then in the next verse, Peter does it almost instantly. You'd think, after witnessing all the miracles they'd seen him perform, the faith and the loyalty would be unshakable. Yet when questioned, he was so easily surrendered. And yet, how magnificently Jesus surrendered to the persecution: how he said only, "Forgive them; they know not what they do." It made me want to weep.

I sat there at the table over my mug of decaf coffee. My teenager kissed me on the cheek and went out the door. I think I said, "Have a good day, honey," and "Try hard; do your best" ; what I always say. Then I went back to my thoughts until the dog barked and I realized I hadn't really said goodbye properly; I should have said what I wanted to say last night: "I love you," or "I'm so glad you're my son; I'm so proud of you" and I didn't.

Daydreamer! Where is my head? I got up from the table and rushed out the door to catch him before he got on the bus, but outside the porch and the street and the bus stop were all empty, silent, painfully vacant: he'd long gone.

I stood there alone, looking around feeling foolish, and noticed the already-dated Halloween decorations dangling in the wind. And once again, I'd somehow managed to miss it.

Trick or treat

2006-10-31T16:24:00.000-05:00

Grrrr! I am...Batgirl! Or...something like that.
I like the snarl, personally. Very Elvis of me. Now give me that Twizzler before I hurt you.

Lewis and Clark: Day 35, still no path

2006-10-31T14:10:00.000-05:00

Pretty soon the kids will be home from school and we'll start getting ready for trick or treating. If it doesn't rain. It's been clouding up, off and on, all day long. (Sixty percent chance of showers tonight, the weatherman says.)

The air is cool, but pleasantly so; there's no sting to it. You step outside and it's refreshing, like the burst of fragrant breeze that wafts through a half-opened classroom window in late September. You're thinking football, and newly mowed grass, and caramel apples, and buttered popcorn.

Driving around this morning, I saw a woman stopped at an intersection, her hand poised in midair elegantly holding a lit cigarette. Women who smoke when they drive put me in mind of a cat ready to pounce. They hold their jaws the same way, and narrow their eyes just so.

Waiting in line at the bank for a teller to attend to me, I got the shakes. My head got light and I felt unsteady. It seemed to me my heart was beating too fast again, but maybe it wasn't -- maybe it just felt like it was. It felt too strong, anyway, like a Cadillac engine that's been put into a go-cart. I went back to the car and sat there a few minutes, waiting out the trembly feeling. Eventually it did go away -- and I went on with my errands.

I still have the hives. I kept scratching nervously at the left side of my neck as I drove, trying not to dig too hard, but the irritated, restless feeling wouldn't leave me and I couldn't quit itching at it. I kept changing the radio station, dissatisfied with everything they played.

I got behind an old man, an old man driving a dusty blue car in a haphazard kind of way, weaving from the center line to the shoulder in uneven swathes. He'd look in the rear view mirror every now and then and I'd see a heavily furrowed brow frowning over thick black squarish glasses, as if it required all his concentration just to hold on to the wheel. Then I didn't feel so much impatient as sorry -- how it must feel to be that old, to be so uncertain that even the automatic, rote motions of a driving a car could no longer be trusted, or taken for granted.

I woke up this morning thinking of how time sculpts a person -- how wind and water erodes, but time and choices carve a face completely. Why else do some faces look harder, more brittle than others? What is it that happens to people?

How does a person learn to give, instead of breaking? There must be a secret, some message that some of us got in a folded note when no one else was looking.

Then I went to my son's Halloween party at school and I was still thinking about this and another mother drifted past me and murmured kindly: "What's wrong?"

I jumped, startled: "Nothing!" I felt defensive, unexplainably so, as if I'd been accused of something. But really it was that I'd been lost in my own, private musing (and also thinking, irrelevantly, that I need to schedule my sons for haircuts), and it seemed to me suddenly I'd been exposed -- that instead of sitting there silently I'd been broadcasting my thoughts (however sober) to the rest of the room, and everyone was frowning at me for it. Or: that everyone else in the room was having a great time (dressed in costumes, faces painted): why wasn't I?

I made myself smile and laugh lightly and say something casual, and I determinedly kept a smile on my face (however forced it felt) until my face got tired (or until I looked utterly psychotic) and we left early.

I'm not good at parties, maybe. I should be better at socializing -- and I'm really not. And it's not like I could talk about what I was thinking of; but even if I am having a cath on Thursday, there's nothing anyone can say or do to help, and I just need to deal with it -- and shut up.

2006-10-31T10:23:00.000-05:00

Happy Halloween!

once upon a moon

2006-10-29T20:18:00.000-05:00

Joe Niekro died.

