The Ruffed Grouse.

On a sunny, bitterly cold day in Vermont, the snowpack depths grew deeper as springtime approached. It flowed in soft routes around and over tree trunks, boulders, streams, farm fields and well-worn hillsides.

Beautiful as ever, it was, to all of us.

Our daughter had come home from college for spring break and we had decided to spend the time together, retreating into winter’s encore and greeting spring from the tops of Vermont’s ski mountains.

*****

The daylight flashed sparks of winter’s last light, beckoning us to come walking in the woods, just before sunset on our first day in Vermont. We packed up some appetizers with cold beers and traveled only a couple of miles deep into the forest where we made a campfire and sat, feeling how cold it still was and how glorious a campfire will always be. We had arrived, again, to a second-to-last day of winter. Over the years, the last days of winter had taken us to the world’s most beautiful snowcapped mountaintops. I arrive at those summits, ancient. Yet in all my lifetimes, never have I, nor never shall I, conquer the mountaintop. I am destroyed by the sublime magnificence of being there, every time. My tears barely drop, before the high-alpine air changes them into snowflakes that take flight. I follow them. Some I catch. Some disappear forever.

One of those timeless snowflakes flew from the top of Rendezvous Bowl in Jackson Hole, Wyoming where so many years ago, my daughter and I skied through deep powder snow that buried her strong little body. She had to go potty, now, and the potty was all the way at the bottom of the mountain, 4,000 vertical feel away. “I can wait till I ski down the mountain, Mommy,” she said. I followed her rainbow-shining trail of snowflakes, and have continued to do so, through the stratosphere of times gone by, and into the triumphs, trials, and tribulations of our lives together, today.

A mother slips into such memories, whenever she is spending time with her children.

Our campfire blazed heat, but the sun was setting fast with no moonlight to guide our way out. It was time to break our spare snow camp, and leave the forest. We walked until the trees, blackened, weaved paths to the stars through teal-flavored blues, glowing beyond.

Turning from the sunset, there was Jupiter, though we weren’t sure what we saw. It was a dazzling light acting like the most gigantic snowflake that ever hesitated to fall from the sky. We were lucky. Our feet left the ground at the sight of it and we soared, tumbling and gliding through the final hurrahs of the day.

*****

Every season has its last call. When I sense it’s coming, it makes me anxious. I never get enough and will wave my arms at the heavens, shouting out to, and pleading with, the Great Bartender in the Sky:

One more round!

Winter’s sun moves, the light comes up, and I am at last kicked out of one season and left to go in search of the next.

I nurse the long goodbyes, the indulgent farewells. Like time spent with our dearly beloveds, time within New England’s seasons is a joyful, focused existence for anyone fortunate enough to live a long life traveling through spring to summer to fall to winter.

Nowadays, I awaken to the sun bouncing along the eastern horizon like a white ball pointing out lyrics to a song. Bird song, frog song, flower song. It has been moving from the right to the left, every day, making leaps one-whole-sun-circle width wide. I can’t stop it. Spring is here.

The signs are everywhere.

*****

Of course, one sign of spring is the annoying chirp of grouchy New Englanders. They are sick of snow, ice, cold and dark days. I’m not from New England. But I’ve lived here for a long time, almost forty years. When I first moved to New England, from the sunny southwestern Mexican/American borderlands of Arizona, I noticed that the natives weren’t the friendliest pickles in the barrel. I gave them the benefit of the doubt. Maybe they are just unhappy about the weather.

There was a pond on the campus of my university where I went on winter mornings with a pair of ice skates. I went there to feel happy. As alone as a seed cast by wintry winds to nowhere, I skated around my own private au natural ice rink. Next, I thought it would be fun to learn how to ski.

Winter was a long season—as long as all the rest, but colder and darker. It was too long of a season to give over to feelings of dissatisfaction. Furthermore, I made an acute observation about winter in the modern world—we have the technology to be outside in wintertime all day long. High-tech gear suits us up like bold adventurers traveling into outer space—and protects us while we cavort and gavotte—down mountains, through woodlands, and over icy lakes and ponds.

There is a poem by William Carlos Williams. Danse Russe. After I found the poem, I often thought of it while twirling around New England in search of people who knew how to enjoy wintertime. One year, I won the spring skiing mogul competition on Outer Limits at Killington. I was a novice skier and a woman, competing against guys. We revisited those old playground ski trails on the first day of spring with my daughter. I asked my husband to tell it to me straight—had I won the mogul competition because I was the best skier or was it because I skied topless like the guys?

*****

Danse Russe

If I when my wife is sleeping
and the baby and Kathleen
are sleeping
and the sun is a flame-white disc
in silken mists
above shining trees,—
if I in my north room
dance naked, grotesquely
before my mirror
waving my shirt round my head
and singing softly to myself:
“I am lonely, lonely.
I was born to be lonely,
I am best so!”
If I admire my arms, my face,
my shoulders, flanks, buttocks
against the yellow drawn shades,—

Who shall say I am not
the happy genius of my household?

*****

Or had I won the competition, as a happy, lonely genius, in my dreams?

I am only kidding about skiing topless. And I’ve never entered any skiing competitions.

But our family does have a tradition for engaging in friendly forms of competition when we are out and about outside. We hand out Rusticator of the Day awards to anyone who earns them. The awards are named after the Rusticators of Acadia National Park, who seized the great outdoors while wearing suits and ties and petticoats.

Our competitions are wide open and there aren’t any rules. You never know if you will earn a Rusticator of the Day Award. It is merely an atta boy or atta girl bestowed upon anyone who carpe diems the rest of us when we least expect it.

My daughter is a great competitor for Rusticator of the Day awards. She is a natural source for magic and creative fun.

*****

As I have gone through the last days of this historic winter season in the Boston area, letting it go, muttering prayers of gratitude for such an epic experience of endless snowstorms, I have considered the scorn such a beautiful season, filled with so many surprises, arouses in people. Another William Carlos Williams poem comes to mind, The Last Words of My English Grandmother. Here follows last lines from the poem, about his grandmother nearing the end of her life, while in an ambulance heading for the hospital:

What are all those
fuzzy looking things out there?
Trees? Well, I’m tired
of them and rolled her head away.

I hope to never lose my reverence for the power of life in all its forms.

