ReinventedVoices

I have been wondering, ever since I read Tess Kincaid's Blog about  Anne Bradstreet's poetry on February 18th, how many of my fellow woman bloggers were feminists long before you heard the word. Or perhaps some of you men were, as well. Perhaps some of you wondered why on earth girls you knew as buddies outside of school had to wear dresses and play jump rope in school.

How many were labeled "Tomboys" but the name didn't set right? How many of you balked at the differences you were told to respect?

My dad said it went back to my birth. "You came out the chute going, 'Oh, Yeah?' and you've been saying it ever since." He was so refined, my dad.

I do know that ever since I can remember I felt as if I never got it "right." I did not know how to be a girl "right." That's a sad thing to feel, but as I look back, it stood me in good stead, except in my love life. And, well, my love life was one confusing fiasco after another--but it was never boring!

My Blasphemous Youth--We're talkin' REALLY "Youth"
When I was told "God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son," my first question was why wasn't it a girl? My Sunday school teacher had no answer and was annoyed. My  minister talked about how long ago baby girls were killed at birth because people valued sons. And then I learned, that this still happened in the world, even in the 1950s! And it was a shocking revelation.

I had overheard my  mother and father over breakfast. As was my custom, even when I was school aged, I would wake up when Daddy changed from hot water to cold in his shower. After I heard him go downstairs, I would follow with some book and curl up on the end of the couch closest to the kitchen.  Mom and Dad discouraged me from joining them because this was the time they had together without everyone around. What they didn't understand was that this was my time to be near them without everyone else around, too. So form me, the compromise was to be very still, and read on the couch.  They knew I was there, but a)they often forgot that I was right there,and b) they would forget that I listened to their conversations. And that day, I heard them discussing some country that killed unnecessary girls. Unnecessary girls?

I was already on overload of school admonitions that "boys will be boys," and "Really, Jeannette, can't you play with the girls just once?" and "Well of COURSE your dress is dirty when you insist on playing kickball instead of jumping rope like a good girl!"  I was already fed up with having the teacher calling on Walter first, even when I raised my hand first. It seemed as if the boys always got to do the really cool things first. I hated it. And I had already decided, in all humility, that every girlfriend I had and I were smarter than the smartest of the boys. Unnecessary girls?

This put me over the top. I leaped up and bolted into the kitchen, knocking inot mom's chair as I rounded the table corner to stand between them. I could feel the heat of my face. "I bet God had tried to give begotten daughters a few times, but people were so mean and stupid they drowned the babies at birth! God just gave up and tried a son, so maybe someone would listen. NO ONE listens to GIRLS!" I pounded the table and knocked over Dad's creamer, which he caught in an unusual demonstration of manual agility. He was nonetheless stunned silent.

Mom reached over and stroked my tear-heated face.  She did not correct me though. Instead, all she did was open her shining blue eyes wider, smile a little sadly and say, "Honey, I never thought of that. I wonder how many people have thought of that." She barely brushed a strand of hair wandering across face, using one finger. I could feel my lower jaw trembling as I tried to unclench it.

"Dear, you just be Jetty. We understand that you don't like girls' games. We know you hate dresses and that you don't understand why boys seem to get all the fun. You are a tomboy."

I was only seven at most, so that word only made me vaguely  uneasy. Eventually, however ...

I was not an Anything-BOY!
After a few more years of being called a Tomboy and being told that most everything I did for fun was wrong, I Snapped one day. "I'm not Tom. I'm not a boy. I'm a girl but I don't LIKE doing all those things everyone tells me I'm supposed to like. I DON'T! WHY isn't that OKAY?  I just like what they do better. BUT. I. AM. A. GIRL!"

Daddy said, "Okie doke, Snigglefritz."

Mom smiled.

They never called me that again. Breakfasts with me around must have been such a relaxing treat.

I have no doubt at all that there are many women over fifty who resented being told we must wear dresses and do girl things when we were at school. Or under fifty, for that matter. I know that the word "tomboy" is still used, though there are not the gender restrictions on clothing or on what girls choose to do on the playground.

