At the End of the Limb

 While this illustration might more often relate to starting an adventure without thinking about where it takes you, or how it ends -- something akin to painting yourself into a corner -- it also relates to aging.  Getting old, being old.  For who thinks of arthrities when we are nine years old and eating cotton candy at the church fair? Lately I'm glimpsing the place where the cartoon character Lio finds himself: near the end with someone else holding the end of the pen, with that invisible hand writing where I'll go from here.

I have felt for some time like I just can't get my sea legs in my life and I'm missing that feeling of being on top of things, in control of the fates -- although the way everything is hyper-analyzed to death these days, the argument could be made that I never have been in control of anything that happened.  But I felt in control.  Or maybe that's the older me looking back at the younger me.  Surely couldn't have been the nights I was up with a child who had an earache and I desperately wanted sleep but couldn't lay them down, even after dosing them up with pain meds.  Or it couldn't have been when I was in the Divorce Tilt-A-Whirl, as I let go of the center and careened around the track in nauseating spirals.  The rational, older me knows that the feeling like I was in control was an illusion, but the side of me that wants to feel better about things just knows at some point I was master of my ship.

I mentioned to my 87-year-old mother that I was old and almost before I finished the statement, she retorted that "You're not old!" But the problem is, if I'm not old, what am I?  I don't feel 40.  Or 17.  Or even 55. And the government would give me money if I asked them for it, proving that I must be old enough.   Her genial insistence that I wasn't old left me frustrated with nowhere to be, unable to find my place, to figure out my tasks and why aches are a part of my day, and forgetting a part of the mental landscape. I can't figure it out, can't seem to get a rhythm going.

My father is ninety and when I think about feeling this disoriented for another three decades, I feel worse than ever.  Some time ago the fiction I tell myself was that I was sailing on through life, feeling pretty good about things, then it was cancer, then surgeries, the body failing me in too many ways, but nothing so serious that would warrant sympathies on Facebook or a headline in the news.  Just garden-variety, life-and-energy-sapping, getting old sorts of ways.  The fact that I am surrounded by friends and loved ones enduring sad news, deaths, cancer, divorce, infidelity and illness doesn't help much.

For now I see the endings sometimes almost before the beginnings, and internalize the struggles before the fight has even been defined.  At my age, every step onto that sawed off trunk now carries with it the ink pen of the ending.  It could be the beginning of another delightful experience, or an abstruse journey of near falls, scrapes and injury along with a requisite sprinkling of good cheer.

Or...not.

General Lost Freshness

(Picture taken in 1979)

 

Years of 1978

Youth is an army ... on a considerably reluctant march into the
enemy's country, the country of the general lost freshness.
                                                                —HENRY JAMES
In that mysterious country, time ran backward—
or we ran forward and everything lay in our slipstream.
The only swamps were rice paddies far south.
The year heavy-footed it across fallow fields
toward peacocks that screamed all night.
Your great-grandfather had gone to the plains
from some hellhole in Europe, life savings
stitched to his pocket when he boarded the cars west.
Falling asleep east of Chicago, he woke penniless.
What we lost, we lost by increments—
not beauty, perhaps, just being young.
What might almost have been innocence.

William Logan
Tin House, Volume 17, Number 1 Fall 2015
from Poetry Daily

Lost Summer

 The morning after this summer's surgery to rearrange my clockworks, a tray was brought for breakfast with an enormous domed lid, which when lifted, revealed a solitary 2" pancake and a container of syrup.  It was actually perfect, even though it looks rather pitiful on the plate.

Contrast that with this sandwich two days later on cranberry walnut bread, topped with a ripe tomato from our garden, two lean slices of ham.  This was perfect, and I had it every day for lunch for a week.

The stay in the hospital was confusing, painful after the spinal block wore off, and incredibly noisy, thanks to the woman in the next bed who always had 17 of her closet relatives visiting her at any one time.  Okay, maybe it was only five, but in a room really built to hold one bed comfortably, it was a squeeze.  I was in Surgery Limbo/Bonzo Brain Land, a haze that persisted for weeks even after arriving home. 

