two kitties/small city

Old.

 

Maggie (2007) Watercolor on paper. --Sue Rubira

It's going to happen. It's happening already. It's been going on for some time. Maybe five years ago, I noticed that when I looked at photos I'd ask in confusion, "Who is that?"  before the eye settled and realized it was me. The doughy under-chin. The turkey neck. The dark roots. The fat. The one, brave age spot on the right side of my face where the Montana sun beat down through the window on the passenger side.

Even my mother, through the fog of dementia, recognized that I have her mother's hands. She'd never said it before. I can only assume that she saw how my thumb knuckles seem to be swelling or lengthening - doing something strange, anyway - as I get older. And yes, my hands look like my grandmother's. Not when she was young, but when I knew her in the last part of her life.

Now, I let people take pictures of me and simply don't look at them. I'm not one of those hovering over someone else's camera display pressing the trash can button. I know that in ten years, I'll think I looked great. I think, while I pose and smile, of my youth and beauty and how I wasn't confident enough at 103 pounds to wear a bikini. That I thought I was fat when my weight climbed to 117.

Every pair of pants I try on, I'm still 42. Not 22. I can lose weight but I'm not going to lose my scars, or the extra skin that folds over them. I'm not going to spend $10,000 to get any of it removed. All I have is the memory of what it used to be like to be able to wear almost anything I tried on. My biggest problem in any dressing room was that my waist was too tiny relative to my bust.

I ran a 10K this past weekend and posted a photo of me crossing the finish line. It was all I could do not to caption it, "Fatty at the Finish." But I held it back. The girls are watching. What message does it send to train for something for so many months if you are only going to degrade yourself once you've met your goal? And, when I look back at the photo in ten years, what will I be thinking?

Will I be thinking that, at this weight (whatever it is, because I only weigh at the doctor's office and most of the time I make them keep the number to themselves) I could run seven miles; that I was stronger than I'd ever been at that point? That the race weekend was an incredibly happy weekend with John, the man I would marry just a few weeks later? That it was the perfect weather when we stood, that same weekend, under a blooming dogwood tree and held hands while we watched the old fire trucks and the floats and high school marching bands go by in a parade? Will I remember the play I saw in the city with my friend the next day? Or how John and I sat on the bed and talked all night afterward, playing with our cats and simply being happy?

 

The Upside of Anger.

 

I stole that title from the movie. I've always loved that movie.  Joan Allen plays her character caustic and brittle. So much pent up anger about their unsuccessful marriage that, when her husband suddenly disappears, she finds it imposible to consider any explanation other than an affair. That his gorgeous, Nordic secretary left at the same time to return to the homeland only confirms the suspected cliche. His body is discovered many months later at the bottom of a well in a wooded section of their property. It's impossible for the viewer not to ask  -- out loud and even many months, or years, later -- what might have happened if she had set her anger aside and gone out looking for him. Or even picked the fight she'd really wanted to have before he'd gone.

I've spent so many years being angry  - often without really knowing why. Sometimes I did know why but had to force it down. My sister thinks of me as a grudge keeper, and perhaps this is true.I think of it less as grudge keeping than of hurts kept to myself. All in the interest of keeping the relationship civil. At least we can keep it civil, if we can't keep it kind.

Of course, anger in occasional doses is a healthy emotion. A reaction -- they say in all my books -- to being taken advantage of. To not feeling valued. Sometimes things happen and suddenly I get that bitterly familiar taste in mouth and I'm not sure what to do with it. Do you chew, spit, or swallow? Break it up into little pieces and push it around the plate or spread it thin over something sweet?

Just once, I want to take the other road. Not the high road. I fantasize about that every once in awhile. What it would be like -- just once -- to tell people what I really think and feel. Civility and my own dysfunction aside. I might say:

--You've raised your children to be a bunch of little assholes.

--This moment is about me, not you.

--You exhaust me and everyone around you with your anxious drama.

--You're sick. You need help for your alcoholism/anorexia/histrionic personality disorder/(insert dysfunction here.) And I don't want to be around you until you deal with it.

--You're spoiled and rude.

The short list.

I imagine that if I ever really did that, people would just stand back and stare. They're used to me being a doormat. And, of course, they love that about me.

Simple Messy Hair Updo Bun You Can Do By Yourself.

I found this via Pinterest, and tried it this morning. I'm always looking to upgrade my 'do on the days I don't want to wash my hair before I go running. Weirdly, it worked for me. I didn't curl my hair first (I have plenty of natural wave) and I forgot to put hairspray in first. I did not manage to roll the second part the way she did. Still? It looks pretty cute. Try it!

