Living the Van Gogh Life

I was sitting out on the front porch yesterday evening with my husband. He was pointing out beautiful birds in our yard which I was pretending to see.  Red birds, blue birds, buntings and starlings and thrush moved from pine to feeder to oak to bath and back to feeder again. I could see the motion when they moved from one place to the other. The titmouse has a way of fluttering its wings when it moves about that I can hear from 50 feet away. It is like a humming bird and I love it. I could see the huge lazy shadow of the buzzards riding the Indian summer heat over our heads. I just couldn’t see the birds, or the feeders for that matter.

I looked out over our yard and I realized my landscapes have become those of Van Gogh. Beautiful colors, swirls and whorls and dots that represent definable shapes but have no strict definition. No red birds or blue birds or thrush darting about, no flowers or chipmunks or squirrels are enjoying the evening as we are. I hear a vehicle roll by at 250 feet but couldn’t tell you anything about it. I can’t see even the motion any more at that distance.

 

I love Van Gogh; this is not a terrible state to be in. I do worry about what comes next though in this interminable process of losing my vision.

I used to know my family by the way they walked, turned their head, held their shoulders or moved their hands. No more. I have to be within ten feet of them now to be sure they are who I think they are. This frightens me on two levels. One, and this is the big one, I do not want to NOT be able to see the faces of those I love. These people are why I am here! If I lose them I will feel adrift and frightened. The second, which is really still the first but seen from a different angle is that I can’t see! I already can no longer ride a bike alone. I move faster than I can decipher obstacles like trees, curbs and psychotic killers. I am now afraid to walk alone because I no longer see well enough to see anything approaching, like dogs with foaming mouths and rabid foxes and psychotic killers. You can interpret this two ways… either I am just a scaredy-cat or I read the news and know that there are indeed rabid foxes, vicious dogs and psychotic killers whether one lives in a metro area or the heart of the country as I now do. With my track record for one in a million happenstances, (tornados, pregnant while taking the pill with my tubes tied, etc.), I choose to avoid them whenever I can.

For now I enjoy the hell out of my impressionist’s yard (people pay hundreds of millions to hang a slice on their wall. I LIVE it baby). The fluid lines and melting edges and glorious colors titillate and soothe by degree. The morning I wake up in a five year olds watercolor, splotches of color running together into browns, lines obliterated and subject up for anyone’s guess will be a sad day for me, I think, maybe not. I will have color and light and God willing my lovely and loved seeing-eye-people to help me navigate it.

Vincent Van Gogh (Duh!)

Night and birds by John Scott's Photography (my hubby, in my front yard.)

Bunky's Playhouse --CHAPTER 2—

Bunky is staring at me from the corner of the porch. I feel his eyes on me before I spot him eyeing me from behind the glider. He is tiny, a serious little man in a serious little world of his own. He wears a coonskin cap we found at a yard sale and swimmer’s goggles cover his eyes. His blue striped shirt, once fresh and clean looking, is faded, permanently wrinkled and shrunken, having been washed nightly for two months now. I think, as I always do, that I need to find a shirt he likes as well or he will go through life with his buttons popped and his seams split. His shorts ride low, waist band sliding under his rounded belly into a natural resting place on his scrawny hips. Just below his clay stained knees his rubber boots, bright red and shiny look huge and out of place and ridiculously new. He is dressed for adventure.

My heart jumps. I want to run up through the yard and onto the porch and grab him up. I want to swing him around and smother him with kisses and inhale his milk-and-dirt little boy smell. I want to sit in the glider with him on my lap and sing silly songs and tickle his sides until he begs for mercy through his giggles.  I want, I want, I want…

I stroll through the yard slowly, stopping to smell a flower, to pull a weed, to toss an acorn. I approach him coolly. Bunky is the epitome of cool. Four years old and outbursts annoy him. I nod at him as I settle on the porch steps, acknowledging his presence as he sidles up next to me and lays his hand on my shoulder. I pat the tiny fingers, softly, and we stay like that a while, looking out into the yard at the teeming wildlife and the luscious greenery, companionable.