For the first week home, I coughed (pain pain pain) when I talked for more than five minutes.  I couldn't pull up the blanket in the middle of the night.  I ate applesauce at 3 a.m. in the bathroom so I could take my meds in the middle of the night.  I slept more than I was awake, or at least it felt that way.  I watched more TV than I normally do.  I missed my quilting.  I felt isolated, amazed/surprised at "friends" who never sent notes, or even called, to see how I was doing.  I was intensely grateful for those who called nearly every day for quick conversations,  just to gauge by my voice how I was doing.  My husband kept everything going, including too many doctor appointments when I developed some complications.

This week is the fifth week post-op, and I have reclaimed much of my life.  I can get in and out of bed, clothes, the car, and most chairs although I still avoid our squishy sofa.  I can put a meal on the table, but am infinitely glad when my saintly husband does the dishes.  I can do most of the laundry after the basket is brought down to the laundry toom, but when the bending over gets to be too much, he takes over.  I can now read a book, a concentrated task unimaginable even two weeks ago.  I have driven the car -- twice -- and am down to one short nap a day.  My husband takes me out once a day just so the storms of tears and boredom don't overwhelm our calm existence.

But it's a lost summer, to me.  The run-up was emotionally draining (worry worry worry).  We're incredibly glad they didn't find any cancer, although I still have another scan for the spots in the lung, the little bits of anomaly which led to this whole experience.  I knew it was to be a major surgery, but was probably unprepared for how large a space this would carve in my life. 

While I'm still not seeing complete popsicles in my way (still a few more weeks of recovery), a lot of the obstacles have been dealt with.  After a lost summer, I'm hoping that fall will bring a re-engagement with my life.

St. Paul's Suite

I seem to turn on the radio whenever I'm in the car and recently heard Gustav Holst's St. Paul's Suite as I drove up the long sloping freeways to our neighboring town.

The piece, written in gratitude for his new office at St. Paul's Girls School, or so the announcer said, has several parts and the section that really caught my ear was the one where a traditional tune (which reminds me of "what can you do with a drunken sailor") is overlaid by Greensleeves.  Which led me to think about the commentary I read about a not-so-favorite quilter who claimed she'd invented a technique where she overlaid her quilting pattern over something else, and that the two designs, without any relationship to each other, coexist on her quilt.  I've seen a couple of those quilts and I would typify it more like an argument these two designs were having.

 

(from *here*)

That made me think of my current argument with the world: about how everything old is new again, but I seem to be the only witness to this in the quilting world.

This quilter claims she has a new and original idea about overlaying two distinct patterns, but here Holst was doing it musically decades before she was every born.  Another quilter proclaimed that her book contained New! and Fresh! block designs for quilts, but the block she chose was one I'd seen in a book published in 1970, some forty years ago.  Another duo talked about their take on combining two blocks in one quilt, but Joen Woelfrom pioneered that idea some twenty years ago.

Maybe it's because I traffic in the "modern" gang--young women who, having missed out on Home Ec and Sewing are now learning to sew by quilting, by trying to reinvent the wheel and claiming for their own.  Some of us oldtimers laugh at the young'uns trying to enforce copyright on traditional quilt patterns.  Several of us were drawn into a working group (called a "bee") and have named ourselves the Mid-Century Modern Quilters, the mid-century a nod to the fact that we are all over 50 years old.

I listened to an NPR show the other where an established artist (read: older) talked about his younger years and how he thought his ideas were new and interesting and really lit the art world on fire.  He chuckled, paused, then said, "I suppose all young artists think that."  I suppose so.

Easter 2014: Because of Him

Days Stacked Like Dishes

 

Days

Each one is a gift, no doubt,
mysteriously placed in your waking hand
or set upon your forehead
moments before you open your eyes.

Today begins cold and bright,
the ground heavy with snow
and the thick masonry of ice,
the sun glinting off the turrets of clouds.

Through the calm eye of the window
everything is in its place
but so precariously
this day might be resting somehow

on the one before it,
all the days of the past stacked high
like the impossible tower of dishes
entertainers used to build on stage.

No wonder you find yourself
perched on the top of a tall ladder
hoping to add one more.
Just another Wednesday,

you whisper,
then holding your breath,
place this cup on yesterday’s saucer
without the slightest clink.

