Not all of her dreams came true, but she was never sorry she had them.
Maybe it was because we didn’t have much money, but mostly I think it was because my mother knew the difference between trends and fashion. She had the patience to put a piece on layaway, investing her time in quality. Be it blouse or heart, she was in it for the long haul.
I spent my time wisely, simply by watching her.
Within the last week, I have had two requests for some of my original artwork. One dating back a couple of decades. And it warms my heart, not just to still be “in fashion,” but it takes me back to the Viking Plaza, right beside my mother, storefront, watching, learning that the best of things, the best of us, will always last.
I want to keep growing. Try new things. Ever. But I always begin from the same place. The long haul of my mother’s heart.
The French have a saying, “entre chien et loup” — between dog and wolf. Most poetically it describes the transitional light of dusk, the time of day when you’re not certain of what you see. Is it a dog or a wolf? A friend or foe? Safe or threatened? Caught somewhere between comfort and fear.
I suppose within all transitions, a choice has to be made. In this, a big one, our first of the year, I’d like to set the tone and choose dog. Choose that this is going to be a great year! We’re all given the same light. We just have to decide how we see it.
You may say that’s Pollyanna, but I say poetic. And wasn’t it in Our Town, when Emily Asked, “Does anyone ever realize life while they live it…every, every minute?” — she was answered, “No. Saints and poets maybe…they do some.” So I will take that unsure light, that “some”, and try to see it. Minute by minute. How magical this world is. How beautiful. And if I, we see it, really see it, then won’t we be a little more precious with it, with each other, a little less careless? Yes, joyfully, yes, some.
Just outside my dorm room, I came across a red balloon. Nearly deflated after its apparent celebration, it merely hopped in front of me, seemingly hoping for one last hurrah. Who was I to turn away? I gave it a little tap with my foot. Did it blush deeper red as it popped up to my hand? I waved it on ahead. And we danced. It didn’t occur to me that my normal three minute walk to class had now taken upwards of nine. I took on the same blush of red as I walked in late. The professor looked at me and asked why I was late. “Because I grew up on a gravel road,” I said. Always a proponent of the specific, he smiled and let me sit down.
It was true what I had said. I had consumed hours kicking a single rock down the gravel of Van Dyke Road. It’s something, I suppose, to kick a rock on the paved streets of town, but it took special attention to traverse your specific rock in a sea of them. It started out simply, just a little tap by Weiss’s house. Then a quick passing of Alf’s. Once between Muzik’s and Dynda’s, I really gathered steam. Passing Norton’s I was ready to make it all the way to the North End, where all gravel went to rest in giant cliffed piles. Simply acquaintances at the edge of my driveway, we had now become friends. So certainly, as with any friend, I was ready to take it back home with me. Back up the hill. Maybe it was a foretaste of the feast to come, but I was unwilling to settle for any abandoning.
You get over being left, but one has to decide if you are going to be a part of the leaving. I wasn’t. So I kicked that red balloon all the way to my creative writing class, in a story that began on Van Dyke Road.
It’s one of my favorites in Paris, the Musée d’Orsay. Maybe because it feels most like me.
It didn’t start out as a museum. At one point it was a train station,
even a parking lot, long before it housed the most beautiful impressionists in the world. I suppose I’ve always known it — that I would have to become, and keep becoming.
When I was a kid, I thought I would just figure stuff out, you know, and be something, and that would be it…that would be my life. Because didn’t they always ask, “What are you going to be?” And especially at this time of year, as we prepared to dress up and go from door to door asking for our treat behind the question, “What are you supposed to be?”
At first I was a cowboy, (was this my train station?). Then I was a hobo, (my parking lot?) It took a long time to become an artist. This was me. Who I was supposed to be.
I think that I, we, just have to keep becoming. We change and grow. We are molded by love and trips around the sun. It takes a long time to build a soul. We get older, maybe wiser, (even better, we gain a little grace) but we don’t finish – we don’t have to – we begin, and be, and begin again. I think that’s the gift of living…the joy of being alive!
When I look at the people in one of my sketchbooks, they all look like they belong. The paper becomes part of them. I suppose it’s the same in real life.
If you would have put the first grade class of Washington Elementary in a lineup, I think it would have been rather easy to tell who was growing up on a gravel road. Skinned knees and elbows. Dusty shoes, worn on the heels from braking our bicycles. Eyes in half squint. Just a hint of feral. It was only a mile from town, the gravel of Van Dyke road, but it was different on the north side of Big Ole. I imagined we cursed the gravel while rolling up windows. Kicked the ground that so often tripped us. And perhaps I didn’t see it then, how it formed me, formed us. But I do now. Proudly. And even a country away, I wear it still.
We are being formed constantly by our surroundings. There are regulars on the path that I walk each morning. I don’t know them by name, but how they walk on the gravel. It’s only recently that I’ve seen two of them out in the “real” world. One at a green grocery. One at an electronics store. And I had the same feeling for both. It was quite strange, but I noticed how they both looked smaller in this new context. And I can only think that on the gravel path, in this untamed world that we inhabit together, we walk a little taller. We stand strong. We stand out. Without words we take pride in our collective journey. And it makes me smile.
We can be proud of the paths we walk. Each stone that we have traveled over. Each rock pulled from shoe. They are victories. Don’t hide your journey. Shoulders back. Head high. Walk in it. Stand tall. Wear your gravel well.