*****

On the very last day of winter, we were riding the chairlift together, when my daughter pointed to a fat, feathered beast in a grove of trees. “What is that?” She laughed. Everyone’s eyes grew wide with wonder.

Her father said it must be a grouse.

A what?

A grouse. A Ruffed Grouse.

We have lived, camped, hiked, and biked in the woodlands of New England for all of her twenty years. And it has taken her this long to spot a grouse, hiding out.

She earned the Rusticator of the Day award. I’d never seen one, either. When you see something you’ve never seen before, it feels magical.

Which makes me think of the words Hokusai, one of my favorite artists, said before he died:

“If only Heaven will give me just another ten years… Just another five more years, then I could become a real painter.”

But back to the Ruffed Grouse we saw. They are shy birds and they hide in the snow. Their lives often end in violence, because they hold a vulnerable and valuable position in the food chain. The males create an interesting drumming sound with their wings. In wintertime, they grow projections from the sides of their feet which might be a form of seasonal snowshoe. And, Aldo Leopold wrote this about them: “The autumn landscape in the north woods is the land, plus a red maple, plus a Ruffed Grouse. In terms of conventional physics, the grouse represents only a millionth of either the mass or the energy of an acre, yet subtract the grouse and the whole thing is dead.”

*****

In terms of conventional time, my life represents the tip of a blip of a snowflake, in the blizzards of one Solar System’s infinite winter storms, melting in the warmth of a spring breeze.

The thought of it makes me hope to never subtract a day from any that belong to all the seasons of my life, because every one of them is a possible harbinger of unexpected magic.

Magic like the rare sighting of a Ruffed Grouse, emerging from a big New England winter, ready for spring.

Gypsy Pole Dancing.

A neat woman I know asked about my artwork. She linked me to other neat women she knows who have developed slick businesses selling their artwork.

A song runs through my head. It’s the White Stripes I Just Don’t Know What to do With Myself.

I’m feeling discouraged, so I pull the song up on youtube. There’s Kate Moss, pole dancing to the song. It is very funny. That’s me. Squirming around with a vacant look in my eyes. But it’s not me, because I don’t know how to market my afflictions.

Distraction.

I watch Kate Moss and begin to wonder about pole dancing. It looks so dumb. But, whatever. People do it. I watch it some more. Laugh, laugh, laugh. I lose patience with my own dumb self.

And then I think: why do people dance with a pole when there’s tango? Once, I went to Argentina. My niece, who was studying abroad in Buenos Aires, took us to a tango parlor in a shifty warehouse in a shifty part of the city—though just about every part of Buenos Aires is shifty. As we fell deeper and deeper into the night, and drank more and more of the house wine, musicians and dancers began to arrive. After midnight, guitar and harp players showed up and sat arranged in an arc near the generous dance floor. They filled the old, abandoned space with the music of lustful desire. Every note of passion hung in the air the way the sultry sweat of lovers, on a hot summer’s night, drips from every petal on every flower in a meadow where they sway, kissing and dancing to the sounds of insects seeking mates.

The real deal tango dancers emerged from the darkened perimeters of the warehouse as the night ran away from the world. They stood so still, until they could feel the music. And then, the musicians led the men, who led the women, who wrapped their bodies all around the men, to the beat of every life that ever wanted to live free.

So anyone who likes pole dancing, should go to Argentina and watch the people dance the tango. A pole is so dumb. But a man and a woman and a group of musicians, that’s the kind of public display, group sex that doesn’t leave anyone out. You can watch, or you can join in.

After watching Kate Moss ruin I Just Don’t Know What to do With Myself, (original by Burt Bacharach and Hal David; there’s a youtube video of Tommy Hunt singing it with the big-band, bluesy woosey sound that will smear a salve of solace over any artist’s distracted soul), I tried to find a video of the tango. I got distracted and found Ode to Tango instead, which includes pole dancing, with some mighty big poles. If you watch it to the end, you will see why pole dancing is dangerous. Being your most corny woman self, on the other hand, is really fun:

*****

Dancing around the pole of distraction has not ever earned me an audience. In fact, it often caused me to be sent from the classroom to stand out in the hall until I stopped dancing. The meanest teachers would send you out to the hall and make you stand, facing the wall. I can still smell the cinder block, commingling with my sighs, the heat of my shame boiling the condensation of my breath into a stench that—

Distracted me. What if my exhalations came out in colors? I dreamed of painting the hallways with my puffs of color and making them prettier.

*****

E.B. White wrote in Here is New York, “…creation is in part merely the business of forgoing the great and small distractions.”

I’m cursed. I cannot forgo neither great nor—worst of all—small distractions. E.B. says, though, that creation is only in part the forgoing of distraction.

I will say that when the neat woman I know asked about my artwork, and suggested that I do something with it, I sent a reply that read: “I don’t know why I can’t figure out what to do with my art. It drives me so crazy, that sometimes I want to steal every bottle of Ritalin and Adderall out of every school backpack in America.”

This morning, I was standing up with my cup of tea staring out the window. I saw a delicate droop of last summer’s bloom, covered in dewdrops, on the smokebush:

It made me do this:

And then I did this:

I drank some more of my tea. And then I did this:

And then this:

*****

I don’t know how to balance the pole of distraction over the fulcrum of the heart. Our culture has developed an impressive selection of drugs to quell the spells of distraction, and it leaves all of us dancing around with vacant eyes, playing games of Russian roulette with corporate marketing, medical research, misguided expectations, and one unique human being’s chaotic destiny. Would drugs make me fit in with more successful human beings? Students? Money makers?

I am capable of paying attention and drawing, as exactly as possible, what God has created and the teacher wants me to see:

Even when I’m distracted by the beauty of a dried-up sunflower leaf, I can concentrate long enough to draw it:

But God gave us our own brains. If we are fortunate enough to live a long life, we become creators, too. It’s fun. I found the following, unfinished drawing from another class. It’s some kind of seed head:

Everyone else had completed their drawings. But, I had been distracted by a pattern I saw:

After I saw the pattern, I started to daydream and play around with the seed head, and stare at it, instead of just putting it down and starting to draw it. As a kid, this was the moment when the teacher zeroed in on me, and wanted to know what I was doing. “I don’t know.” I would say, which was a little bit of the truth.

