"Teacher"

“I miss the days when I could lift my weight in wild cats!”  An old guy told me that when I bought home-grown produce from him yesterday.  Classic old guy stuff.  I have to wonder where they come up with their material.  I said, “Maybe you still could if they were dead wild cats?” and the old guy laughed because I played his game.  I looked at him closer and could almost see the young guy he used to be hiding behind his eyes.

Old guys know a lot of stuff.  Maybe I should’ve hung out for a while and let him teach me some things?  What is becoming increasingly clear to me after several failed attempts to write this post is that I don’t feel like writing about teachers today.  I want to make pickles.  The cukes are sliced up, salted, and chilling right now, just waiting for the real action of canning.  I’m making bread and butter pickles, which I realize a lot of people don’t like as much as dills, but it’s a comfort food from childhood for me sometimes.  Here’s what you do…

Slice up a bunch of cucumbers and onions.  Layer them in a big container with pickling salt and ice and let sit for an hour or two.  In a big pot, combine 2 cups sugar, 2 Tbsp mustard seed, 2 tsp turmeric, 2 tsp celery seed, 1 tsp ginger, 1 tsp peppercorns, and 3 cups apple cider vinegar.  Bring to a boil, then add the rinsed cukes and onions, and return to a boil.  Pack into hot canning jars with ¼” headspace, and process in hot water for 10 minutes.  The recipe says this makes 7 pints, but I pack in more than 4 pounds of cucumbers when I’m doing it, so I get more jars than that.  It sounds a lot easier than it actually is too.  That’s a lot of slicing and standing over a hot stove.  Thankfully it’s a perfect summer day, yet cool enough for canning.

If you want an easier recipe for dills, buy a jar of pickles that you like.  When all the pickles are gone, cut up some cukes, submerge them in the leftover pickle juice, and put in the refrigerator.  If you leave them alone for a week or two, they’ll taste like your store-bought pickles.  This only works about 1 ½ times, then you have to buy some new pickles and start over, or use this recipe… Cut 8 pounds of cucumbers in half lengthwise.  In a pot, combine ½ cup sugar, ½ cup canning salt, 1 quart vinegar, 1 quart water, 3 Tbsp pickling spice, fresh or dry dill.  When the mixture is hot and well dissolved, pour over cukes, seal, and put in the fridge.

I’m going to have a lot of pickles next year because I ran out in March this year.  That’s completely unacceptable.  I’m convinced eating pickles will make you live longer because an old woman told me so.  Well, okay, she said a spoonful of apple cider vinegar every day would make you live longer, but I believe in taking artistic license with such advice.  It even makes a bit of sense – the vinegar as a tonic anyway.  Vinegar is astringent, so swallowing some every day might actually keep your insides clean.

Old people are the best teachers – even if they can’t lift their weight in wild cats any more. I should go back and give that old guy a jar of pickles :)

"Freeze"

My grandpa stayed with me for a while once.  I had a waterbed, which he was absolutely sure he couldn’t sleep on until he woke up the next day and said he had the best night’s sleep in decades.  He strongly suggested that I iron the sheets with starch during his stay, but no matter how much I loved him, I wasn’t about to iron sheets, and I’m real sure I didn’t own starch.  Then he requested “dry apple pie”, which didn’t even make sense in my mind.  Why would someone put dried apples in a pie?  He couldn’t give me a recipe, and that was before instant internet recipes, so Grandpa didn’t get his pie either.  Don’t worry, he didn’t go hungry, but ironed sheets and pies?!  Grandma spoiled him.

Since I wasn’t burning my life ironing sheets and baking, Grandpa had a lot of time to tell me about drying apples.  He grew up in Tennessee, and the late summer days had a lot of sunshine to dry out apples laid out on the barn roof.  He talked about life before stores (?!), when they had to make everything from scratch or it didn’t exist.  Pillows were stuffed with the chest feathers of geese, Clothes were made at home, and his favorite toy was a stick whittled into a gun.  He told me about that gun twice, in way too much detail.  He talked about going into the mountains in winter with the menfolk to saw up frozen lake ice.  They packed the ice in straw and loaded it onto horse-drawn wagons which they drove home to store in underground pits lined with more straw.  Grandpa said the ice often lasted through most of the summer.  They needed the ice to keep food fresh because this was life before refrigerators.  Iced tea was a luxury for company.