What we did have that are a thing of the past were handwritten comments on every single quarter of our report card. And while sometimes teachers did write nice things about my grades, there were, every single year of my childhood, the following comments:

• Jeannette pays far too much attention to the boys at recess.
• Jeannette seems to have trouble accepting her role as a girl. (REALLY. This was in third grade)
• Jeannette spends too much time with just one other girl, alone and removed from her fellow classmates.
• Jeannette is too bossy.
• Jeannette tries to answer too many questions, without waiting her turn to be called on.
• Jeannette does not participate appropriately in class.
• Jeannette needs to remember she is a girl and that kick ball is not an entirely appropriate recess activity for her at school, as she wears dresses and can get a little rough! (That was first grade)

Dreams Dashed
I believe I have mentioned some of this before, but it fits in nicely into the discussion. Y.A. Tittle, a quarterback for the New York Giants, was one of my heroes. I'd found some black and white picture of him and put it on the wall above my sister's and my desk. By third grade she was off to college, so she didn't care what I put up. I also had a picture of Sam Huff, who was with the Giants first.  He was a star.

The guys likened me to him when we played touch or flag football, and called me the blitzkrieg. Jerry Griffin, the fastest of our gang of twelve, used to smirk at me when he would run away to try to pass to one of his brothers. He said I was like a bulldog because I would doggedly go after him. I was not fast, but I did not give up, and I was agile, so a change of direction did not stop me. So when they said I was like Sam Huff, I thought it was a compliment.

A girl I knew said it was because I was chunky and that hurt me, and I thought maybe I was all wrong. When I told Jerry, five years my senior, he looked upset and he pat me on the head and said, "No, Jet. It's because you are a really good player, and you get in the way of every play I try to make. You're a little blitzkrieg. Don't listen to them."

By fifth grade, however, my mother put an end to my play and my career dreams all in five minutes.  She had been watching us play and noticed that the boys' "Touch" had a little too lingering a quality, she said. She told me that life was hard, but sometimes a girl really could NOT play some games with the boys, and that I was too old to play football with them. I knew what she meant, but I was mad anyway, and would not talk any more about it.

Then I blurted somewhat desperately, "But if I'm going to be a linebacker, I gotta take it, Mom."

She simply looked at me. "Excuse me?"

"Yeah. I'm going to be like Sam Huff."

"Oh, honey. Oh. No, you can't do that. You--"

I burst into tears. I remember the day so clearly. I leaped out of the kitchen chair so hard, the chair flew backwards into the sink. I could not look up and simply focused on picking up that chair. "Right. GIRLS DON'T PLAY FOOTBALL. Right. Okay. Right. I can't be a major league football player. Right. Okay."

I think my mother was as heartbroken as I was. She did not laugh at me. She stood there, as did I, sort of limp, just looking at one another.  We never spoke of it again and I never played football again.

It was when I really began to notice how unfair it was in our culture to be a girl, and the resentment set in: Thanksgivings of being stuck polishing silver while the boys watched t.v. with dad; the hatred of Easter dresses, hats, white gloves; the fact that Daddy didn't want Mom to work, even though she wanted to; the way it was considered such a big deal when I beat Walter doing the number facts, talking about a girl beating the boy, almost as if I were a freak. Dozens of things, blatant and subtle.

I did not resent the boys for it; I did resent my teachers. Oddly enough, I didn't hide it very well. I'm sure you all find that hard to believe...

Yet I do wonder why my sister never minded any of it. One day when I was perhaps thirteen, I pointed out to her that Jim was given a later curfew than she had been, and she simply shrugged and said it was because she was a girl. I believe I made a rather rude sound, accompanied by swearing.

She laughed, shook her head at me and said, "The difference between us is that I never met a rule I did not follow and you never met a rule you were not tempted to break."

"ONLY when it's a STUPID rule," I snapped.

Imagine how delightful I was when the dating years began a couple of years later!

That's for another day...

***  Wonderings ***
I do wonder whether others of you were acutely aware of gender expectations as kids? I'm not looking for an equal rights diatribe. I guess I can't help but wonder why it bothered me so, as it bothered others of my girlfriends. We girls in my elementary school, wound up filling half of the top twenty spots in our class of over six hundred in high school. (Our town had four or five elementary schools.) No one spoke of women's rights, but we did hear about civil rights a great deal. My mother helped organize a sympathy march in our town, since most of the moms could not attend any Civil Rights march in Washington. But my rebellion began young.

