Yashica-Mat

I spent some time tonight poking around in the attic, and surprised myself by finding my dad's old Yashica-Mat. I'd been half-heartedly wondering where it was ever since I moved here. Presumably it still works -- at least it did ten years ago, when Gideon went through a stage of taking photos with it. I wonder if you can even get that 2x2 format film anymore, or if it's some kind of ridiculous specialty item.

But I wasn't looking for the camera. I was pawing through my insane number of boxes (there's nothing like a lifelong apartment-dweller who suddenly comes into possession of a house with full attic for an example of some seriously random packratism) in search of some slide boxes that had been my father's. I found them, finally -- three steel boxes, about 8 x 11 x 2, surprisingly heavy. Especially the one I was looking for, which was filled with glass slides, presumably taken with the very same Yashika-Mat in Okinawa in the early 50s. My dad, an anthropologist, did field service there during the Korean War studying the effects of the conflict and the influx of servicemen on Okinawan hookers and their families. I realize this is ripe for all sorts of off-color comments, but hey -- we're talking about my father, so as far as I'm concerned I'm not going to go there.

I'd looked at them briefly a few years ago, when I came into possession of a bunch of his stuff, and I'd been meaning to pull them out again. They were as haunting and beautiful as I remembered -- neatly labeled on a piece of oak tag by subject: Material culture, Okinawan wedding, Okinawan bullfight, brothels and whores (nice, dad), children, adults and children, adults, houses and villages, and markets. Each one painstakingly edged in black cloth tape, which made getting them out of their slots a bit of a pain, but the effect was elegant.

I wish they scanned more clearly, but I probably need a better scanner with a setting specifically for slides and transparencies, plus I didn't sit down with the needed damp cloth and clean them. But here are a few, just to give an idea of what's in this box of slides from 55-odd years ago.

Wordle

Back late from a wonderful day in the country laden with licorice and Jack Daniels and glossy magazines and a big root bundle of lily of the valley and SUCH a tired little dog (who is the Best Guest Ever and should be invited everywhere). I got nothin'.

Well, I got this, a Wordle word picture of my blog (and, by extension, I guess my universe):

Sunday

I woke up very early and hightailed it down to the upper east side to have breakfast with my friend Nina. She is one of my two best friends from high school, tenth grade, and for the past 4½ years she's been living in Hawaii homesteading a piece of land with her husband and building a house. I'm not getting out to Hawaii anytime soon, so I jumped at the chance to see her for an hour or so before she and her brother headed up to Massachusetts to visit their parents for the week. Sunday morning, no traffic, and I made it down there in close to 20 minutes.

It was a short visit, but a good one. 4½ years is a long time to be missing someone, and it was good to see her face again. We even ducked into a doorway and called the third part of our best-friend triad, Leslie, in Vermont, and talked for a while. Nina had to leave by 10:30, so I drove across town and did my grocery shopping for the week and was home by 12.

Funny to be out so early on a Sunday. That's traditionally my day to move slowly, drink coffee and read recipes and answer email and stay in my pajamas as long as it takes. I've always liked Sundays for that reason. I can remember being a little kid and doing pretty much the same thing, minus the coffee and recipes and email but with big stacks of library books and crayons and markers. I didn't like TV all that much even then.
For all the childhood pictures I've been posting, I don't really think much about that time in my life. A lot of people seem to have very clear memories from when they were little, but most of mine are generalized and blurry, with odd details showing up here and there. I do remember spending a lot of time in the back room in our house, though, sitting on the long burnt orange couch with sunlight coming in the wooden blinds, drawing or reading. Time seemed so weirdly elongated then, and feels so collapsed on itself these days. And my, that's certainly an original thought.

This was a good weekend, if tiring. I did a lot of socializing and none of my own work, but that's how it pans out sometimes and it's all necessary in the mix. I did get my pepper and eggplant seedlings in the ground, although they look awfully puny considering how chilly the nights still are. We'll see how that goes.

I would like to point out, though, that in addition to my other good traits already mentioned I am also a superb parallel parker. Seriously, I can get my Blazer into a spot with 24" leeway on either side in about three steps, none of this sawing back and forth shit. I have the touch. For years and years I was terrible at it and one day something literally clicked, and now I can do it every time. What's funny is that this has been since I've had a garage, and I rarely park on the street -- you'd think it'd be one of those things that needs regular practice, but apparently not.

