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).
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.
❧ ❧ ❧