Everything About Me but the Kitchen Sink (That Too)

A Wall with a Past, acrylic on canvas, 24" x 24"
private collection, Mercer Island, Washington

This tag is courtesy Kim of Creating Space. She's requested I divulge seven "unusual" things about me. Here the problem is not coming up with seven offbeat traits/events. It's deciding which to leave out. Oh well, here's a sampling of my quirks:

1. As I've mentioned (numerous times), I was born breech, entering this world ass-backwards and I've been doing things in a roundabout way ever since. Example:

2.

I once dislocated my toe while helping my son learn his spelling words. Don't ask.

3. My eyes are afflicted with a corneal disorder which affects 1 out of 2000 Americans. My uncorrected eyes see something (beyond a certain distance) like this:

Marcel Duchamp
Nude Descending a Staircase

I only wish I could paint what I see.

4. On the Myers Briggs Type Indicator, I am a INFJ, which purportedly occurs in 1% of the population. Kindred spirits include Geoffrey Chaucer, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Eleanor Roosevelt, Carl Jung, Mother Teresa, and Martin Luther King Jr. (As best as I can surmise, these findings were gleaned from the online test-taking results in the hard drives of these folks' discarded i-Books.) Wow, I guess I'm the underachiever in the group. That makes me even more unusual.

Then again, I've not lived a life completely devoid of attainment. Examples:

5. I was the valedictorian of my high school class, graduating with a grade point average of 97.425. I was also one of the Top Ten Magazine Salesmen in our senior class's primary fundraiser. For this I received a goldtone trophy in the form of a comely young woman. (Yes, I still have it. It resides in a place of honor in a cardboard box along with my Proficiency in Two Foreign Languages Award, My Best All Round Girl Award, my aforementioned Valedictorian Award, and an assortment of letters from various dignitaries, among them a state senator and the President of the company my dad worked for, congratulating me on a job well done.) For the record, I honed my art sales skills selling little prints in white plastic frames door-to-door in the fourth grade. I sold the hell out of stuff like this:

6. A small photograph of my own painting Heart's Destiny appears in the current issue of The Santa Fean. The feature is called "Fall Art Openings." And no, the photo wasn't taken at an opening. Get this: the photographer wandered into our gallery one afternoon just after Bennie had sold Heart's Destiny. A mood of festivity prevailed, so the photographer snapped a picture of Bennie, the buyer (the woman on the far left), a friend of the buyer, and yes, the painting. How's that for uncanny timing?

Where was I? In the studio painting of course.

7. AND my kitchen sink was immortalized on the cover of a literary magazine called...what else? The Kitchen Sink.

Oakley took the photograph.

I now tag 7 highly unusual (in the very best of ways) people:

1. The Moody Minstrel (who resides in The Land of the Rising Sun)
2. Ron (who Vents)
3. Lee (who dreams Chrysalis Dreams)
4. Jo (who Celebrates Life)
5. Peg (who hears Angel Voices)
6. Todd (who makes Pottery for Peace)
7. Paschal (aka murat11).

Your turn to confess.

Is Every Day Dia de los Muertos?

Wanderer, 40" x 30"
acrylic on canvas

This morning when I was soaking in the lovely hot tub, I saw the spirit of a teenage girl sitting in the spirit chair. Her name was Michelle, she lived a quarter mile from my house in Westacres, and she was in my grade. I think she was my first "crush." I remember going tobogganing with her and several friends at night in the eighth grade. After the toboggan runs we all met up at the community clubhouse for a dance...we danced to the Monkees and Beatles, drank hot chocolate, and I couldn't stop thinking about Michelle. A few years later, probably when I was a student at Oakland, I heard she had died in a car accident somewhere in the east. It made me sad. I never did find out for sure. Still, I think she was in that chair this morning--looking very young and pleasant. Don't know what to make of it...


These were words I received in an email from my husband yesterday, Halloween. Last year I posted the story of our "spirit chairs," one of which is the focal point of my blog header. From time to time wandering spirits do take a load off here. Hiram and Lily have frequented them. And now Michelle has come calling. Last night Bennie and I lit candles in our living room and sat for a time in their quivering light. We talked about the spirits, the few times we or our family members have had visitations from dear ones.

