Musings

Trying to Find Happiness

Karen

The Art of Happiness :: Page 18

Now that the third quarter of the school year is behind me, I’m finding a bit of relief from the non-stop essay grading that was consuming all of my evening and weekend time. The 3rd quarter is when I relentlessly try to prepare my seventh graders for the Califonia STAR Writing Assessment, which is, in many ways a mockery of everything I try to teach my students about writing. They had one hour to read a two and a half page story and write a response to literature essay about it. One hour to read and analyze the text. One hour to plan, write, and proofread. No feedback. No peer editing. No revisions. How many people do you know (remember we’re talking about twelve year olds here) who could write a solid essay which traces the development of a character and analyzes theme in an hour? But no matter. It’s part of the state testing madness, where the ability to answer multiple choice questions or write a single draft of an essay are valued over trivial things such as creativity, problem solving, teamwork, and critical thinking, and the sheer joy of reading and discussing a piece of literature.

The rain is pouring down right now; a few minutes ago it was hailing. And when I opened the door and reached out my hand to touch the tiny white pepples of rain, the smell of battered anise floated over me.

I’m trying to make time now to work on my altered books again and have decided to do some more pages in the continuing saga of my Altered Book Journal :: The Art of Happiness . The two pages I just completed are not my favorites, but they’re something. The two colored squares I chose stretch my color complacency to the brink of disaster. But I feel the need to keep creating, no matter how I struggle with my art right now.

A big thanks to everyone who has written to me regarding my mom. Many have taken the time to let me know that I am not alone. Thank you for the encouragement, support, and reassurance. Even though you are all strangers, your words of comfort make me feel as though we are friends.

No Altered Books — No Art at All

Karen


Fear

How does one continue to create art when a big part of your life is unraveling? I know some people find that art helps them work through their grief, but I can’t seem to make it work that way for me.

As many of you who read my blog know, my mother has Alzheimer’s. Two weeks ago, she took a dramatic turn for the worse, refusing to eat or drink for four days, until my father was finally forced to admit her into the hospital. I spent five days in the hospital with her, holding her hand, talking to her, talking to doctors, nurses, dieticians, physical therapists, coaxing her to eat and drink. It was exhausting. In the middle of three art projects, I have been unable to pick up where I left off since I returned home. My mind constantly goes back to her, weak and wasting away with no desire to eat or drink. Sleeping most of the day. Falling asleep as I try to get her to eat another bite of vanilla pudding. Everytime she reluctantly takes a bite, she makes a terrible face, as though I had just fed her the most horrible tasting medicine in the world. And then she closes her mouth and shakes her head no; I try again later and the process repeats.

The doctor says that this is a normal progression of her disease. Her brain apparently is not receiving hunger signals from her body and her tastebuds no longer recognize even the foods she once loved. I sit next to her while she’s sleeping, holding her fragile hand. She wakes up and looks at me; I wonder whom she sees. She smiles and says hello and tells me that she loves me. When the nurses come in to take her blood pressure, she accepts their good-natured prodding, then looks at me and winks. She’s humoring them, afterall. That spark of life and wit — I cling to it until it disappears.

Then they discharge her, saying there is nothing more they can do for her in the hospital. As they remove the IV and the foley bag, I feel like I am watching them remove her life blood, and I suddenly long for the soothing beeping and light from the LCD screen.

At home, she spends most of her time sitting in her lounge chair by the window, sleeping, while we flutter around her trying to do useful things. I stay at my father’s house for as long as I can, but soon I have to return to my job and my family and my life at home. I kiss her on the forehead and tell her I love her and wonder if I will see her again. I’m glad to be leaving, thinking it will bring some relief from the sadness, and then immediately regret the feeling. When I’m away, I feel as though I’m abandoning her; when I’m there, I feel helpless.

It’s hard to get into a routine at home. My brain is fragmented. I have to be “on” in front of 145 seventh graders each day. I have to grade essays. I have to plant bulbs. I have to wash dishes and pay bills and make sure my son does his homework. There is no time and no inclination to pick up a paintbrush or open a book. Those projects have to wait.

Spirit of Cat

Karen

Almost exactly a year ago, my cat died. Here’s what I wrote about it at the time:

1/11/05
We buried our cat today. She was fifteen years old and had been ill for a while– frail and fragile and not eating very well. I knew she was dying. I thought I was ready for the day, but when she didn’t come home yesterday, and then last night, with the rain coming down in torrents, my heart prepared for the worst.

