Heat Wave

I grew up in suburban Maryland, a mile outside of Washington, DC, a city known for the stupefying heat and humidity of its summers.  Since I was the youngest in my family, my bedroom was the last to graduate to a window air-conditioning unit.

During the day, in truly sultry weather, my sister and I would hide out in her room in the attic, which boasted the largest, loudest, most powerful air conditioner I’ve still ever seen.  A behemoth of a window unit, it took over the whole window, and was installed permanent year-round because no sane person wanted to risk lifting that monster.  In my parents’ room, meanwhile, a more ordinary window unit hummed along with vastly more energy efficiency on oppressive July nights.

In my room, an aging window fan moved the humidity around, the effect much like being the jet exhaust of an airplane.  The room stayed stubbornly hot, but the noise and wind provided distraction.  I remember nights lolling on top of the sheets watching shadows on the ceiling, sometimes with my nightgown wetted down with tap water and the idea that evaporative magic would leave me cooler, not just clammy.  I knew if I turned the blasting fan off -- and I did sometimes when the noise failed to outweigh the swirl of air -- I’d hear the summer crickets and frogs, the occasional car driving by, the rustle of wind through the crabapple tree in the backyard, perhaps a rumble of thunder to go with flashes of heat lightning if a storm lurked.  The sense floated that unlike the climate-controlled inside, I was sleeping outside, awash in the elements, that I was part of nature and velvet night, in the wild zone of secrets bestowed upon those awake while others slept. 

For the last three days, here in my adult life in Fredericton, NB, a heat wave has consumed the city, with highs reaching into the mid-90s.  Floridians (as I have been and will be again) experience this as a matter of course, but not so in the Canadian Maritimes.  As proof, I offer up that my apartment, like many in the city, does not have air conditioning.  For the past several days, I’ve closed the blinds and windows in the morning in the hopes of holding the cool captive inside through the heat of the day.  The apartment and I have shambled along by day mildly cooler and certainly darker and mustier than the great outdoors. 

It’s evening now on the last day of the wave.  The windows are open wide and still humid but finally cooling night air is drifting in. I have the ceiling fan at the 2^nd highest setting because at the highest setting it swings from its stalk and makes noises that suggest it might launch itself from its mooring.  The night and the breeze on my skin, the few sounds of a neighborhood mostly quiet, leaves me homesick for summer in my childhood bedroom, for that loud fan and the favorite pillowcase with a cartoon walrus on it, for the shelves crammed full of books and board games and stuffed animals, for the wooden dressing table from my mother’s childhood bedroom and the fish tank in the corner with the one stubborn algae eater sturdier than all the goldfish carted home from the elementary school carnival.  I am homesick for summer in the bedroom with the unquestioned, unacknowledged comfort of my mother sleeping in the next room.

In my adult life here in Canada, July 4^th marked the 5-year anniversary of my mother’s death.  I miss her every day in some little way, Mom being woven into the fabric of my every day of childhood, that is to say, the time that I was becoming a person, and so here I am, always a little frayed and unraveled without her.  I often drink my morning tea from the same blue and white ceramic mug from which she drank her coffee.  Some days, holidays and anniversaries and heat waves, remind me more of the details.  So here is what I want to tell you: once or many times – childhood memory being murky the way it is –  my mother and I sat on the screened-in porch and watched torrential rain fall in heavy sheets.  Wind pushed bursts of water through the screens turning it to mist, the storm spray and deluge offering a shared exhilaration and providing a temporary respite from the long slog of a hot summer in suburban Maryland.  

Summer Holiday

Although I was not intending it to be the case, Artful Mistakes (and I) ended up taking the summer off.  Creative work was still going on, albeit in my usual sporadic way, but I didn't have much to say about it.  After feeling bad about my neglect of this blog and accompanying implied shoddy work ethic, I've now opted for a broader view. A fallow period in any project can be wise in that it provides the opportunity for context, reflection and course corrections.

Artful Mistakes: A Short History

Artful Mistakes started as a place for me, a relatively private person, to be more public in my wranglings with art. I also hoped to start conversations and perhaps collaborations with other arty-inclined friends.