Last weekend, my husband had some friends over for a music jam. I was upstairs in my studio painting. The keyboard player led the jam with a tune I’d never heard before and I was distracted by it. It made me paint this:

Before bed, I looked up the video of the song they played–Lonely Boy, by the Black Keys.

I think I’m a combination of the joyful spirit of the girl in Ode to Tango and the improvisational spirit of the lip-synching dude in the Lonely Boy video by the Black Keys. This video inspires me to keep dancing my lonely girl groove around the teeter totter pole of distraction—in the kitchen with my tea, in the studio, and out in the garden—wherever the spirit moves me and whenever I just don’t know what to do with myself.

Oh, oh oh—I got a love that keeps me waiting.

A love for art.

Rock out, pole dancers. Here’s a link to distract you:

Gypsy Art Show.

If a writer

is also an artist

is also a designer

(of gardens and homes and journeys)

is also a lover

is also loose loosey in the brain

and is,

most ALSO of all

a mother–

there comes a day,

it’s sunny

it’s Friday

when she is supposed to be doing some things

but ends up doing some other things.

Looks at abandoned sketch books

years and years of scribbled remembrances

and thinks

I like it.

*****

I pulled sketch books off one shelf: (There are more, on more shelves, and in more drawers.)

And picked a sketch book to look at.

It was a long time ago when I did these drawings. I carried sketch books wherever I went and committed fast drawings to the papers hoping to return to them someday.

What a pleasure, to arrive at a time and place when my own artwork is making me smile. For that reason alone, I think it’s worthwhile to carry a sketch book and draw–even if you are always busy tending to other people and other things.

I consistently failed at most kinds of conventional schooling. The voices of teachers “speaking to me” and memories of their eyes rolling into convulsions over my wiggly butt, have kept me out on my own, trying to learn what I can, with the brain I was born with.

The voice of the critics can be so loud. Beware of it. I have no trouble engaging in the practice of drawing, but after I draw, I do have trouble learning to like what I’ve done.

I’m not a scholar. But there is a “call to artists” for work depicting plants and I’m hoping to mine my piles of sketches and put together some things to submit.

Here are the naked sketches:

Look carefully at this next sketch. It’s kind of cool–it’s trees in a sort of hedge? I don’t know. Inside the trees grow my ideas for designs:

Here follows a sketch of one day in spring when I was wandering through the garden and spied a fledgling cowering on the lower branches of a tree. I called my son to come and see and we stood there together laughing at the poor little bird–its feathers were scraggly and unkempt. I have watched so many fledglings in my gardens, I have watched their parents frantically bringing them food, I’ve watched the crows circling, and every season, I worry about all of them!

I don’t know what this next drawing is. But I do know that whenever I was caught drawing these kinds of mind relaxers during class, I got into trouble. In the last couple of years, these same kinds of drawings, elicit similar suggestions from odd ducks who might be sitting next to me in a lecture–have you considered what a psychologist would say about your doodles:

SELF PORTRAIT!

I think this must have been drawn when I was thinking of garden arbors:

Dried milkweed pods in the meadows where I walk most days:

More garden design-y brain work:

A windy day when the plants get blown over and onto my walking paths:

A rose is a rose is only a rose is necessary, necessary, necessary:

SELF PORTRAIT!

And then, after I sketch and sketch and sketch, one day I go into my studio and, without looking at any of my sketches, I start painting. After I painted this zinnia, I didn’t like it. But today, I do. That’s Friday for you!

Here’s a painting I did after a week-long outdoor sketching class in Provincetown. On the horizon, are the sand dunes with little trails. The green part is the marsh as the tide is draining the sea away:

NOW–look at the same painting in sepia tones! It looks like a cool map. I love maps.

Art is inside everyone.

I really believe that.

Over-Fifty Shades of Starry Starry Love.

Oh the great expectations of Valentine’s Day.

Here are mine: Arousal.

Dreams–that are normal.

Disappointment, assuaged.

Plan A: Ocean-view room in deserted Bar Harbor, Maine where I planned to take my valentine for a weekend of cross-country skiing and snowshoeing in Acadia National Park. We would have found a brew pub. The town library. Might have shoveled out the fire pits on the coast in Southwest Harbor and created a big, hot-burning blaze. Crazy love.

But the romantic cuddle-huddle against the cold and snow-blinding love won’t happen in that setting, because another blizzard is coming through. The timing isn’t great. Nor are the temperatures, which promise to have wind-chill factors even hardy New Englanders, like us, know we ought to fear. I cancelled the reservation this morning.

What is Plan B?

There’s been a lot of talk about a long-anticipated, must-see movie in the theaters: Not much of a plot. The main character is a crazy eccentric. He grunts, snarls, roars. Neglects women. Sexually harasses them. I hear there’s a scene where he is lashed to a ship’s mast in a snowstorm!

I have to see it. It will get me all excited.

The movie is Mike Leigh’s, “Mr Turner”, about the English Romantic painter, J.M.W. Turner–a man who lived to obsess over capturing the power of the sea and the majesty of light, with paint. Watching the film will inspire an imaginary excursion for my valentine and me into Victorian England, because one of the most romantic escapes we ever enjoyed was a trip to York, England. We arrived late at night when the medieval, walled city glowed by the light of a moon that rose above the York Minster and cast serene shadows of history into every snickleway. A light rain moved in, the moon disappeared, and so did we–into the pubs, into the Roman ruins, into the medieval chambers of dark lives, into the Victorian gloominess of slave trading histories, poverty, and the sumptuous brilliance of ordinary people.

Ordinary people! I love people who are ordinary and self-taught.

After we see the movie, we’ll find a place to have a drink and discuss. I’ll remember college and my first art history teacher–a short woman with hair spun into drifts onto the top of her head. She swayed like a drunken schoolmarm the day she began to talk about J.M.W. Turner. Listening to her, I feared the hair tower would come crashing off her head and, like a woman at a Jim Morrison concert, she might remove all her clothes, climb onto the stage of her desk, and leap right through the screen on the wall where she flashed slides of Turner’s paintings. I left class that day energized: “How can I get art to do that for me?”

My valentine and I will stare into each other’s ordinary eyes over our drinks and tell more stories and prattle on about how ordinary we are. We love to do this–go see great works of art and then come crashing down to earth together, like falling stars, over how ordinary we are.