I thought about her all day at work. Maybe she had squeezed into an open cupboard in the garage. Maybe she was stuck in a closet somewhere. But surely I would have heard her delicate mew like I always did when I called her.

After work, I walked around the house, called her name, which was Cat because nothing else really seemed to fit. She had adopted us and had been a perfect fit for our young family– aloof in that wonderfully cat-like way, but also eager for a lap and a snuggle now and then. I looked for her under favorite bushes and trees where she would cool herself on warm summer days. Then I opened the back gate to look into the field, and that’s where I saw her, half way down the hill, a raggedy white heap of fur. I called her name, still clinging to the hope that she was alive. But she didn’t move, and I knew that she was gone.

I hated the idea of leaving her there until my husband got home from work, but I didn’t have the courage to go through the deep green grass and bury her alone.

It took too long for him to come back from work. I kept going outside and looking down at her there, drowning in that impossibly green grass. I was worried about the crows or turkey vultures or- whatever- getting to her before we could. I watched over her from a distance until I was so cold I couldnt’ anymore. I tried to occupy myself with chores around the house, like putting the dishes away– there were the treats we were trying to get her to eat. Putting stuff away in the garage– there was her litter box. You know how it is. Everything becomes a sudden reminder when the day before those same things were practically invisible in their mundane normalcy.

Yes, I know she was just a cat, but no one who has ever lost a pet would ever put the “just a” in front of their pet’s name with any real conviction.

Finally, Michael came home. Lucky for us, the soil was soft. We wrapped her body in an old red towel. I wanted to look away, but I couldn’t, as Michael lifted her already frozen body from the deep grass and into the hole. I didn’t want to see her face, but I couldn’t look away, one last time. But it wasn’t her I saw; not any more. And so now, I have to force that last second image out of my brain and replace it with all the ones I have from the years when she shared our house and our lives. Blue-eyes, apricot nose and ears, long soft fluffy white fur and tail.

Good-bye sweet Cat. You had us longer than any other pet of mine. And I am going to miss you.

What made me think about this is that yesterday I was working out in my backyard. Saturday’s rains had washed the sky into a luminescent blue and the fields are once again a glowing green. I dumped some leaves into the field and looked down to the place where we had buried Cat and thought about her, and how she had died just one year ago.

I went back to my work, returned to dump some more leaves, and as I looked down into the field again, saw with amazement a white cat sitting in almost the expect spot where we had found our own cat’s lifeless body. This cat bore an eery resemblance to our own, with the signature apricot ears and nose and piercing blue eyes. I spoke to her, and she meowed at me and quickly ran away. I had never seen this particular cat in our neighborhood before. Maybe by remembering Cat, I had conjured up her sweet spirit. At any rate, it was a very strange coincidence that made me think of the journal entry I had written the day she died.

Mom Doesn’t Know Me Today

Karen


Mom and I at Christmas

From my journal dated 7/3/05

Mom doesn’t know me at all today. She’s tolerating me like a house guest . . . barely. When she got dressed this morning, she put on long johns and underwear. When I suggested that she put on some pants or shorts, she asked me, “Why? What difference does it make?”

“We don’t wear long johns in the summer,” I replied.

“Why do you care?” she asks.

“I just don’t want you to be too hot. It’s so hot outside.”

“I’ll be fine. Don’t worry about it.”

“Okay,” I say.

Dad comes in to talk to her. I walk away but linger in the other room to listen to their conversation. Mom says, “Leave me alone. Don’t bother me, and tell that girl to stop telling me what to do. She deeps coming in here and checking on me every five minutes. I’m going to leave if she doesn’t stop it.”

“That girl is your daughter, and she’s just trying to help,” says Dad.

“No she’s not. And I don’t need her help.”

I bite my lip and walk away. I hurts so much inside to hear her talk this way. My dad says not to take it personally. It’s just mom’s illness. I know that intellectually, but it’s too soon for me not to care, not to feel sad and hurt and emotional about being the stranger that Mom doesn’t want in her home.

From my journal dated 7/14/05

Mom is sitting next to me at the table on the porch. She’s sorting flower heads and seed pods into beautiful little rows and clusters. We sit a while. I’m reading. She looks at me and says, “Do you know Karen?”

“Why, yes I do. I’m Karen.”

“You are?” she asks, amazed. “No, I mean the other one.”

“You mean your daughter, Karen?” I ask.

“Yes. Do you know her?”

