hail with it

the yard is begging for a facelift but it keeps being miserable outside.  I'm taking EMT classes, leaving by 8:45 a.m. and so far we've been cut short two out of the three days I've gone because of response calls coming in.  I've been learning to use the blood pressure cuff and the little finger clip monitor that analyzes the space between the heart beats.  Pretty interesting stuff.  Reading, I've finished the sequel to gone with the wind  which was a real potboiler and I liked it good enough.  Wondering about the summer, if it will ever get here...
Did a painting I called "japanese spring' after the incident in Japan.  Had an easter card from my brother and apparently their airport got blown around in a tornado.  He just bought a new house in the St. Louis suburbs...I guess they're ok according to family but what a thing to happen...
Today I helped the girls next door get the gallery for our women's conciousness raising session and book discussion club.  We generally have the book club on Tuesdays the last week of the month and the consciousness raising gets done on that Thursday, or vice verssa, but we couldn't this month because the girls were away doing their thing so we're doing it today.  I helped mop floors and get it tidied up.  They fed me an egg salad sandwich, which was nice of them.

mermaid icons

I've been working here and there lately.  One day it was absolutely beautiful outside, Saturday.  We got up early and went to the beach at Shipwreck Point where we scoured the beach and cleaned the roadsides
that was pretty much fun.  After that we had barbeque with theother beach cleaners.  Then we came home and unloaded the trash we'd found.  There was a rug and a tire with a rim also.  We tossed the tire and the rug is being cleaned for the rental house.
We're back to Monday now.  Yesterday was Easter Sunday.  I went to the Presbyterian Church breakfast but didn't get up in time for services at the Rock.  Went to Easter Mass at St. Thomas and then had a long nap because the day started so early.  Later on we had Easter supper at By the Bay Cafe and then watched television till bedtime.  I was crocheting a rainbow colored legwarmer. 
Today I am dressed warm because it's raining again.  I have to go to Tops at 3 and then to the firehall at 6 for the beginning of EMT training.  Another busy week lining up it seems.
The mermaid icons have been showing up.  I found one this past week that was oriental in nature but the woman had a fish tail so it qualified as a mermaid.  Not sure where I saw it, possibly the co op when I was in there for juice and milk.  I sometimes feel as though I ought to appropriate the mermaid symbols when I see them but I should just draw them in my own version of what I've seen.  That would be the thing to do.  I have wash on the line from Saturday, getting a nice dose of fabric softener in the rain fall.