I don't believe I was that special in noticing these things. I just don't. And if any of you have stories of your own confusion about these things, I would love to read them. I know that guys found me, well, odd, to say the least. Off-putting is putting it kindly. As I said, that's for another day, perhaps. It's the childhood memories that I wonder about--whether other boys and girls found it as confusing and, well, wrong as I did in those days before the Movement.

That's all for today.

I lied. I'm finding the comments really interesting--as interesting as the blogs of the commenters are! It feels like an actual discussion, even though I have an outdated format. Anyway, I DO love it when people comment about their--your--own histories and feelings. Sometimes a post is just as much, to me, about the readers' experiences as mine. Okay, NOW that's all for today. Happy March.

 Friday is not usually a day that I post. I have enjoyed either seeing or writing on other people's sites when they are meeting challenges for poetry or "55 word Stories," or simply asking people their opinions.  Since people are so kind to me without exception, one thing I hope to start doing on weekends will be to refer folks to other blogs for whatever reason strikes me. It seems sort of like a courtesy I can extend to bloggers I follow as well as those who follow me. And if sometimes I do it on a different day, well, that's me I'm afraid.

Some are artists/artisans. Some are poets or writers of other sorts. Some are photographers and/or painters. I read their blogs for all sorts of reasons, so it is an ecclectic bunch. But, then, a committee of wackos inhabits my brain, so why wouldn't my collection reflect that?

Because today(Friday) is busy for me, I'm simply going to cite two.
1. I have just had fun doing this exercise over on One Minnesota Writers' Blog. She Calls it "First Five Fragments for Friday." I don't know why in particular this struck me--perhaps because it was light, and so much of what we see on tv and read in the papers is anything BUT.

2. And as fort Pearl, Why You Little ...? I don't know what to say except that she just often makes me guffaw. Clearly she does this for her million plus followers, but I don't care. I had to list her.

That's all for today, most likely. I had a re-run of unremitting pain for about twenty-four hours. Laughter got me through, and launched me for today.  I know I follow many other bloggers I find funny, but for now? For now, I'll just stick with these two, one because her entry today gave me something simple to do for myself, the other because most days, I am assured a laugh or six.

And I'm not looking for comments-- I simply hope to find ways to group every one of the bloggers I follow and/or who follow me, to promote the tremendous talent and kindness I run into every day I am at my computer. It will take me a while, but giving back should be part of blogging ... at least for me. It is not likely that I will promote more than three in any one day. I simply feel that each of the blogs I follow has something that hits me--sometimes witty, sometimes funny, or profound, or touching, or beautiful. Or it just satisfied some quirk of mine. These two did it for me today.

Have a wonderful weekend. My niece, a freshman in college, is coming to get away from it all for tomorrow and Sunday. My focus will be, naturally, on her.

Two Others on Saturday--Then I'm Done (Gotta Get My Niece)
I talk about my having the chance to view other lives, and to meet kind people.
1.) Sometimes she is quirky and entirely nuts--qualities you know I enjoy. Sometimes her pictures simply give me peace, as can the life she writes about. Kerry's Farmlass is the blog.  Her life is very different from mine, yet there are points of overlap. I simply like her. She makes her living through photography, painting, and felt work. I have to promote people who take the plunge to pursue their art to make a living. I just have to!

2.) Finally, Sian. Life on a Small Island is simply about that. She lives on one of the Orkney Islands and her photographs and stories of her life hit a place way inside. She soothes my soul. Period.

Now I really WILL stop with the blog promotion for the week. I'm picking up my niece at noon and we are having art time together. She has a special big white shirt that was my dad's that she loses herself in. Already she has found that she can forget all about it with painting and being dopey with her aunt for a day. You can well imagine how easily I can lose myself with her, too. I can never lose when she is here overnight.

Have a wonderful weekend.

I promised myself I would write every week, but I've already blown it. Perhaps having several in one week counts?

Regardless, I painted during my vertical times this week. The problem is that my new painting does not translate well on the little bitty computer screen. It was created to be viewed from six feet away or more. I do love it myself, but for those of you who prefer pictures that lean toward realism, it won't be a favorite. That's fine. Like my writing, not everything will be a hit with everyone. It is hard getting used to that, I admit, but it's part of what goes with the territory. The wonderful thing is that I painted from my gut, and that it was what I envisioned. Two of my friends love it, and two think "it's pretty." That's code for "not my cup of tea." My friends don't tend to be critics.