When my father was diagnosed with cancer, he woke from a nap to find his own deceased parents, and my mothers' parents, and her brother who had died in World War II, standing at the edge of the room, very still, all of them looking at him, smiling. He described them as looking young and healthy and very happy. He was completely unnerved by the experience. And my mother-in-law, on her fiftieth wedding anniversary in 1999, saw her own mother Mildred sitting in a chair, dressed in fall colors and a fall hat (even though it was August and Mildred had died in 1985). Mildred too was smiling and radiant. Bennie asked me last night, "Do you believe that experiences like this are in the mind?"

I don't know. Some would say that any experience is completely in the mind, that as we go about our ordinary activities, we are journeying from one place in the mind to another, passing through a world we've imagined.

Passing Through, 30 " x 40"
acrylic on canvas

The chair I sit on is an arrangement of subatomic energies, ordered just enough to provide the illusion of solidity. I can't "see" those energies, but they're there.

detail from Passing Through

What else is out there, all the time, that I can't, or don't, or won't see?

Six Unremarkable Things about Me

Laura, the dream-loving therapist of From the Couch, has tagged me with a meme. I'm supposed to divulge six unremarkable, ho-hum things about me. Easy.

Here goes:

1. At the age of 1 1/2 I ran away to join the circus.

2. My newfound family was just your average family. Loving. Somewhat dull. They used to say that Uncle Roscoe had been fired from one too many cannons. I always wondered what that meant.



3. Save for an unfortunate incident involving an irate bearded lady, a cotton candy machine, and my upper torso, it was an uneventful childhood. I emerged virtually unscathed. (I stand before you today a typical menopausal woman.)




4. I spend my days in recollection. One of my sweetest memories is that of the day I met my future husband. It was love at first sight...
...of those clown pants.

5. We had two rather ordinary children....

...who shared a penchant for impersonating Cherokee Indians...

and bringing home stray animals.

6. To this day, I enjoy simple pleasures. Friends. Family. Walks in the countryside. I now live in the high desert of New Mexico,

a sparsely inhabited, unremarkable place where the license plates say Land of Enchantment.

Go figure.

Marie Larson 1926-2008: A Legacy of Light and Shadow

"Aunt Marie is one of those people that just does everything perfect!" 8-year-old Oakley was beside himself with delight. Marie Larson, Bennie's aunt, had just moved to New Mexico from Michigan and had purchased a modest little condo in Albuquerque. She had invited us for New Year's Day dinner and had made an Oakley-friendly meal--roast beef, baked potatoes, green beans. Plus her condo was such an interesting place to be. It had nice tall ceilings with vigas, and saltillo tile floors, and for those places that were lacking in architectural charm, Marie had shopped salvage stores for corbels and mounted them in doorways and beside the kitchen cabinets. Although the art this dazzling painter made was very much classic representational, she had an eye for the "found" art object, and her walls were decorated with a vintage snowshoe and sled. Her furnishings were a mixture of simple comfortable contemporary seating and dark walnut antiques, set off by elegant candlesticks and a big jar of her own paintbrushes. We all laughed at Oakley's comment, understanding immediately the truth of it.

Marie's relationships with some of her family members will be remembered as less than perfect. She and her husband divorced rather bitterly when the children were small and apparently, she never completely recovered from the hurt of it. According to her children, she wasn't the perfect picture of the nurturing mother. She freely discussed the perhaps exaggerated shortcomings of their dad in their presence, and sometimes these shortcomings she applied to the entire male sex. She wrote off men as romantic partners as a waste of her time. It was a way of simplifying her life raising two children on her own in the 60s. It was not unlike the way she distilled a composition into the essentials of light and shadow.


She had a gift for portraying the human figure and face. She inevitably tapped into her models' vulnerability and sadness. It was as though the sadness at her own core opened a door into the hearts of her subjects.


She preferred to paint and draw rather than to cook, and at an early age the children learned to get their own meals. Bennie remembers his cousin Paul reporting long afternoons spent as his mom's captive model.