Family Reunion

Not a full family reunion today, but close enough for rock'n'roll -- my sister and brother-in-law, who hosted, my aunt and uncle from Yonkers, my cousin and his wife from up in Albany, my cousin and his wife from California, my mom, and me. It's a good family of kind people, your pretty standard east coast Jew story overflowing both ends of the 20th century: Lower East Side → Bronx → Yonkers → Westchester and beyond, less Woody Allen than Neil Simon with an E.L. Doctorow backstory. Some of us, of course, have gotten stuck between the Bronx and Yonkers after lingering way too long on the Lower East Side, but hey -- someone's gotta be the black sheep. Baaa. I love them all dearly.

The afternoon was enhanced by a flat tire half a mile out of my mom's door -- I was driving my her car because it is fun and zippy and mine is a rattly behemoth with wall-eyed headlights and smells like dog. And -- have you guys been waiting this whole month for something confessional? OK, here you go: I have never changed a flat. Not because I'm any kind of shrinking violet -- I've never had a flat. I've seen them changed, I've had it demonstrated for me, I know what page it's on in my owner's manual, but I've never actually done the deed myself. So for a number of reasons that seemed good at the time -- wearing somewhat nice clothes, didn't want to screw it up and have the wheel fall off my mom's car in the middle of Rte. 119 -- I called AAA to come put the donut on so we could limp back to her place and get my car and proceed. Which was all well and good, except it took them a good hour and a half to show up, and time wasted makes me cranky. If I'm not working and I'm not reading and I'm not cooking and I'm not getting some form of exercise and I'm not sleeping, I'd better be doing something fun -- not sitting in an office park in lower Westchester on an overcast, windy day. It was what you might call an Exercise in Letting Go. And hey, extra time with mom, even though the she wanted to talk about picking out the accessories she wore that day and I wanted to pace.

But OK, we were only two hours later than planned, and the party was fun. It's always good to see everyone. And extra time with mom! Who, by the way, outdid herself on the Overprotective Mom Comment of the Day -- I like to privately time it and see how long, from the moment I step into her house, it takes her to say something ridiculously over-the-top motherish. Today was about ten minutes from point of entry. I had helped her transfer the weird bean dip she'd made to a serving bowl and had put the original container, as directed, into the sink, when she told me, "Just fill it up with water. The hot water is the faucet on the left."

And you all wonder why I can't change a tire! I was raised to have servants. Something didn't work out, though.

[The photo is of my mom, my brother, my sister, and me in 1965. If my sister ever sees that I posted this she will disown me immediately and there will be no more family reunions, ever. So don't tell her.]

Cosmic Lottery

Tonight I went out with my wonderful friend Meridith, all the way down to Red Hook in Brooklyn. Red Hook is a really fun, up-and-coming neighborhood -- lots of storefront galleries, lots of small restaurants with great wine lists. When I first started hanging out in the city and my mom had just moved to Brooklyn, the understanding was that you just didn't go to Red Hook -- it was where the navy yards were and there were projects, and you just didn't have any reason on earth to walk in that direction. And now, of course, New York and neighborhoods being what they are, I'm not even sure I could afford to live there -- at least not in the style to which I am accustomed. But I can dream -- a neighborhood of artists' studios and waterfront furniture-makers and overpriced antique stores.

We went to a benefit at the Kentler International Drawing Space, of which Meridith is a board member, and then out to dinner at a fine tiny restaurant whose name I cannot remember. I had ragu of lamb over pappardelle with a fabulous glob of lemon ricotta on top, and we shared a kickass bottle of wine. And talked and talked and talked -- she's just back from a three-week fellowship in Rome and glowing with it.

But here's my point: I've known Meridith for, I figured out on my rainy walk home from the train, 24 years this summer. 24 years. My friend Nina, who lives in Hawaii and whom I'm going to see for a few hours on Sunday before she heads up to Boston to see her folks, 31 years. Leslie in Vermont, my sister-in-arms, 31 years come October. Eileen in Colorado, to whom I owe a phone call like nobody's business, 28 years this September. Jane in Brooklyn, 24 years. Dena and Patricia downtown, 23 years. And Sandy, also downtown (hey, call me!), 20.

I totted up all the numbers as I walked home and it made me feel really good. This isn't one of my beloved traits, or anything that I've had any real control over. It's just a blessing from out of the blue: These friends, who have been with me for such a long time. Talking to Meridith over dinner tonight, realizing that no matter how long we go without seeing each other -- and lately it's seemed like I've been dating my girlfriends, we have to take such care allocating time for each other -- we're always still connected by some fine and unbreakable line. And then coming home to my family here, where the ties are newer but still full of promise -- the feeling of being blessed doesn't even begin to cover it. It's like I hit some cosmic lottery.