I started this blog in the very tail end of 2009, a few months after my brother's death. In retrospect, his death was the first several events punctuating a tough era of my life, one from which only fairly recently would I say I've emerged.

While my stated initial intent was to write about art in its many forms (writing, painting, photography, music, the creative process, etc.), what I also ended up writing about was absence, loss, grief, and difficult relationships, be they with the living, the dead, fictional characters or thorny art projects.  In writing about all of those, I necessarily wrote about healing and finding peace, the way out of dark places.

My mother was diagnosed with cancer in 2011 and died in 2013.  A man I knew killed himself in 2013. Another friend of mine's mother, Betty, an enormously kind woman who among other brave moves taught me how to drive, passed away in 2013 also.  Other family members had concerning, complicated health issues. I moved multiple times - DC, Maryland, New Mexico, Oregon, Florida - disrupting local support networks, and pursued romantic relationships that were stressful and ill-fated. It was no wonder I was having trouble moving out of grief.

One marvelous aspect of art is that it provides an indirect way into touchy topics.  My mother, for instance, became a consistent reader of my blog, and in that somewhat circuitous way, I think we began to know each other in a different way, not just as mother and child but also as readers, armchair philosophers, and lovers of beauty also put upon by griefs that preceded and followed my brother death.  Also, because this blog is public, any commentary was much less fraught or pointed than any email or phone call -- it was just what I was thinking about, and Mom could connect with it or not; it wasn't a barometer of our own personal relationship.

Of course, I suspected some pieces Mom would like more than others, just as I knew other family readers would like some more than others too. Some of those opinions were based on artistic merit, but often, it was also personal opinion and style -- and sometimes I was surprised by who liked what. Unexpectedly, friends would find something on a post to which they connected, and sometimes strangers, or near strangers.

One offshoot of this blog is that I was often uncomfortably aware that people could, if they liked to read, know a great deal more about me than I did about them.  Although I wish my writing more often had larger scope, I am largely a confessional writer. And, of course, some folks whom I wished would riveted by all things about me (me me me me me) did not commit each post to memory, much to my dismay.

Particularly during my mother's illness and for some time after her death, I struggled with, yeah, the meaning of life.  It became abundantly clear that time was short.  My brother's death showed that death could come out of nowhere, sudden, harsh, final.  My mother's illness pointed out that not only is it short, but that quality of life is of consideration too.  My friend's suicide made that even more clear as I floundered in and out of my own depressions, hoping to avoid coming to the same solution he decided upon.

I used art to communicate what sometimes I could not articulate, or could barely piece together. One of my first paintings - dreadful and not at all true to life, but one very large canvas - was of my mother and brother together.  And in working on that, I saw an insight into nuances of their relationship that I likely could not ever have seen had I not spent so much time staring at a photo of them and wondering about particular expressions and all the time that came before that moment, and the short time that would come after it and how to translate that onto canvas.  The literal struggle of understanding the angles of people's faces explored the more complex struggle of trying to understand the internal world of people I loved.

I would give a great deal to sit and talk to my mother again, or just sit and hold her hand. I would give almost anything to have been able to magically take away her cancer and give her a longer life. Instead, I only see her in dreams, usually with my brother in attendance.

So what I am saying in again, a somewhat circuitous way, is that art is one thing that kept me afloat during a sometimes isolated and tumultuous time.  I didn't know that's what Artful Mistakes was about for a while, although I realized I wrote about the dead too often for it to be a Fun, Lighthearted blog, and that my writing is (as this post is as well) often too personal for some folks. Probably, I have lost some work opportunities because of this blog, but possibly, I have also been given some opportunities because of this blog as well.  Certainly the warmth and conversations it had generated have more than made up for the discomforts of exposure and vulnerability.

Artful Mistakes: Looking Ahead

And now here I am back to life, and a fallow period (perhaps) coming to a close, grief managed as much as any losses ever are.  My address is constant, my friends and family solid, and one ancient cat still purrs next to me.  Many things still need to be figured out -- it's life, you don't just arrive one day, the decisions big and little keep on -- but I know I am more solid at the core.

Ophelia
acrylic on canvas

What that means for my creative life, and how it will manifest in this blog, I'm not sure.  My current painting in progress is Ophelia from Hamlet.  In some ways, I'll always be drawn to darker subjects. But before her, there was Tree of Life.  My hope is that my art will be more about exploration and curiosity, more external, less internal, and more connected.