The Charm.

I never had a "real" wedding. I didn't think anyone would show up for me, is the truth. Or thought that the people who would might hurt me.

I find myself, now, in a very strange place. I don't *really* have anybody, anymore. Apart from my sister, of course.  Not having anybody makes it easier but it also makes it harder. Easier not to have to tell my grandmother that I'm about to get married a third time but harder because big events like these sharpen the edges of friendships that have faded over the last few years.

I got married in Hawaii the first time. In a long white dress and veil in a beautiful outdoor chapel on the edge of the sea. Surrounded by people I mostly don't know anymore, I said my vows into the harsh light of a setting sun. I couldn't see a thing. By the end I was so sick to my stomach, I didn't attend my own reception. It might have been something I ate. In the middle of the night we snuck out of the hotel and drove to the emergency room. My then-husband had a severe allergic reaction to something. We passed a pack of wild dogs on a golf course in the dark.

My second wedding was in the living room of our Montana home the day after Christmas. I spent the morning vacuuming on my hands and knees with a Dirt Devil handheld because the housekeeper forgot to tell us she broke the belt in our regular vacuum and there was no time to run to town and find one. Afterward, we rode up the hill with a "Just Married" sign and a bunch of empty soup cans tied to our ATV. My old friend from high school made us a carrot cake with Hershey's Hugs sunk into a thick layer of cream-cheese frosting and we listened to our contractor give a toast about how M. was, as a man, the "new head of [our] Christian household." My sister promptly dropped a champagne glass and broke it. We were all a little gobsmacked by that 'Christian household' thing.

My third wedding is on May 25, 2013 at 11 a.m. at The Old Stone Church in Winchester, Virginia. There will be a simple cake, vegan cupcake and punch reception afterward. All my people are gone, now. I keep hearing that in my head. My parents. My grandparents. My step-brothers. There are once-close friendships I'm less sure of today than I was just two years ago. My still-good friends are few and feel very far away. After twenty years of waiting, whether anyone shows up or not, I'm finally going to marry my best friend. And I can hardly wait. If you're reading this - you're invited.

Conflict and Costume: Herero Tribe of Namibia by Jim Naughten

I read about Jim Naughten's new book in Selvedge - that magazine that makes me panicky from aesthetic pleasure overload. In a way the website I just linked you to doesn't even come close to capturing. I mean, in what other magazine could you become completely engrossed in a five page article about the origins and maintenance of the 1930's art deco upholstery on the London Tube? Exactly. But I digress.

 

 

Jim Naughten photographed the sort-of traditional dress of the Herero tribe of Namibia. The 'sort-of' is tacked on as a kind of explanation for how the Herero adopted and transformed patterns of dress from German and English colonizers in the early 20th century. Naughten comments on the addition of 'cow horns' to the womens' headdresses as a marker of the importance of cattle to the tribe's well being.

 

 

This is material culture. This is anthropology at its finest. This makes me panicky.

Food Issues.

Image ripped off from Tangelo Studio. The piece is for sale.

 

I want this piece of art. In another life, I was that woman, bent back over the table. I lived in a big house. For six years, I made dinner.

You could look back and pick out the reasons why. In the kitchen, I could be alone. M. never wanted to hang out in there. I could do whatever I wanted to do, so I did almost everything in there. I canned cherries. I wrote about what I saw and what I didn't see.

I made things. I made something out of nothing. I cooked food because it was the only trick I had in my pocket to make him happy. I opened my stomach as if it had a hopper and ate food I didn't want because it was all we could do together. We both got fatter. I learned to ask him for help if I wanted him to go away. So I guess I had two tricks.

When I came here, to Virginia, I put all of that stuff away. Or, maybe I just got weird about it. I ate with John but we mostly ate out (in the beginning.) I sometimes cooked behind his back, waiting until he left on a work trip to attack and destroy the kitchen. In one of our few real misunderstandings, he called just after I'd made myself a steak under the broiler. He said something like, "So you like to cook but you just don't enjoy doing it for me?" Meaning, "I want to understand that there's something about doing it for another person that took the enjoyment away for you, right at that time in your (my) life."  So soon after my divorce, I could only hear M. in that remark. I heard, "So...you like to cook but you just don't want to cook for ME?"