The Marie that Oakley and Flannery and I knew was the more public Marie known by her art students. A Marie who laughed. A Marie who offered encouragement. Once we drove down to Marie's place on the evening of July 4. I made food and we grilled steaks on her patio; afterwards we watched the fireworks from there. Although whatever food I brought was so simple I don't even remember it, Marie said, "Well, I just don't see how you have the time to work and cook." She always expressed appreciation for simple gestures. And as recently as this past spring, I received an email from a former student who was trying desperately to track her down. She wanted to visit her and catch up. (I have met other students of hers, some of whom have become clients of our gallery, people on whose lives she had a dramatic and positive impact.) By that time, however, Marie had moved back to the Midwest to be closer to her children and was living in an assisted living facility. Yesterday she quietly passed on with them nearby. Paul says it was a beautiful fall day and a feeling of peace pervaded the room.


I believe the last time I spoke with Marie it was the occasion of one of her last outings after a serious heart attack. Oxygen deprivation had left her with on-and-off memory loss and she had become quite frail. Soon she would be returning to the Midwest. Paul had come out from Chicago, and he and Marie met Bennie and me at a restaurant. I'd just had my hair cut and one recalcitrant curl kept falling over my forehead. The first thing Marie said to me: "There was a little girl who had a little curl right in the middle of her forehead. When she was good, she was very, very good. But when she was bad she was horrid." We all laughed and had a delightful meal.

I treasure that memory of Marie's remark. It does apply to all of us. We are all part good/part horrid. We can hope that our legacy of good will outweigh the horrid. I believe that in Marie's case that is very much the case. Marie's artful hand fashioned a life pared down to the luminous essentials. And that's good.





(Note: All paintings and drawings in this post are the work of Marie Larson.)

Return of the Prodigal Blogger

Return of the Prodigal Son, Rembrandt van Rijn
oil on canvas, 262 x 206 cm.
Hermitage, St. Petersburg

I know. I know. I've been a bad blogger. I ran away for better than two weeks and didn't so much as leave a note. Thank you for your notes, however. I'm touched by your concern, and in some cases, your gentle chiding. One blogger assumed I was on a top-secret mission with the U.S. government. OK. You were somewhat close. I've been coaching Sarah Palin on foreign policy. Did you happen to catch that brilliant performance with Katie Couric?

Of course I'm joking. I was actually in Paris observing my painting "Heart's Destiny" being installed in the dazlling new contemporary wing of the Louvre.

Looks great doesn't it? I'm not too keen on the ostentatious frame, but what the hey, it's the Louvre, right?

You don't buy that either? Seriously, I've been doing what I usually do when I disappear from Blogland. I've been holed up in my studio, doing battle with the canvas. And Bennie, God love him, has been selling them faster than I can produce. Even "Heart's Destiny," which I blogged about in late April, is finally being shipped, not to the Louvre, but to a collector in Durham, North Carolina, an employee of Duke University. If you happened to have read my earlier post, you may recall that I said the painting was "my painted acknowledgment of the way our lives are often altered for the better when we follow our heart’s urgings." Although I didn't meet the buyer of this painting, she left me a very kind note telling me she was "thrilled" to own my work. I was very attached to this particular painting--it had great emotional resonance for me. As I'd told another blogger, another artist, I was afraid I had jinxed the painting's sale by own desire to continue to look at it. I'd actually felt slightly sad on seeing Bennie take it down to prepare it for shipment.

And then yesterday I had the opportunity to speak with the buyer on the phone about a logistical matter regarding the shipping. At that time she told me she had cried when viewing the painting. (Bennie had mentioned this. I just didn't quite grasp it until I spoke with her personally.) It seems she is in a difficult time of transition in her personal life and "Heart's Destiny" simply spoke to her about her own heart's destiny. And it did that when she first stood before the painting and regarded its surfaces, before she knew its title had anything to do with hearts or destinies. As I have written before, there is such an inevitability in the process by which a painting comes to reside with the right person. Such exchanges are what keep me going back into the studio.

And, equally thrilling for me was the placement of "Desert Spirits" in the permanent collection of MOMA in New York.

OK, you're on to me. I'm a very poor liar. Truth be told, "Desert Spirits" is now residing in a lovely home in Las Cruces, New Mexico. A home in which I am invited to visit and stay in the guest room, with the understanding that it is unfinished due to the owners' recurring purchases of my art. "I'll sleep on the floor," I said.

It is this particular couple's third acquisition from me, and they told me my painting would be replacing a series of original Dali lithographs, which would remain in the room, only on an opposite wall. This I'm not joking about. They actually laughed and said, "Now, you can tell people your art has replaced Salvador Dali's."