When I was researching post-traumatic stress disorder for a former client, I had opportunity to learn another term: post-traumatic growth. After the bad times can sometimes come a leap forward.  And I am hoping that leap is next for me after this fallow period, that the ground is restored and ready for new growth.

Like everyone, I have regrets - things I wish I had done, thing I wish I hadn't.  But I'm resolving to to look forward more than backwards, to look toward those adventures yet to be had, love and laughter and all the other greeting-card sentiments that are, as those cards proclaim, the moments that make our lives quirky, creative and wondrous.

Time Lapses

After my mother died, I kept thinking about time. When she was sick, there were predictable thoughts -- precious time, wasted time, good times & bad, being cheated of time, how much time she lived and how long she suffered in illness.

But after she died, I more often thought about time as it works as a dimension. Time, sometimes called the 4th dimension, locates a specific event as it occurs in a specific location.  After she died, that's the time I wanted to understand.

I've long tracked my own history by location, e.g, if it was when I lived in New Mexico the first time, it must have been 2006.  Because of my many moves, my timeline is easily tied to longitude and latitude. Many of those locations I have repeated.

In The Moviegoer, Walker Percy writes about the pleasure of repetitions separated by time.  In his character's formula, a repetition is "the re-enactment of past experience toward the end of isolating the time segment which has lapsed in order that it, the lapsed time, can be savored of itself and without the usual adulteration of events that clog time like peanuts in brittle." When I moved back to a location, it was often with the (mistaken) belief that the peanuts would be gone this time.  And, of course, it was never like that -- life is always throwing peanuts at you, no matter how many times you leave and return, a point that I'd been rather slow to learn.

During my mother's illness, time's looming presence for all our family was largely tracked by her life, with markers for key moments such as diagnosis, first surgery, chemos, remission, recurrence, emergency surgeries, hospice, death.  And we chronicled the first of every event after her death, as in, all the things she missed, all the times and places when and where we missed her.

But if time is just a portion of the equation of locating a person in a spacetime, I reasoned that it seemed like just one measly layer, one that if you could just peel through it a bit, you could see everything and everyone that had ever been there in that location throughout time, and see them clearly. Think time-lapse films, where the plant germinates, grows, blossoms, withers and dies.  Everything is there on the film, all happening all at once; it's just where you choose to play the film that gives you what you want to see.  

In the refashioning of history and relationships that happens when one party is no longer there to refute them, I found my mother everywhere. There were remnants of her in the places she frequented, in every object she touched, even in the way she appeared in dreams, as dream time seems the most permeable to changing the physics of time, a loophole or wormhole or what-have-you.

In Bill Bryson's book A Short History of Nearly Everything, he talks about the dispersal of durable atoms over time and points out that we all may have a little bit of Shakespeare in us (o happy writers!), as those freewheeling atoms have been circling about for long enough that some may have found their way into your pinkie finger  But if you're hoping that you have some Elvis atoms in you - sorry. There hasn't been enough time since his passing to have dispersed the atoms far enough through the universe for you have incorporated his atoms. I thought about Mom's atoms when I walked on the beach, splashing feet in the water, as up in Maine, some of her ashes went into that water. Who doesn't want the whole ocean, all oceans, as their mother?

People talk about ghosts, but what if it's just you can sense evidence of where they were, like perfume that lingers in a room someone has just left?  And what if everything is drowned in that smell, and peels layers of time away like turpentine on paint?

Or what if you just miss your mom - and you want to bend your limited scientific knowledge to keep her around for a while longer, even if only is in some great cosmic metaphysical time travel kind of way?

Joan Didion describes in The Year of Magical Thinking how after the death of her husband, when she was clearing out his closet, she kept some of his shoes because he would need them when he came back.  It was around then that she realized she was not, perhaps, holding things together quite as well as she had hoped. She writes:

“Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. We anticipate (we know) that someone close to us could die, but we do not look beyond the few days or weeks that immediately follow such an imagined death. We misconstrue the nature of even those few days or weeks. We might expect if the death is sudden to feel shock. We do not expect this shock to be obliterative, dislocating to both body and mind. We might expect that we will be prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss. We do not expect to be literally crazy, cool customers who believe their husband is about to return and need his shoes."