“Yes, I know her. I am her. I am Karen. Don’t we look alike?”

“Well, yes, you do,” she says smiling.

“You’re my mother. And I’m your daugher, Karen.”

“Oh, I am so sorry. I’m so embarrassed. How can I not know my own daughter?” she wonders.

This is what I’ve discovered since that day. Bad days come and go; she’ll know who I am one moment and not know me the next. It’s hard to believe, but the pain of her not remembering me lessens with time. I just try to enjoy each of those precious moments when I’m her daughter again and don’t dwell on the times when I’m not.

I don’t try to convince her who I am any more because it’s not productive. If she thinks that I’m someone else, I just talk to her as though I really am that person. If she thinks I’m her sister or a different daughter, I just go along with it because I don’t want her to feel bad about not knowing. If she thinks that her sister Louise is still alive and talks about her as though she is, I swim with her memory.

And I don’t tell my dad how it hurts anymore. I write about it, and I talk to my sisters and husband instead. My dad is dealing with it too, and it just adds to his stress and heartache when he knows how this whole thing is affecting me. Can you imagine . . . for a time Mom slept in the recliner in the living room because she said it was wrong to sleep with “that strange man.”

They’ll be celebrating their 50th wedding anniversary in March.

What Inspires Me

Karen

I recently visited Sheila’s blog DelineationDotOrg and left a message for a post she’d written about her Crisis in Art. I could relate to much of what she was talking about and left a message of my own. The next day she sent me the following email: You and I need to have a long talk… Especially about those lovely reliquaries. I’ve been wanting to make one, but I haven’t a CLUE where to start. ~Sheila

I’ve been thinking long and hard about what advice I could give her about “where to start.” Maybe she wants to know the mechanics, the “how-to” behind making the reliquaries. Or maybe she just wants a kick in the butt. I don’t know Sheila at all except that she makes some very cool collages that she posts on her blog. But it got me thinking about my own process of beginning a piece of art, and that seemed like something worth writing about.

There are a lot of things that inspire me to create the art I do. The idea behind my Reliquaries was inspired by a magazine I picked up in the doctor’s office where I found photographs of a home filled with antiques and gorgeous calendar reliquaries hanging on the walls. They were like small architectural gems. I love the beauty of architecture in art, so it got me wanting to create my own.

Sometimes I’m inspired by the smallest things: my second son’s baby teeth, a lock of my oldest son’s blonde, blonde hair (which he now dyes jet black, shaves, and mowhaks for special occasions), or a fishing lure. My most recent altered book was inspired by a baby doll that I found lying in the gutter a couple of years ago. That doll had been sitting on my cluttered bookshelf, just waiting to be enshrined. It was the idea of children soldiers that finally got me moving.

Other times I’m inspired by a piece of beautiful paper. In one of my favorite stores, I happened to come across some incredible paper that I’d never seen anywhere else. So I bought it in several different styles and colors and once I started working with it, I didn’t stop until I’d used every piece. When I went back to the store six months later, it was gone.

I have been inspired by a shade of paint that I bought– Golden’s Quinacridone Gold– and used it in a series of collages I did called Mixed Media Collage :: Woman’s Ideal of Man.

I’ve found inspiration from old postcards, photographs, holy cards, and pictures in books.

And of course, my number one source of inspiration is the book itself, particulary book titles, chapter headings, and text. I wouldn’t have created the same set of collages with the Quinacridone Gold paint if the book chapter I opened to had been something other that “Woman’s Ideal of Man.” The title, the paint, they both swam in my mind and caused me to move in the direction I did with those collages. So much of it is just kismet– opening a certain page in a book, finding the paper with vintage clown images for Clown Art Reliquary :: Angel’s Bone and then the bone, and then the clown pin, and then the red fringe. What makes something fall together that way? It’s luck, fate, magic, fun work, an obsession for collecting– all these things inspire me.

So . . . decide on the medium- canvas, watercolor paper, board book, regular hardcover book, board, bottle . . . Or . . .find that special thing that lights a spark of an idea inside . . . a feather, a photo, a crushed can, a piece of bone . . . Or . . . find a color of paint that matches your mood or sends a little shiver of optimism through you.

Or . . . Don’t wait. Don’t think. Just plunge in and go! Who cares how it ends up? If it’s crap, toss it or hide it, or give it to your best friend who’ll love it because she/he loves you. Then go on to the next piece, and make it a little better. Just keep going, because in twelve months if you don’t create something, you’ll still be a year older.