What's in a tail?

Yesterday, walking out of Whole Foods as I was walking in, two men addressed Luci like this:

"Oh, what a fine dog you are!" one squatted to tell her. 

"And," the other added, "You have such an important tail." 

I've heard Luci's tail called a lot of things--my previous favorite being "resplendent, which it is.  A long shaggy tail on such a little dog is definitely noteworthy, and it's often noted, but I'd never have thought of it as important. 

I love this so much that if I were a writer of children's stories, I'd write one about a fine dog with an important tail! 

Editing Stuff

For the first five or six decades of life, it's as if we're all climbing some hill in our heads--getting, as best we can, the stuff we need to complete the picture called What My Life Is Going To Look Like.  

The very first choice I made in that direction was choosing the china, crystal and silverware to set a table and have dinner parties.  I barely knew how to cook, but so what?  Married people were supposed to throw dinner parties, right?  Place settings were advertised in Seventeen and Bride magazines to get us there.  Not recipes, but the carriers of food and drinks to mouths.

I have rarely had a dinner party.  I used to cook for people and always for my family, but I don't even do that anymore.  Yesterday we celebrated Will's and Veronica's pair of 44th birthdays together at a Thai restaurant.  

We sold our wedding silver to buy a dog--a German Shepherd named Tony, a dog I'll never forget. The silver was returned to a department store a knife and a fork at a time until we had enough money to buy the dog. Then the set was incomplete, so we sold the rest.

We didn't actually have a table anyway, just a three-legged one that we propped on the radiator, and a series of rental houses with not enough space for dinner parties.  All I'm saying is that my Big Hill of the time didn't match my imagination. 

Along the way, there were other hills, smaller than Whole Life Hills, but hills nonetheless.  

Now, most of us have reached an age when we're acquiring way less.  We know what we need for the real lives we have. In fact, most of us--like Barbel on a smaller scale--are letting things go, even beautiful and potentially useful things. 

Learning to paint and collage was a hill I started three years ago. I bought all the sets of paints, papers, brushes and do-dads I saw crafters and artists using on You Tube.  

I had fun playing with supplies, so I don't regret it.  But now I'm editing them, giving away what I'm no longer likely to use--like glitter and paint colors I don't care for, magenta, some greens. 

Having learned to mix my own colors with primary red, blue and yellow, and black and white, I don't need sets of colors. Cooks know that the main event of a meal is the deliciousness of the food, not the plates and glasses and forks.  

I've spent the weekend organizing my painted papers and gel prints into four baskets--cool colors, warm colors, black and white, and neutrals.  I'm  more likely to use them if I can find the color I want without searching through stacks and stacks of pages. 

One of my new favorite art teachers taught me this.  

My previous work space was more like a buffet--too much for anything to feel special. This newly sorted space feels clean, more user friendly.  What's left will find its way into collages and painted compositions. Sometimes less really is more.  

NOW for some good news!

Today I had a long wonderful FaceTime visit with my dear friend Barbel in Albuquerque. After a difficult series of cancer treatments, she is well--and well on her way to her next adventure in The Netherlands!  This is the best news I've heard in ages! 

Barbel here with her love, Karel, who lives in The Netherlands.  

Barbel is a happy, generous, lively, creative soul!  She's packing up everything she owns right now, planning a big estate sale before her September move.  We talked about her readiness to let go of almost all the beautiful things in her house to start a new life with Karel.  She'll be taking only clothes and art and art supplies--but that's okay.  She's ready. 

Barbel has always been a woman of adventure.  She moved here as a young woman from Germany, then made her home in Texas--San Antonio and Alpine--and now New Mexico.  And here she goes again around her September birthday. She doesn't know the language yet, but knows the languages of life and love.  Her positive attitude and friendliness will cross any other language barriers and she'll have countless new friends by the end of the first year. 

These two happy faces say it all! 

All day I've been thinking about these children,  an hour's drive from here, killed by an 18-year-old with a machine gun.  