Samuel Butler

it was the above named author that put me in mind of new zeland, the book erewhon...which I read in a very tumultous time a few years back.  i was soothed by it and intrigued by the author, who lived about hundred fifty years ago and I know nothing of him.  it appears he was a 'serious' satirist'.  i suppose the clowns who now write for saturday night live would do well to study him a bit...I again exposed myself to the humor of snl.  it again defeated my laughing whereas the purloined video tape (yes, Mrs Woolf, we still have them about) of Adam Sandler doing a takeoff of his sabbath singing would have been the kind of humor to toast my gabotchniks.  there's no depth to humor on snl.  the little fatboy 'big k' doesn't do it.  well he never did.  he's still a kidnik, what do they call those? boychicks?  yeah, that's him...lemmee see...the last macro of the corpse of john belushi...something like that
I sound kind of putzki myself making fun of a show still trying to be on the air
well yeah, we used to write for it, in black humor at 3 am on yahoo chat on sat/sun mornings, sat eve sun morn and laughed until we fell out of our chairs
where's the ability to do that anymore? can I find humor in the fact I'm staring the financial stew with a twisted stumick? nah..I was writing about the Butler book 'the way of all flesh' which kind of rung true, although it too smacked of the worry over one's pitiful financial picture (I look like the grim reaper in the mirror on that one, ishh)
butler's book, the way of all flesh, expounds on the limits of child abuse, in the educated...it was a good thing thought by this narrowminded minister who married a woman he couldn't hardly love but he did and had three children with her once he figured it out...I came away from the book, because it was hardly bearable to read that this minister assaulted his oldest boy for having a lisp, he couldn't say his 'c''s...it was painful to read and quite shocking
i could think in butler's day that the presentation of this child abuse would have been the thing to think on if one were looking toward the victorian era and the happy family of victoria and albert..that this righted the path to that end and thus a family was endowed with the graces it was intended
i would think also that love comes naturally if all else is in place and that such ideas as whaling on a child for speaking as a child wouldn't even have been a consideration...ah, but it was the father/minister himself that had been born without a good cause..that he came into the world was possibly to contain the essence of his wonderful grandpapa..who, as butler tells it, was one of those lights of the world that lands just in the middle of a common everyday settlement of people, individuals of all sorts, to whom his light spreads and things are good...he gives (the grandpapa) by his being among us, the joy of our existence...let's us know, here's why we're here...so his vessel of soul is maintained by his progeny, of whom he only had the one son..who was a prig, a bore, a bastard at heart and so on...according to butler
but, as we bear on in the book, and we do, we can't be putting it down because we're stuck in airports the long day, all day, from early on, we're reading it to find out a little on the advent of victorianism, which it is...and it does create the very fecund environment of victoria and albert and their many children...I do n't want to know about them, but I do know that if anyone read butler's book in his day, they would have thought the child beating passage most cruel..and also the alcoholic wife of the beaten son...who never seems to cut a break in his life until he's grown past most of it, including the raising of his own two lovely children (better off without me, he says)...bummer
what is life if you have kids and aren't there...I dunno, I figure I am, somehow, most of the time, but I'm me too and perhaps that's it, that's the sacrifice of the past centuries that we would now know ourselves a little better, go to a psychoanalyst of some sort and get our rages, dispossessions and so on, ironed out...I should hope that's what we've learned...It's kind of like treading familiar ground, this butler book, kind of peeping in the window and listening to incessant yammering of the quasimodo sort, where the dragons of no faith are ever in the cobwebs and the dust bunnies of life...
he doesn't go in for that sort of detail, butler, he tells a little of a house the beaten son occupies for a time, but only at the onset of the habitation (I'm talking in the vernacular of the book here), rather he goes on a mile about faith, belief in faith, faith as a constant, faith as a moral bankruptcy that it is so poorly interpreted
certainly we had lovely books on the saints growing up - oh yes, my catholicism is coming up like a newly forming volcano here, but I leave it aside to examine the fortitude of the epistle (the way of all flesh)...I also pad away a moment to investigate my own hearth..
 there, situation adjusted, fingers a bit stiff with cold, certainly that is the season, it's dribbling rain outside - we're used to it but it is dreary, so the thoughts about this book are of that sort, that its issues with theology lie buried in the attitudes of the family explored.  there is no joyousness in this family, and I don't recall its name other than it was of the cloth, throughout, the beaten son even ordained into it but not a minister, at last, rather a newborn theologian asking his readership (if there was) to qualify their beliefs in the foundation of his own thought.  That I had a challenge with.