—Billy Collins                                                                                                                

Sailing Alone Around the Room

Russian Choral Music

 

One of the weirder side effects of my recent surgery was the Russian Choruses that played in my head sporadically.  I would lay on the bed and hear the music and wonder what in heaven's name my husband was listening to downstairs.  On other occasions I'd heard the phone ringing over and over and over and wonder where he'd gone to.

The technical name for this is paracusia, or auditory hallucination, and while most cases are neurological in nature or associated with mental illness, occasionally some can be triggered by drug use, or overuse of caffeine.  I have to chalk it to the pain killers they gave me, or perhaps the after-effects of anesthesia, or just being bored out of my mind while laying on the bed, foot elevated, with icy toes.


So last night, in honor of this effect, I watched The Hunt for Red October, and enjoyed the Russian choruses.  But I have thought about other aspects of this.  I had a friend die several years ago and not long after, I heard her voice as I came out of a dream, calling me.  The night before last, I dreamed my daugher and I were at camp and had to put on a pancake breakfast for 200 and had nothing but one bag of pancake mix and a waffle iron, and then I heard my son Matthew's voice, asking me to tell him what I wanted at the grocery store and then he proceeded to make out the list for me.  As I came out of that dream (more side effects of the pain killers were vivid and sometimes disturbing dreams), my rational mind took over and the youthful Matthew had morphed to the man who just came off a week-long Scout High Adventure trip and could easily manage a pancake breakfast for a crowd.  I relaxed out of that stressful dream and thought about him.

I have heard others talk about having conversations with people that have passed away, and how comforting it was to hear their voice.  Somewhere in this house, I have a cassette tape (can I even play it now?) with the sounds of my family, from the fetal heartbeat of my first child through to a clip of an interview my husband did in Riverside for the local radio show.  I have saved phone conversations on our answering machine from nearly two years ago, when many called to talk to me when I was diagnosed with cancer.  My husband is a good sport about forwarding through these nine messages to get to the one that just came in.

In our foodie world these days, I have read many pieces about the connection between taste and memory, certain foods and events, but haven't read much about the effect of hearing your mother's voice on your answering machine, telling you she is concerned about you and hopes you are doing fine. 

Now, in our digital age, I don't really know how to save these voices, preserve them for later listening.  So I can only hope that somewhere in my infinite mind, a tape recorder is going, and will play them back for me when I need them most.

Distraction Paradigm

My colleague and I collect cartoons related to student life.  There's something that could be called the Distraction Paradigm, which is what happens when a student is distracted from the original task to something more pleasurable and loses control of the time spent.  That's usually when we professors hear things like "This took me like, forever, to finish!"  or "Do you want to know how much time I spent on this paper of yours?"  (It's always MY paper, even though they wrote it.)

While sometimes I'll arch an eyebrow and say something like "Sounds like a time management problem to me," after reading the book The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to our Brains, I now approach this more directly, asking them how many devices they had next to them or consulted while they were writing.  The above cartoon is an excellent example of the problem faced by students.

Or by any of us.  While writing this short blurb, I deviated away from the writing several times in order to check the exact wording of the title, the spelling of another word, the meaning of yet another.  And since being laid up with my foot, I now welcome distractions as I'm not trying to get anything accomplished, other than laying here with my foot up doing nothing, wondering if I should call interrupt Dave and what he's doing in order to come up here and vacuum the cobwebs off the ceiling in the bedroom.

from the Edge.org: A Conversation with Mark Pagels

"The interesting thing with Facebook is that, with 500 to 800 million of us connected around the world, it sort of devalues information and devalues knowledge. And this isn't the comment of some reactionary who doesn't like Facebook, but it's rather the comment of someone who realizes that knowledge and new ideas are extraordinarily hard to come by. And as we're more and more connected to each other, there's more and more to copy. We realize the value in copying, and so that's what we do.

"And we seek out that information in cheaper and cheaper ways. We go up on Google, we go up on Facebook, see who's doing what to whom. We go up on Google and find out the answers to things. And what that's telling us is that knowledge and new ideas are cheap. And it's playing into a set of predispositions that we have been selected to have anyway, to be copiers and to be followers. But at no time in history has it been easier to do that than now. And Facebook is encouraging that."