There are pictures -- good lord, there are SO many pictures. But they're upstairs in boxes and it's late. So let's just say I feel roughly like... this.
And this.

Moms, Kids

Me and my mom, Venice, 1967
Gideon, Walton, NY, 1992
My mom and Gideon, New York, NY, 2005

Only Six Days Into This Blogathon Thing and Already I'm Resorting to Posting Topless Photos of Myself

In fact we're all topless here: me, my dad, and Gumby, who for some reason I named Rajah. It's May, 1967, which makes me not quite four. We were in either Jerusalem and Tel Aviv -- we spent a year in each place but I'm sketchy as to order. I guess it was hot.

My father died ten and a half years ago. Strangely, I've missed him more these past couple of years than in the preceding ones. Rather, the first stretch was your basic mixed bag of grief, guilt, loss, lightening, sadness, relief, acceptance, guilt again, and this is different. Lately I've been struck more by a sense of shrieking unfairness.

If he were alive now we'd be close in a way that we weren't when I was a child or sullen teenager or self-absorbed young adult. There were a number of years when I had finally achieved some kind of rough maturity but he was already an invalid, edging back into perpetual childhood. We never did find common ground. If he were around now, with all his wits about him, he'd be so proud of me. He'd love what I do for a living, and he'd want to talk to me about what I was working on, what I was reading, what I was listening to. He'd be endlessly amused at the fact that my boss turned out to have been a boyhood friend and neighbor of his. He'd like Jeff very much -- finally, a man he would have approved of, whom he never got to meet. And he'd be so incredibly proud of Gideon, his one and only grandson.

We'd be close; I know this. I can see just how it would be. He'd call a couple of times a week, always while we were eating dinner, and want to talk to me about some review he read or something in the news. And I'd roll my eyes and put my plate up where the dog couldn't reach it, and go out to pace in the yard while I talked, and I'd tell him everything. And after a while I'd come back in with my ears ringing, since I really kind of hate talking on the phone, and I'd say, "Jeez, my dad."

That eye-rolling -- it's a child's prerogative and best defense and endless link to those who gave her life, and I miss the option. I had to call my son tonight and say something dopey, just so I could hear him on the other end, rolling his.

Rolling in Ecstasy

My 20s were all about sensation, diving into everything I did headfirst without a whole lot of thought beforehand. I made art and heard bands and took drugs and ran around with boys and read everything I could get my hands on and stayed up all night drinking and talking, and then abruptly flipped all that over halfway through the decade and had a baby. Which was every bit as intense and immersive, just without the bands and drugs and boys.

My 30s were about synthesis, figuring out how to take all that raw input and reconcile it with who I was – and figuring out who that might, in fact, be. A little slower, a little more thoughtful, although not a whole lot.

My 40s are turning out to be about scholarship. I think I’m as much myself as I’m going to be, but at some point I noticed how much there is in the world I don’t know, and fell a little in love with the idea of trying to learn some of it. Part of that is just the realization that I don’t have all the time I used to, and in fact it seems to be contracting on me, speeding up in direct proportion to how much I want to do. Which is a lot. Lately I’ve been waking up in the morning dazzled by the sheer potential, every day, for putting something new in my head, or making something, or connecting with someone. Not to say that I’m necessarily more productive. Just that the universe lately is oddly bright and shiny. Maybe it’s just latent ADD, unmedicated and coming back to bite me on the ass. Maybe I’m moving in on the age my father was when he had the first of his mini-strokes, and I’m getting all Use It Or Lose It.

Whatever the case, these days I’m feeling some kind of imperative to take those hours when I’m not at work, or on the train, or walking the dog, or cooking dinner, or sleeping, and own the hell out of them. Even if I don’t end up with something to show for it. Even if that involves sitting at my table and listening. I want the world to roll in ecstasy at my feet.

(I already have cats doing that.)

Cheers

OK, enough with the sad little dog pictures. I'm taking a little time off from work, and while there will be more about that later, in the meantime I am trying to work my way through the Seven Deadly sins in their entirety. And since most of my days are already filled with Wrath, Pride, and Envy, it seems only fitting that a vacation should consist of Lust, Gluttony, Sloth, and Greed. I haven't gotten to the Greed part -- I'm headed downtown to have lunch with a friend so maybe I can do a little shopping and get that out of the way, but that tends to be my least favorite Deadly Sin. On the other hand, I've been very assiduous about the other three. We are in possession of a large amount of incredibly good cheese sent out of the blue by a dear friend, for one thing, and I think we've got every single one of Thomas Aquinas' Gluttony categories --

* Praepropere, eating too soon;
* Laute (washedly), eating finely;
* Nimis, eating too much;
* Ardenter, eating burningly;
* Studiose (keenly), eating daintily;
* Forente (boringly), eating wildly.

