Cat Portraits

I am enjoying and am better at painting cats than I expected.
These are Anna (black) and George (orange), the cats I'm house sitting.

George is holding a carrot-feather toy.

I painted Anna in goauche, George in watercolor & gouache (because I realized gouache is too solid).

Replacement Moose

 I saw this sign in the neighborhood where I'm house/cat sitting:

LOST Stuffed Animal Moose
Name: Pearl

Thought I'd keep an eye out for a donated stuffed moose at work.
They're not common, but on Wednesday a toy wood moose came in, which wanted to play...

 I got off the bus a mile before my stop, so I could drop the moose off at the door. It was mid-afternoon, about the time school gets out.

I walked on, and after I'd passed the intersection, I saw a little girl in a pink coat and her mother cross the street, heading toward the house.
I didn't want to stand and stare, so I walked on a bit, then turned back just in time to see them walking into the house.

I'm sorry I missed seeing them react to the moose, but I was happy to see the girl was about the age of Penny Cooper.

"I Don't Worry About a Thing ('Cause Nothing's Going to Be Alright)"

Do you find this kind of thinking comforting?
I do.

Mose Allison's "I Don't Worry About a Thing (Because Nothing's Going to Be Alright)"

"You know this world is just one big Trouble spot
Because some have plenty, and some have not
You know I used to be trouble, but I finally Saw the light
Now I don't worry 'bout a thing,
'Cause I know nothing's gonna be alright."

Recorded March 15, 1962.

Dino Go

I. Go, go dinos

Me at work yesterday, carrying an armload of donated dinosaurs to put on display.
(You can see my new blue eyeglasses here, too.)

As soon as I put the dinos out, an older woman customer said,

"Oh, I love to give those to kids", and she bought them all.

Of course that's the idea, but sometimes I want my displays to stay up longer, so I can enjoy them.

Ha-ha-haaaa! DINOS SAY, NO--WE GO!

Speaking of going, I'm going cat/house sitting today.
I have to scoop up the last-minute stuff to take over this morning, and then I'm off.

I'll be gone almost 4 months, till early June. It's 5 miles away--I won't go back home if I can help it.

II. Childhood Treasures

I'm starting to catalog treasures that I'd started saving in a leather marble-bag when I was in fourth grade. This is the first batch:

 

I'm really happy with this painting. (Except for the hot-pad making loop, which lost the plot. I might wash that off and repaint it--nice thing about gouache, you can do that.)

I'm excited to paint more of the contents of the bag--there're about 20 things? from then till now.

I'm inching forward toward painting more personal subjects and ideas. NOT that the toy portraits aren't personal. They are.
But... well, I'm feeling more confident is the thing, I guess, to branch out.

Catching Up: Cats, Cousins, Cake

What's up?

I. Getting Better at Painting Toys (Especially Fur)

I've been painting toy portraits in gouache most Sundays, when I get together with bink for coffee.
bink gives me tips: "Black is too intense for shadows--try a blue or purple...".

I'm getting ever so slightly better.
The texture of fur is a challenge--I was pleased that it looks better in my painting of House Mate's stuffed rabbit, with her doll, Jayne:

II. Cat Sitting, Coming Up

In six days, I go sit a house and two cats I've sat for two summers in the past--for FOUR months. (Yay!)

The woman of the house had cancer, and she has died. I barely knew her, but it's sad--she was only fifty.
Her son is in college, and her husband will be working out east till mid-June, so I'll take care of the place and the pets till then.
I'm happy to have a place all to myself, (no roommate!), and the cats are dears.

I'm taking along paints, toys, and books, and a change of clothes.
Which is pretty much what I own.

I'm de-cluttering my room this week, before I go.
I don't own much, but flotsam and jetsam does drift ashore.
I took much of it back to the thrift store, including books I'll never (re-)read.