These fourth graders are all somebody's Elena, somebody's Makken.  Beloved children whose parents have taken them to school and dance lessons and Little League, have reminded them to brush their teeth, do their homework, and follow the traditions and rules of their family. 

Ten year olds, like Elena and Makken, have already imagined their future careers. They want to be veterinarians, dancers, teachers, doctors, astronauts. 

They love what they truly love:  horseback riding, sports, cars, books, writing stories, cooking, making paintings, animals.  

Ten years olds love birthday parties.  They laugh when the pinata breaks and candy spills out all over the ground.  They have best friends.  They love magic tricks and jokes and silly riddles, pies and puddles and painting. 

Jan and I, grandmothers to Makken and Elena, can barely stand to see the pictures of the nineteen children now dead.  Tears flow when you imagine the forever broken hearts of these children's grandparents.  We say, all of us, over and over, "The world of our grandchildren is such a different world from the one we knew at their age!"

These children trust grown ups.  Their teachers and other adults will take care of them.  

While our spineless Texas governor sends "thoughts and prayers," he  records a pro-gun video for the NRA convention.  He blames mental illness, refusing to name the real problem: the easy availability of AR-15s to 18-year-old boys.  (Our governor said this killer had no history of mental illness--but stands by his mental illness talking points.)

One man from England, now an American citizen, said that his family and friends in England ask him, "What's wrong with America?  How can they let boys buy these terrible weapons on their 18th birthday?"

I don't know yet if Elena and Makken know what happened in Uvalde two days ago.  I can't imagine how parents explain this horror to innocent 10-year-olds.  I can't imagine having Bad Man Drills at school.

Just a few minutes ago, they believed in Santa Clause! Now they have to believe in Bad Men barging into their schools with assault weapons?   I can't believe that there are men who--like Ted Cruz, Greg Abbott, and Donald Trump--don't give a damn about ten-year-olds. 

Greg Abbott, you actually had the audacity to say you couldn't make it in person to the NRA "because you're busy healing the hearts of the people of Uvalde."  Your healing powers are worthless.  Nobody wants your thoughts and prayers.  What the world wants is a truly strong man who has the courage to do something to stop this uniquely American madness! 

Rain

"Into each life some rain must fall" came to mind during the rain last night.  I looked it up, remembering a song in the 50s, and found that that phrase actually goes all the way back to American poet, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, 180 years ago. 

In my childhood, I probably never read the actual Longfellow poem, but I knew that phrase.   Carlene and Mimi both had books of poems and aphorisms (Leaves of Gold) and I loved reading them--so I may have encountered this line in one of their books.  Ella Fitzgerald and the Ink Spots popularized the words of Longfellow, but we've all heard variants of it. 

Rain in this poem signifies dark and bleak.  By the time he was 35, the poet had lost his first wife to a miscarriage and his second wife to a fire.  

Yesterday's tragedy in Texas was the largest and most terrible school shooting in Texas history. Most Texans would never use the analogy of rain (or even storms) to describe horror.  We live in a place that knows drought and extreme heat, and rain is something we always welcome.  When it rains, especially after weeks of triple-digit days, we meet each other in the streets and stores and comment on the rain: "How about this rain?" strangers say to each other.  "Oh, we really needed this!" we say. 

When I used to visit Minnesota, people always commented on their gratitude for the sunshine.  Texans take sunny days for granted, at least in terms of weather. 

In spite of the unthinkable horror of yesterday, it also brought different kinds of rain and showers to me: 

Jan sent Lorraine and me a 2014 essay by Roger Angell written at the age of 93. "This Old Man," re-published at his death last week at 101,  is about the perils (and pleasures) of aging. 

In response, Lorraine wrote these two beautiful lines: "I feel my age more and more. I also feel spurts of renewal, wisdom, connection, wholeness and letting go."

Two gifts of writing felt like invigorating rain,  in spite of everything.

My day had begun with a painful flare of sciatica.  Freda came to give Luci a walk--another shower of goodness. Luci met  Freda with whimpers of pleasure and delight at the prospect of walking together.  

