It has been so long since I posted anything…here goes with art. I’ve been painting more than I’ve been writing, and lately I’ve been painting landscapes adorned by fine black lines that make me feel like I’ve been writing. I’m going to share a few here, to memorialize what I’ve been up to. Many are based on a trip we took to the American Southwest–Ian, Erik, Chad, and me–in August 2016, the summer before Chad died. It was a special time even as we lived it, made even more so by memory and loss and longing. I hope you like my paintings. They are somehow a way of telling a story that connects me to my son and a time that will not come again.
Under a ledge at Slide Rock State Park, Arizona
We spent a day at a park called Slide Rock, where we rode down a chute through a canyon.
The River Where You Pulled Me Out
I jumped in the Colorado River when we went rafting in Moab, but then could not pull myself back into the raft. Chad grabbed me by my lifevest and hoisted me back in–not once, but twice, for I do not learn from my mistakes. And it was a hot day.
Shelter
We sought shelter in the shadows of rocks from the heat and the sun. I imagine them now as bright colors and easy places, but they were hard hikes and hot days. Memory transforms everything, doesn’t it?
In the Guilford College woods the wind blows with the past. We sit beneath the witness tree, full of nails that pointed enslaved people to places north, to the hope of freedom and the future. The woods glisten in the early green of June leaves and light. The woods are so old and the trees so full, the sky is but a sliver of color here and there.
I first came to this place as an ignorant and hopeful 18-year-old. Now I am nearly 60–and all that I do not know and all that I hope overwhelms me as I listen to James Shields, a Black man, tell me a history I have never heard.
How in the early 1800s a little white boy, a Quaker, saw a group of enslaved men chained together and walking down the road, and how his father learned that the men had been separated from their families and sold to slaveholders in Georgia. That little boy, Levi Coffin, would become an abolitionist and work with freemen—and women—to carry other enslaved people to freedom for the entirety of his life.
The man who tells me this story tells me so much I cannot remember it all—but as he speaks, I realize how ignorant I remain for not knowing the full and true history of this time. He tells me that enslaved people were brought to America with an intentionality—they knew how to farm and irrigate the lowlands of South Carolina, they had a culture and a heritage, they had a wealth of knowledge and a wealth of being. We used it to build our country. He began to sing an old spiritual, “Wade in the Water.”
I asked if he knew a song of the African diaspora, “Step It Down.” Of course, he did. The Williamsburg brickmakers sang it as they made bricks for houses they knew they would never enter and streets they would never walk. They sang of their hope that their children would walk as free people on those bricks and live as free people in the houses that they built.
The wind blew in the trees and caught in my throat. I thought of all I have yet to learn—not naïve, but not informed. Hopeful as ever, but weary of what remains to be done. Like the brickmakers I hope my hands build something for a better future. The wind rushes over me—voices of the past in the present moment. I listen —and hope that in listening I move as all those souls before and with me have, with intention and purpose for a world where everyone is at home everywhere.
Last March my husband, Erik, underwent quintuple bypass surgery. The surgery went well…the pain management did not. I wrote an essay about it, which ran in the January 2022 issue of The Journal of Hospital Medicine. I am posting the PDF here as a way to keep track of it, and for those who are interested in reading about his experience–and my fight to get him better care.
It is impossible to write about grief, so instead I’ll write about Chad. His big heart had a short life. He was 24 when he died in 2017; he’d have been 29 this Thursday, October 7. There is no easy life with addiction; there is no easy life when the people you love are gone.
The other day my 7 year old granddaughter was frustrated by the loss of her go0gly eyes into her silver slime. Nothing could be retrieved. She began to talk to her 3 year old sister about “big emotions.” Big emotions…I’d been having them all week. Unable to know them, only to recognize them. Love, grief, anger, regret, happiness, sorrow, longing, resignation….how many more? In the end, I wrote a poem about getting caught in that riptide of language.
In college I used to write poems on cocktail napkins while frequenting happy hours with my boyfriend or other students…why not? Happy Hour at Huck’s had twenty-five cent glasses of wine and I was 18 and full of myself, and wildly in love with language and a man who swept me to another world.