So that's what I'm doing now: I am telling you: My art has replaced Salvador Dali's! And I trust you are rightfully impressed. I know I am. I'm impressed, again and again, by the faith and generosity of those rare souls who purchase art at whatever level is affordable to them. I am including those who buy from the toniest showplace in Manhattan, those who buy from smaller galleries such as Bennie's and mine, those who buy from art fairs and flea markets and their next door neighbor. People who invest in hand-made things that have no function other than as a resting place for tired eyes--these people are unusual. I mean, you can't climb behind the wheel of a painting or a sculpture or a piece of pottery, and drive it down the freeway, cutting off those you want to impress with your flashiness. Art is much more personal than that. It seldom impresses anyone other than the buyer.

Transactions like this, like so many things, good and bad, like breakdowns in home appliances even, tend to come in threes. Last, but no less exciting for me, Monique, my brilliant French economist, whom I wrote about this past summer, chose to purchase a second painting from me.

Flow, acrylic on canvas, 48" x 48"
private collection, Arlington, Virginia

Monique called me when her painting arrived. In that lovely French accent she said, "Eet eez more beautiful than I imagined. Even my 5-year-old gasped when I unwrapped it."

The 5-year-old and the 7-year-old were having a grand time stomping on the bubble wrap too. I heard the mini-explosions in the background, the whoops of delight bouncing off the walls. Monique was shouting, "You weel go to bed at 5:15 EEF you don't deseest in making that racket!"

"Not you, San! Theez eerascible keeds!"


Dear friends, I hope you will forgive my prodigal disappearance. I am happy to be back.

Shall we kill the fatted calf?

Shall we stretch a colossal sheet of bubble wrap from one end of cyberspace to the other? Shall we dance on it till it explodes?

Shall we go with the flow?

Minding My Zs and Qs

OK, wrong game, but the closest I had in the image files.
Monopoly. Thanksgiving 2005.

Flannery was way ahead in this game. (Scrabble). Bennie and Oakley threw in their tiles. "You win," they said in sad capitulation. I was ready to follow suit, but Flannery simply adores playing to the bitter end, especially when she's a clear winner. Being a dutiful mom, I decided to see us through to the end of play. Mistake.

It was my turn to empty the last two letters from the little felt pouch. And wouldn't you know what tumbled out? I got Z. I got Q. Ordinarily I treasure these premium letters. They're worth 10 points apiece. But when you have next to no vowels, and there are no remaining tiles to draw, the words keep diminishing in length thanks to the dwindling number of tiles. There's just no place to play anything, let alone Z and Q. And at the end of the game, the points of the tiles lingering on your rack are subtracted from your score and added to your opponent's. A double whammy of defeat. Curtains.



I began to resort to pathetic two-letter words like "ef," the phonetic spelling of the letter "F." (Yes, that's allowed.) There's something so cold and detached and Cartesian about spelling out one letter with two letters. It feels twice-removed from reality. Wasteful. And you get only two miserable points. I wandered into the kitchen and devoured a sorrowful spoonful of Cherry Garcia right out of the carton. Out on the arroyo a coyote howled and pounced on its prey. Every carnivore between here and Highway 285 howled. "YOUR TURN MOM!" Flan's voice was annoyingly sweet. I imagined her eyes gleaming in anticipation. She was into the kill.

I wandered half-heartedly back to the Scrabble table. Now my opponent had gotten really fortunate. She 'd gotten rid of two letters. Her last two letters. I and L. Clearly, my verbal prowess was plummeting in my dotage. I was outshone by a whippersnapper. Oh my God, I had just actually thought the term whippersnapper in reference to my firstborn. I was thinking like a geezer. I felt ill.

ILL. Flan had attached her I and L to the L of my GLADE, spelling ILL. What?? I took off my glasses, cleaned them, and put them back on. There it was--floating before my eyes--Flan's I was completely unattached!

In a frenzy, I pounced. I played my Q, my U--hoping against hope, I had refrained from making TUB a couple of moves earlier, knowing I'd need U to accompany Q if any miracle opportunity presented itself--and my Z. I made QUIZ! The Q was a double letter and the whole thing was a double word. I racked up 64 points in my last turn, seizing victory from Flannery's ILL. Talk about ILL-gotten gains!!!!!