Whereas we may all at some point be recognizable as churchgoers, when the chips are down, we have only our faith to turn to.  Do we?  would we if we knew what I now know about this particular English family?
Well, in a quick moment I recollect that we're never going to be the supreme being that God is.  If anything, The Way of All Flesh makes this a graphic presentation.  Here is the main church in England, I don't think Butler even calls it 'Anglican' though I suppose it must be, what else would it be? I came away not knowing for sure if it was the Anglican church, but I guess if one attends Cambridge and becomes a minister from it, then that must be what he was ordained to be serving in..hmm
What the book does is tell all that is without foundation in belief.  It comes up with the platitudes of belief - that God serves the daily prayer, but we don't see the characters being sustained by this, rather that they survive somehow in spite of it.  Only the original patriarch, the grandpapa early on in the story, has any joy of being in him.  Only he recognizes the true worth of life, that it is to be lived to the fullest.  Butler suggests this grandpapa may have been steered a bit by taking a wife it would appear to be not the most satisfactory spouse, but even this the man makes a good sort from, and they have a child.  It is this child that raises the ugly head of the best of our existence, our original sin in not recognizing life as a state of paradise.  Grandpapa knows well that life is this paradise.  He lives  his life out in this joy as Butler tells it.  Further on his family would have disappointed him no doubt, but had he been there to sort it out, surely it would have been a better thing.  Each child would have known his place in that man's heart one feels assured of it.
In the end the beaten child, whom I now feel confident (again the language of the story) to name as Ernest, whom he was.  Ernest lives to share with the rest of us, through Butler, how we may accomplish our life to the best of our ability.  We may be like a boat at sea in many storms, but if we listen to our inner voice, which we wou ld probably define as 'our soul', we may achieve the peace of knowing our place.  To reflect on how we got here, well, if it doesn't s uit, why bother.  That we are, and shall be, that's what we must do.  The book is an exercise in this  achieving element.  To be saddled with a set of behavior tools that don't suit us, as Ernest was at his father's knee (again and again) may take away our awareness of the essential goodness of being, most of it being compromised by situations that confound us, we may also know that having been born as Ernest was, in the bosom of the church, we may learn from it what not to take away from it.  That while God may be with us from the moment we are born, he does not sit idly by letting us be coddled by his presence.  Rather if we are the people in his service, we may be challenged beyond our ability to actual be human, and become as automatons of the written word of those with whom we share this life.  Did they know heaven on earth, could they understand suffering and death, were they not vile greedy sorts that consumed all in their path?  Some of them, perhaps, but they stand as effigies of the wrong way, and if they are the ones representing what He wants for us, then we know from that it is not what He wants for us.  So that is why Butler wrote the book for his time and for those after, that we may understand from it that we can choose our way, we can be strong, or we can crumble.
Certainly some of those characters in the story did crumble, or were made into clay statutes of their time, like Ernest's parents, who were outwardly the ones we would look up to, as minister and his family, their behavior was exemplary.  This is what also called them to be so cruel to their children as they thought it was called upon them to do so.  Their nature was not allowed to flourish and respond to the light of faith but rather to carry it out as some sort of dire military service, which in their recklessness was never made obvious to them.  They didn't squirm other than to respond to the base needs of their personalities.  As such, you can only surmise to get through it, the story, that this is faith on the surface when confronted with the choice to do evil.  I should survive it even if it calls to me like a siren.   Butler does reflect on Scylla and Charbydis a bit, in the case of Ernest and his choices as a youth, but we know that these are only for him signposts and he learns what the wrong turn can lead to. 
my fingers are still cold and I don't hear the fire crackling...I shall return momentarily
 here's momentarily...fingers again cold...fire is absolutely NOT cooperating, although I've finally made it go..
well...lots to think about with butler's book, but it boils down to live the life you've been given with as much good grace as you can give it..don't dwell on shortcomings but make the most of your opportunities, be enthusiastic, innocent and yet, trust in the Lord, for he knows all and will sustain you in spite of the major obstacles that a person like Ernest must face..to retain one's niaevete in certain danger is to be vindicated, however long that takes, it shall happen...and whatever theology one encounters, temper it with the experience of life for there is where you shall see love and grace in their element, and in no other place, however fine the speech...hehe, like here, haha