Later, Bonnie brought me soup for dinner and stayed to visit.  We watched the news of the Uvalde shootings in horror, and we also talked of happier things--like her upcoming trip to Vermont. 

What would we do without the showers that come from friendships, every single day?

As I was about to close this piece, I saw a remarkable thing in the news.  

As our governor, surrounded by people who share his point of view, was waxing on about the tragedy, sending smug promises of prayers, blaming the murders on mental illness, Beto O'Rourke appeared out of the assembly of people to confront our arrogant supported-by-NRA governor.  I couldn't hear all of O-Rourke's words, but it included the word, predictable!

He was called a "son of a bitch" who only wanted to make it political--while the governor and his men doggedly stuck to the mental-illness narrative, avoiding any mention of the easy access to guns.   Beto was ordered to leave, but he continued talking to his supporters outside.

What a brilliant courageous expression of his right to freedom of speech--a downpour of truth!  In a nation that has more guns than people and more school murders than any other, it's obvious that unless people in power have the courage to name the real causes, these horrendous shootings will (predictably) continue to shatter us all.

Meanwhile, off our governor and his followers will go--to the NRA Convention in Texas. They will yammer on and on about "abortion as murder."  But they will do little if anything to protect living children in classrooms. 

In this drought of truth-telling, Beto danced us some rain! 

 Michael Moore said "Americans love their guns more than their children"--anticipating the unanimous response:  "Oh no!  No way!"

The same ones who refuse to get rid of guns are the ones crying their crocodile tears over abortion. Republicans who decry choice in reproduction issues are doing everything they can to protect the rights of people to carry guns into restaurants and churches and schools. 

"It's time, "Moore said, "To get rid of the almighty Second Amendment.  The founding fathers who wrote that had no idea what kind of guns we'd have in the 21st century." If the founding fathers were to return to America today they would be appalled at what is happening to our living children who die from gunshots more than any other cause of death.  

We are so entrenched in our beliefs about the Constitution that was written before our great-grandparents were born.  What if guns were absolutely banned? Moore asks.  Unthinkable! say the current party of protection of the Second Amendment above saving our children.

Legislators will send thoughts and prayers and look shocked--the party who refuses to make changes in gun laws.  They will vote above all to protect fetuses, even newly fertilized eggs by rape or incest.  Many of them voted against appropriating funds to feed babies already born.  But banning guns is unthinkable.  

"What are we doing?" Chris Murphy asked Congress. Is your job and power more important than traumatizing children and grocery shoppers and church-goes?  

I agree with Michael Moore.  If we love our children more than anything--which we do--how can we not do everything in our power to stop these senseless massacres?  

"When in God's name are we going to stand up to the gun lobby?" Biden asked today.  "Don't tell me we can't have an impact on this carnage!" 

Color--food for soul

I believe--but am not sure--it was May Sarton who said, "Color, like light, feeds the soul."  

I'm taking an online class by Louise Fletcher, an abstract painter, who has taught me so much in her free classes and You Tube videos.  Tonight's video, on color, blew some vibrant gold into my brain.

She demonstrates how with three shades or tints of primary colors (any red, any yellow, any blue) along with white and black, you can mix countless colors, "all of which harmonize with each other because they are all made of the same three primary colors."  

Our assignment for today is to take three colors we don't normally use (or like) and put a blob of each color on a palette, plus a blob of white and a blob of black.  "If you add white to a mixture, you get a tint of a color; if you add black, you get a shade."

Who knew?

Probably every one of you who paints knew that, but it's news to me!

This video inspired me to mix some colors (later, in daylight) and to search for words on color by painters, photographers, writers....

“When you photograph people in color, you photograph their clothes. But when you photograph people in black and white, you photograph their souls!”

- Ted Grant.

 “If one could only catch that true color of nature—the very thought of it drives me mad.”

- Andrew Wyeth.