Grandpa was born in 1896.  He served in WWI, but got the flu in the great epidemic so he didn’t go to Europe to fight.  He was disappointed about that when he was young because he liked traveling.  He was of a generation after the Civil War, and that war wiped out the family finances since they were on the losing side.  Grandpa said they were “land rich and money poor”, so he hopped on a train to Detroit for work.  The train stopped in Akron, Ohio and he and his brother stayed because they were told there was work in Akron.  He worked for Goodyear until his retirement, which all happened before I was born.  Grandpa was always old in my mind, but I suppose he was young once.  He talked about parties he attended in the neighboring county, drinking and carousing, and all sorts of stuff I couldn’t imagine of my completely sober Grandpa.

I thought he was handsome, and women seemed to think it too.  When I see pictures of Matthew McConaughey, I think Grandpa.  Well, maybe not quite as buff, but for all I know, Matthew has a place in my family tree, and Grandpa was buff in his day before Grandma was fattening him up with pies.  Or perhaps white people all look alike?  Or Southerners are all related?

I wanted Grandpa to tell me stories about the people he knew when he was young, but he just didn’t.  He talked about activities, like sawing the ice or watching his grandma plucking feathers from very mad geese.  I knew he loved his grandma, but I don’t have any details about why he loved her except that she made dried apple pies.  I don’t know if it matters.  The way he told stories, or didn’t tell them, was part of who he was.  The fact that he took pictures of steam engines, or the tv during the moon landing, was a reflection of the fact that he lived through a lifetime of miracles.  We talk about the wonders of the internet, but what about living in a life before electricity, cars, vaccines, tv… when ice in tea was precious?

"Bounce"

When we’re kids, we hear old people saying things like “In my day…” and we roll our eyes and think they’re just old people who aren’t adapting to inevitable changes in the world.  So sad for them, but old people aren’t going to hold us back from embracing the future… and then we become old people too.  I feel an overwhelming urge to tell some young snot about how life was like in the olden days, before handheld gaming devices, when Super Balls were a cool, new thing.

My childhood was an era of optimism, and contrasts.  Hippies painted flowers on themselves and made love while politicians and ministers and older brother soldiers got killed in industrial numbers.  Disney had a weekly tv show with talking animals, and Jim on Wild Kingdom wrestled alligators.  Things were simple.  I laughed at my mom’s post WWII compulsion of thrift to collect twisties… and then I realize I have somehow become an adult with a stash of twisties too.  Something feels seriously wrong.

I often write about growing up in “The Glen” as idyllic.  In a lot of ways it was.  It was an isolated neighborhood in the woods, and my fellow “River Rats” knew everybody else’s business in an extended, dysfunctional family.  One of my old ladies used to play her own version of 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon by explaining how almost everyone was in some way related to the Noonans, either by genetics or marriage.  I have Noonan nephews, so I’ve even been sucked into that vortex.  It’s inescapable, like collecting twisties.

I meet a group of friends once a month at a local restaurant.  Sometimes new people come, and the new people get absorbed into our group in such a seamless way that I forget about how or when they showed up originally.  It’s a “now” group.  We talk about stuff going on in the world, and what’s going on in our lives now.  Ed talked about working on his boat > canoeing the river > used to live in the Glen… say what?!!  Suddenly my past and present slammed together in a way I hadn’t expected.  It was like finding out I was friends with a cousin I didn’t know I had.  A distant image of an older boy running across his front yard popped into my head, drinking lemonade with an old woman sitting next to a stone fireplace, a periscope in the yard…

One thought races after another, and I felt the river calling me this week.  I watched minnows and found a sucker under a rock (that’s a fish), who let me examine its stripes and colors and details before I gently covered it with the slab of shale again.  There’s nothing like watching the ripples of the water for making me realize that my now life is stressing me out and I need to take time to breathe and be quiet.  I sat on the front porch of the old homestead with my brother and counted all of 2 cars go by in an hour.  Bro is going to live at that house forever, so in some ways I’ll always be able to go home again.  Someday maybe I’ll sit on that porch and tell a kid how everyone is in some way related to the Noonans.