countdown to Christmas

I'm pretty sure nobody reads this blog, per se...so I could elaborate on my secret Christmas plan here if I so choose.  But I guess I'd better be careful about it...thinking that to leave from Bellingham on December 23, which would be a creative move on my part, hehe..I'd have about sixteen hundred miles to do and could do eight hundred each day, which would take two days, sleeping momentarily here and there...which I've been doing anyways, arriving on the doorstep Christmas day, sometime.  I'd so like to do it but I'm not probably going to, for reason and another, and am looking into airflights and so on, to see how that goes..
It's going on noon right now..the wind has been howling all night.  An excerpt from Handel's Messiah "For Unto Us a Child is Born" is playing on the Canadian radio station I listen to.  The fire has been burning steadily for several hours but this old house doesn't like to warm up.  I feel like a good book and some hot food a little later. Meanwhile, I'll keep busy figuring out the accounts and wondering what comes next..it's a challenge.

art

I s'pose that if I weren't who I am, I might not even care about the topic, or what it means.  art is something that is contained within one's environment.  Not all of us use it, look at it, like it, or are even aware of it.  I'm kind of in the middle of it because I do it all the time, I find it is the curvature of my earth, so to speak...the interpreter of my existence in real time.  The spirit of me, talking.
I was helping a healer heal someone the other day.  Still kind of regrouping from that one because my mom called up just after we were at the home and told me there was a rumor going around I was bringing a 'devil man' to the lady's house (the one who needed healing).  I got a picture of "Guernica' in my head as Mom was talking.  Yep....ignorance isn't bliss if you're dying and could be helped.  But, one must take the high road or not get there, either.  So, "Guernica"....
Kind of a stark example of what I mean about art being the rudder of my little ship...but I had this other thing, about faith I wanted to share because I guess my friend who's dying is going to die.  I can't do anything about it because that is what she wants...even though I tried to press the logic into her about what it was that was going to happen...there won't be any Jesus at the end of the tunnel for her because he's there watching her suffer and wondering why she wants to do that.

Here's a little prayer from Louisa May Alcott...

A little kingdom I possess
where thoughts and feelings dwell
and very hard I find the task
of governing it well
For passion tempts and troubles me
a wayward will misleads
and selfishness its shadow casts
on all my words and deeds
How can I learn to rule myself
to be the child I should
honest and brave nor ever tire
of trying to be good
how can I keep a sunny soul
to shine along life's way
how can I tune my little heart
to sweetly sing all day
Dear Father help me with the love
that castesth out my fear
teach me to lean on thee and feel
that thou art very near
that no temptation is unseen
no childish grief too small
since Thou with patience infinite
doth soothe and comfort all

I do not ask for any crown
But that which all may win
Nor seek to conquer any world
except the one within
be thou my guide until I find
led by a tender hand
thy happy kingdom in myself
and dare to take command

So the happy kingdom of myself is the awareness, for me, that I can make art, that there is art, that art is what sustains us on the mortal plane.  Brotherhood and the entire can of worms that is humanity, the spirit thereof, if you will, is about being interpreted as such, by art.  Take the movie Hotel for Dogs, for example.  I just saw it so it's fresh in my mind.  Two kids really taking care of some animals with some clever little rigs that feed, exercise and attend to the needs of stray dogs in the big city.  The happily ever after comes with the kids actually running a dog hotel with foster parents.  Wonderful story.  Good for everybody because the comical inventions to keep the pets fed and so on are extravagantly efficient along the lines of a PeeWee Herman story ...
the point is that it was art that explained the kids' need to care for the dogs...better it would be human interest but then that would be "The Soloist"...with Robert Downey, Jr.  Jamie Fox got big kudos for his performance as Nathaniel Ayers, the mentally ill guy that played Beethoven's cello so well.  It was, after all, Beethoven who was playing the music for Fox's character.  Had to have been. The strings would not have resonated for anyone else, quite as well, because Beethoven is a consumate artist.  He has gone to his rest centuries back but he's still here, coming to us as a broadcast whenever his music is performed, by anyone.  Fox included.  Ayers' situation was convoluted because as they said at 'The Lamp' where he was allowed to have the gift cello he played on, 'we don't treat 'em unless they want it, they have to ask for it' , meaning that it is convenient to dispense with someone and also to keep the person dispensed with, if they can't function without some help. 
Point of the Soloist story was that Downey's character, Lopez, wouldn't give up on Mr. Ayers, whereas I, who have been in the field with the psychotics and so on, know a different tack on his situation and that would be that mmm, yes, Fox is psychotically dangerous, but not to himself because to himself, he's not hurtful but does just as he pleases, only sometimes when forced into the corner where he has to confront the issue of WHY he is creative with music, he has to admit he stole it - that ability - from Beethoven himself - and that makes him want to confront who so ever is nearest (I call it the 'food' factor)...physically assaulting them to the point of committing murder.  It's getting so those of us poseurs who only control the art, that is, disseminate it (havening lots of issues with that at the moment but there is another story there as well) are becoming like the restaurant in the old neighborhood "Food for Thought", which I think is a great name for a restaurant and I want to run one by that name someday...