I remembered that comment with particular relief when, after my mother died, I realized some part of me believed Mom was sending me messages in the lyrics of pop songs.

Immediately after she died, I moved to Florida.  Coincidentally, Phillip Phillip's song "Home" was playing incessantly everywhere, the song with the refrain, "Just know you're not alone / Cause I'm going to make this place your home."  If, for instance, you are afraid you're going to start to cry for no reason standing in the towels aisle of Target, and that song comes lilting on the piped-in music, it feels like a benediction - or it did for me.

And then I spent some time pondering how it must be for those people with schizophrenia or psychotic breaks of some kind who believe they are receiving coded messages from the TV, and I got a little uncomfortable with finding comfort in pop songs and feared I was just a short time hop away from wearing a tinfoil hat to keep the aliens at bay. But even with that, I took the comfort anyway, that moment at Target and those that came after, moments where the music felt like what I needed to hear just then -- a coincidence, a serendipity, a sign, grace, good vibes, self-nurturance or my mom looking out for me, whatever it was, I took that comfort. I let it be, which I suppose is my own version of faith.

So when an ABBA tune played while I was in the rug section in IKEA, I got teary because I figured it was A Sign that buying furnishings was a good plan, tending to my new home.  Mom and I listened to ABBA in the car on the way to chemo a couple of times.  She came to ABBA late in life, having spent most of her life listening to classical music and occasionally musicals, but somewhere in there, Mamma Mia picked up the relentless happy beats of ABBA.

After Mom died, I turned to time, wanting more of it, wanting to redo it, wanting to relive the good parts and fix the bad parts, and I wanted her to still exist in a fashion, to be literally living and breathing.  And in the timeline, she is.  I can't fold time over like a Star Trek episode, but then again, I live on a planet that is still receiving light from stars that could have winked out of existence hundreds of years ago.  If all things are simultaneously happening in all timelines, then in some tiny portion of those instances, there is Mom humming along to store music as she did sometimes.  Why shouldn't I find parts of her in pop songs -- or wherever else she pops up?

Graffiti seen in a park, Bangor, ME

Mother's Day

Quilt made by Margot Daffron,
finished by her daughter Susan

Designed and pieced together by my mother, this quilt was (we believe) intended for me, but still resided in the UFO (unfinished object) category at the time of her death. My sister had the pieced work professionally quilted and finished the edges and backing herself, and mailed the completed quilt to me a few weeks ago for my 45th birthday.

As such, on Mother's Day, I can curl up on the couch and be warmed by the colorful heart and creativity of my mother.

Thanks to my sister for such an amazing gift

and

Happy Mother's Day, Mom.  We miss you.

Evolution of a Painting

For the first time in a long time, I attempted to paint people -- and it became an absorbing exercise.

Our models!

I started with a photograph (which I like to think of as models that don't move). I selected one with which I've actually always had a somewhat awkward relationship; I find something unsettling about their expressions. But that was exactly the draw in terms of painting: strong emotional content and body language.    

Edited photo

Then I edited the photography down to the composition I wanted, one highlighting their faces, and which also mirrored the scale of the canvas I would be using. I ended up moving them closer together so they fit better, hence the noticeable line at their shoulders.

Next, I printed out the photo on my black and white printer. Given that I was fairly sure I wouldn't be using the same color scheme, I was more interested in seeing the light and dark of shadows. And, well, I don't have a color printer. 

I folded that paper in quarters and drew the same guidelines on the canvas, with the hope that I wouldn't get so hopefully off that way. I used pencil -- bad idea, as I had to paint over it.  I'll use charcoal in the future, since that will smudge away when I no longer need it. I heard recently that some people now use projectors, but that seems a little bit like cheating to me.  And while I am trying to plan more, I like the unexpected that produces new directions, the discovery in the process of painting.   