And for another view, here's a blurb that's been going around the web--How to Steal Like an Artist, by author and artist Austin Kleon:

Mindfulness at the Dinner Table

I ignored a recent article at the New York Times, Mindful Eating at Food for Thought, mindful of my 20-article limit per month.  But when it crept to the top of the Most Read list, and stayed there, I decided it was time to read it.  I should memorize it.

The lead quote from the article's author, Jeff Gordinier encourages us to put "a forkful of food in your mouth," and in order to pay attention to it, we must do "the hard part" of putting "the fork down. This could be a lot more challenging than you imagine, because that first bite was very good and another immediately beckons. You’re hungry."

He goes on to say that "Today’s experiment in eating, however, involves becoming aware of that reflexive urge to plow through your meal like Cookie Monster on a shortbread bender. Resist it. Leave the fork on the table. Chew slowly. Stop talking. Tune in to the texture of the pasta, the flavor of the cheese, the bright color of the sauce in the bowl, the aroma of the rising steam.Continue this way throughout the course of a meal, and you’ll experience the third-eye-opening pleasures and frustrations of a practice known as mindful eating."

I once took a "food" class where the moderator attempted to retrain us on our eating habits.  This was ages and ages ago, and it was in conjunction with yet another approach to losing weight.  I think I've been on just about every diet in the world--well, at least many of them.  Part of this was a desire to lose the weight after a baby and part of it was defense due to unrelenting criticism on how I looked from the person I was married to at that time.  The experiences I had during that time marked me, and perhaps skewed my vision of, and my response to, shedding weight.  Not only have I been on countless diets and eating plans, but I have also read countless articles on eating, obesity, weight gain, weight loss.

But this article doesn't mention weight loss as the goal, anywhere, but only how to enjoy our food--the textures, tastes, the temperature, the fragrance--all of it.  After years of trying to get through a plate of food--quickly, before the baby did, or the teenager had to be driven somewhere--this advocates a thoughtful approach to eating.  Like what we did in one lovely restaurant in Halifax, Nova Scotia, as we dissected the brilliantly designed salad, bite by bite, flavor by flavor.  We photographed and documented it, and I wrote down the list of ingredients in my travel notebook. (Don't worry, the restaurant was nearly empty--we were early birds.)  We were eating mindfully.  From my travel blog, I wrote:

The “Mayhem” salad was a work of art, which we planned to share, bit by savory bit.  We wrote down what was in it as we went:
thin slice of turnip
wedges of radish, roasted zucchini, roasted yellow squash
peas
“quickled” beet–a beet pickled quickly, in other words
pea pod
puree of butternut squash
smear of balsamiced honey
shiitake mushroom jelly (that was a new on on us–kind of like clear little lumps)
quickled fiddlehead
quickled cucumber (English-type, julienned)
confit of quickled onion
poached whole shallot
currents
plump dried cranberries, softened

All on a little tiny plate.

We still talk about that salad.

The Divided Brain

A little animated video, courtesey of RSA and my having graded research papers all week.



"The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift." - Einstein

What it Takes

Ira Glass on Storytelling from David Shiyang Liu on Vimeo.
(Many thanks to Heidi Hathaway for posting this on FB.)

Forgiveness

FORGIVENESS FLOUR

by Marguerite Stewart

When I went to the door, at the whisper of knocking,
I saw Simeon Gantner's daughter, Kathleen, standing
There, in her shawl and her shame, sent to ask
"Forgiveness Flour" for her bread. "Forgiveness Flour,"
We call it in our corner. If one has erred, one
Is sent to ask for flour of his neighbors. If they loan it
To him, that means he can stay, but if they refuse, he had
Best take himself off. I looked at Kathleen . . .
What a jewel of a daughter, though not much like her
Father, more's the pity. "I'll give you flour," I
Said, and went to measure it. Measuring was the rub.
If I gave too much, neighbors would think I made sin
Easy, but if I gave too little, they would label me
"Close." While I stood measuring, Joel, my husband,
Came in from the mill, a great bag of flour on his
Shoulder, and seeing her there, shrinking in the
Doorway, he tossed the bag at her feet. "Here, take
All of it." And so she had flour for many loaves,
While I stood measuring.

And *this,* too.