In these pandemic days and nights, like so many other people, I find myself alone, wondering what to do next to fill the long days and nights while we wait for this disaster to pass. For me, being alone has always given rise to creative thoughts and energy. This go-round it reminded me of those old cocktail napkin poems. And so I began to write them again, this time using the “Notes” function on my iPhone: that tiny screen surely approximates the size and weight of a cocktail napkin.
This collection, The Cocktail Napkin Love Poems: Short Verses for Long Nights, includes about thirty love poems, inspired by memory, family, relationships, marriage, and the world I observe every day. The poems are simple and easy to read. They would not a degree in English to parse…just a loving heart. Some of them would make great text for a wedding invitation, or a love letter when your own words just can’t get you there. The cover illustration is by my friend, Anita Ewing, a fellow member of the Muddy Creek Artists Guild, and was inspired by the poem, “We are Diving”:
Near the coral where the fish
are a rainbow of color
only more subtle for they catch
light and move more quickly
than we can tell each other to look.
When I say, “I love you,”
words are like that–
Magnificent and fast.
Watch me instead.
Just now I am a dolphin
bounding for the air
“We are diving” in The Cocktail Napkin Love Poems
The book is available via Amazon, in paperback and in Kindle and, just now, is free on Kindle for those who are members of Amazon Prime.
For those of you embarking on new romances or engagements or in need of Valentine’s Love or anniversary specials, here is my own favorite (from my own book).
What were my dreams
Before I dreamt you?
What were my words
Before I spoke you?
Was there a song
Before I heard you?
I see the world before me.
I see everything
I see you.
From “What Were My Dreams” in The Cocktail Napkin Love Poems
Of course I hope you’ll buy my book or read it in Kindle. Even more, if you’ve read this for, I’d love to hear your comments on these poems. I did not submit to the usual literary journals because these aren’t literary poems. These are cocktail napkin love poems. Love endures. In hard times it is all we have. So perhaps for this little while my poems will help some of you out by going through.
I grew up in the art galleries of Washington, DC, taken there by my art student mother. We saw most major exhibitions that came to the Smithsonian in the seventies, as well as many that opened at the Corcoran, and I accompanied her to some galleries on Seventh Street, which was then a rundown collection of studios in buildings that had once been the shopping district of the city. We saw a few poetry readings there too, something that nurtured my own growing love of language and a desire to own it with my own poems.
It should have been no surprise to my parents that when the famed East Wing opened my high school boyfriend and I would often skip school to catch the subway to it. We were at a school for gifted math and science students, and our gifts could not be contained by those four walls—we had each other and were full of ideas. One of those was always to see what was at the East Wing. Our other practiced art was each other, a discipline in which we became experts that summer of 1979.
Now my house is full of art: Every wall is covered with art, some with paintings stacked like the Louvre–but those would be walls with my art, naïve paintings that I began to make the year my 94 year old grandmother died and I found my writing voice silenced for the first time in my life. I found that color was the only voice I had, and so I began to draw. At first, I drew cartoonish figures of memories: In my grief, I compiled images of all the things she and I had done together, or that my other grandmother and I had done together. I compiled these little drawings in a collection that I called,What Are Mothers For? but more aptly could have been called, Why I Needed You.
From there I became hooked on paints: watercolors, acrylics, alcohol inks, gouache. My supplies began to appear in rooms throughout the house: my office, the dining room, the living room. Spare surfaces became easels. The closets filled with random art supplies which grew to include beads, wires, tiles and more. The more I made and the more art stores I visited, the more I seemed to need. Watercolor paper, multimedia paper, sketch paper, drawing paper, paper of all sizes. Frames, glass, mats….there is no end to the supplies an artist—no matter how amateur—can amass.
And all of that work needs a place to be. It was not enough for me to fill volumes of sketchbooks and pages of journals with the things I was making. Some pieces that I made were so precious to me that I had to frame them. They represented something new I had created, or some bit of a moment I wanted to record. They marked something I had achieved, or thought I had achieved, in my development as an artist. Never mind that I had not taken a class or read a book…I simply watched other artists, joined an artists guild where friendly artists encouraged my nascent attempts, and I was gone.