“I found I could say things with colors that I couldn’t say any other way – things that I had no words for.”

- Georgia O Keeffe.

“If you see a tree as blue, then make it blue.”

- Paul Gauguin.

“All colors are the friends of their neighbors and the lovers of their opposites.”

- Marc Chagall.

For anyone looking for an excellent yard man--who also does plumbing and electricity and carpentry--I have hired today a man I really like.  His name is Homero and I'll be happy to send contact info if anyone needs it.  He's worked with a landscaping company, so he knows plants--how to plant and how to trim.  He is now on his knees rooting out stubborn nut grass. 

To wait out a flare of sciatica, I'm watching Etruscan Smile on Hulu--like it a lot so far.  

While in Scotland movie world, let me recommend to you a timely poem recommended by Bonnie--by Wendall Berry: "The Peace of Wild Things"

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Art as a Cake Walk

Nellie was my first and favorite friend when our family moved to Lawrenceville my junior year.  At graduation, 1966, I played for her to sing a solo,  a strange song called "My Work Is Done." What must we have imagined we'd do after high school, all our work finished up, I wonder?

After graduation we went our separate ways to college and marriage and different states and lost touch.  We saw reconnected at a Christmas service in Lawrenceville many years later, and shortly after that we took a trip to Italy together.  She read the Rick Steves' guidebooks and kept us on track, and we were excellent traveling companions.  

I remember visiting her once in Florida where she and Art (her childhood boyfriend who reappeared after many years and they married on the beach) now live.  And she visited me once in San Antonio.  We've watched giant turtles dropping eggs on the beach, made collages together,  maneuvered a small Italian rental car through curvy Tuscan roads, and met some of each other's friends.  

COVID slowed almost everybody's art making energy.  We've both played (in all ways) less than we used to.  But yesterday she sent me this lovely affirmation to get back to living like an artist.  I loved it so much I wanted to share it.

Today I am going to start living like an artist. 

Today I am shucking my ratty gray gown and dressing simply, quietly, so as not to disturb Art with a capital A. I am savoring the morning quiet as I make my coffee and light a candle to keep it warm. I contemplate the dream that woke me. Cake walks. The adult game where the prize is a cake from the mothers…donated and perhaps yours to take home. What a curious custom to surface in my night dreams. What a strange mind that recurs such memories.

I’m going to recall the senses today. Little ordinary moments of beauty, of memory. Numbered circles that with luck might result in a sweet treat from a neighbor's kitchen. Life as a cake walk.

Is that where it comes from? That saying? Noticing, recalling, making a visual or written representation of quotidian cherished moments past? Life as a cake walk. 

Today I am going to start living like an artist. 

This being human....

On Tuesday morning, car all packed, Luci at Camp Jannie, I was just about to push the go-button to start my three-day trip to Port Aransas to meet two of my oldest Texas friends. We'd planned it for the four of us, but the fourth had a scary fall in another state this weekend and is far from travel ready, so our group of four former Baptists who'd met at church in our twenties was down to three. 

We've been having retreats for decades--talking about books, art, music, our lives; writing together.  We've swum in rivers and the Texas Gulf coast, hiked in mountains, and visited each other's families.  

As it happened, however, a repair man who was in my house for a couple of hours on Monday, called me just as I was about to leave, to tell me he had COVID.  I didn't want to risk exposing my friends, so I had to cancel. 

Yesterday they called to help me feel part of the retreat from a distance.  One of them shared a poem we all love by the 13th century poet, Rumi--a timely poem for any age.  Now that we are all septuagenarians, we've known each other through countless visitors of these sorts. 

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they are a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice.
meet them at the door laughing and invite them in.

Be grateful for whatever comes.
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

A weekend with the kids

From Friday bus-stop to Nathan's band banquet on Saturday to a long afternoon swim, it's been a great weekend on Ogden Lane!

Elena here helping her adored big brother get ready for his big night, helping him out with the hair thing!  