A few weeks ago, we were at MoMA to see a Matisse show. After that show, we went to visit, in another gallery, everyone’s favorite: Van Gogh’s The Starry Night: I get as close as I can to these kinds of passionate paintings. I want to roll around in every brush stroke. It’s so arousing. I practically want to lick the painting. Only when I’m tied up and handcuffed is it safe for me to continue moving through the galleries. It’s best to put a gag over my mouth, too, and perhaps a leash on me. But–I’ll struggle if anyone tries to cover my eyes. I have anxiety issues and can’t deal with being blindfolded.

*****

The over-50 crowd, the born-to-be ordinary people, (like my valentine and me), can become desperate with the expectations of Valentine’s Day. Some of us have been married forever. To the same person. More than twenty five years of being married to the same person. AND–before we got married, some of us dated forever.

How does anyone get aroused on Valentine’s Day with a lover you’ve had forever and ever? Books? Movies? Excursions to the edges of society, the underworlds of desire, the forbidden behaviors of good Catholics?

We’ll keep holding hands in the art museums and sitting close together at the movies. (BIG screen, letting the full effect of the film seduce us.)

Then return to our ordinary house. Where our own starry, starry love story lives.

We’ll stand next to it, roll around in it, lick it.

And let every brilliant, dreamy part consume us.

The Found Art of Dancing.

Friday night and company rolled into camp for the weekend. It was my husband’s sister and she is as much as fun as he is–always game for an adventure that promises a good time.

Gypsies like to dance so we invited our guest to a dance lesson at our dance studio where we are taking lessons, followed by a dance party where we could practice whatever we learned. The featured dance lesson that night was The Swing. Using all my powers of concentration, I moved my feet in the demonstrated patterns. I practiced a few rounds on my own. I practiced with a dance partner. I tried putting it all together with music.

It was great. We were all having a good time with a lot of laughs.

But then came the transition that used to make me pop out my eyeballs and drop my head onto the desk when I was a kid in school–it’s that moment when you’ve figured out how to add two plus two AND you’re good enough to get it to equal four, AND you’re satisfied–ready for recess. But the dang teacher waltzes over to your desk, puts his or her hands on your shoulders (tells you to pick your eyeballs up off the floor) and starts leading you further and further onto the dance floor. He or she wants you to find unknown values for x, y, and z using mathematical slices of pi.

You’re ready for this! The great educator smiles.

NO. You want to say. Can’t you see I’m in a happy place? Can’t you see I want to grow up and be a professional doodler?

If only I could learn how to mete out my powers of concentration, instead of using up everything I’ve got from the start.

After the dance instructor taught us the basics of bopping and swinging on the dance floor, he stopped the music and said the next thing we were going to learn how to do, was underarm turns. Turn is such a tame word because we weren’t turning, we were spinning. And, there wasn’t just one spin, there were three. I felt like a ballerina-school flunk-out spinning in a music box owned by Sid on Toy Story.

But I knew I just needed to regroup my powers of concentration, and see if I could get two plus two, to equal four plus four, to equal eight plus eight. I needed to figure out the dance pattern, learn how to count the pattern with the timing of the music, and do it all without looking at my feet. Grade-school never promised me that if I learned math, I would be able to dance. Actually, math is important if you ever want to learn anything that has to do with music. In fact, if all I ever did in grade school was learn how to play the great music of the world, using all the great musical instruments of the world, along with learning all the steps, to all the great dances of the world–well, there you have it: another one of my plans for education that would save the world.

After our dance lesson, it was time for the dance party. I’m too old to act silly, so I kept it to myself that all I wanted to do was throw not only my head, but my entire body out the window. I’m an introvert, too, so I’d rather stand in the corner and watch. And doodle. Honestly, dancing not only works out your brain, but you are expected to get your body in on the action, too. There are leaders and followers and it doesn’t happen in the safe, sedate world of cyberspace with a little thumb action–it happens in real time, with real brains and bodies grooving to music. There were waltzes, foxtrots, tangos, rumbas, cha chas, and other dances going on that did not look easy. It’s one thing to jump into the lake when you don’t know how to swim–you can thrash around on your own. It’s quite another thing to be thrown onto the dance floor, and find yourself thrashing in the arms of a stranger with twinkle toes that have been lovingly placed into a pair of official dancing shoes.

The polite dancers smile at you, tell you what to do, and after a few trips around the dance floor, they say: You’re ready for this!

*****

For the past several months, I’ve drawn a few doodles on the dance floor with my feet. I’ve filled my brain with counting patterns and steps. In between, there’s my body. My whole body. Every part of it can move to the music, with a partner. I’m the follower. And, oh, the places I go through the music of the world and the dances of the world.

There’s a lot of following going on in the world nowadays. Dancing is my kind of following–I get to meet the people I follow and together we perform the dances that used to bring people together in real time, for shared enjoyment and pleasure.

Anyone can learn to dance and begin traveling across dance floors close to home. The next thing you know, you and your dance partner will be lighting up the dance floors of the world.

But you have to know how to count!

*****

Buenos Aires. Our niece took us to a tango parlor, where the musicians and dancers cast a spell on us.

Romancing the Mind.

Why the Gypsy Apprentice? The autodidact? The pilgrim? It’s because I believe in the quest to feel life, so I can live it better.

For me, it’s not gut feelings that influence my decisions or processes. I’m more mindful of the feel of a shine to the heart, or a surge through the head. If I’m trying to learn something or trying to improve existing skills, or if I’m trying to care for relationships, or believe in myself–I want to replace fear, vulnerability, shame, and humiliation, with something better. Something that feel good. I seek the shine and the surge of elation, but I also know that I have to journey through the fundamentals in order to arrive at the shine. So there’s a kind of faith I believe in–it’s a promise–that if you keep trying, you’re going to be jumping for joy at some point. And, it will start out to be just a point, so brief–but memorable enough to hold your attention and make shame, humiliation, and frustration more bearable, more humorous, and more useful as you get better and better at living and learning.

We are born knowing how to breathe, our hearts already work, but we have to learn how to eat. We try drawing, reading, and writing. Then someone else shows us other ways to draw, read, and write. We observe, we self study, we copy, we practice, we ask for help, we are judged good and bad, we experiment, we fail. Then we try again. Or we don’t.