In the meantime, I think I need a Super Ball.

I had a more brilliant idea for art this week, but it didn’t work out.  Sometimes that happens, and usually, I pitch my Quasimodos without anyone knowing, but maybe the world looks a little too perfect and unattainable if we only see the best people can produce?  That doesn’t mean I’m going to actually show you my hideously ugly mistake, but hey, it happens to all of us.  I kind of like the simplicity of a single bouncing ball.  I made the blue ball in penance :)

"Lonely"

A lot of people avoid solitude because they’re afraid of being lonely, but as I recently heard on a radio program, solitude is necessary for real creativity.  Schools and businesses like to have brainstorming sessions and work in teams, but according to the expert on the radio, this only lets the most assertive person’s ideas prevail, who may or may not have the best ideas.  More creative results happen when introverts are given a project before meetings to work on by themselves.  Since bosses are often extroverts, they usually don’t understand why the introverts want or need to work alone.

I don’t know if I was born an introvert or became one by my environment.  I didn’t have much choice about solitude when I was growing up.  Living in the woods made me look forward to church and school so I could play with other children.  Sometimes I was heartbreakingly lonely, but I also figured out ways to be self-entertaining.  In the end, I decided to like my own company because no company is better than bad company.

Envy is a motivator in our culture, but it’s isolating.  It pushes us to conform to what we think other people expect from us, whether or not those things are true to our natures or make us happy.  When we give up ourselves, we can be lonely in a crowd.  When I was alone in the woods, I might be jealous of kids who lived in town because they had neighbor kids to play with, but I had plenty of things to do.  I didn’t have to conform to what anybody else wanted, and the freedom of solitude is something that a lot of people never experience.  In some ways, I was lucky to be lonely – even though there were times I complained about living the experience.

It seems to be human nature to rank ourselves in hierarchies.  Is our social status based on beauty, athleticism, intelligence, achievements, bank account, ancestry, or whatever, and how can we climb up a rung on the ladder?  When we’re alone, there’s no one to compete against except ourselves.  The only one judging us is ourselves – and we’re taught those judgments by others.  Babies in the crib don’t worry about whether their smiles are good enough.  When I stuck feathers in my hair, draped my neck with flower leis, made jewelry out of cicada shells, and dabbed myself with pine resin for perfume, nobody was there to tell me that I looked funny and cut it out.  I swam naked in the river and had absolute freedom without worrying about whether my arms, legs, nose, mouth, fingers, toes were the right shape.  The right shape for what?  To justify my existence?  Should I modify myself to conform to someone else’s concept of what I “should” be?  Quit swimming because someone might see?  Who?  That was kind of the point.  There wasn't anyone to see.

We’ll never make everybody happy by being ourselves, but that’s their problem.  They’re working out their own envy/hierarchy issues.  When we quit worrying about them, we’re free to really open up our enjoyment of life and our creativity.  When I was grown up, I told a friend I was practicing for when I could be an eccentric old lady.  He said I could quit practicing.  It's one of the joys I get from being a feral child in the woods :)

The floral above started with the really simple idea of the gray squares with a pink dot, but it just insisted on going its own way.  Since I was by myself, and nobody told me not to, I let it.

"Carry"

I’ve carried a lot of things in my life… rocks, brothers, backpacks, tents, canoes, lumber, drywall… Okay, let’s talk drywall – 88 sheets of ½” x 4’ x 8’ of it.  Well, maybe I should start talking about drywall from the beginning…

The story of drywall begins in Indianapolis, Indiana where I lived with then-husband (TH).  I’ll skip the part where he went behind my back and overpaid for a house and go straight to the part of “let’s unload this place and move back to Ohio!!!”  We hadn’t lived in the house long enough to get our money out of it, so we decided to finish the attic as a way to at least break even.  

I carefully drew up a floor plan for 2 bedrooms, a full bath, and sitting room.  I drew up more careful plans to update the wiring and plumbing.  I read books about how to do it all, and then I ordered stuff – a lot of stuff.  It came in a big truck, and 2 burly guys carted it all into my living room and stacked it in giant piles that strained the house’s foundation.