(thank you, Marta!)

-- pretty well covered. Can I just say: Cowgirl Creamery Mt. Tam with blueberries? Holy shit.

(The bartending bear was a commission for a friend's husband's birthday.)

Flickr Meme Thing with Pictures

OK, so I saw this on two blogs I like a lot, Two Pointy Sticks and Alecto's Ophelia. Now, sometimes I like these meme things because they're good prompts and I tend to do well with motivators -- deadlines, assignments, telling people I'll do something and then having to do it so I don't completely humiliate myself. Then again, I'm also a cranky aging punk rocker (I was about to say "ex-punk rocker," but then realized that after all those years of saying "It's not about the FASHION, man," this would be a reasonable opportunity to take that to heart -- it's not about the lifestyle, right? Right?) and you know. No meme is the fuckin' boss of me.

This one appealed, though, probably for the most part because I like looking at pictures on the internet so much. I know it's all a big old time suck -- but still, there's so much cool stuff out there to feast the eyes on, BibliOdyssey and the Nonist and Strange Maps and Things to Look At and Decocentric (even though I can't read Russian, really, just enough to sound out the words) and I check out Ffffound! every single day, even though they're in snotty beta stage forever and I can't actually join. Which I suppose is part of my problem, having a million RSS feeds and wanting to look at every single one of them. I'd probably get a lot more done if I never turned on my Google Reader. But I don't know, I like having visual stimulation, and I do think it's good for me as an artist and even as a writer to have a lot of shiny input. You know the saying Kill 'em all, let God sort 'em out? (Or, in Latin: Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius.) Well, I say, Look at all the pictures on the internets, let my brain sift through 'em when I'm asleep or something. Hey, I don't watch TV -- I've gotta have some kind of guilty pleasure.

So this meme is all about found pictures and shiny objects so I liked it, plus since there's some kind of evolved internet etiquette wherein picking up a meme from someone else's blog is a sign of love and respect (not that Alecto and Ms. Pointy Sticks don't already know that I love and respect them, or if they don't then they should), so I get to do that twice with one blog post.

So, the concept:

a. Type your answer to each of the questions below into Flickr Search.
b. Using only the first page, pick an image.
c. Copy and paste each of the URLs for the images into fd's mosaic maker.

The Questions:

1. What is your first name? Lisa
2. What is your favorite food? Pasta
3. What high school did you go to? The Putney School
4. What is your favorite color? Bottle green
5. Who is your celebrity crush? Steve McQueen
6. Favorite drink? Red wine
7. Dream vacation? Morocco
8. Favorite dessert? Licorice
9. What you want to be when you grow up? A Dog Whisperer
10. What do you love most in life? The family
11. One Word to describe you. Try
12. Your Flickr name lisapeet

1. Lisa's little paws, 2. 3 Types of Pasta, 3. The Putney School, 4. Ten green bottles....., 5. Steve McQueen and wife Neile in Palm Springs 1963, 6. Red wine, 7. Chefchouen, Morocco, 8. Old Finnish liquorice tin from the 50s, 9. dog whisperer, 10. Bear Family, 11. try, 12. lisapeet age 8

(I cheated a bit on the last one by uploading a photo of myself and naming it accordingly. But it's a cute picture, and I haven't really changed much other than the hair color.)

So that's my little photo mosaic, and I encourage everyone to make one of their own because it's a really fun way to kill a Friday evening, and there's something oddly aesthetically satisfying about it as well.

I still owe Alecto a whole nother meme, one of those that fit into the category of Interesting Prompts That Will Probably Make Me Think in a Good Way and Something Interesting is Sure to Come of It. I just haven't gotten to it yet. Too busy looking at shiny pictures and stuff. But this'll do for now.

45

Yeesh. In my mind I'm still 33 1/3.

Maybe it is time for that tattoo...

On a Sunny Afternoon

Everyone was hanging around outside all day. I cleaned the basement. Shakey climbed into the planter full of catnip and had himself a long stoned nap.
He certainly does like it in our yard.