When I painted a sunflower that approximated the look of a sunflower? I framed it. A watercolor of my son that almost looked like a boy diving into the river? Framed. A triptych of bright colors that had an impressionistic bent? Framed. Soon, the entire entryway to my house was full of my mother’s art—her beautifully rendered work, the work of a master—and mine, done between the ages of 53 and 58, as if a kindergartener had been set loose with a budget to frame anything that caught her eye.
On the other hand, the bright works surround me with what I love: color, design, and art, things I have been seen all my life as the daughter of an artist. My walls feature art that my mother, Mary Hourihan Lynch, has created over various points in her long career, starting with a trip she took to Normandy my junior year of high school and she had just graduated from college. She brought back canvases rolled in tubes from where she had painted them in fields along the French coast, a plein air experience that cured her, she says, of ever wanting to paint outdoors again. My painting hangs above my bed, a beautiful impressionistic garden outside a cottage—it is near dark and the flowers emerge in a gorgeous tangle of color and abandon against the white of the cottage. The painting is small, not more than 18 x 24 inches. I have carried it with me from a college dorm in 1980 to my first apartment to the house where I have lived now for 24 years.
Another favorite is a large abstract canvas in gradations of purple and blue with an object about two-thirds along the horizon that might be a sailboat. The painting is actually something she made while painting something else—this was simply a way of cleaning off a palette-full of colors she had mixed and liked.
While these canvases and a few others hang flat like traditional canvasses, most others hang out from the wall, the three-dimensional sculpted or shaped canvases my mother has spent her career inventing and perfecting. On the inside these look the interior of early airplanes, delicate pieces of wood carefully supporting frames of canvas. But this is deceptive because the pieces are strong and sturdy and, once hung, appear to be as strong as any other well-built canvas.
Of these, my favorite is one called Kimono. It is about 4.5 feet tall and, at its farthest points, as wide. It is two pieces that swoop across each other with a belt of sweeping golds and silvers, one with an undulating pattern of wood. The primary colors are shades of purple with muted metallics fanning across, and, behind them, more pieces that fan out in different shades of copper and metal. It is narrow at what might be the waist, but has a gesture of movement, as if a woman is walking away. I have always loved this piece—as much for its movement and architectural finesse as for the fact that purple is my favorite color.
Several years ago I found myself in LaCrosse, Wisconsin, interviewing a just-widowed woman whose husband had been a prominent local figure. I was writing about best practices in end-of-life care and, thanks to that city’s excellent record on advance care planning, her husband had experienced a relatively peaceful end of life. Even so, it was daunting to find myself alone with a newly bereaved woman, asking her probing questions about the final days of her husband’s life and how it had been for her.
Somehow, the story came up of what she had buried him in. Their son had served in Vietnam and on some part of his journey home from that war, he had stopped in Japan and purchased a kimono for his father. The woman laughed. “A kimono! What would his father ever do with a kimono? Where would he wear such a thing?” Apparently, they had kept it wrapped up for thirty or forty years, until the widow had come across it as she tried to decide what to bury her husband in. c
“That kimono seemed just right, it just seemed like the right thing to lay him to rest in,” she said. “People sure were surprised, but there he was, as handsome as could be in his kimono.”
She went on to tell me that she had met her husband when she was a government girl in Washington, DC, during World War II. He was working in the Torpedo Factory in Alexandria, making torpedoes that would be sent down the Potomac to be loaded on to boats and off to war. I gasped when she said this.
“Yes, he even made me a tiny torpedo charm necklace,” she said. “ I wore that everywhere I went for years.”
I happened to have my mother’s business card with me. She has had a studio at the Torpedo Factory for decades, and for many years the image on her card was of the kimono. I took the card from my wallet and explained to the widow that the Factory had long since been converted to artists’ studios where the public could watch artists at work. More than a hundred artists have studios there, I told her, including my mom.
“This is one of her pieces, it’s called ‘Kimono,’” I said.
She looked at it and smiled. “The world is surely full of strange coincidences,” she said, or something to that effect.
I replied, “I guess God wanted us to meet each other today,” I said. “Something sent me to you.”