   Well, I feel as though I digress a whole hell of a lot and don't get to the point of the issue by being bogged down in things...real time issues, when the truth of the matter is that I enjoy my day off more fully than I'd ever done till now...the dog standing by the door wagging her tail because she wants a walk...to sit here and write when it would have been time to rush out the door to an office..well, the office has changed but the art hasn't.  I had the most marvelous studio in a warehouse recentlyand all I did all day was kowtow to the muse when I realized that the muse cou ld be exploited I decided it would be a societal thing and so here I am, en tow, to make that happen.

The topic was 'art'...more to come

artist in residence...

it's 4 a.m. and the wind is kicking up outdoors.  The fire has been lit, the animals have been let out, in and out.. I'm wearing two sweaters and a tee-shirt, a pair of jammy bottoms and a pair of thermal pants, socks and slippers, a long knitted cap, over which there is another sweater.. We've had a blizzard and the snow is now melting.  The girls at the gallery are at Lake Quinalt having two days of turkey and spa.  Foster boy is with his real parents.  I've been home alone, keeping the fire warm, trying to complete some creative projects for a show and sale at the Community Center in Neah Bay on the 7th of December.
Yesterday I woke up dreaming about Kenny, which I thought meant that I should start writing.  Well, I didn't.  Yesterday was Thanksgiving.  I planned to go to the Sekiu Community Center for the turkey dinner there.  I would meet my mother and brother.  The guy up the street came down and ploughed out the parking space in front of the gallery next door and left a big pile of snow in front of my car.  I got out the snow shovel and tried to clear a path to back out of where I was parked in front of the house.  I did manage to get the car out but when I went up to put some gas in 'er, the gas station wasn't open.  I didn't want to get over to Sekiu and find out the snow was bad over there.  I thought I would run out of gas trying to get unstuck.  I didn't have enough left in the tank to risk it.  I had made a great big sweet potato, apple, carrot dish because the dinner was potluck, with volunteers cooking turkey.  Never heard from my mother or brother if they made it there or not.  I called them when I got back from the gas station but got the answering machine (it didn't play a message, just clicked on.)  I saw Ted Muralt and his daughter walk by with backpacks.  I figured they must be headed to Sekiu.  I thought about joining them but I wasn't ready to pick up and run.  I had my casserole in a brown crockery bowl: it wouldn't have traveled well walking. 
What I did was put the vegetable dish in the fridge, put some more logs on the fire and watch the snow start to melt.  I fried a steak a little later on, added a romaine lettuce salad and a baked potato with sour cream and bacon bits.  For dessert, I had a slice of pumpkin pie with whipped cream that I had been given.  I made a fresh pot of coffee and drank that with the pie.  No one called to ask if I were going to the turkey dinner or why I wasn't there.  It was a very quiet evening.  I watched movies on Sundance.  My son called from Maui and asked how Thanksgiving Day was going.  I told him that I had been marooned in my own home due to circumstances.  (Time to check the fire.)
The dog is barking, no doubt at the paper girl, although I think it's a bit late in the morning for that (5 am now).  She's usually around by 3, which is about the time I woke up this morning.  Wondering how to manage the rest of the day on 5 hours sleep..  The studio is a wreck and has been for some time.  Every once in a while I get it tidied up but I haven't painted since last winter.  I really miss that I think.  Something inside me feels blue and sort of abandoned when I don't paint.  I do get some good drawing time in when we meet on Tuesdays for our painters' circle.  That's not why I came to the studio though.  Here I intend to give full rein to my creative processes.  I think what's holding me up is building new stretchers.  That's probably it.  I have to take apart the table saw a little bit so I can push the wood through and slice it to size.  There's the jig of course, but it's all dependent on getting things so I can move around in here.  I use the studio as an office among other things.  The basic elements of painting are all here.  It was much simpler without two desks and the cupboards that hold the paint.  Last spring I made a series of containers for ponytail palms that were used at my daughter's wedding. I collected shells and lacquered them with white enamel.  I brought them to the wedding and they were used for gifts to the people who came.