Once, my mother put a small clump of flowers–sweet alyssum–into my hands and told me to plant them in the garden. I was little and I didn’t know if I could do it. As my mother kept working, I kneeled nearby, watching her. I cradled the plant like a little fledgling that had fallen from a tree, afraid I would kill it and cause my mother to stop loving me. By mid-summer, the plant was blooming in the garden, saturating the breeze with its distinctive perfume every time I visited it.

There was the time I came upon the studio of a woman in Maine whose weaving and chair-caning skills mesmerized me. I asked her, “Where did you learn your art?” She said, “I taught myself.” It’s so hopeful, whenever I hear something like that. There is desirable prestige in being able to study with great masters and being able to attend great schools. But finding your own way to skill and knowledge is another excursion all your own. I am drawn to the wabi-sabi spirit in life, the perfect imperfections, the shine of a unique heart, revealed.

In Argentina, my husband and I were copying the patterns of other tango dancers in a dark and sultry warehouse in Buenos Aires. We danced around and around in a circle with everyone else, our bodies succumbing to shame, humiliation, fear of failure. And then, a teacher danced into our embrace and said to us, “Feel the music.” She stayed with us, holding us up, showing us how to believe in the music. The tango in Argentina is improvisational, you must feel the music.

This week, my son texted me: “How’s the blog going?” I texted him back: “Fun. I like practicing my writing skills.” He replied: “Good. It’s all about the feel.” It feels fun. Good. Like. Definitive words.

Today is Friday. The end of another week writing down words I don’t know, or words I liked, that I came across in my travels: scabrously, temerity, ableist, putrid and pitiful, caper about, baseness, slatternly. The week was not a bust.

I watched snow fall.

I made a good meal.

I began reading a new book.

I wrote letters and put them in the mail.

I called my mother and father.

I text chatted with my little niece–her incoming texts are so funny, not annoying at all. They are arrivals of shine and surge.

I blogged. What an ugly word–blog. I am a blogger I said to my daughter. A blogger. The word is ugly like booger-(which should be spelled like bugar, rhymes with sugar).

And–there was a day when the house was empty and cavernous and into that vast void flew the bedeviled foul breath of remembered shame, humiliations, vulnerabilities, and failures as I tried to work. I sat down at the piano. There has been a piano in my home since the year 2000 when my husband’s parents gave us $1,000 for Christmas to celebrate the new millennium and we used the money to buy a piano for our children. My husband, my son, and my daughter are all musicians. I am not and I have never played piano in all of my life. But I sat at the piano that day. I put my right hand on a set of keys. And then, I played a note. I don’t know what the note was, but I played another note and another and it sounded enough like Kumbaya that I kept pressing down keys in all the right orders until I had played the song. Then I played it on other positions on the keyboard. I loved how long the music from one tap of a piano key would linger and rise up, sounding so sweet, coating all the remembered ickiness in my mind with the bright yellows of corniness. I don’t think anyone has ever played Kumbaya on our piano. I am sure of it. Whenever streams of children sat at our piano, they played Mary Had a LIttle Lamb, or Jingle Bells, or Chopsticks, or Smoke on the Water. I remember how my son, during the bedeviled days of his adolescence, played Clapton’s Layla on that piano. We’d all jump on board his ship when he did it, happy to escape into the passionate anthem to angst.

The whole little foray in my home, the excursion to nowhere that ended up at the piano, put a shine to my heart.

And a surge through my head. I moved on through the day, the romance of my life restored.

Ten Books to Read Before You Die.

1. The ones your son gives you.

2. The ones your daughter reads over and over again.

3. The ones your son and daughter were assigned in high school and college.

4. The ones your son and daughter write.

5. The ones your husband reads, even if they’re about industrialists, capitalists, and how to achieve your dreams. Because he always reads the ones you give him to read about artists, dreamers, lovers, and rainbows.

6. The ones your mom and dad are reading and have read.

7. The ones your mom studied so she could master financial independence.

8. The ones your mom and dad give you.

9. The ones your sisters give you.

10. The ones your sisters write.

11. The ones your brothers and sisters give to your son and daughter.

12. The Bible. King James Version. (Might not finish before you die. But there will be versions of these stories wherever you end up.)

13. The Dictionary. (Hahahahaha)

14. The ones your friends, teachers, and spirit guides recommend.

15. The ones your friends write.

16. The one your sister-in-law suggests.

17. The ones you took from “take a book, leave a book” shelves in campgrounds. And the ones you bought from people you met in the gypsy camps–the ones they read aloud on the gypsy stages. Those precious pages of self-published souls.

18. The ones in the homes of your brothers and sisters.

19. The ones your nieces and nephews are reading. And writing.

20. The one your uncle mailed.

21. The ones your cousin gives you.

22. The ones your cousins write.

23. The ones that were dropped off for you when you were lost to grief and couldn’t think, or concentrate, or enjoy anything.

24. Every single one written, by every single one of your favorite authors.

25. Every single one written, by every single unappreciated woman.

26. The ones that protect the art of poetry within their pages.

27. The surprise ones you find in random bookstores in your travels.

28. The ones you read a zillion times to your children, and to other children, out loud.

29. Read those ones a zillion times more.

30. The ones about love.

31. This is all about love.

Chocolate Covered Marshmallows. Cold Roasted.

My daughter had a roasted marshmallow collection. I liked it the best of all her collections. But it’s a tough call.

Her feather collection was neat, too. I remember one tiny feather, and the way her small fingers pincer gripped it in a meadow where it hid, trying to pretend to be a blade of grass. We were out hiking. As soon as my daughter spied the feather; she captured it.

She organized her collection of feathers by sticking them into a repurposed block of styrofoam. We knew the blue jay’s feather, but everything else was known as biggest, smallest, tiniest, prettiest, coolest, best polka dots, best stripes. The collection is still on display in the library upstairs.

Her roasted marshmallow collection, though, was unique. She started it when she was in third or fourth grade because by then she was a champion marshmallow roaster.

Marshmallow roasting–real marshmallow roasting–inspires a life-long appreciation for patience. The fire has to be just right. (Use glowing coals, not flames.) The stick has to be just right. (Au natural, native to the campfire location, tip nicely cleaned with a few swipes of a jackknife.) And the marshmallows can’t be knock offs. (Jet-Puffed.)