Anyway, here it October Blizzard, 2011. If you click on it, you can get a feel for what went into it, but still. The picture will have a substantial, pure white matte. I'm kind of disappointed at how it translated in a digital image, but I guess I'll just have to live!


In other news, I had a dreadfully difficult week with the neurological complications of my back. For four days, most of the time I tried to walk, I had to focus very particularly on moving each leg. I sometimes do it aloud, saying, "Left move, right move, left move, right move." Sometimes I do more for going up and down the stairs. It is exhausting and overwhelmingly frustrating. By the fourth day I began to get a little scared, I confess. The pain and inability to move got to me and my courage failed. I was afraid that this was "it." That they were failing and this was the time I would find that I could not get up one day. It wasn't. So we will leave it at that. I'm really rather human, I  am afraid. Sometimes the fight leaves me entirely.

Except when I want to paint. I DID do this in ten minute installments sometimes. Occasionally I managed twenty minutes, but I got into a rhythm for parts of all four days, where I would paint and/or glue, lie down for half an hour; get up and walk the thirteen steps to the table, paint and/or glue, walk the thirteen steps back to the foldout couch, and lie down. I would keep that up over the course of about six hours, then just give up for the day.

Still, I finished another abstract painting that captured how the world appeared to me that day and the next. And as long as I am happy and some people whose opinions I value loved it, I know that I am moving along with my art. And that I am living life here as I planned, setbacks with my health or no setbacks.

Things are better in that I can move, but the pain's still pretty significant, so I'll leave my post at this. I feel as if I battled my back and won this week, so all is well.

PS
I finished it! Softened the white paper shapes, created a little more depth, brought out the branch coming in from the right. Subtle differences, but I am happy now! It was FUN doing this one, despite the pain. On to the next.

Betweet 2000 and the end of 2001, my friend who is like a sister to me, and who had two very small children, was struck with kidney failure several times and fought to keep her life. I lived half the time at my house and half at hers. My sister and I had decided to hang onto our home in case G died, which she nearly did six times in a year and a half. We knew we might be raising two children because, by his own admission, C was no kind of a father to raise kids alone. Then my minister, a friend who had helped me through my husband's desertion and daughter's death, whose wife was a dear friend, hanged himself. And my brother was diagnosed with terminal liver disease one month before his older son hanged himself. Then Jack died. Then my voice teacher and choir director and friend of ten years died.

It was not a good eighteen months.

And at the end of that time (G is STILL with us), my women had an inkling that I would fail if I did not get the hell out of Dodge for a bit. So Nancy, who was going to take a professional photography course in Santa Fe, consulted with my sister about sending me with her. They colluded, this bunch. And for Christmas of 2001, I had a ticket to Santa Fe and a hotel to stay in and ten days to call my own!

Perfect. And it was. Only on the plane ride home, I contracted an odd strain of bacterial pneumonia. Four days after I was home, my fever spiked and I was terribly, terribly ill. I saw the doctor and he gave me two choices. "The hospital today, or you do absolutely NOTHING for the next three days, let other people take care of you, do your breathing treatments religiously and find some way to keep your breathing deep and even. I will see you then, and if you are better, you may continue that way. 2/10ths of a degree higher temperature, you are in the hospital. And do NOT lie down to sleep at night."

Painting My Way Home
I painted. I remembered, in my counseling, yes, I DID do visualizing when the flashbacks started to come. I learned to keep them from coming by a strong, strong visualization of the safest, most serene spot I could imagine. I had two. One was at Sandy Hook, New Jersey. I gave that painting away. The other, my fifth painting ever, is this. I am sorry about the reflection. I gave it to my sister when she was having a particularly rough time two years later. I worked on this every day, played Handel's Watermusik in the background and focused on breathing. It is just watercolor. I surrounded myself with New Hampshire pictures. Water. Granite. Pine. Mountains. The Flume. The Basin. Roadside rushing water. The Lake. You name it. At the other end of the room I did the same with pictures from my Runaways to Red Bank. Nothing but Sandy Hook, West Long Branch, the ocean, rocks. sand. I would move back and forth between paintings, then the couch, paintings, the couch, for about eight or ten hours. I had a gallon of ice water there as well, and a cooler with more ice.