I don’t know how she knew. There were no influencers. No self help books. And even if there were, she wouldn’t have had time to read them. She would have laughed at the thought of someone telling her to stay “in the now.” “Where else would I be?” She would have said.
It was a Saturday evening. Grandma Elsie’s “now” was filled with some pots brewing, others soaking. She shooed me away from the stove into the wafting of Grandpa’s pipe. I followed it into the living room. I didn’t ask, I simply followed the pinstripe of his overalls onto his lap. He perched the pipe away from the top of my blonde head. “You smell like today, “ I said. He raised his eyebrows. It was a combination of sun, and breeze, and hay and earth, topped with just a hint of tobacco. I squeezed the pouch in his pocket, still wanting to touch the end of his pipe, but remembering the heat from the first and last time I touched it. I pulled at the corners of his pierced lips to form a smile. He was still so new. I wanted to know everything. I didn’t have the words for it then, but he, being already formed, I wondered if I could be a part of it. I sculpted his face and flannel like clay, wanting to be somehow connected. I put a thumb on each of his eyebrows and pulled upward. “That means surprise,” I said. He smiled on his own this time, without my pulling, and I knew that we were connected.
The pans clanked in the kitchen. The coo-coo of the clock stayed silent. It was only a moment, but it was beautiful. And we were in it. I’m sure he had thoughts of tomorrow’s farm, but he didn’t stray. He tapped his pipe in the tray beside the lounger. And we gathered in the scented remains of the day.
It was the most delightful combination of comfort and brand new.
I made a book of photographs for Dominique’s mother. Each visit we would go through the book, again, for the first time. Her short term memory collapsed upon itself within just a few minutes, but the long term — the love of her family — this recognition remained until the end. So we turned, page by page, holding.
Maybe it’s the heart that takes over, when the brain has had enough. The brain that has warned us, urged us. Shot the warning signs again and again. But thankfully the heart seems to win — turning the the brain’s fears of “remember when…” into the heart’s gathering of “aaaah, but remember when…”
They say memory is unreliable. I suppose if you’re using the brain, that’s true. So I write the stories from my heart, where they seem to be holding, strong. Each day turning the page, saying the “I love you’s” again, and for the first time.
We took it on good faith that these were actual words, what Grandma Elsie named her desserts and baked and fried treats. Through the years, I suppose, I brushed them off as perhaps Bohemian. Maybe they came from the “old country,” as some called it. Maybe I’d just been saying it wrong — after all, I was in my pre-teens before I realized that Aunt Mavis was not in fact Aunt Navis as I had been mumbling. In my defense, there were just so many of us, and when the treats were being made, even more gathered around, claiming relations that no more existed than the names we had apparently made up for the passing of said treats.
After moving to France, I had both the time and inclination to bake. I became curious about some of these desserts of our youth. Google seemed just as baffled as I was. I asked a few relatives. All remembered eating, but the names varied, each still ungoogleable.
I hadn’t realized it until I looked at yesterday’s painting for the blog and compared it with today’s image. I have been thinking that I’m painting in the colors of Provence, while it looks exactly like the colors of Hugo’s field next to my childhood home.
Memories are malleable. They appear at our table without knowledge or invite, like a farm neighbor riding the scent of misnamed desserts — welcomed, and finding comfort in the ever changing knowledge of what we call home.
My grandma never made apologies for her wide feet. Standing on them for decades, as she did, rubbing her rounded aproned belly, holding a rootbeer float — “it was bound to happen”, she smiled, and sported her men’s Thom McAns proudly. And I loved her all the more.
My mother never made apologies for her long feet. “I’m going to rely on my heart for balance?” She laughed. They lengthened her already long legs, and stabled her heart that bounced and bruised and giggled again. And I loved her all the more.
We have been, I gratefully say, to the finest museums in the world. From Paris, to Rome, London, Amsterdam, New York, Chicago…seeing the finest artists of all time. So it may surprise you when I say we enjoyed our visit to the National Cowboy Museum in Oklahoma. Not because it could compete with a Cezanne or VanGogh, no, but it wasn’t trying to. It was cowboys. From films, to wars, to horses, and cattle, it told a story, their story. And it was beautiful.
Sometimes, when visiting a smaller city, they try to compete, and it never works. But when a place embraces their history, goes all in, wearing their shoes proudly, (or boots as it were), now this is something to see! I hope I do that. Give that. I was taught this, by two of the most different and lovely women that I know.
I hope we all can, step into each and every day, proudly, lovingly. We all have a story to tell.
The way they warned us, the teachers at Washington Elementary, trouble seemed to be a place, a spot. “Don’t get into trouble,” they said. The only “trouble” I was having was figuring out where this place was exactly. Because when the teacher said, “Now Steven is in trouble,” he seemed to still be right there, sitting beside us. Hadn’t he said “present,” when she called out his name? Why couldn’t I understand? How come I couldn’t see it? Maybe trouble was invisible, I thought.
It sounds funny, I suppose, but it turns out, I wasn’t all that wrong. We never know what people are going through. We see the outsides so easily, but that’s usually not the whole story. To see the real story, we need to actually be present. It’s not enough to just call it out. We have to be there. Show up. Again and Again. And ask questions when we don’t understand. Listen. Raise our hands. Reach out. Find a way to connect. See with our hearts what our eyes cannot. Make all around us visible.
And if you saw that I am not just my face, but all that I have faced, and if I did that for you…