Since that project, I haven't been all that creative.  I've been working on a portrait of myself and my oldest son.  He is 5 years old in the photograph I've been using.  I did a series of drawings and the canvas is still in progress.  I'm not happy with the skin tones, they look a little bluish, so I might just paint it over and begin again, or start a new canvas.  One chair in here is draped with fabric that will be stretched and sized.  Getting up at 3 am doesn't make me feel terribly energetic to get the stretchers built but just thinking about it starts the process, I believe.
We've been having a series of women's support group sessions at the gallery.  I don't know that I'm any sort of mediator but it seems as though I take on that role.  Usually the therapist from the Neah Bay Clinic has a series of comments to make about her staffing issues, patient situations and her coming to the area.  She was last in Colorado so the climate is taking some adjustment.  She was living in a FEMA trailer at Neah Bay and has moved here to Clallam Bay to a very nice modular home on the hill above my house.  I can't see her place for the trees but she has a spectacular view of the Straits of Juan de Fuca whereas here where I am, I can hear the surf but don't see much of the water, just the twinkling lights of Sekiu at night.  When we gather, there are at least four of us, more often five.  We talk about general subjects like what we want to do with our lives, where we think we are at, how to be positive and direct our energy to the achievement of the goals we set ourselves.  It's definitely a consciousness-raising session.
Right now the dishwasher is running.  I could go out and get the paper and climb back into bed and read for a while.    I could go out and get more wood for the fire...I could CLEAN UP the studio and get started building stretchers which is what I really ought to do.  Having moved into this house and started my life here, it's been a challenge to stay on task because so much needs done.  In addition there's the foster kid, who is autistic and a teenager.  Wonderful combination, hehe.  He's fine though, not really many issues there other than it's just the two of us and he is, after all, a teenager.  I find life with him has settled into an expectable routine.  There's another clean up pending in his room, while he's visiting.  Like to just take everything out of there and shampoo the carpets, see if I can find where my dustruffles went off to, if they're lodged somewhere in the bins under his bed.  We painted the room before he settled into it but we never quite got finished with it before we were in.  I could do some finishing up in there, in addition to getting the studio more functional but I do feel a little bit tired from getting up so early.  It's not even time for Bob Mackowitz, who starts his radio show at 6 am. 
I was thinking that I have done my multimedia thing with the art process by getting ready for this craft show.  When I see something that I want to make, I take the materials I think I will need and create it.  For the past few months this has been alternately the garage...oh you should see the nice doors I built for the front of it...the siding, which has been long cedar boards and donated shakes, along with the lids from tin cans that have been nailed to one bottom edge..I'm also painting a mural on the street side.  We stored wood underneath the garage because the little storage area I built got flooded.  I see now that the snow has caved the roof on that little shed, along with the plant place I made that was intended to become a greenhouse.  More carpentry there to be done.  My intention is to create a driveway behind the garage with covered parking and a deck off the back of the house.  Probably won't get to that until summer, in meantime am storing likely wood for that project.  Besides the garage I've been doing the portrait and drawing birds for the mural on the garage.  I haven't tacked in the molding in my bedroom, which was left undone when I put my bed and dressers in there.  I have put up the curtains several times because the cat likes to climb them.  When I was in Maui he brought one of them down.  I've tried to keep organized in the bedroom because it has plenty of built-in cupboards and closet space.  It's hard to do because I'm downsizing from the four bedroom house I was in.  My piano isn't here yet but I think it will be before long.  I practiced for several hours at the last painting session at the Sekiu Center.  That was very fulfilling.  I didn't feel as though I was challenged by not playing at home, rather I enjoyed the sound of the music.  Since there were only two of us that day, I played in the downstairs room and my drawing partner said she enjoyed the music as well.  So I haven't not been doing art, I've integrated it into my daily process, which is what my intention was, just like this blogging exercise.  What I haven't done is read any books.  I haven't been to the library since I moved here.  I can't say why that is, other than I'm not sure what I want to read.  I spend a lot of time watching movies, catching up on the films I've not had a chance to see.  I think I've seen most everything current, including a lot of the popular films of the last several years.  Of course, the library has them available for rental as well but I haven't gotten to that yet because I can see most everything on television, other than the pay per view, which my phone isn't hooked to as yet and probably won't be.