I packed all the books I've never read but might, to take house-sitting with me. If I don't read them in the next four months, they go back too.
I predict I won't read them but will continue to find more tempting books at the store, or in the well-stocked Little Free Libraries by the cats' house--it's the affluent neighborhood. There's a branch library nearby too.

I think there's some law:
the books on your bookshelf are never as tempting as the books on another shelf.

III. Talking to a Cousin Over the Wall

After Auntie Vi died this past fall, a friend of hers mailed the obituary I'd written to all Vi's nieces and nephews, along with all the contact info she could find for everyone.

Not exactly sure why she did this, since none of them had in touch with Vi for decades, except me and my sister, but it turned out well.

The family is fractured, and none of my cousins wrote to me, nor I to them, except one cousin I'd never met, Donna.
Her father (my father's brother) had divorced her mother when she was young, and she'd grown up with little contact with his side of the family.

Both our fathers are dead now. Donna's was an angry, secretive man, and he never told her about his childhood, while mine talked a lot about his as did Auntie Vi.

Donna said, "I think my father had unresolved issues with our grandfather."
I wrote back, "He wasn't the only one."

Without going into too much detail--I wasn't sure what would be welcome--I told her our grandfather was emotionally humiliating and physically cruel to his wife and children.

She and I exchanged a few more emails, and this week she wrote,

"I am glad I connected with you. I do not feel so all alone anymore. And I have stopped trying to analyze why I am the way I am. You  have answered a lot of my questions."

Wow.
The power of information....
Donna is older than me, and to think she'd lived all these years wondering why her father was so punishing, and why she herself, it sounds like, practices a lot of tactics that it turns out are from the family:
basically, a Berlin Wall–style of emotional regulation.
I saw myself (again) in what she said too.

Donna also has some of the family strengths:
a solidity, not easily knocked down.
And a big gift for joy--there was always a lot of laughter--often about the absurdity of life.
A very Sicilian family, I think---dark and suspicious, but secretly generous and loving.
Donna said that at the end of his life, her father told her for the first time that he loved her and was glad she was in his life.

So, that was an unexpected gift.
After Vi had died, I'd thought that side of my family life had ended. I don't think Donna and I will be in touch much, but this unexpected connection was welcome. Vi would've been pleased.

The ancestors I was close to are all gone.
BELOW: my father (far left, b. 1931) with his sister Vi & brother Tony

IV. Sometimes You Get a Sign and the Sign Is Cake

Life in the City continues to be Historic, and weird.
A few days ago, the police here killed another (another, another) Black man, Amir Locke (NY Times article). It's like they're bent on proving something.
"This IS what we do"?

I've more or less come to a philosophical acceptance with what I do, where I stand, re society.
Working at the thrift store, I get to be helpful, or try to be helpful (or sometimes avoid being helpful by going in the back and ignoring whatever mess is brewing).

Helpful to Mr Furniture, for instance, who is having an art show next month.

Yesterday he asked me to find photos online of lynchings of Black men to print for one of his art pieces
(including the lynching in Duluth (Wikipedia article) in 1920).

Right: Detail of one of Mr Furniture's fabric-collaged suits

That afternoon, I was wandering around the break room moaning about how there wasn't any cake.
(Sometimes there's cake in the bakery donations, but not yesterday.)

(This is what I'm like at work.
I'm the person you can ask for photos of lynchings and also the person who moans about how THERE'S NO CAKE.)

Later, Mr Furniture came up to me at my desk, holding out a piece of birthday cake he'd saved: "I forgot I had this."

So, I take that as a sign.

(Also, the cake was great. The bakery we get from Big Grocery never goes bad, it's so full of chemicals and palm oil.)

I'm also helping out BJ, the friend of the store who lives across the alley, who is living with late-stage lung cancer.
I do stuff like mop her floor and do her laundry, which is EXACTLY the sort of stuff I want to do--practical, helpful stuff.

As with Mr Furniture, I've helped her find stuff on the computer too--including an affordable cremation plan from a place with a good reputation. She called them, and they were very kind and helpful.

Kind and helpful. That's the cake.

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