At our campsites, the kids chopped the wood and built the fires. It was a wild thrill for them to be able to swing the axe, especially if they brought friends who never got to go camping. We had some good competitions setting logs up on a stump and waiting to see who could split them with one slam. There were a lot of strikes, but that just made the kids more determined to figure it out. Wood chopping uses the same tricks as baseball and golf–you gotta keep your eye on the ball–and, you have to keep your grip tight on the axe. We never lost any fingers or toes or arms or legs. Or noses. No eyes ever got poked out with the marshmallow sticks. No one’s hair ever went up in flames once the campfire started to roar. I’ll always be grateful to the gypsy winds for blowing fair through our camps.

So, my daughter’s Perfectly Roasted Marshmallow Collection was dedicated to preserving marshmallows that had been slow turned over the campfire coals just right–until a brown as soft as my daughter’s sun-tanned skin appeared–and then–ever so carefully–only for a few more turns beyond, in order to form a coating of delicate crunch. All gypsies admire excellence in the campfire arts.

Marshmallow roasting is a many-splendored thing. During one excursion to find the perfect stick, my daughter was led astray into a thicket on the shores of Lake Champlain in Vermont. She claims a flash of light distracted her and seduced her curiosity. Into the thicket she went as the sun set. I thought she was lost, but before panic stopped my heart, I heard her gleeful shouts and, soon after, I saw the silhouette of my little girl, back lit by the last glows of the day, leaping up and down. She had come upon the nearly-complete skeleton of a deer and when she showed me where it was, I couldn’t figure out how in the world she had ever crawled into such a tangled hedgerow. We braided the vertebrae onto a rope and marveled at how precisely they connected, one to the other. You can read all about how the world was made, but when your daughter finds a deer skeleton and you play around with it like a puzzle, suddenly the hand of God strokes your soul.

Here’s a simple way to make chocolate-covered marshmallows, sans the fuss of a campout. They are surprisingly fun to eat and there’s no waste–you eat the stick, too.

1. Put sturdy pretzel sticks into big marshmallows and line them up on parchment on a tray. I used Snyder’s pretzel sticks–not the skinny ones. You want some heft.

2. Set up bowls of decorating bling.

3. Rig up a double boiler. (I put a stainless steel bowl over a pot of water.) Break up a bar of dark chocolate–I used 70% dark, but you could use semi-sweet, too. I used one bar and it coated about twenty marshmallows.

4. Melt the chocolate and dip the marshmallows. You can dunk them or dip them.

5. Dab and dress the marshmallows up with chosen accessories. Here’s my version of desirable food porn:

6. Let the chocolate set outside if it’s wintertime and you live in a wonderfully wintry place. Keep a close eye out for bandits! Only takes a few minutes for the cold to roast the chocolate and create that perfect coating of crunch.

7. Check them out!

8. Wrap them up. I use butcher’s string to tie the sandwich bags. I cut off the zip-loc tops.

ONE TASTE HITS THE SPOT.

The ReStore. Gypsy Treasures.

Good will meets home improvement and treasure hunting. The ReStore. Here’s a nonprofit home improvement center selling furniture, building materials, appliances, office furniture, light fixtures, tools, tchotchkes–all at a fraction of retail pricing in a warehouse that’s a lot easier to walk through (and get out of before your life is over), than Ikea. The dollars earned support Habitat for Humanity. You can donate, or shop, or do both. We took a Saturday morning excursion to check it out. Gold Star Blvd. Worcester. (There are other locations throughout the land.) Check out the ReStore blog on their website to jumpstart your creative energy and get ideas on how to restore ReStore finds.

Let’s use and reuse what we already have. If container ships keep unloading stuff on America’s shorelines, and the stuff keeps getting distributed throughout the land,

America is going to SINK.

The first easy-bake oven. But look! Old, sturdy file cabinets. I have an idea. Use them as walls, slap on a roof and line them up for dorm housing. Every student has five drawers. One drawer/per day of the week to organize what you will wear that day. Eliminates excessive clothing all over the floor, excessive clothes flowing out of closets, and excessive clothes overloading washing machines. Reduces student stress–just open the drawer marked, “Monday”, when it’s Monday, and proceed to get dressed. Return clothes to the drawer for the next Monday.For weekends, choose clothes at random from the five drawers.

Impressive selection of tables. Great for art studios, restaurants, classrooms.

More fun than the Big Apple. Buy this ensemble for a party, serve some kind of apple-themed dish, get a few oohs and ahhs and what funs from your guests, and then give it back to the ReStore to sell again! Ten bucks. Or, fill the big apple with some bling, like shiny beads. Let children scoop out some of the bling to put into their little apples and they can string together necklaces or bracelets. Or, make a big apple container of white buttercream frosting. Then use the little apple containers to make frostings in all different colors. Then decorate cut out cookies–shaped like apples! Or, fill the little apple containers with rainbow sprinkles, tiny chocolate chips, tiny m&m’s, teeny dots (whatever those are called). Put melted chocolate in the big apple. Have on deck, ready to dip, big marshmallows. Dip and swirl them in the chocolate, then swirl them through the decorations. Let set. I am already feeling buyer’s remorse because I left this great toy behind at the ReStore.

I wasn’t going to buy anything. But then I saw these bowls and I fell for the green color. Two for a dollar.

I brought them home and liked them even more. I looked them up on the Internet. Fire-King Jade-ite Swirl Pattern Bowls. From the 1950’s. Some people were selling them for up to $50. Martha Stewart is hoarding them in all her houses.

I FOUND A TREASURE.

I have become captivated by my treasure.

Early morning tea, looking at the exquisite curves of the horizon, the rising sun, my new bowl.

I draped some of my rosaries over the side of the bowl.

The next one is from the Sacre Coeur in Paris.

I bought it when I lit a candle there for my cousin Amy who was going to have a baby.

It looks like a perfect prayer for a little baby.

I put my most favorite bowl, into the new bowl. My daughter painted this bowl for me.

Another work of art, placed into the bowl. This is a clay sculpture by my son when he was little.

The original set up for my son’s clay pot is on top of a rock painted by my daughter. I keep this sculpture on my desk.

With a newspaper clipping inside the clay pot:

“I have drawn things since I was 6.

All that I made before the age of 65 is not worth counting.

At 73, I began to understand the true construction of animals, plants, trees,

birds, fishes, and insects.