Dorrie sat around looking pretty and completely innocent of doing a thing like digging that big hole under the tree roots to the right of the picture.
All these nice photos were taken by Jeff.

Speaking of Mothers...

Me and my mom, Venice, 1966.

Because once upon a time, we were both fabulous.

On Being Sick

I’m a healthy girl. Robust, I’d say, if that didn’t conjure up stout apple-cheeked fräuleins yodeling as they toted buckets of water or something. I’m reasonably strong, have good endurance and a tough immune system – I went all last winter without so much as a head cold, and the one before that as well. I don’t get migraines or have back problems or debilitating period cramps.

And, like any other kind of privilege, it’s not something I think about much. It took getting sick in the middle of March and then staying sick for an unreasonably long time – not flat-on-my-back-in-bed sick, but exhausted-and-draggy-like-someone-let-all-the-sawdust-
out-of-me sick – to really point up to me how predicated my life is on being healthy.

I won’t trot out a laundry list. Suffice it to say that we ate badly, the dog got fat, and the house was adrift in pet hair almost instantly. I’m not talking about who does what around here and why. Just that what I expect to get done in the course of a day depends, really heavily it turns out, on my being able-bodied and having a certain amount of energy that I just… didn’t have for a while there. It was weird, and to a certain extent even scary.

The weekend before St. Patrick's Day I came down with a bad chills-and-fever-and-aches cold – I’m loathe to use the F-word, since I refuse to get an F-shot –which progressed to the hacking cough everyone was getting after their bad chills-and-fever-and-aches cold. Mine refused to fade away, though, and morphed into some form of ugly pulmonary crunk. I felt like something was squeezing my lungs with two fat invisible hands, some malevolent creature sitting heavily on my chest at night. For every morning I woke up feeling like I was actually getting better, by the time I went to bed I’d be coughing and winded. And tired. Tired every fucking moment of every fucking day. And another assumption about the eternal state of my health I’d made was that I didn’t have a doctor. I don’t like doctors, as a rule. I’m actually kind of scared of them. It’s a combination of bad childhood experiences and bad adolescent experiences and just plain neurosis, I guess, but I’d rather sit in the dentist’s chair every day for a week than sit on the table in a paper smock. I do it every so often, just enough to act like an adult, but I don’t like it.

This time I knew I was whupped. I went and found myself a doctor.

My place of employment offers a number of different health plans, from straight-up disaster insurance, health savings accounts, HMOs, private physician plans. I had picked one that lay in between the last two, a point-of-service plan, I believe it was called. Kind of like carrying only liability on my crappy old car – I wanted to be protected in case of dire emergency, but didn’t need anything too fancy for the good times. Which means, basically, that when I found myself up against the wall and needing to pick a personal care physician, I didn’t have a hell of a lot of choices. There were a few out in Queens, Brooklyn, lower Manhattan. One in the Bronx, but the south Bronx out by Yankee Stadium, and I didn’t really feel like dragging my sick self all the way out there on the bus. And one on the Upper West side who took walk-ins, a woman with a nice Jewish name. I’m big on names – that’s how I picked my dentist, Dr. Ivylynn Davis-Bell, for instance, and I love her.

The doctor’s office was on Central Park West and 65th Street – a classy address. But it was an odd little hole in the wall, slightly dingy but not dirty, with drab linoleum and heavy wood furniture. Behind the receptionist’s desk was a wall of wooden pigeonholes, like the kind you got your mail in at summer camp, crammed to the ceiling with yellowish, dog-eared records. The place was clean but seriously dowdy – nothing white, nothing gleaming.

The doctor herself was a little old lady, wearing not a lab coat or a smock but the kind of outfit your aunt would wear to tea with her best friend – a blouse, silk or rayon, and slacks. Not pants – slacks. She was tiny, slightly distracted, but she asked the correct doctor questions and took my blood pressure and looked in my ears and mouth with her doctor gadgets. The examining room was cluttered and the table had giant metal stirrups which I sat between, thinking that even if she did do OB-GYN work I would never in a million million years get a pap smear there.

“I’m going to prescribe you a Z-pack,” she said. Fortunately I’d had a friend mention that last winter, so I knew it was Zithromax – otherwise I’d have had no idea.

“I’m allergic to that,” I told her. Wasn’t she supposed to ask me that first? But no problem – instead she wrote me up a week’s worth of Avelox, which is specifically for lung and respiratory infections.