But if you know John, you know he meant it the other way. The, that's perfectly ok, baby, I am happy kinda way. Because he loves a fancy dinner just as much as he loves a bowl of cereal which is as much as he enjoys eating at Burger King. And if I'm in the kitchen he's in the kitchen because he loves ME and he's spent the day crawling around repairing a giant industrial machine that's so loud no one can really talk while they're at work. And I'm the one that has to remind myself to slow down and listen instead of running away to do something stupid - like put the laundry in the dryer - instead of listening to the person I love, who loves me, tell me what he saved up in his heart all day to talk to me about.

More often than not, when John's cooking he shooes me out of the the kitchen. For him, it's the surprise factor. He wants to plate it and show it to me in all it's majesty.  Even though he's not a vegan he says that he enjoys the challenge of cooking vegetables. He said once, "I think anyone can just cook a good hunk of meat, but how many people can master the ins and outs of vegetables?" He steams vegetables and rice in the steamer or sweet potato "steaks" with mustard sauce. He whips up green smoothies with kale and fresh fruit for my breakfast, serving them with a side of oatmeal with mango and cinnamon on top. He stands over the sink and eats the rinds of the fruit telling me he ate for himself while he was making mine. Cinnamon toast. Vegan chocolate chip pancakes with fresh strawberries on top. I told him once I'd still love him if he didn't serve me breakfast in bed and once during a busy stretch he didn't. I still loved him, but I did miss that love on a plate.

I've been cooking with a mania ever since I found Veganomicon at my library a few weeks ago. Not in secret. This is vegan food I want to eat.  I've made a velvety Carrot Bisque, Potato-Kale Enchiladas, Snobby Joes, Mushroom pate, Peanut Butter Oatmeal Cookies. My Instagram feed is ripe with the ideas.

I've cooked so well for so long that I know exactly how this all works. That I can switch the walnuts to pecans in the Mushroom pate recipe. That the Carrot Bisque will never be right without fresh ginger. But I learn things from this book, too. I learn that if you dip the tortillas in a pie plate filled with tomato sauce and then roll the filling inside them, the wetness of the tomato sauce will hold your enchiladas together like glue. Fucking genius.  One week I play a game with myself - trying to use every vegetable I've bought and not waste a single cent of the $60 I spent at the store. The next week I spend $30 on artisan salts.

The unseasonably cold weather makes it easy, too, because the gas oven heats the house. The new fridge bumped to the other side of the kitchen makes the work space flow better than before. I still enjoy the wide open space of being home alone. When it happens I stay up and wake up later. Writing, exercising, working at odd hours. I start cooking in the middle of the afternoons and make enough to freeze and eat during the times when John is away. This week he's away for seven days straight.

I focus on that - trying to lay it all up for moments exactly like this one.  I know the day is going to come - and soon -  when I will be unable to force myself to drive to the store to get a box of cereal.  And many times I won't know why that happens. At others, I will find out that this old house is just too cold and my body wants to hibernate. Or that I didn't have enough to eat the night before and my blood sugar is low. It can all be sorted with a microwaved bowl of homemade soup. When its ready, I eat one bowl of soup from the batch and freeze the rest in my individual serving containers. The next night, I make another soup. Or a casserole. Alone in my kitchen, but not lonely. Right as rain.

Lisa Ross Photographs Black Garden

Lisa Ross shoots the art I'd make if I made the time. Not the photographs, but the shrines themselves. Markers for everything that was supposed to be, but isn't. That should be, but cannot or will not. Shrines and burial sites in the form of dried sticks, ladders, fences, and scarves. Burial cribs with doors. These, from China.

Not for babies - mine, anyway - but for ideas. Dreams. Expectations. Hope. Faith. Trust. And then some.

Bad People.

One of my favorite lines in the film, The Hangover is when Stu tells his girlfriend Melissa, "You're...such a bad person! Like, all the way through to your core!"

 

There's a much longer buildup to all the reasons why Stu's scene is actually the best possible outcome for the relationship. In that moment, it was absolutely the right thing for him to do. And I think I sort of envy the fact that he said it out loud.

Bird Screen II: Catherine Eaton Skinner

Tibetan paper/archival ink/encaustic/thread/bamboo

Catherine Eaton Skinner, Bird Screen II, (2007)

 

Kiki Smith favors Tibetan paper. Oh, wait, no. She likes Nepal paper. I buy paper at Michael's. Once I made it.

Barbara Keal Wool Felt Animal Hats

Barbara Keal makes wool felt animal "skins" for performance and personal. This Icelandic ram deserves to be on stage.