I met Joe Niekro, once. When they named a highway after Phil Niekro. I was there. I talked to them both.

I remember it, sort of. It was a sunny day. September 29, 1997. Warm. One of those assignments where I was more or less winging it; what do I know about baseball? Not much.

I'd gone to a few Oakland A's games, when I lived in San Francisco. Sometimes the Writers and the Artists in our circle had a baseball game against each other in Golden Gate Park. I didn't play for either side. I sat on a blanket and bounced my baby son on my knee and talked to him about the trees and the flowers.

So no, not a baseball expert. Certainly no one with a rabid enthusiasm for the game. And going to the highway dedication was like being at someone else's family reunion: everyone's real excited to be there, lots of warm welcomes and inside jokes, and you're just trying to keep up with it all. People were very pleasant, and I tried not to let my ignorance show too much.

The story made the front page. Not for the quality of anything I wrote, certainly. It was just news and I happened to be the one to pick it up.

Still, reading the headlines in the Sunday paper this morning I started thinking about all those articles I wrote, once upon a moon.

So then I had to go down to the basement and start looking through the old articles, the archives, which is just an elaborate word for a laundry basket bowing out at the sides with the weight of folded papers I threw into a stack when we moved, too tired to consider cutting each article out to file somewhere. When the pile on my lap got tall I gave up and took a sheaf back upstairs with me to read over more closely.

Yes, I was a journalist once. Yes, it appears that I wrote quite a lot. Among others, there's an article on teen pregnancy ("The girls in national teen pregnancy statistics are growing up in our neighborhoods. And the teens who end up as parents are ironically the ones who needed their own the most."), and education ("I think a community gets the quality of schools that it deserves," said a school superintendent). An article for The Gabriel Project (one of my better moments, I thought).

Yet I kept sighing. The longer I looked the more sadness I felt. Lots of crime stories in there. That was my beat too -- the courts. Lots of times I'd see other reporters cry at sentencings, confessions while I would keep writing, woodenly. Some of those reporters would ask me, later: how can you hear that and not get teary?

I don't know, I'd say. I just can't let it in.

Which was, and was not, true. Of course it gets in. Some more than others, of course. And then another of my articles fell into my hand: Judge Rules Rape Suspect Must Face Grand Jury.

I remember that morning too. A little girl on the witness stand, little, younger than ten, pale-faced and her back rigidly straight as the suspect's lawyer badgered her mercilessly. The courtroom was packed: the air was hot, uncomfortable. You had the feeling everyone else in the room was much too close to you.

"Do you think someone could tell you to say something and it's not the truth?" the lawyer put it to her -- too bluntly, I thought. "...Did anyone tell you what to say?"

"No," she said.

"You were a little weak on that," the lawyer shot back, with an accusatory heat that struck me as ridiculous.

Rage shot through me. My pen shook so hard I could barely write the words. A grown man picking on a little girl in front of all these people, a little girl who's surely, surely suffered enough.

Those are the stories that started killing my desire to do my job. I'd open my eyes at 3 a.m., three hours before I had to get up and start getting ready for work, and I'd think, Ah, God, help me; I don't want to do this anymore. Maybe if I quit this gig, I could start sleeping again. Stop thinking about what kind of world it is we're living in.

Then I thought, if I could just write about good things, write to put love into the world; maybe that would make the difference.

Or maybe it just got too hard to figure out what the good things are, or I just felt too depressed to try. Or I got tired of trying to beat the TV news for breaking stories, rushing to make deadline. What's the point, really? How much do people really need to know? Maybe there's some things they'd be better off not.

You'd go to the police stations, do the rounds, and it started to all seem so predictable. But then, something would come up that wasn't predictable, and then that was even worse.

So I shouldn't have been suprised when they made the decision to pull me off reporting and put me back on the copy desk for a while, a place I'd spent some time in the beginning. I'd always preferred reporting -- I had to write, or so I thought -- so it was an easy out and I took it. I quit.

Compounding the irony of all these reflections: an extra section in today's Sunday paper on Women in Business. Women in various fields intelligently discussing their careers. And all I could think of -- flipping through pages of overblown, professional photos of women in tailored suits and looking commanding -- was: I used to be this.

And now I'm barely recognizable, so that when I turn in a professional article people react with suprise: hey! Didn't know you could do that! Way to go!

Well. After a while there came a day when I woke up and found that writing wasn't as easy as it used to be.

It's not easy now, either.

ta-dah

2006-10-29T12:39:00.000-05:00

The Fairy Calendar is finished!

friends

2006-10-29T06:47:00.000-05:00

Last night's drawing.