Bunky tells me he wants to go adventuring, please, walk in the woods and find some interesting bugs for his collection. I shudder at the thought of more creepy crawlies at the same time I am bursting with pride at his inquisitive mind. I see that he has his mason jar ready. Holes punched in the lid and grass in the bottom. A magnifying glass, net and bug book sit next to it. They are in a neat row, laid out in a manner that tells me he was expecting an argument and wanted to have everything ready to point at if and when I said no. The book is there simply to make me happy. In an effort to curtail his passion for insects that actually moved and bred I bought him the book. As good as having them I explained, but better!  More variety, more color. You can learn about them without actually having them in your room! He had looked at me somberly and called me out. You only bought it so you wouldn’t have to hunt bugs with me. It is a simple, and true statement but the way he says it sounds so bad I cringe like I have been caught doing something mean and petty.

No worms, Bunky, I mean it, no worms and no grubs and no crickets. Deal? And nothing that bites or stings! And no stink bugs!

I am talking to myself; he has run off the porch and is trotting around in circles with his arms flapping erratically calling out Butterflies? How about butterflies? Are you afraid of butterflies? Are they scary granma? He giggles. My heart soars.

The Joy of Finding Stuff

I haven't been in this house long. I come in from the outdoors where I feel totally at home and find myself in some strange twilight world surrounded by boxes and barrels and bags. A haphazard maze beckons me with its mystery. Should I go left and open a neat clean box, taped carefully, unlabeled as are most of the rest, or should I cut apart the twine holding together the handles of the Disney Store bag and see what delightful possessions are making it bulge? Should I cut through the layers and layers of tape holding together a box which has been used to hold goods many, many times, its various labels, handwritten or printed by machine overlapping each other, black, red, blue, white and green looking delightful and happy together? I see a box that had held a space heater, a piece of masking tape over the bright image and lettering factory printed on the box saying only, teasingly, "STUFF". I WANT STUFF! I NEED STUFF!

Hang on now, what if it just that, just STUFF, nothing worth naming specifically? Perhaps the contents of the junk drawer in the kitchen, the paper clips, rubber bands and expired coupons, picture hangers and batteries (dead or alive? who knows but I can't throw them away), box tops and marbles and shoe strings and nail clippers and stubby pencils and dried up pens and mysterious phone numbers on the backs of envelopes or the cleaning supplies and extra rolls of paper from under the washroom sink. Maybe it is even worse STUFF, like crap I swept into a dustpan from the garage floor? Screws and nails and bits of wire and nuts and bolts and teeny Allen wrenches and dust and wire nuts and fish hooks and, well, you know, STUFF? I thought I had labeled those boxes GARAGE STUFF but I admit it. I am a slack labeler. I may not have gotten the word GARAGE on there at all.

Maybe it is personal STUFF. Knitting needles and yarn from my bedside table. Massage lotion (that's right, I said it, I ain't skeert), the book I was reading before the move which seems to have disappeared, six keys that go to God knows what, but when I find whatever it is I am sure it will be locked. A coin from Panama, where I have never been, a china dog my youngest daughter gave me when she was seven. Some loose Tums and Motrin PMs, 3 unmatched socks and a back scratcher. All of these things should be in a box somewhere, labeled PERSONAL STUFF but I haven't found it yet. Maybe I am just mis-remembering and it just said STUFF, or, knowing me, had no label at all.

I pick up the box and shake it. I can feel something heavy and off balance shifting, I hear rattling of copper and tinging of tin and silent noise of plastic bending.

I am doing it! I am opening this box next. I can't wait! I am getting my STUFF back! I slice open the tape, giving myself an adhesive rimmed paper cut in the process, I rip the flaps open and what do I see? Random freaking stuff, not STUFF like I had hoped but regular old running around while they loaded the truck picking up mismatched and forgotten items and tossing them in a box stuff. Two plastic coat hangers, a windbreaker, a Christmas ornament, a pot lid, a dust pan, a wonderfully silly tall top heavy metal sculpture of a frog, the key card for the community pool and the key to the large ornamental gas fireplace at the rental house. Two back issues of Southern Living and a wash cloth pad a cheap vase and one shoe sits sadly in the bottom.

Next time I am going for the bag...

Apothegms

ap·o·thegm  [ap-uh-them]  –noun

a short, pithy, instructive saying; a terse remark or aphorism.

“Another day another dollar”, “six one way, half a dozen the other”, “in for a penny, in for a pound”, “slow and steady wins the race” These are the apothegms I grew up with and find myself repeating on a daily basis. They give me courage, help me stay on course (NOT stay the course, what a ridiculous tag line), help get me motivated in the morning and help me deal with the results of my actions at the end of the day.