The older I get the more I depend on the blessing and power of forgiveness in my life.  When I went to the Springville Art Museum while in Utah this past 11 days, I saw this statue and immediately thought of the the poem Forgiveness Flour (above).  In tracking down information about the poem, I came upon a speech on forgiveness given at BYU, a powerful address that I plan to print out and place in my scriptures.  It's the link just below the poem.

Half the Sky

My friend got me into listening to audio books on my digital device, and my mother and I have started a mini-book club; we choose a new book every few weeks and listen to it together.  I don't usually post here about books (perhaps I should), but this one is a little different.

This is a difficult, yet sobering, book to listen to or to read.  My 83-year-old mother chose it for us to listen to because she is a far-reaching thinker and astute observer of the human condition, but because of its depictions of the difficulties that women face in developing countries, I thought it might be difficult to listen to, esp. in the sections of human trafficking, female circumcision, and maternal mortality.  But I'm glad I persevered.  I listened to it while quilting: working on cloth and patchwork and piecing--a so-called woman's set of skills--listening to the deprivations endured by so many women across the world.  

I read a quilt blog this past week where a fellow blogger linked to some of the brouhaha over whether or not there should be more racial diversity in our quilting world.  While a legitimate topic of discussion, most of it trended to whining about privilege and money and bias, along with some slander here and there.  I just wanted to shout, "Wake up, whiny quilters!"  I thought the discussion was a curious maelstrom, considering there are those who can't even begin to contemplate owning a new piece of cloth, let alone the luxury of pursuing art and hobbies. I told my husband after listening to this book, I realize how good we have it here in the United States, and while we already tithe to our church--which has many humanitarian projects currently going on in the world--I wanted to do some more.  

My husband's family has a long legacy of philanthropic attitudes and projects, so perhaps I'm just now coming awake to some of those possibilities.  As a family we've talked about Kiva, which offers micro loans to help others, however, I was quite impressed with the stories in the book about Camfed, which strives to educate girls in Africa.  No, I just didn't find a Do-Good Badge on the ground and pin it on.  But if you choose to read this book--and although hard to read in some parts, I believe all women should read it--you might find yourself at the other end of it wondering how you can help from the boundaries of your own life.  I know I was moved to tears at many points, but the authors weren't yanking on emotional heartstrings for pathos or for pity's sake.  They were informing me, changing my vision of the world.

We don't need to give up everything and go to these countries to live as they do, although if you feel called to that mission, you will do much good.  As Kristoff and WuDunn point out, sometimes our well-placed 25 bucks can make a huge difference to some young woman, or a young mother across the world.  I generally have no hesitation plunking down amounts far greater than that in quilt shops or in excess shopping at the mall.  Listening to this has made me realize that I can do better than simply amassing more fabric for my stash, but I don't think it's either/or.  I can do both and make a difference in a life as well.

If you are intrigued, they have a great website, with a whole list of different opportunities that, for the price of a few fat quarters, I realize I could leave another lasting legacy besides my quilting.

Playing Fair

from a Carolyn Hax column (Washington Post):
Seriously. It’s not that hard to play fair with other people, once you internalize the idea that speaking your mind about something “mean” is a lot less mean than imposing silent punishment for this thing you decided was too mean to mention.

I've always tried to be upfront about things, and this approach was further influenced by two things in my adult life: living in a fairly horrid marriage for 15 years, and listening to a tape by Lynn Scoresby, a family therapist.  Scoresby always noted that people who wouldn't talk about issues, things, problems probably didn't love the person they were at odds with as much as those who did figure out how to talk.  His reasoning?  Solving problems can only be done through discussion, and a marriage (or relationship) with lots of problems solved is a happy (and loving) marriage. Having had both kinds, I tend to agree with his observations.

Maintaining relationships can be difficult, especially if you want the person who is driving you crazy to take a break, maybe go to the moon for several years. (Of course, it's always them.) Building relationships can also be a challenge, requiring meeting the loved one in the middle (or not-loved one, esp. if you have teenagers!), talking through hard things, and yes--as Hax notes--not imposing the silent treatment.  But the hardest of all is repairing relationships, trying to foster harmony where two disparate people view each other with hostility and misunderstanding across a wide divide.