The first completed draft of the painting looked like this:

First complete draft

This was after I'd redone her mouth twice and his nose once (with somewhat limited success, but hey, it's better than it was), but before I re-did both their eyes (so that, for instance, he no longer looked like he was wearing eye shadow) The first wash of the painting was a background shade, the light gold that you see coming through the window, was almost entirely swallowed by other elements, but somehow, it was nice to have that base color, rather than straight white.  And it turned out to be a happy accident - the idea of a growing, light-filled window connecting them on a symbolic level really worked for me so I eliminated the weird curtains from the photo, making the window both more central, but also its detail more diffuse.   

The painting as it stands now looks like this:

As it stands right now

I wouldn't say it's done, but it's resting for the moment, until I can come to it with fresh eyes.  Relative to the original photo, umm, ok, not exactly an amazing copy, no.  But I am pleased that they do a) look recognizable as people and b) have emotional exchange. 

I was reading more of Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain last night as part of my project to be a little less inept in the drawing department. I have not yet comfortably gotten to the point where everything is just shapes with no symbolic value.  But I am starting to get a glimmerings of how that works, of being able to make that transition to a different kind of thinking when I'm working on art.  Progress, however, slow, is satisfying. One thing that amused me is that one of the items that often harder for beginners to draw (or paint, in this case) because of the high symbolic value is a shirt collar.  We think we know what it looks like, so we don't actually see it as it is. I definitely had that with her turtleneck, which, I am aware, looks more like a priest collar.

I also completely eliminated the hood of her coat, which instead turned into a background image, that of a couch under the window (which may not be clear to anyone but me, but that's what it is). 

Yes, a long way to go.  But progress. 

Afterall, let's consider many years ago, when during a very brief spate of painting, I tried to paint a face, and it ended up looking like this:

Eek!

Scary. 

And with no recognizable personality.

You can sort of see why I gave up on people for a while, given the inauspicious beginning.

But I'm going to keep going with the people this time. One recommedation I can make to new painters: if you have opportunity to use BIG canvases, go for it. My new painting is enormous -- 4 foot by 5 foot or so (part of the stash of old canvases with which I was gifted when I was living in in the artist's studio).  While it's a little daunting having larger than life people looking down on you, it's also much easier to put in details, as on that scale, even the details are broad strokes. 

Happy painting!

What I Learned in May

The omentum is an apron-shaped layer of fat lying over the belly. Tumors from ovarian cancer sometimes spread to the omentum. As an outdated evolutionary safety feature from pre-surgery days, the omentum sometimes curled around an unhappy appendix, controlling the spread of poison if it burst, allowing for survival.

Portland Head Light

An extra hour driving through Pennsylvania beats New Jersey Turnpike tolls and traffic.

When I'm nervous, I repeat myself, restating information gleaned from other people to verify it.

Lawyers sometimes hug clients.

On some superstitious level, I think my mother having an admission nurse named Grace who just came back from doing mission work means we have a good word in with God. The Grace of God.

Fresh asparagus tastes better.

Of the many smells permanently fixed in my brain, one of them is that of my brother's spit, which still clings to his toys stored in the basement of my mother's house.

Maine drivers are polite, but gratingly slow. Lights are badly timed in Portland.

Sitting by Back Cove

A dog that is sitting has a much harder time barking.

Low tide in a small cove looks like the plug has been pulled on a dirty sink; rather than the swaying grasses and blue water of high tide, all that's left is ring of muddy pebbles and gray, murky water.

Hospital beds have amazing hydraulics that lift them in all manner of ways, safety rails to keep patients in, and emergency CPR releases to flatten the bed down if needed.

Swelling after surgery is common. Combining swelling with the mellow tones of morphine makes for different facial expressions.

Dilaudid, a relative of morphine, can be administered via IV or in pill form.

Staples from abdominal surgery are informally referred to as a zipper. They come out two weeks after surgery.

Crescent Beach in fog

Two weeks of gray weather is a recipe for depression. The whole city slows down in drowned dismay.

Gardening is just not my thing. I like flowers, but I'm not inclined to put them in any order and I'm not crazy about dirt under my fingernails.

Postoperative ileus is common after abdominal surgery. The intestines, angry at having been moved around during surgery, are slow to wake up their nerves and do their usual work of coordinated contraction. To a point, the solution is to withhold food, hurry up and wait, hoping the nausea and vomiting settle.