By Still Waters, Peace

From this painting everything else has sprung. I am a woman of granite and water. Mad rushing water has smoothed my edges. Pools of calm reflect the colors of ages. I am a woman of pine and birch, of seasons and extremes, of dark and light. (Well, and I'm just plain nuts to boot, lest you think I've gone all mythical mystic goddess on you.) Northern writers have just as many layers as the southern writers do. It took me until I was about forty-five to know that for sure.

I guess I'm blogging more than I thought I would. Oh, well. Here is the mother painting for me. Again, apologies for the reflection's muted color and lines, but perhaps you can get the feel of it. Oh. I finished both in nine days. On the tenth I rested! No hospital. I was very close to well.

And whenever I look at this painting I seem to automatically breathe more deeply, and I disappear there to rest.

 Not only did I complete a sketch with a gameplan of how to render it with my preferred artist media of watercolor, tissue paper, lace paper, and pen; I also worked on the painting I began in...

 "Excerpt from "Finally-translating-inspiration-into a Painting"

The Transformation begins
And Friday night I lugged a formless, nameless painting -- the one I began on my retreat --upstairs. I did not work on the one I thought I would begin. I worked on one where all I knew is that it kind of looks like choppy water. I said aloud, "PLAY with it, for God's sake. Don't worry about what it is, what it may be, just play with it. Screw the voices. To hell with anything but the process. JUST PLAY." I stomped my foot, which, of course, hurt, but when you are six, you don't care whether or not it hurts. If you are mad, you're mad. Stomping is what you do, at least, if you are six-year-old Jetty.


So I played. And then it began to look like the Lake on a choppy day, the way it did when I'd gaze, unfocused, down from the picture window in the cottage, the one by the giant field stone fireplace my grandpa built--on the daybed, tucked there under the window, with the enormous wood box at its head, the old record player in its beautiful wood encasing at the foot. The room always smelled like pine. Sometimes I would open the wood box top and just smell. I'd climb onto the wood box, crouching, and leap from the box onto the daybed, making sure my feet never touched the floor so that the alligator under the bed could not get me; a cheetah pouncing. Then I'd lie on my stomach and slither up to the window, lean on my elbows that rested on the sill, push my nose against the glass and stare. I was a hissing cobra, and my elbows and head were the hood. But finally I would simply lose myself, seeing nothing but the water, dancing. White caps and sparkles and every shade of blue. Sometimes a maple leaf would drift in my line of sight, and I would blink.


And Grandpa would bring me back home with his laugh, having witnessed my transmutations.


And so I began painting nothing but water. I collaged long lengths of tissue with the flat side down, curves and bumps on top, in every shade of blue I could make.


When I was done for the evening, I stood my lake against the oak desk that was at the cottage, too. The one Grandpa did his paper work at,  by the one light, in the evenings. If I peeked in after bedtime, opening the swinging door from the bedroom hall, I would see him bent over papers.


"Jet. Aren't you supposed to be in bed?" I would see an eyebrow raise and I would giggle and run to my room again.


I played last night, too. And again, for just a little while this morning--long enough to get that darker blue just so, there, toward the top, to balance something or other that I cannot name.

 This first gives a close up so you can see how it is I layered the water. There are about four kinds of paper in the collaged water, each torn strip had been previously painted, then new layers of blue washes were applied. A hint of white caps is done in white acrylic. The leaves were done with three layers of craft weight tissue paper, pre-painted in various shades of yellow and flame, each painted separately, glued together, then glued to the painting. Details were then painted so that I could make them as realistic as possible.

I have done it this way to replicate my little girl wonder at the water and the enormous leaves, as I would position myself so that I saw absolutely no land.

The second gives the beginning of how the whole will look--I've not yet done the single white pine bough that intruded on all views from the left. That bough nearly kissed the window in my mind, but perhaps you can get a little of the feel of the water. The way I work, this painting is perhaps a little over halfway completed. Regardless of when it's completed, this is directly from, as Bruce Coltin so precisely described it, a conversation with one of my ghosts!