The whole thing took maybe 15 minutes. I walked out with my paper in hand and thought, Man, she looks like the kind of doctor people would hit up for bottles of Oxycontin – an easy touch with the prescription pad.

Never let it be said I don’t know how to call ‘em. I Googled her when I got home and found, among other things, a New York Times article from ten years ago reporting her arrest for selling controlled substance prescriptions to an undercover cop outside her office. Not only that, but at the time she was 76.

Soooo… OK. My new doctor is an octogenarian pusher. I guess I could have done worse.

I took the Avelox for a week and still felt crappy, so Dr. Feelgood sent me to St. Luke’s-Roosevelt for a chest x-ray. When I showed up there and presented the referral slip, the receptionist asked me if I knew why I was there. I wondered if that were some kind of trick question, if maybe I was dying of some kind of horrible wasting disease and Dr. Feelgood hadn’t wanted to tell me. “Chest x-ray,” I said. “Why?”

“Because your doctor didn’t write down what you were here for,” she said, and laughed her head off. I guess that kind of thing is funny when you work in a radiology clinic.

The x-ray came out negative, which is good, because in addition to being doctor-phobic I’m also a bit of a hypochondriac and had spent the day mentally practicing how I would react to the news that I had lung cancer. “I’ve seen a lot of this lately,” Dr. Feelgood told me, “a viral infection that turns into a bacterial infection and it lasts forever.” And then she wrote me out another prescription, this time for cough syrup with codeine. “Take a teaspoon of this four times a day,” she told me. “Don’t take it at work.”

I couldn’t quite figure out how that math was supposed to come out, so I just took it all day long and sailed through the next week. Then stopped taking it except to sleep, because it helped. A lot. And gave me the coolest, most vivid dreams. I dreamed about body-surfing an enormous tsunami, plotting a novel in a writing class in Sharpie marker on a game of Twister, having a big party where everyone I knew showed up and got enormously drunk and planted a rose arbor on my garage roof deck.

And I got better, slowly.

And now I think I’m cured. I can think straight again, take deep breaths, walk up the hill to my house without having to stop with my hands on my knees halfway up. Got off the codeine, checked back in with the usual boring dreams, and have no plans to visit Dr. Feelgood any time soon, for anything.

But man, that was a long haul.

What really went out the window? Was my creative life. Before I got sick I had this really good creative momentum going, drawing and writing and all that. And now I feel like I’m starting again from scratch, which sounds way more dramatic than I’d like and also just sounds lame. But I feel like I had my feet kicked out from under me in a strange and intangible way, and I have to clamber back up on the horse. So much for the apple-cheeked fräulein. On to the next manifestation of self-regard. And hopefully I can stay healthy for long enough to figure out what exactly that might be.

The Surprise

Well, yes, not only am I a Master Baker but I am a really shitty blogger, and yes, I am aware of that. But these days I actually have a little bit more reason than usual. I've been trying to get back to drawing every day, or something close to that, in my sketchbook.

What many people don't know about me is that I was an Illustration major in college -- I have a BFA from the School of Visual Arts, which is a fine institution of some renown. I was one of those kids who was always drawing, and I think I did have some promise, but I think I was also lazy and largely squandered it. No matter -- I have no desire to take up illustration on a professional level again. But what I would like to do is get back to the point where it was fun. Once upon a time I always had a sketchbook, and the doodles flowed out of me naturally and pleasurably. Over the years sitting down to draw or paint has felt more like work, like something I feel like I should be doing. And that really kind of sucks.

Here's what I think happened:

Back when my husband and I split up in 1996 I suddenly found myself solely responsible for keeping body and soul together for both myself and an 8-year-old. Not that my ex had ever been much on co-parenting, but at least he was a second warm body and I had some mobility.

When it became just me and Gideon, I had to plan everything out, plan everything ahead. If there was going to be food on the table and clean laundry and garbage bags and school lunch, I had to plan and plot and think ten steps ahead all the time. Never a break. Before I got my own washer, laundry night meant that we had to have some kind of dinner prepared that we could come up and eat while the dryer was running and Gideon would need to be set up to bring his homework to the laundromat, and whatever needed to be bought would have had to be bought on my way home from work or better yet on my lunch hour so as to save those precious 15 minutes.

And yes, I know, lots of people's lives are like that all the time, and probably worse. Eventually he got older and I could leave him alone for little chunks of time, and he started spending more time with his dad, and I acquired a little more flexibility. But that endless planning never quite let up. There was always something that needed to be accounted for, foamcore boards for science projects and sneakers suddenly grown out of and lunch money lost... all that stuff that almost feels like nostalgia now.