She told me more about what it was like to be a young woman in World War II, dancing with a boy who made torpedo necklaces. They were married for more than 50 years. Who’s to say what any of this means. When I got home I finished my assignment, writing about the widow and what it took to fashion a good end of life based on her husband’s wishes. I did not describe his kimono, or my exchange with his widow.
As I write it is the end of Veterans Day 2020. I am looking at the kimono that hangs in my house, thinking about my own grandfather who served in Okinawa for 2 years during that war. The world moves full circle. Art moves us every day. Every piece of art that hangs in my house tells me a story. If I gaze long enough with my eyes clear and focused, I hear the stories. Some people may only see brushstrokes and color, others gaze at art and see nothing; some look and think, “Oh, I could do that.” My foray into art has taught me how much I can’t do. To me, each canvas is a novel. Even my little bits of color in their cheap frames have something to say, if only to me. If the purpose of storytelling is to connect, then the purpose of art is to connect what we see and what we think we know with the emotions and skill the artist presents to us. We must listen closely to hear it. Sometimes we do—and then we are lucky for there are worlds contained in each painting we encounter.
I’d only been at my company a couple months when a coworker, Ben Markowitz, posted in a corporate Slack channel, that he was running late because he was trying to save a kingfisher he’d spotted stuck high in a tree near his house. Our colleagues responded quickly with ideas and compassion. In that moment, I knew that I myself had landed with the right group (flock?) of people. I’d been worried about it: I’m among the oldest members of the team, I’m new to the world of start-ups, and more. But smart, compassionate people? When you find yourself among them, it’s good fortune.
I was lucky to be able to tell Ben’s story a few weeks later for The Washington Post. It reminded me of something that happened nearly a decade ago, when my daughter, Alyson, and my niece, Alanna, had spotted a bluebird chick trapped in a storm drain. With a crab net and perseverance, they rescued it and took it to a local wildlife refuge. I can’t remember anymore the fate of the bird. I remember the pride and relief I felt in having raised a kind girl.
In an era when we are trying so desperately and earnestly to unite ourselves across and despite the awful history of racism and America, and despite the awful toll of COVID-19, and the absolute evil of the current Administration, I find solace in the kindness of others, in small hope that somehow this will prevail and guide us to the path we meant to build.
Having loved Olive Kitteridge I could not miss this book, Olive Again, although it meant missing book group. Strout has mastered telling a series of stories linked by a character who is not a lead in every tale–not a collection of short stories, not quite a novel, but something rich and absorbing that I cannot resist. I’m so glad Kindle analytics suggested this book to me, or I might have missed it.
In these long weeks of isolation, a story of an isolated old woman gave voice to emotions that many of us might share, no matter our age, gender, circumstance. Although I am a few decades younger than Olive, I certainly appreciate her sense of growing old and more invisible. I’d heard older women speak of this phenomena, but until you live through it, you don’t really understand how dehumanizing it can be.
You thought? You become an afterthought. I so wanted to know how Olive resolved relationships, her own reputation with people in the town, her sense of self and place. Her interactions with different characters–a new husband, a home health aide, a poet, an old friend–each lead Olive to some sense of self, but no sense of her life.
Unfortunately I borrowed this book from the library on Kindle and my notes–the passages I so loved!–vanished when it was reabsorbed. They had to do with isolation, light, and love. I may try to find them, or hope that someone reads this short review and remembers them, or underlined them and points me to them.
I’m not sure I’d want to have a chat with Olive, but reading this book leaves one in a conversation that lingers.
I love to spin a tale. But for months now, I’ve been spun by them. So when my friend sent me a photo of an abstract piece of yarn art she’d seen while in South Africa, I had to smile–and then make one of my own. When my 28-year old son saw it, he assumed … Continue reading “I Yarn for You”
I love to spin a tale. But for months now, I’ve been spun by them. So when my friend sent me a photo of an abstract piece of yarn art she’d seen while in South Africa, I had to smile–and then make one of my own. When my 28-year old son saw it, he assumed it was all about stress–but it isn’t at all.
Turn it one way and it’s March, blowing in.
Turn it another, and it’s the bottom of the deep blue.
My son wanted a picture of me holding it for his new style blog on Instagram, but my hair was a wreck. So I held the canvas in front of my face and called it a self-portrait.