The leaf will go off the frame, as will the water.  The whole painting is taped to a board, so I won't get the full effect of a white matte until it is finished. I do want this painting matted white, because the screen frame was bright white. At least that is how I remember it vividly, and how I felt. The leaves are actual size of the largest maple leaves.

This is the first painting where I've finally been able to get a digital image that shows the layer upon layer upon layer that goes into  much of the work.  The mountains in the painting that is my permanent banner reflect approximately twenty layers of paper, all in different variations of white, some toward the top with the irridescent pearl white, some with tinted white washes. I get lost in some odd zone when I am layering papers. It is a free sort of activity, painting sheets of paper, tearing into approximate shapes, gluing with intentional folds, painting again. Most of the time it is almost entirely right brain, with the sporadic left brain--fold this one here. No. Re-angle that one before it dries. Take that one off and put it there. Almost rhythmic.

Okay, so I lied. I cam back already. Today is the day I have a meeting--spiritual stuff--at 3, dinner with the wackos I love at 5, song circle at 7. Painting or doing a lot of sitting activity is not possible if I want to have fun this evening. How I missed singing for five years--it feels like a miracle to have found a group where it does not set off the trigeminal nerve. Where the sound is about hushed harmonies!

That's all for now, though! I do love it when people yell at me to shut up and run with it. More than one person has told me to stop thinking so hard and simply paint, sing, or write as the mood hits. I'm not a good listener...

Thanks.

... and another ramble from a memory.  In the seventies and early eighties, I had an "aunt and uncle" who built a dreamhouse on Cape Cod. Joy was actually my mom's first cousin, but they grew up around the corner from one another in New York (Flushing), so felt the relationship was more like sisters. She was about ten years younger than mom and we always thought of her as Aunt Joy. It was to her place in Paris my sister and I went during the summer of '74, when I was graduated from college.

My aunt designed and had built a wondrous home at the Cape, to which  my sister, my best friend G, and I would run for a joint birthday celebration of G's and mine. Joy was a gourmet cook and would make us fabulous meals. She was estranged from her daughter and I was the surrogate. Or so she said.

You know what? For now I will cut to the chase. Four years after I was married, she called one day and told us Jack's "Ship had come in." He was a brilliant man--ultimately part of the group that invented the early voice recognition for telephones. A computer scientist who put himself through school playing, as he called it "cocktail hour piano." He relocated from his position for ITT (Then) International to form his own research company and he said that he had sold at long last, one of his patents. Joy was ecstatic and immediately they called me and told me that I would never have to worry about Mark's and my kids' education again. They had a big dinner for all four of us kids and our children to tell us they were setting up college funds for the kids and were giving every adult in the group an income GIFT of $10k a year! To us, it was something.

And if I could not trust my surrogate parents, the aunt who had been there for me during my twenties, when my mom's drinking had overtaken her more than half the time, well...

And they called me especially, telling me that they were sending me fifteen thousand dollars to get a GOOD CAR and pay for the added auto insurance, title fees, etc. The check did not come, but they insisted there were glitches. In the meantime, I called G, who was newly out of law school, that she should plan on a vacation.

One of G's shots related to where this ramble's headed

She and I were renting a place in New Hampshire to take a long dreamed of vacation together so she could have autumn shots of New Hampshire.  She had an affinity for shots in the mist, taken through foliage, and of reflections.  The Lake beckoned. I kept putting off getting the car, though, wisely thinking it was best to simply pay, not get a short-term loan. But I made our reservations.

Finally, Jack called and said, "I just mailed the check. Why don't you get the car."

Mark said, "Honey. Let's go get that car you picked out and just take the loan and pay it off in a few days. It's the only one on the lot."

We got it. It was the color of my skin when I got a tan. Back then I had only lately given up tanning...

I called Joy and told her, then drove to my folks' house later in the day so that they could see I no longer had the breakdown king of cars. The phone rang. My dad got off the phone.

"It was a lie. Jack was picked up by the police, drunk, trying to buy a gun and shoot himself. He didn't sell a thing. He refinanced their paid for house and made it look like they were rich. He is penniless."

And I had a car we could not pay for.