I haven't spoken to my brothers this Thanksgiving.  I wanted to go to St. Louis to visit my brother's new place in the suburbs.  As it turned out, I probably couldn't have made it even if I had gotten the reservations because of the weather.  (Need to check the fire..)
Fire's going well.  Haven't spoken to my other brother in Port Orchard, either.  I guess, according to my mother, that Kitsap County got hit pretty hard with the snow.  We're now into the melting part and there's a slow drizzle, which I expect is coming there way as it passes through here.  We wouldn't have been able to get down there or meet them in Port Angeles as we have done other years.  My mother and brother did well to get to the Sekiu Center, if they did make it there, which I don't know because they didn't call and I haven't heard from them to know if they got there ok.  I would have thought the brother in Port Orchard would have called but he didn't and I only heard from my oldest son.  My daughter called the day before Thanksgiving to tell me what she was up to, lots of people coming for dinner Thanksgiving day, heading to the gym to work out in anticipation of a big feast.  She's starting a second job today.  She'll see how she likes it.  She works as a nurse in a clinic attached to a hospital in Phoenix.  Since my neighbors next door had gone off to the Lodge at Lake Quinalt, there was only the couple across the street, who as it turned out, evidently went to the Sekiu Center for dinner.  I probably could have hitched a ride with them if that's where they'd gone.  She came out while I was trying to shovel out the car and called out 'Happy Thanksgiving' in her pink bathrobe.  It was around noon at that time.  Her husband was piling wood into a wheelbarrow.  They got ready and left around two fifteen.  I didn't know they were going out for supper.  I had a little feeling that I could have dined with them because the girl at the gallery says she eats with them sometimes.  They've never asked me though.  I invited them for a turkey dinner this summer but neither they nor the girls at the gallery came.  Only my brother came and I think he thoroughly enjoyed it because Mom was in Minnesota at that time.  He was batching it.  It occurs to me I could have called my brother in Port Orchard to wish his family a Happy Thanksgiving and probably that's what I should do but I just haven't gotten to it yet.  I'm too busy at the moment keeping the fire going and making things for the craft sale.  That and watching the snow fall, which it did quite a bit of up until yesterday morning, has been the sum of the last week.
I've got some minutes to do for an economic team I'm a part of here.  I should probably get those out of the way and then go read the papers for a while.  I think maybe I wanted to make some observation about life in general but I don't know exactly how to put it.  I'm hustling along, baking bread, keeping the house as clean as I feel like, thinking about rearranging things, getting the bed nice and comfy for when I land there...that's been the sum of my days up to now.  I had a nice trip to Maui in September for my 60th birthday but that seems like ages ago.  Winter really set in which they said it was going to do, but it doesn't feel any more harsh than in previous years.  I was able to trade my windmill frame for manure which I mulched around the transplanted rhodedendrons I brought here.  With this snow and ice we've had,   I think that will probably help them out.  There's a couple of piles of branches to be burned at some point and the creek needs rock where we cleared out the debris that was clogging it.  I got a line on a guy that hauls dirt but I haven't spoken to him about that.  I want to get the rest of the brush out of the way and see what I've got there before I go layering it with fill.  As far as observations go, it's all about staying with the processes of being creative and where that leads.  I look forward to each day and the new things that come with it.  Also cherish the past as the golden opportunity it was.  I find myself referring to my days back East as a continuation of what I do now.  I'm not in a major metropolitan area here and the ability to think clearly about a specific process I want to explore is very easy to do.  As I said above, the phone doesn't ring all that much even though it's a holiday and I've got a couple of days all to myself with lots to do, once I get to it.  Writing at the blog was probably the first task.  The rest of the day awaits!