At 90, I will enter into the secret of things.

At 110, everything–every dot, every dash–will live.” Hokusai

The bowls make a nice trap for trolls, bad thoughts, wasteful grumblings. Errant ants, spiders, and ladybugs.

MADE IN USA.

When you leave the ReStore, you check out near a nice display of clocks. Seattle, Denver, Chicago, and Worcester times. Why Dublin time for the big clock? Because the store manager loves Ireland.

IT’S A GOOD LUCK STORE!

Homage to a Country I Love. France.

I love France and I love the French people. I am usually puzzled by people who tell me they don’t like the French. I am sure I can convince them to like France and the French. But they do have to like artists. Great food. Wine and champagne. Fresh-baked bread. Persnickety personalities, eccentric souls, beautiful churches, parks, gardens, chateaus. They should probably have an appreciation for rebel beings. Passionate lovers. Beloved dogs. Everywhere. And children, with impressive manners. Oh, France. When we are there, the French let me sit with a drink and my paper and pen in a cafe for as long as I want. They help and assist me and encourage me. I have so many memories of contentment in France. And some of conflicts, too–but that isn’t what stays in my heart. The French expect that when I am there, I become as French as possible. What an honor–that they believe I can do it!

Both of my children studied French in high school. I am old enough to know that no matter what language or culture you study, or fall in love with, within every culture there is good and bad. But it was the spirit of my son’s French teacher, (a native French man who had the courage of all of his own beliefs in how to best teach know-it-all Americans), that caused me, when it was time to find a college for my son, to go looking for one that still believed in the freedoms of speech and expression, and the dignity of individuality.

My son was a free-thinking boy who, throughout his years as a schoolboy, had taken hits (suspensions) for his penchant for satire and rebel writings and for defying the gods of music departments. His first experience of censorship involved two rowdy cartoon characters he invented when he was a fourth grader: Lizardo and Dude. (Dude was a dude and Lizardo was his sidekick, a big lizard.) I remember when one of his cartoons was censored and another parent (who had grown fond of Lizardo and Dude) said: “We need to make ‘Lizardo and Dude Forever’ t-shirts!” It was all innocent and safe, here in America.

I was glad to discover Bard College, on the Hudson River in New York, for a kid like my son. One thing that I stumbled upon, during my search for a college, had a powerful effect on me. It was a commencement speech given at Bard College in 1996 by Salman Rushdie. I am going to type the speech entirely on my blog. I do this because I want it to be read. I do it also because it is something I still find inspiring. And, to sit here in the safety of my home in America, as a writer and an artist, typing out the words of an artist condemned to death and forced into hiding by the powers of evil because of his work, will be a useful meditation in gratitude and inspiration, as I think of France and the overwhelming grief and anxiety the people in that country must bear during these dark days. Salman Rushdie takes us, in his speech, from the present day all the way back to the Greek myths–where we are continually reminded that humankind has been the same for a long time, and that the battles for good over evil will never end. He also graciously thanks Bard College for offering him shelter, at a time when fear caused many in his world to abandon him. And at last, he encourages us to battle evil–with our peaceful hearts and our minds and our pens, pencils, and paintbrushes. To be courageous, creative beings. And, most of all, to rise to our best selves when the battle shows up, and to recognize what is good and what is evil.

TEXT OF COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS AT BARD COLLEGE, MAY 25th, 1996 SALMAN RUSHDIE

Members of the Class of 1996, I see in the newspaper that Southampton University on Long Island got Kermit the Frog to give the Commencement address this year. You, unfortunately, have to make do with me. The only Muppet connection I can boast is that my former editor at Alfred Knopf was also the editor of that important self-help text, Miss Piggy’s Guide to Life. I once asked him how it had been to work with such a major star and he replied, reverentially, “Salman: the pig was divine.”

In England, where I went to college, we don’t do things quite this way on graduation day, so I’ve been doing a little research into Commencement and its traditions. The first American friend I asked told me that in her graduation year–not at this college, I hasten to add–she and her fellow-students were so incensed at the choice of Commencement speaker–whom I suppose I should not name–oh, all right then, it was Jeane Kirkpatrick–that they boycotted the ceremony and staged a sit-in in one of the college buildings instead. It is a considerable relief, therefore, to note that you are all here.

As for myself, I graduated from Cambridge University in 1968–the great year of student protest–and I have to tell you that I almost didn’t make it. This story has nothing to do with Politics or demonstrations; it is, rather, the improbable and cautionary tale of a thick brown gravy-and-onion sauce. It begins a few nights before my graduation day, when some anonymous wit chose to redecorate my room, in my absence, by hurling a bucketful of the aforesaid gravy-and-onions all over the walls and furniture, to say nothing of my record player and my clothes. With that ancient tradition of fairness and justice upon which the colleges of Cambridge pride themselves, my college instantly held me solely responsible for the mess, ignored all my representations to the contrary, and informed me that unless I paid for the damage before the ceremony, I would not be permitted to graduate.

It was the first, but, alas, not the last occasion on which I would find myself wrongly accused of muck spreading. I paid up, I have to report, and was therefore declared eligible to receive my degree; in a defiant spirit, possibly influenced by my recent gravy experience, I went to the ceremony wearing brown shoes, and was promptly plucked out of the parade of my gowned and properly black-shod contemporaries, and ordered back to my quarters to change. I am not sure why people in brown shoes were deemed to be dressed improperly, but once again I was facing a judgment against which there could be no appeal. Once again, I gave in, sprinted off to change my shoes, got back to the parade in the nick of time; and at length, after these vicissitudes, when my turn came, I was required to hold a university officer by his little finger, and to follow him slowly up to where the Vice-Chancellor sat upon a mighty throne.

As instructed, I knelt at his feet, held up my hands, palms together, in a gesture of supplication, and begged in Latin for the degree, for which, I could not help thinking, I had worked extremely hard for three years, supported by my family at considerable expense. I recall being advised to hold my hands way up above my head, in case the elderly Vice-Chancellor, leaning forward to clutch at them, should topple off his great chair and land on top of me. I did as I was advised; the elderly gentleman did not topple; and, also in Latin, he finally admitted me to the degree of Bachelor of Arts. Looking back at that day, I am a little appalled by my passivity, hard though it is to see what else I could have done. I could have not paid up, not changed my shoes, not knelt to supplicate for B.A. I preferred to surrender, and get the degree.