There is far more to that story, but that is enough. My parents helped us out. And my husband said that we would FIND THE MONEY and to just go on vacation.  We had lately found out that my dad was dying...

part of the image G gave me for my wall

G and I went and it was wonderful. I would park my brand new, comfy car, and she would get herself into contortions to take pictures. And in the course of our adventures, we found this One House Island (that may be our name for it) on, yes, Golden Pond.


 When we got home, of course, all hell broke loose for year after year after year, it seemed.

But along the way, I wrote poetry. I do not say it was good poetry, but it helped me.  And one night I dreamed an image, and the next day wrote a poem so that I would not forget.

The other shot she took

Dream Witch of Holderness
In the mist, a castle-cottage
Rising silent from the water
Like the Loch Ness Monster --
You startle.

Un-turreted, but towering;
Alone, on small island nestled,
Where no safe harbor welcomes --
Only rocks.

Does your dock draw up at night?

Does your long-necked, pine-crowned bough
(So still and silent serpent
Over now day-misted lake)
Snake further still in the dark?

Turning gently to its queen,
"Dear Sorceress within,"
Does it whispering to you ask
"Where do we wander tonight?"

Then silent as owl's flight,
Does my Innisfree arise,
Unfurling gold-scaled dragon wings,
And vanish?

Do you color these worlds I dream?


In my head I took the dock in the background and combined it with the memory of a giant fallen tree you cannot see from this angle. It snakes into the Lake a good ten feet, but it is from a direction where she could not get a decent picture. There rocks in the right background jutting out to the left.  G took many photos of misty still waters, brilliant foliage breaking through it. She has a painting I did based on her work hanging next to the two inspiration shots at her house, in fact. We used to be like that, working off of each other's art. The image in my head had more the mist of the first painting.

 I dreamed that poem once again. Last night. I have to work on it now. I don't know whether I yet have the skill for it, but I have to try. Eventually I will get it, I know. Plus I have to finish the painting "Snow on October Fire" too. This means I'll not be writing for a bit. Not long, but probably not more--except on comments, of course!  Joy died before Christmas. Jack's senility has made him kind... such a gentle surprise. Many difficult memories reside with these two as well--I may or may not write of them. But I remembered the Joy who was there for me, and tried for thirty-five years to find her again. She left when she lost that Cape House. She never came back...

But has so often been the case, out of a time of pain and turmoil, came nuggets of great beauty and wonder for me, and a simple children's poem, and an image that haunts me still. I had to wait until I could BEGIN to paint it, until I could feel Joy's death as LOSS, to find my way back to it again.

In Arnold's words, "Ah'll be Bahck."

PS
I just finished a sketch that has promise! Kinda excited now.

I realize I've gone longer than I want to without posting. Why? I have been working on a new post and I want to cut some of it, and I have needed to let it percolate a bit.

On the other hand, I always find it interesting reading about the process of writers or artists of any medium. I include the "practical" arts, making little distinction among artisans, artists, writers, what have you. I mean there are cooks/chefs who are artists in my book. ANY time engaging in the creative process is a  large and important part of a person's life, I feel artist is good generic word. I so often see that the process is very much the same. We are inspired to create and we start to act on that inspiration. Sometimes we get all tangled up and must start again. Or we must "edit" our finished product, or it can change along the way. Potters, quilters, cooks who stray from recipes, writers, painters, photographers, metalworkers, sculptors--you name it. I call it art.

I learn from the process as described by others.  I feel less alone. And I feel supported just by reading how other people wind up changing their focus smack in the middle of a project!

But, all this remembering is sure getting in the way of this memoir-writing stuff! It's a total pain in the hoo-hah, I can tell you.

As I started to look at my 300 pages (no exaggeration there) of memoir material and began to choose material where my mother and our relationship were more of a focus, well, then my dad leaped out and said, "GAWDAMMIT! I have something to say." He will not brook SHUT UP from anyone--it was true in life and quite clearly is true from the Great Beyond.

The Demon Was a Boy... Darn it all
And now? Much to my confusion and sometimes distress, the humanity of brother Jim is leaping into my brain. This is hard, yet necessary. It is not so much that I blocked those memories, but for years I had to focus on what I had blocked and simply put them aside.  Now HE won't shut up, either.