I'll be spending the rest of my life working through all three of these, I'm sure.  I can only hope that I'll get better at it with practice. It was sobering then, when my mother said that she found the list of things she hoped to be forgiven for growing, instead of shrinking.  I understood why on some levels, but when I asked her, she said that she was remembering experiences that she felt were left unresolved (my words, not hers) and could have been smoothed over.  It's tempting in our culture I think to use the models we see in television scripts and movies as templates for conducting human relationships, ofttimes not realizing that the artificial bonds and links of those fictional characters are not normal, but instead they are slaves to the plot and purposes of the film makers, and often do not apply to the person who is across from you at the table. Conflict is what makes a good story.  Resolving conflict is what makes a satisfying relationship.  I guess that's why I try to maintain relationships with frequent contact (mail, email, visits), taking an interest in the lives of those I love, and trying to see how life is from their side of the equation. 

Most of us fail at all noble goals with some frequency, I've discovered in my older life.  But since all we carry with us past the grave is our relationships, it imbues the building, maintaining and repairing with a much greater urgency, a sense of gravitas and importance.

Art with Christine

I was in Washington DC last week, and the first day there, my sister came in from where she lives via train to meet me for a day's adventure.  It was hot and muggy in DC, so we wisely decided to spend the day looking at art INSIDE museums.  But first, we headed to the Outdoor Sculpture Garden.

This is one of my favorites.
Typewriter Eraser, Scale X, 1999 by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen.

Christine seated on one of the marble chairs in Six-Part Seating, by Scott Burton.  Although there are signs everywhere saying don't touch the art, this one said, sitting okay.  But only here.

Graft, by Roxy Paine.

The National Gallery of Art notes that this stainless steel sculpture was "Made from more than 8,000 components [. . . and] weighs approximately 16,000 pounds" along with the following observation: "Graft presents two fictive but distinct species of trees—one gnarled, twisting, and irregular, the other smooth, elegant, and rhythmic—joined to the same trunk. Among its rich associations, this sculpture evokes the persistent human desire to alter and recombine elements of nature, as well as the ever-present tension between order and chaos."

But when we rounded the corner and saw this. . . 

Four-sided Pyramid, by Sol LeWitt

. . . Christine recognized his work.  This idea, that artists have a recognizable pattern of working, of creating is not a new one, but for some reason it stuck in my head all day long.  Back at the hotel, I went to the website of the National Gallery of Art, where I found this: "Much of LeWitt's work explores permutations of the grid—the square and the cube—in both two and three dimensions, discarding, as he said, 'the figure, the word, and the symbol.' "

The key to LeWitt's work, the grid, helps me understand why my sister could recognize it, just like I can recognize Matisse's free-form paper cutting and shapes (above).

Christine was also able to pull these LeWitts out of the collection, whereas I had to look on the wall plaque to identify him again. 

Coupled with this experience was the one of the next day: visiting Lorton (D.C.) Workhouse, an old prison remade into an artists' colony. They had several buildings, with multiple artists in each one.  My friend Rhonda, who took me there, knew of one of the artists--Marni Maree, a watercolorist--and amazingly, Maree was there and showed us her art and her studio.  We talked also with Mary Gallagher Stout, who is an artist working in acrylic, chalk and charcoal, with stunning creations with lots of vibrancy. Her energy and infectious enthusiasm for her work was appealing, and I wished I could bottle some of that and keep it my workplace when all I want to do is sit and surf the web.  While I wouldn't be able to identify everything these women have done, I can see they have a consistency--with creative variation--to their work.  They know their skills and their strengths, and they figure out their avenues of exploration.

After doing a life's review of the medium in which I create art (quilts) I can't say I have an identifiable style.  Perhaps working in a series would help.  Or staying away from copying/making others' patterns, which may be difficult because it is probably in my creative DNA, given my entry into quilting from dressmaking.  My husband tells me that my quilts are my creative expression, and his belief in me has given me a new lens from which to view my creations.

I pointed to one painting on the wall when I was with Christine, and said "I'd love to make something like this." "Then, do!" she said, encouraging me.  But I have to say much of me resonated with something that Stout mentioned, after we complimented her on one of her creations: a rendition of the Washington Monument.  "Oh," she said.  "I almost painted over that one.  I did it and I liked it but it didn't seem to go anywhere or get sold, so I was about to paint over it, when someone from the government called and bought it."  She laughed.  "Can you believe it?  I almost painted right over it."