I have grown more stubborn since. I have come to the conclusion, which I now offer you, that I was wrong to compromise; wrong to make an accommodation with injustice, no matter how persuasive the reasons. Injustice, today, still conjures up, in my mind, the memory of gravy. Injustice, for me, is a brown, lumpy, congealing fluid, and it smells pungently, tearfully, of onions. Unfairness is the feeling of running back to your room, flat out, at the last minute, to change your outlawed brown shoes. It is the business of being forced to beg, on your knees, in a dead language, for what is rightfully yours. This, then, is what I learned on my own graduation day; this is the message I have derived from the parables of the Unknown Gravy-bomber, the Vetoed Footwear, and the Unsteady Vice-Chancellor upon his throne, and which I pass on to you today: first, if , as you go through life, people should some day accuse you of what one might call aggravated gravy abuse–and they will, they will–and if in fact you are innocent of abusing gravy, do not take the rap. Second: those who would reject you because you are wearing the wrong shoes are not worth being accepted by. And third: kneel before no man. Stand up for your rights. I like to think that Cambridge University, where I was so happy for three marvelous years, and from which I gained so much–I hope your years at Bard have been as happy, and that you feel you have gained as much—that Cambridge Univerisity, with its finely developed British sense of irony, intended me to learn precisely these valuable lessons from the events of that strange graduation day.

Members of the Class of 1996, we are here to celebrate with you one of the great days of your lives. We participate today in the rite of passage by which you are released from this life of preparation into that life for which you are now as prepared as anyone ever is. As you stand at the gate of the future, I should like to share with you a piece of information about the extraordinary institution you are leaving, which will explain the reason why it is such a particular pleasure for me to be with you today. In 1989, within weeks of the threat made against me by the mullahs of Iran, I was approached by the President of Bard, through my literary agent, and asked if I would consider accepting a place on the faculty of this college. More than a place; I was assured that I could find, here in Annandale, among the Bard community, many friends, and a safe haven in which I could live and work. Alas, I was not able in those difficult days, to take up this courageous offer, but I have never forgotten that at a moment when red-alert signals were flashing all over the world, and all sorts of people and institutions were running scared, Bard College did the opposite–that it moved towards me, in intellectual solidarity and human concern, and made, not lofty speeches, but a concrete offer of help. I hope you will all feel proud that Bard, quietly, without fanfares, made such a principled gesture at such a time. I am certainly extremely proud to be a recipient of Bard’s honorary degree, and to have been accorded the exceptional privilege of addressing you today.

Hubris, according to the Greeks, was the sin of defying the gods, and could, if you were really unlucky, unleash against you the terrifying, avenging figure of the goddess Nemesis, who carried in one hand an apple bough and, in the other, the Wheel of Fortune, which would one day circle round to the inevitable moment of vengeance. As I have been, in my time, accused not only of gravy abuse and wearing brown shoes but of hubris, too, and since I have to come to believe that such defiance is an inevitable and essential aspect of what we call freedom, I thought I might commend it to you. For in the years to come you will find yourselves up against gods of all sorts, big and little gods, corporate and incorporeal gods, all of them demanding to be worshipped and obeyed–the myriad deities of money and power, of convention and custom, that will seek to limit and control your thoughts and lives. Defy them; that’s my advice to you. Thumb your noses; cock your snooks. For, as the myths tell us, it is by defying the gods that human beings have best expressed their humanity.

The Greeks tell many stories of quarrels between us and the gods. Arachne, the great artist of the loom, sets her skills of weaving and embroidery against those of the goddess of wisdom herself, Minerva or Pallas Athene; and impudently chooses to weave versions of only those scenes which reveal the mistakes and weaknesses of the gods–the rape of Europa, Leda and the Swan. For this–for the irreverence, not for her lesser skill–for what we would now call art, and chutzpah–the goddess changes her mortal rival into a spider. Queen Niobe of Thebes tells her people not to worship Latona, the mother of Diana and Apollo, saying “What folly is this! To prefer beings whom you never saw to those who stand before your eyes!” For this sentiment, which today we would call humanism, the gods murder her children and husband, and she metamorphoses into a rock, petrified with grief, from which there trickles an unending river of tears. Prometheus the Titan steals fire from the gods and gives it to mankind. For this–for what we would now call the desire for progress, for improved scientific and technological capabilities–he is bound to a rock while a great bird gnaws eternally at his liver, which regenerates as it is consumed.

The interesting point is that gods do not come out of these stories at all well. If Arachne is overly proud when she seeks to compete with a goddess, it is only an artist’s pride, joined to the gutsiness of youth; whereas Minerva, who could afford to be gracious, is merely vindictive. The story increases Arachne’s shadow, as they say, and diminishes Minerva’s. It is Arachne who gains, from the tale, a measure of immortality. And the cruelty of the gods to the family of Niobe proves her point. Who could prefer the rule of such cruel gods to self-rule, the rule of men and women by men and women, however flawed that may be? Once again, the gods are weakened by their show of strength, while the human beings grow stronger, even though–even as–they are destroyed. And tormented Prometheus, of course, Prometheus with his gift of fire, is the greatest hero of all.

It is men and women who have made the world, and they have made it in spite of their gods. The message of the myths is not the one the gods would have us learn–that we should behave ourselves and know our place–but its exact opposite. It is that we must be guided by our natures. Our worst natures can, it’s true, be arrogant, venal, corrupt, or selfish; but in our best selves, we–that is, you–can and will be joyous, adventurous, cheeky, creative, inquisitive, demanding, competitive, loving, and defiant.

Do not bow your heads. Do not know your place. Defy the gods. You will be astonished how many of them turn out to have feet of clay. Be guided, if possible, by your better natures. Great good luck and many congratulations to you all.

Excursions

The Gypsy Apprentice

Category Archives: Travel

The Ruffed Grouse.

Gypsy Pole Dancing.

Gypsy Art Show.

Over-Fifty Shades of Starry Starry Love.

The Found Art of Dancing.

Romancing the Mind.

Ten Books to Read Before You Die.

Chocolate Covered Marshmallows. Cold Roasted.

The ReStore. Gypsy Treasures.

Homage to a Country I Love. France.