You know, it’s one thing to do the math about how many sheets of drywall it takes to finish an attic, and a whole other thing to actually look at 88 sheets of it piled in the middle of the living room.  There’s also the reality of a stairway that makes a 90 degree turn halfway up, which is in direct conflict with the fact that drywall doesn’t bend around corners – and none of that takes into consideration that sheet rock is HEAVY.  TH promised to help carry stuff upstairs, but yeah, he promised a lot of things.  I figured out ways to prop it up while screwing into the studs, and when I really pitched a fit about needing help with the ceilings, TH got his friend Don to give me a hand.  I’m pretty sure Don saved TH’s life right about then.

Anyhoo, we eventually sold the house and eventually got back to Ohio, and I listened to a lot of criticism about how I emasculated poor TH by being actually competent at such things, which is only one of many reasons why we settled our differences at the courthouse, and might lead you to wondering why I’m rambling on about sheetrock when I had a picture of a pail with seashells at the beginning of this post.

Well, because sometimes life can be a whole lot easier amongst females, and I spent time at the beach with 2 of my friends from high school this week.  Or in other words, I don’t feel like carrying anything heavier than a beach pail any more. 

We went to Kelley’s Island and stayed in a posh suite courtesy of Leanne.  We stuffed ourselves with the finest dining the island has to offer, joked about the young bucks by the pool, and the only heavy lifting I did was to pour more wine into my glass.  Mary Lou has been to the island many times before and acted as chauffeur and tour guide, which included searching the woods for a statue of Mary and finding this very cool abandoned building in the woods. 

We went to the beach and saw Cedar Point in the distance while the island breezes blew and the waves splashed around our legs and the seagulls swirled around in the air.  And talked, and talked, and talked, and talked… there’s a lot of life between high school and 2012.  I think I’m talked out for at least a month or two.  The ferry ride back to the mainland was a blast with huge waves crashing into the boat and loons flying backwards in the wind.  Good times.

Really Officer, I didn't know it was trespassing.  I just found this sign in the woods and thought I'd help with the litter problem :)

I did the beach pail art for Mrs. Fields.

"Lost"

Everything was fine in my 20s except I didn’t have a dog, and life just isn’t good enough without one.  My BF said “Fine.  Get a dog, but it has to be purebred, male…”  His list of requirements was an insurmountable barrier, and that he knew it was evident in his self-satisfied smile.  I was the lowest person on the totem pole in an art studio and supporting BF in his dream of starting a business.  How was I supposed to pay for a purebred?

My mornings at the studio started with the dog section of the classifieds.  Purebreds were $300-500, and I didn’t have it.  Months went by.  BF was happy.  I was determined.  I finally found a listing for Dalmatian puppies for $110.  Okay!  I didn’t care if I had to eat lentils for a month.  I’ll pay $110!  I quickly called the number and found out that in a litter of 13, there was only 1 male.  “Please hold him for me!” I begged the woman.  I called BF and shared my joy.  We made plans to pick up the puppy after I got home from work.

BF made me call the woman again before we left the house to make sure she still had the male.  No, she didn’t, but she still had a dozen beautiful little girl puppies.  BF said “No, it has to be a male”, and I did something I had never done before.  I cried to get my way.  Well, to be perfectly honest, I didn’t start crying to get my way.  I cried because I wanted a dog.  The getting my way part was sitting in the middle of everything so BF had to see me crying.  The more he tried to ignore me, the more I cried.  He eventually relented.  He said we could go “look” at the puppies.  No promises, “just look”, and then he got a box and an old towel to put inside it.  I knew we were doing more than “looking”.

The puppies were a scene from 101 Dalmatians, spilling out all over the woman’s garage.  The proud parents checked us out, and Papa Dalmatian showed off by running around the expansive property in the twilight, a white and black blur, while one puppy made it clear to me that she loved me more than all of her sisters.  I was in love.  BF could’ve said “no” in that moment and I would’ve put him out on the street.  I’m pretty sure he knew it too.  We brought Ivory home.  BF loved her too, and we eventually got a male to complete the set.

So what’s all this got to do with “lost”?  If you’ve ever had a Dalmatian, you wouldn’t ask.  Sometimes I’d remember watching Ivory’s dad running in the fading light and realize that I should’ve seen his beautiful power as something to dread.  Dalmatians have to run.  They were bred for it.  They also don’t like running in circles.  They run in straight lines, and things like railroad tracks, roads, and fences aren’t going to stop them.