The theme broadens then, and I wonder what I want to say and I wonder whether my story will have meaning beyond an interesting read. I find it presumptuous to begin a project and feel that MY handling of life would be any kind of inspiration to follow. Yet what I still find miraculous is the mind that tucks so many wondrous memories in with the horrors, when I blocked out the pain so long ago. It's as if I wrapped the pain up in a whole lot of packing paper, but tucked prisms in there along with each horrific memory. And as I try to figure out where to put the one who was most monstrous, damn it all... turns out that, yes, he was just a baby once upon a time. And a small boy. And a ten-year-old who practically carried his little sister home one day, so she would not burn her bare foot on hot tar. And a teenager capable of showing me true tenderness.

And then, where two of the men start yelling, the third's not far behind.

Jack starts yelling at me, too. "Yo! Jetty. What about when we went to the lake with Feej and sang on the dock. And how I wouldn't let you go in the back room at The Depot when someone was singing up front. And what about when I thought I'd be a minister and you would not hang out the clothes ... and..." Yeah. Right. WhatEVER. So Jack had his dark side even when we were kids.

I look at all the stories, and, believe it or not, I have not told them all in here! I look at them and over and over what I see is a collection of people whose personalities themselves were rain forests of wondrous light and terrifying darkness.

I was the heroine of light, right? Not so much. Inconveniently, I remember my darkness as well.

And Our Heroine Had Her Demons, too  ... No Surprise, I'm Sure
When I was twelve, I was asked to baby sit for a teacher's little girl who was four. When I was there, I kept having images of pushing her down the stairs, of pushing her off a swing, of things that terrified me. I did not do anything to hurt her, but I told Mrs. Richardson that I felt I was too young to care for her little girl. She thanked me for my honesty. I cried through most of that night, believing I must be some sort of demon straight out of hell.  I refused to EVER baby sit through my teens. By my twenties, however, no such visions came to me in the presence of small children.

The lesson was there, though. And I had many demons of my own, biting at my heels. I was hell-bent to self-destruct off and on until at last I sought professional help. And I'm thinking that I cannot leave it out or the book will not state the truth. Truth, as opposed to the facts. Honesty without hiding, without leaving out what is not pretty about me, not just them. (I hate that. It is just so much nicer to stay aloof, to imply that I was pure. But that's also boring, so what the hell.)

So what is the thing I want to say? And do I need to know before I put it all together? The "books" say I should. The "experts" say I should be able to state my theme in a sentence or two--clearly, concisely.

And So It Goes...
And I say, probably I have to simply ramble and THEN see what route I wound up taking. AFTER that, the editing with a HATCHET will be needed.

Unless, of course, I change my mind!

There is something about the men in the house. The Father, Son, and Holy Ghost--those tee-shirts from Jim's girlfriend at the time. The women did not tend to speak up without risking the sarcasm of the Holy Ones. My mother took the brunt of the derision, and that is part of her pain, as well. My sister absented herself from most of the competitive bile from "the boys." She was judged by them, regardless.

I leaped in with both feet, mouth a-blaze, and held my own when I could. I learned to slice people to ribbons at an early age. It saved my skin in junior high, when I was so often the target at school.

Daddy said I came "out the chute going 'Oh, YEAH?' and never looked back." Interesting metaphor... Nevertheless he is right. And I have been struggling for a week with the new stuff that keeps gushing from deep inside, like a geyser from the middle of the sea.  And I am not sure but that this is the thing about it all.  My story reads like a novel. A sweeping southern saga with layer upon layer upon layer.

My mom told me I could NOT be a southern writer, which made me very angry. I was drawn to them. They could tell the scariest, most painful stories without ever losing the beauty of it all.

So I'll just dive in and see where it goes, for all my trying to find focus. I will allow the Carson McCullers and Harper Lee inside run wild.  Maybe there are two books in one. I have no clue. But you are all along for the ride, so ...

Now I will delete the old draft, because I've covered it all here! Undoubtedly, you'll read some of the story in here, but I know I have to keep some of it for the book now, not the blog. So I'll write about other things.

PS
I'm not looking for words of support or comfort. It isn't that. However,  if you all have some story of your process--preferably the part that makes you NUTS, that would be great! And by the way, long comments are ALWAYS welcome. And it can be all about you. That's fine with me. I learn from comments-- A LOT sometimes.