The thing is, I'm still in the habit. Kid's gone from home a few years now and the only creatures really dependent on me are a dog and two cats. But I'm still always thinking thinking thinking ahead, thinking about what I'm going to wear while I'm in the shower and thinking about what I'm going to cook for dinner while I'm at work, and if I walk the dog all the way around the reservoir when I get home then what order do I make the food in so we can eat at a decent hour and I can put a load of wash in when I get home if I do it right away and Monday is recycling night and oh we're going to need more soap in the bathroom in a couple of days...

So OK, I'm a bit compulsive and on a certain level it works for me. We're fed and the animals are fed and the house is in order and the bills are paid, and I rarely get that fucked up behind-the-eight-ball feeling.

But what I've also divorced myself from is a level of spontaneity, of letting happy accidents happen, and that is fucking me up artistically.

It's one of the reasons I like writing -- I can write in my head at odd moments during the day and there it is. I can put it down on paper later. I had this particular thought sequence about 15 hours ago, and I've been looking forward all weekend to getting it down. And in fact with my writing, having something planned out gives me a framework to get started and propel myself forward in order for a little serendipity to happen.

But making art, for me, is different. For most of my life I just liked putting pen to paper to see what happened, starting in one corner of the page and doodling across it until the space was filled. Or not. It didn't matter what happened -- the joy was in the surprise.

That's what I want to get back to: The Surprise.

So I've been taking the time to just draw, draw anything, copy pictures I like, or write things down by hand and make some pretty letterforms. Whatever catches my fancy. Just to get my hand moving.
This week I've been drawing trained bears. Not to flog a really tired cliché, but -- it's all good.

In totally unrelated news, it's 38˚ and pouring rain and there are two raccoons having hot raccoon sex up in the big tree in our yard. On Thursday we had the goshawk hanging around. This place is turning into Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom. Kinda cool for the Bronx, though.
Oh, and I updated all the links on my sidebar to reflect what blogs I'm reading these days with any regularity and with a whole section for food links. Enjoy! Or not.

Eight Random Things

This is a meme that Maia tagged me with oh, ages ago. And I’ve been thinking about it on and off. Mostly thinking that anything people don’t generally know about me is probably either unsavory or illegal or both, and that there’s probably a reason it’s not common knowledge.

Still, I am nothing if not a good sport, so here for your edification are eight random things about me.

1. Between the ages of about seven and eight, I was obsessed with wolves. Being a bookish kind of girl, I read everything I could get my hands on about them -- Julie of the Wolves, yes, and The Wolves of Willoughby Chase (and I actually had the wonderful fortune to meet Joan Aiken later in life, but that’s another story), but the one that really got to me was Farley Mowat’s Never Cry Wolf. It was the story of his going to live peacefully with a wolf pack – I believe he used the word “community” – in the Arctic, back in the early ’60s. It’s one of those first-person wildlife sagas that has since been accused of all sorts of embellishment and poked full of holes, but at the time I bought into it almost religiously. I wanted to go live with the wolves, painfully so. I’d have dreams where I’d look out the back upstairs window of our house and see a wolf pack trotting down the street, coming to rescue me.

What that says about the “raised by wolves” nature of my childhood I will leave to the reader to decide. But it was a very real yearning for a couple of years there.
2. My first published illustration was in the New York Times when I was 12. That was early 1976, and my dad was taking some time off and staying home with me while my mom went back to school, and back then it was noteworthy in that smarmy way the Times still has of discovering some crazy little trend way way on the wrong side of the curve. We knew someone there who decided it would make a good fluff piece, and when the editor found out I was a budding artist he asked me to do a drawing for it. I was SO excited.
Up until the moment, anyway, when I saw the article with my drawing and it was captioned: Lisa drew this cartoon of her father “househusbanding.” Even at 12, I knew enough to realize how utterly condescending that was. Here I thought I was being contracted as an actual illustrator to create a piece of artwork that would accompany an article in the New York Times with my byline underneath it, dammit, and instead I got a pat on the head.

And you know, the Times wouldn’t do that today. Now, toward the end of the article, it would say something only slightly dopey like Lisa, who is looking forward to her own career in the arts, keeps a keen eye on the family goings-on, above. Or something like that. Somewhere in the past 30-odd years, that aren’t-these-darn-kids-cute tone has mostly disappeared from the mainstream media. But that’s 30-odd years too late for my indignant, insulted 12-year-old self.