But she was in constant motion getting ready for a one-woman show, doing her art in a unique-to-her style.  I envied her vision, but wondered how to find one for myself.  What is my style?  Where is the heart of my work?  These questions are the same one that haunt me as a writer, as I suppose they would in any creative endeavor where I might try to get past technician, and arrive at artist.

Sunday Something to Think About

I Should Be Making Dinner

I should be making dinner, but instead, I'm leaving you a poem.

Sunlight on Hallway Wall • May 30, 2011

We Never Notice--
by Rolf Jacobsen

We never notice when the dark comes on, the earth
emptied of light each evening, even
under the beds.
Silently, behind each speck of dust,
it lifts the light out through the windows.
So too, in the shoe-closet, between the laces
and slender eyelets,
the hours darken.  Glasses
are quietly drained to the bottom, you don't even
recognize your own face in the mirror.

Translated from the Norwegian by Robert Hedin

Existential Question of Writing

I wrote in one of my last posts about feeling out of sync with my own era.  I also think it was in response that I had to turn in a short story to my newly formed writing group last night and I had nothing new.  I have written only short, blog posts for several years now, avoiding the heavy work of long-form fiction writing.  I do think about, and often revise several times, what I write on blog posts, so the craft of writing still peeks its head up when I'm composing the short form.

Yesterday I had lunch with a friend, who is about my age and stage with children launched and grandchildren woven through our lives, and mentioned my angst about all this to her.  I wondered if I was up to the writing, the work, if at my age I had the energy. Her (brilliant) insight was that when we were young mothers and surrounded by work and laundry and fixing meals and cleaning up and activities we would look far into our future and say that when all the children left, we would do_________ and then we would fill in that blank with whatever we--at that point in our younger lives--imagined that we would want to do.  She observed that now that we have finally arrived at that fill-in-the-blank spot, all is changed.  What our 35-year-old self thought is not what our 55-plus self sees as a possibility.

It's a bit disconcerting, all of this shifting around.

In some cases, the shift happens because of forces outside our lives: the recession and business failures, health problems, the dynamics of our extended family.  Some interior forces might be a different way of looking at things, a banking of that proverbial fire in the belly, an altered moral viewpoint.  Whatever the situation that brought us to this point, those dreams we once had--that may have gotten us through that crunch--are seemingly ephemeral and must be redrawn, reimagined.

Out of My Time

Sometimes I feel like I'm always out of my own time.

When I was raising children, I tucked into home and domesticity and chore charts and making a good loaf of bread right about the time all the women my age were going back for advanced degrees, getting big fancy jobs and denigrating those women who stayed at home.  Yes, people like me.

I spent a lot of years making all my children's clothes, sewing for friends and this post from a blogger, writing about her children's flannel nightgowns, triggered lots of sewing memories for me.  I've cooked (and have lots of recipes to show for it), cleaned, sewn, quilted and now that there is a veritable explosion of blogs posting about these things, I'm sort of out of steam, out of energy, and yes, out of sync.  So many bloggers and "sewists" (that's the new term and it still sounds strange to me) are creating and posting all those things I know how to do--and DID--while I'm grading papers and doing lesson plans at my definitely un-fancy job at the local community college. 

On a somewhat related note, I've been thinking a lot about how thin I've spread myself in my creative world.  There's even a book about people like me--who like to do lots of things all at once.  I think it can best be summed up in this quote I have stuck on my cabinet near the computer:

Much of what I read in the blogosphere reminds me of all I used to accomplish in my sewing/creative life, and all that I cannot now do.  Whether I like it or not, those doors are closed to me now.  I won't be stitching up batches of nightgowns, or sewing this or that.  I just don't have the time/energy/vision/youth that is required for all of that.  I have to choose, now, and that is something new (and I have to say) rather unwelcome to me.  I'd rather have all that hope and promise of my thirties--when the world was all new, untested, ready for me to try and do anything--like all these young women bloggers with their blogs.

I suppose I need to tap into the blogs of the fifty-somethings rather than the thirty-somethings, and see if they have something interesting to say.  And while I just don't want to hang out with Premature Door-Closers (or become one myself), there is an elegance to streamlining a life, of bubbling it down to its core--and its creative--essentials.  Of figuring out what I want to be as I grow up.