She's wearing her favorite shirt--one of her dad's shirts from the fire department.  He was going to throw it away and she retrieved it.  "Don't you dare throw that out.  It smells like you, Daddy!" 

Nathan, 15, drove us to the pool.  He is very proud of his new learner's permit.  

What if it's not art?

Paraphrased from the book, Bittersweet: 

Making art, decorating, singing, dancing--whether or not we do them "well," whether or not we do it for an audience--lifts the spirit.  But "we don't need to create art ourselves"--Studies show that the "simple act of viewing beautiful art increases activity in the pleasure and reward centers of the brain.  It feels...a lot like falling in love." 

I have watched hundreds of hours of videos of artists making collage and abstract paintings.  For the first year or so of my art-play (I've never taken an actual art class), I tried to do the things that the first videos taught.  I tried to tell a story.  Now that I've been at it for a while, I've learned which processes can teach me the most in making the kinds of things I can attempt with some degree of success. 

Since I have zero talent at drawing, I don't watch videos in which artists make realistic or semi-realistic renderings.  I couldn't draw a horse or a boat or a person's face if my life depended on it, but almost as fun as making collages is watching others make them in ways I'd never have learned without their help.  

I watch Jane Davies' videos over and over.  She's a kookie and delightful Vermont artist who raises chickens and plays the ukulele. Her process captivates me, a loose and messy process of marking and gluing and painting in large sweeping strokes.  Because I'm by nature a perfectionist, I need the balance of her confident messiness.  Tear, don't cut.  Try this, paint over it if it doesn't work--therefore showing layers of shapes and lines underneath a veil of neutral or white paint. 

Another artist whose online classes inspire me are those of San Antonio artist Lyn Belisle.  Here's a technique I particular like: making a big playful page of images and colors, textures and marks, and then using a pre-cut mat board isolate parts you like.  Maybe the finished pieces are not art.  Maybe they are just pleasant accidents, but doing this gets me out of my head.  

Yesterday, Day wrote a student's name on the board in block letters and beside it she drew a picture of a horse.  Not a good one, she said.  But it stirred curiosity and laughter.  "Now, my name, Miss!" Domingo called out.  Every student wanted his or her name on the board.  After a year of obeying orders (as you'd give to a dog) like "Sit!" and "Quiet!" they were actually laughing and reading and seeing their names in block letters! 

Maybe they will learn each other's names, maybe they will learn it's okay to draw a horse badly, or maybe they will learn to have pride in their own names--without fear of the "police coming to their houses if they speak Spanish."  I'm pretty sure their new teacher didn't have this in her lesson plan book.  She just started playing on the board and they all wanted in, activating the reward and pleasure regions of their teenaged brains.  

A Day in an ESOL class

My daughter is a teacher of teachers, an academic coach.  She's good at it, she loves it, but she misses teaching high school students. 

Due to the recent firing of a terrible teacher, she's offered to take over two hours of her classes along with her coaching duties.  

These classes of English As a Second Language have been so demoralized by having a racist teacher (who was heard to say, "You have to talk to these students like dogs").  Day's first day was so inspiring I had to write about it.

She found a set of books at all grade levels, 3rd grade up.  She gave each student a bag of books and told them to find the one that they can read with ease.  While she'd planned to spend fifteen minutes on this endeavor,  they were having so much fun, it took half an hour.  Okay, her rationale was that they should enjoy reading in Spanish while learning English.  (Each book was written in both English and Spanish.)

After reading for a few minutes, one boy stood up and said, "I love this book!  I love reading!"

So she took the whole class to the library to find books that matched their reading levels, mostly in Spanish.  She recognized books she had read and one girl wanted to read the same books in Spanish. By the end of the class, every student and even the adult translator had checked out books to take home.  

They were clearly excited and New Teacher was ecstatic.  A boy stood up and said, "I love you!" to Day.

Another said to the translator, "This class was so much fun!  I'm not bored anymore."

After one of Marcus' friends overheard the previous teacher's rude comment, he went to the principal and reported it.  Nothing was done. There were other similar offenses, no action. (One was threatening them that if they spoke Spanish, the police could show up at their doors.) 