a book by Collette

I just finished reading The Vagabond by Collette.  She portrays a female divorcee in France, not sure of the year but that doesn't really matter so much.  The divorcee, Renee, is a player in a revue.  She lives alone with her little dog and entertains friends sporadically.  She falls in love with an admirer from the revue, a wealthy gentlemen with 'no visible means' of employment but plenty of money.  Odd how one usually makes a case for wealthy gentlemen, even those pursuing women from the theatre. 
Renee makes it difficult for her admirer, whom she refers to as 'the Big Noodle' because he is like many men she's observed at the performances.  They make mistresses of women such as herself and while she doesn't consider that she is a particularly desirable candidate for this, she falls in love with him after much pursuit.
Renee convinces 'the Big Noodle' to wait for her when she goes on tour with her troupe.  While she is away, it becomes obvious to her that this will never become the enchanting romance she and her lover dream of.  She finds that she has been damaged emotionally by her first marriage because her husband was unfaithful.  Her concept of what love and marriage should be is forever marred and she is too cynical to believe that the gentlemen who offers her marriage is going to remain true to her. 
I found the book quite vivid with descriptions of every day things but when Collette refers to 'a silky mouse' I found that her images, though quite poetic in their visual references, were, like the character Renee, not quite true to their being.  Renee does love the theater.  She describes herself as 'being alive' when she is on the stage and is able to shut out the audience just so she can live in the moment of the performance.  All outside the stage are in another world. 
Collette does not opt for the neat and tidy approach in her story.  She does not go for the 'happily ever after' concept but does go on for many pages of effusive script on the 'being in love' idea only to smash it like a bug with the idea that Renee cannot accept the promise of her lover to love her always, no matter what comes along.  All it takes is for Renee to see a snapshot of him with a young female tennis partner and she is skeptical of the idea of their lives in marriage.  She doesn't accept it. 
Collette does not describe at all how the lover feels when he realizes that Renee will not marry him.  He has waited for her during the forty days of her tour and written consistently, as has Renee.  When Renee tells him that she will not always be the woman she is at 34, he tells her he does not care, that it is she he loves.  She does not believe it and the romance ends.
I didn't find the ending of this book to be satisfactory.  While it is right to express one's doubts and fears about love, one has always the duty to believe in the fact it exists.  It is easy to revel in the happiness it brings, but to cloud the future with 'what ifs' as does Renee with Max, her lover, only serves to justify the ending of the romance because Renee has not the faith to live it and believe in it, to accept it for what it is.  She would rather stick with her stage career, as she sees other women, older than her, who have done so, who have lived a colorful life singing opera in Saigon, pursuing alternative lifestyles.  She sees that she can accept her career, but she cannot accept love everlasting, because that she does not believe in.  She was disappointed once and for her, it will happen again.
I find this personal discovery of Renee unsatisfactory.  Always she was uncomfortable with the courtship of Max and only when he stirred her passion did she respond to him.  Once she did, she was hooked on the thrill of his attention to her.  Away from it she believed that this is all it was, silly passion not likely to enable her to sustain herself throughout the rest of her life like a career in the theater would, where she could adapt the role to her interpretation of it.  She couldn't interpret growing old with Max.  Collette has portrayed a woman scorned who is unable to 'get over it'.  My only thought about Renee is that she should have tried to 'get over' her past life and unhappy marriage and go with the bliss of the new romance, to believe in it and give it her best, which she doesnt seem to think she is capable of doing.  I found this disappointing to say the least.  She was more interested in performing than actually living her life with someone who loved her.  She didn't believe he always would love her and though he offered her marriage, she rejected it.  She wasn't about to be a kept woman and that made it impossible for her to see into what her life could have been had she accepted his proposal.  I found her disappointing, accepting that she was forever skeptical of true love.  It is my belief that one accepts love for what it is, something two people share.