Every morning before entering the monolith I work in I say “another day, another dollar”. It reminds me that that is the reason I come here, for a pay check. I do my job, they pay me, end of story. I like my co-workers for the most part, like what I do for the most part, but it is not my life, it is a means for obtaining and keeping the life I want. Life is what happens to me when I leave here, with my family, my friends, my interests. I simply do not understand people that feel that retirement is a loss. I yearn for the day I can retire, when I can spend my days in happy pursuit of the things that make me content. I want to write and get paid for it. I want to cook for people, to have them say ‘My gosh this is delicious’ and stand groaning and releasing buttons after a fantastic meal. I want to experience at will that moment when the batter I am stirring takes on the exactly right sheen and thickness and air bubbles pop leaving quarter size craters in the glossy slick surface. I want to read about a thousand books (for starters). I want to paint murals on the walls that surround me—trees and flowers, water and rocks, calming, lovely and wildly fertile murals so that the walls do not close in on me. I want to sleep until noon or not at all and spend the day in my pajamas watching trash TV or listening to beautiful music or dancing around my living room singing at the top of my lungs. In short, I want to be the one that everyone refers to as ‘that crazy lady’ while discussing my latest literary work or divine dish. Until then, I square my shoulders, mutter ’another day, another dollar’ and go on about my business.

‘Six one way, half a dozen the other’ is an apothegm that reminds me not to over analyze situations, people, conversations, directives and decisions. I find it so incredibly easy and self indulgent to get into my head and just spend the day there, playing around, messing with things that are better left alone. Imagine a child in a laboratory filled with chemicals and flame under beakers full of brightly colored smoking liquids and you will have an idea of what I mean. I am terribly introspective and could spend all of my time getting to know the ins and outs of me but frankly I am not all that interesting. I have to remind myself that since I don’t even have that good a handle on my motives and inspirations (Lets face it, every new day changes us. How can we ever understand it all?)  why the heck would I ever assume I had the power to determine what someone else was thinking or feeling or dealing with when they say or do something I find questionable. If I go six one way, questioning, theorizing, imagining and wondering, or half a dozen the other, accept at face value, the end result is the same. They said or did something I do not agree with or understand. Why stress over it?

One of my favorite apothegms, ‘In for a penny, in for a pound’, means just go for it. If you are going to try a little bit then just throw your self into it head first and arms akimbo. I had a basketball coach in high school who told us if you are going to foul make them bleed. I thought it was horrible at the time but now, 35 years later I can see the wisdom in the advice (even if I would never, ever tell a child to hurt someone); In short, if you are going to do something that possibly carries a very high price you better give it everything you’ve got. Otherwise you will end up paying the maximum for surely minimal rewards. I am not saying I am courageous. Hell, I am not even close to bold most of the time, but if something is important enough for me to try then screw creeping down the steps in the shallow end! I head for the deep end right away.

The last apothegm in my list, ‘Slow and steady wins the race’, is one I think everyone knows, has heard since they were two and grandma read the ‘Tortoise And The Hare’ to them. I think this is an idea wasted on children, they just want to go, go fast, go faster, higher, longer than any other kid and possibly become Superman, you never know! But, if we hear it enough when we are tots,  ‘Slow and steady wins the race’ becomes meaningful when we need it most, brand new and shiny with purpose (imagine a tortoise with a big S—for slow—on his chest, rolling out of the phone booth of our imagination while a light bulb comes on over our heads). Slow and steady allows us to visualize and set long term goals (i.e. crazy lady status at retirement). Slow and steady allows us to endure the years of school, of work, of corporate climbing because we KNOW that these things pay off, that they will give us lasting peace and contentment (or at least a 401K so that we can fund our own peace and contentment). Slow and steady allows us to stay emotionally and/or physically afloat during the lean years, to stay with our spouse during the ‘Why did I ever marry YOU?’ times, to love our kids through the ‘I hate you! Gimme five dollars’ times, to tolerate our pets during the piss on the floor, chew the shoes and bite the preacher times. In short, slow and steady allows us to shudder through the not so great times so that we can revel in the wonderful times.

What grandma failed to read to us as kids was the epilogue to that story, when the tortoise goes home, has a nice hot soak in a well appointed bath, dresses in a natty new shell, aerodynamically designed with the racing tortoise in mind, pours himself an ice cold beer in a tall chilled glass, looks at a picture of the hare and goes ‘nanny nanny boo boo sucker’ under his breath as he sinks into his comfy furniture in that wonderful log he calls home.