One time, BF took the dogs to work with him, but they didn’t come when he called them.  He slept in his truck hoping they’d show up, but they didn’t.  He came home alone with his tail between his legs, and I quickly printed up flyers (already on the computer from the last escape) and got my little brothers to help me pass them out.  “Look pitiful!” I told them as my desperation reached new levels of panic.  We drove up and down streets and handed out the flyers to anybody we saw.  I forced a flyer on one old man, and he insisted he hadn’t seen my dogs.  “Woof!”  I barreled past him and found both of my dogs locked up in his fenced backyard.  I can’t believe he lied to me in front of my two adorable little brothers.  The dogs almost looked sorry for an instant, but they never learned their lesson.  I kept the LOST flyer filed on the computer.

This picture is a Polaroid transfer, which is a pretty cool process of floating the emulsion of the photo off of the paper and floating it onto a different kind of paper.  You can get some cool techniques out of the process, but this print is pretty straight forward.  The other photo is of Ivory and one of my little brothers when they were both little and cute :)

"Suspend"

Dad wanted me to be an engineer.  “That’s a good field for women!”  Bleh.  No, I was going to be an artist.  I knew that when I was 12.  I remember the moment I knew that too.  I was in 6^th grade, and had one of Mom’s women’s magazines with a painting of a Breck girl on the back cover which I was trying to draw on a piece of lined notebook paper.  An older boy, almost a man, came to visit my teacher and I hovered around the edges and heard them discussing the boy’s studies in commercial art in high school.  I knew I wanted to take commercial art too.  My destiny was in motion.

That was the year I had to take an aptitude test, and the teachers decided that I should become a scientist.  “Science is a great career for a woman!”  No.  A-R-T-I-S-T.  I think the teachers were weeping in the smoking lounge while I was at recess because some great scientific discovery was being lost by my silly career plans.  I had variations of these discussions with various adults up to and through the high school commercial art program.  “Art is a great hobby, but you won’t make any money!”  “Illustrators are a dime a dozen!”  Too bad, leave me alone.  I have focus.  The adults left me alone after I got a scholarship to college.

Today I saw “suspend” as the word for the week, and a string of dangling, suspended things passed through my mind before it finally occurred to me that what’s hanging in a state of suspension is me.  I don’t have the focus of a 12-year-old any more.  I’ve been mistreated by the career of my choice too many times to feel exuberance and love for it.  It’s like marrying an alcoholic husband whom I somehow can’t seem to leave.  I think I’m at the “let’s be friends” stage of my art relationship, but art is how I’ve paid the bills, so it’s kind of hard to really end the relationship. 

I’m kidding myself anyway.  I went to a Rembrandt exhibit a while ago and had sweaty palms and heart palpitations in his presence, so I can’t really get over my art obsession.  I just don’t know what I want to do with that obsession any more.  Rembrandt lived through it himself.  He was popular and rich, blew it all, his style fell out of favor, and then he had to rebuild himself.  Life is tough for artists.  Do I still have time to become a scientist or engineer?

I recently took a PT job which both uses, and doesn’t use, my acquired skills in the field.  I’m feeling mixed about this, especially since the job is for a religious organization.  (If God led me to this job, it’s proof that God has a really wacked sense of humor!)  The job is close to home and a pretty environment.  My boss and coworkers are grownups and know their jobs.  All in all, it’s a pleasant way to pay the bare essential bills while theoretically giving me time to pursue my art addiction on the side.  I’m a bit undecided if I’m just suspending my state of suspension, or maybe this is the best of all worlds?  It’s cutting into my personal blog time, but I guess I can’t have everything.

But if I had to do it again?  Yeah, I’d pick art – even though I did my best to talk my niece out of following in my footsteps.  “Don’t you have any other talents?!”  I found myself repeating all that stuff I didn’t listen to when adults were telling me to go into a different field.  It’s too late for that niece now, and I guess for me too.  She’s in college and happily showed me a package design she made at school when she visited last weekend.  I swear, art is a genetic defect, but it’s great work when you find it!