 "We have to tell your mom," Marcus' friend said.  "She won't let this keep happening."

And sure enough, they fired the. mean teacher and Day agreed to do whatever it took to get these kids in good hands, even if it meant teaching the class herself for the rest of the year.

"I love my new teacher," one student told her next teacher of the day.

"What's her name?" the teacher asked.

"Mrs. Learny!" the girl said. 

P.S.  During the pandemic, certified teachers have retired early and have left some classrooms to substitutes with no teaching experience or training.  The woman who shouted at the kids had been the substitute for the entire year. 

Music and dog lovers and a night with Elena

Grocery shopping with Luci can take a long time.  This morning, we went to Green Door and HEB, both of which together provided her with a week's worth of petting and chatting and sniffing.  

She's already in the napping position and I will join her before going to Helotes to pick up Elena for an overnight visit.

We are going with Jan and friends to the Alamo Heights pool at 7 for a concert by Agarita--and she's excited to hear the music and be anywhere near water.  

If you live in San Antonio, I highly recommend this group's music.  It's a free event, open to all.  

Bittersweet

I've never been drawn to light-hearted movies or comedies; I rarely talk at parties (unless I find someone in the corner who's like me in that way); I prefer sad music to upbeat music.

I always recoiled at the words of the song, "Smile, though your heart is breaking."  I know how to do that very well, but I reject is as sound advice. 

This is me.  Am I a weirdo? 

Susan Cain, in Quiet and now Bittersweet, assures me that I'm not. We live in a time and place that favors extroversion over introversion and cheer (even if it's faked) over melancholy.  

Linda Kot recommended Bittersweet and I'm reading it tonight.   It makes me love my moody self and even my moody friends and dog a little bit more.  

May 1, 2022

Will retired yesterday from the fire department.  During the past 21 years, I've watched him go from rookie to lieutenant to captain to battalion chief.  He's loved his career, especially the earlier ranks and riskier jobs.  Since he and Bonnie started their own business (buying, transforming and renting houses) and have done so well in it, he decided to retire from his first career and devote more time to the more active work he's doing with houses.

I'm so proud of Will!  He's one of the truly good guys, not only in his mama's opinion but in the words of the hundreds of people who have wished him well, many of whom were at Flores Country Store in Helotes this afternoon for his retirement celebration.  

One of my dearest memories of Will happened before he was chief.  At the funeral of a firefighter who was tragically killed in a fire,  I saw Will walking from truck to truck to personally talk to all the visiting firefighters who'd come from outside San Antonio to attend the funeral. This is the kind of family they are; if one of their own dies in the line of service, they are all brothers and sisters.

I felt that family feeling this afternoon but on a happier note: brothers thanking him for his leadership as chief and sharing stories of their work together over the years. 

He attracts people of all stripes with his kindness and lively spirit.  After reading his blog post this morning (I'm copying the first three paragraphs),  I still have a lump in my throat. 

When I was 22 years old I had three dark blue uniforms pressed for the first day of the fire academy and one pair of polished, steel toe work boots. The clock radio went off at 4:45 a.m. playing The Fireman by George Strait like some sort of F.M. omen. I had no idea the ride I was about to begin.

I would make some of my best friends along this 21 year journey and I’d see things I couldn’t have imagined before it. I’d watch those twin towers fall in my first few shifts and see firefighters enter the public consciousness again. 

I sought out the busiest stations and the places I could learn the most. I volunteered for EMS and went to Paramedic school despite having a free ticket out of it. I’m so grateful I did. I’d polish up on Spanish as a Lieutenant at 25’s on the Southwest side and get good at landing helicopters and packing wounds. I’d get on at Rescue as a Captain and hang from ropes and slither through caves and run rapids at night. I’d make Battalion Chief and run fires and rescue calls from a radio. My hands got soft. It was one promotion too many for my personality.

Much Like I Feel With This Transition