I wasn't ready for geezerdom just yet. I was HOT.



I was so dazed by it all, when I went upstairs for bed, I felt compelled to run back down to Flannery's room and say, "You knew I had that Q and Z. You deliberately put down that I so your old mother could win, didn't you?? You felt sorry for me."

She took my hand and said, "Mom, I wish I were that nice."

Flannery with her new Scrabble coach, Dr. Nola Fay Merideth-Jones.
I'm a grandmother (kind of).

Let Me Eat Cake

I've never had a cake delivered to my place of business. Until Friday. Yes, the day after my birthday a gentleman arrived at my desk, carrying a large bakery box. He said he was looking for "Sam."

"Could you be looking for 'San'?" I asked, my hopes rising.

Peeking into the box, he said, "Yes, it's for San. From Margaret."

WOO HOO!!!

I myself lifted the lid of the big white box and caught a glimpse of one of the most beautiful birthday cakes I have ever seen.


What was most beautiful was that figure 526,600, which of course referenced my birthday post the day before--Wildest Gift: 525,600 Minutes, in which I celebrated the gift of another year totaling that many minutes. Now what's wrong with this picture? Correction. What's very, very right with this picture? The cake decorator granted me an extra ONE THOUSAND minutes!!! This celebration just gets wilder and wilder.

And if there's anyone who's looked Wildness in the face, who's embraced Wildness, who's danced with her, and had Wildness whisper her secrets into the ear, that would be the big-spirited giver of this cake, my lovely blogging friend Meg Wolff. Meg also understands deeply the gift of being granted time you didn't know you had.

Look at that beautiful, radiant woman and try to believe that in 2003 her doctor told her to put her affairs in order because she was dying of cancer. Meg had already given a breast and a leg to cancer and it was beginning to look like the rest of her body was now being taken over by that iron-fisted, take-no-prisoners dictator Cancer. But somewhere inside, Meg heard another, softer voice, a voice that was a bit wilder than the voice of the dictator. A voice telling her her work wasn't done here. She had heard this inner voice, the voice of her gut, before. And I quote from Meg's blog:

I had this "red flag" experience when I was diagnosed with breast cancer and a bone stem cell transplant was recommended by the oncologist. Immediately, I had a stabbing gut reaction that this wasn't right for me. I had a sense that it would kill me. I went for a second opinion and the same treatment was recommended. I went to my doctor and told her I felt uncomfortable with this recommendation and she said, "Go with your gut, go with your gut, go with your gut." She recommended yet another oncologist who said, "I am in on the research and in the beginning it looked very promising for breast cancer treatment, but as time and studies went on, we saw that it wasn't as effective as we first thought so, I don't recommend it for you. Your gut feeling was right."

So, again, Meg trusted her inner voice. She believed it. She had more living to do and she would become whole. She might be missing a body part or two, but she would integrate the healing of her body with her life's work. That would make her whole. After all, there are plenty of people walking this earth, people whose bodies are perfect specimens, and still, they feel something's lacking.

To recognize one's calling in life is a huge leap towards wholeness. And that's exactly what Meg did. She followed her calling to learn about macrobiotic diets, to read all the evidence that eating a toxin-free, primarily plant-based diet of whole grains and fruits and vegetables and legumes, had helped people nurture their bodies and spirits back to health and wholeness. She read their stories and she believed them. Those stories became Meg's story! And she's made it her work to tell the world that story. She has authored two books about her cancer experience and her recovery, one of them a loving photographic depiction of her body's journey after cancer. She travels to teach workshops and sign books and give lectures and encourage people. I encourage everyone to go to her blog becoming whole and read Meg's story, read her generous advice on healthy living and eating, look at her books and consider ordering them. I encourage everyone to do so, but in particular, I would encourage anyone who is suffering from chronic illness or chronic pain or even the common cold or everyday burnout, to get to know Meg. Just this past week I received emails from two bloggers who have dear friends with serious cancer prognoses. Why didn't it occur to me until now?--they should go over to Meg's place!

Since listening to the voice of inner Wildness whispering in her ear, Meg's primary job description is hope bringer. And occasionally, she orders up cakes.