3. I have a fat scar going down my midsection from between my breasts to my navel. It’s from a benign stomach tumor I developed when I was 18, successfully removed with a maximum of drama and a long hospital stay, and from which I emerged weighing 99 pounds and addicted to Demerol. Neither of those lasted. I was asked several times afterward if it was a Caesarian scar, which mostly demonstrated a gross lack of anatomical understanding in the guys I went to bed with, and a few times people have wondered if it wasn’t one of those unborn twins with hair and teeth. Which is an awful but very entertaining concept, and over the years I’ve always considered adopting that story and embellishing it. I may yet.

4. During my sophomore year of college I worked for a man who ran a scam gay date-by-mail service, which turned out to be a front for a drug ring. I had no idea of this going in – at first he explained some of my weirder duties, like pasting labels over the old name of the company on their promotional materials, as the result of a lost trademark case. I figured it out soon enough when the angry phone calls started trickling in – “Hey, isn’t this the same as the last gay date-by-mail service that took all my money?” Which it was. In the meantime, there were large amounts of drugs floating around the office – my boss would often nod out mid-sentence – and all sorts of strange seedy characters wandering in and out: hangers-on, whiny druggies, drag queens, credit card scammers.

The boss was one of those magnetic sociopath types who could talk his way out of anything. He was a mail-order reverend, and ran a somewhat unsuccessful male escort service on the side. His brother hung around the office and freebased so much that every so often he’d get monstrously paranoid and pile furniture against the door, and I’d end up being late for class. Eventually it all got too weird for me and I started feeling really guilty for being associated with an organization that took money from closeted men living in the Midwest in their parents’ houses. “These people are not exactly going to call the Better Business Bureau on us,” my boss told me, and in a spasm of conscience I quit the next day. But I have material to last a lifetime, believe you me.

5. When Gideon was somewhere between two and three, he fell down in the playground and chipped one of his front teeth. Not down to the nerve, but it was sharp and it bothered him. So I got a teeny tiny file from one of his dad’s model airplane kits, tucked Gideon under my arm, told him that if he’d just hold still for a couple of minutes I’d fix it, and filed that broken little tooth right down. It didn’t even look that bad when I was done, and he replaced it with a nice big one in a few more years anyway. But for a while I had the redoubtable reputation as the cold-blooded mommy who filed her own kid’s tooth. People came up to me for a month or two afterward, some of them total strangers, to ask if it were true.

If I’d had any sense I would have said “Yep, an’ I worm him myself too, with the stuff from the Agway.” But I wasn’t as funny back in those days.

6. I didn’t get my driver’s license until I was 28. Eh, I was a city girl.

7. I have two tattoos, both of my own design. One is on my left inside ankle, a leaping brook trout, which I got when I was 33 and I split up with my husband – ’nuff said. The other, which I got when I was 18, is on my right hip. It’s from a 17th-century drawing of the skeleton of a dragon that was said to live outside Rome. I riffed on it a bit, left out the base and instead gave it a rose clutched in its claws, which is the only color on the entire tattoo. I still remember sitting in the library on Second Avenue and Ninth Street at one of those long tables, paging through some reference book – back in the day when I used to do such thing, rather than surfing airily over the internets – and finding this picture. It sparked me right away, some indefinable shock of recognition, and I wanted a tattoo of it immediately. I’d wanted one since I was 14, but hadn’t known what it would be – only that I’d know when I found it.
Both of them are kind of old and faded now. At 18 I wasn’t thinking much about the possibility of getting pregnant and ending up with stretch marks running through it, and even though the guy who gave me the second warned me that ankle tattoos don’t age well, that’s where I wanted it.

I don’t regret either of them. I toyed with the idea of getting a third for a long time – I was thinking one of these
on my shoulder, in black – but I think the window may have passed for that. I guess you never know, though.

8. I have never gotten a manicure. A pedicure once, and I really liked it because I have a bit of a foot thing going on, but I have too many cosmetic feet problems to feel good about ever going again. My nails are generally short and kind of scrubby-looking – when they posted the rules for hand and nail care back in junior high or whenever it was we were supposed to learn that kind of thing, I must have been elsewhere. I push my cuticles down, don’t bite my nails down to the ragged bloody quick, file them when I remember to, and moisturize a lot – although I also wash my hands a lot, which kind of cancels that out on a regular basis. But my nails never look good. I also cook, garden, type, and generally use my hands hard – but other people do these things and have attractive nails. Once again, an item of adult cosmetic hygiene that has managed to totally escape me.