Tommy's Tree
 Limerick, Maine

The memorial tree planted at the school where my brother spent over twenty years of his life still looks a little new and spindly.

In some ways, I am more grown-up and capable than I thought. In other ways, I am much, much less than I thought.

Dreams about coffins and rats nipping at your legs are not a sign of optimal mental health.

Fake trees decorating the produce department of the grocery store feel wrong.

An NG (nasogastric) tube can be inserted up the nose and down the throat into the stomach in order vacuum out food thereby ending nausea from ileus or bowel obstruction. While inserting the tube the patient is instructed to drink water through a straw as the swallowing motion moves the tube down the throat. Airplane glue is used to provide extra security when taping the tube on the nose.

Seagull, Eastern Prom

Seagulls seem bigger up north. Maybe they are bigger.

I am spacier than I realized on visual details. I did not notice that my mother's kitchen was gray until she told me. In my head, it was white.

The irony of getting a cold from a germ picked up at the hospital, and therefore not being able to go back to the hospital until I recover from said germ, does not make my fever drop any faster.

"Optimal debulking" is good news.

Petco makes a canine supplement to discourage dogs from eating their own excrement. This is good and bad if said dog is a sneaky pooper that likes to leave deposits on the dining room rug.

Maine Medical nurses are almost universally nice. Some are chattier than others.

For six months or so at Maine Med, medication charting is now handled with a hand-held device that scans the patient ID and then the medication, charting the time.

I have in me the makings of a compulsive hand washer. But not a gourmet cook or neat-nick.

Ruins of Goddard Mansion
Cape Elizabeth, Maine

Changing roles does not change history.

Squirrels really like tulip bulbs. But they leave the flowers for bouquets that liven up a hospital room.

It is impossible for me to look at tulips in a hospital room and not think about the Sylvia Plath poem “Tulips,” which begins with “The tulips are too excitable” and ends with the line “from a country as far away as health.” It is possible for me to not mention that at the hospital though.

Psychological discomfort also manifests as physical discomfort. One solution is substituting in a different discomfort – run faster, walk further, get tired.

If you cry while running in the rain, no one pays you much heed. Who really looks happy running anyway?

Conversely, physical pain inspires psychological discomfort. How do I fix this? What is wrong? Am I all alone here?

Spaghetti squash spaghetti tastes like pasta spaghetti.

Physical contact is comforting. Hold hands. Hug.

Lobster trap washed ashore
Crescent Beach

A parking ticket because you got lost walking for an hour because you forgot to note where you parked your car somehow seems unfair.

If your mother has cancer, you may be able break the rules of a Boys Only Weekend and spend some time drinking with festive, fraternal men who will buy you a mustard colored t-shirt that says “Get Lucky at Ri-Ra!”

Heparin, used to prevent clots, is injected in the upper thigh. Shots sometimes burn.

I will watch five hours of detective shows given access to cable tv and a desire for escape. I should never have cable TV on a permanent basis.

Fog rolling in scares me on some unspoken, primal level, the cold approach of oblivion, even while I consciously marvel at the beauty and power of nature.

Toes at Fort Williams

Anger unexpressed curls the body into odd shapes, closes in on itself, shoulders covering necks, arms across chest, muscles tensed.

Potassium levels must be in the normal range before being released from the hospital. Potassium administered via IV can burn. Liquid medication tastes foul. Pills are large. 

Throughout many years, my cats have seen me through a myriad of events across the country and still come over and purr next to me. And yak up hairballs under the bed at 4am.

To discourage clots in the leg after surgery, patients are encouraged to sit up and stand the same day as surgery. The more movement, the better after surgery, as it inspires the body to wake up and get busy healing. Medical personnel tend to leave out details on just how painful this will be. 

Also to discourage clots, patients often have motorized compression pumps velcroed around their legs, expanding and deflating in rhythmic rounds. Some nurses call them Electric Socks.

Dock, Eastern Promenade,
Portland, Maine

Anger, fear, sadness and love mix up, move around, run away, hit you in the face when you're not looking.

Being the youngest person in the room by ten or twenty years still makes you the baby even if you're 42. This is good and bad.

Taxol is a favored chemical for ovarian cancer chemotherapy.

You can know people all your life and still not really know them.