Smudge It! Charcoal drawing workshop series hosted at the friendly and charming Margaret Lane Gallery at their new Corbin location in Hillsborough, NC, for 3 Wednesday evenings in June. Materials supplied. Take home your own charcoal set! You can save and sign up for all three, or you are welcome to just take one at a time. Details here.
My grandmother, a noted boxer breeder and handler, and former dancer, was eccentric and charming. She struggled with alcoholism and mental illness. And she was one of the most inspiring people I’ve ever known.
My grandmother sits on the bottom stair in the darkened dining room, head in her hands. She is babysitting for my brother and I, who are playing hide-and-seek on the main floor.
Because I am “It,” I’m on the landing, counting to 10, while my brother hides somewhere upstairs. I’ve turned the light on the stairs on, because it’s scary dark. This wakes up Mawn, who gets up unsteadily and staggers over to the wall and flicks off the light, saying, slurring her words, “If you’re hiding, I’ll just turn off the light.” She goes and sits back down. I explained carefully that my brother was the one who was hiding, and turned the light back on. I like to look at myself in the ornate gold-framed, full-length mirror on the landing, which also dimly reflects my grandmother sitting at the bottom of the stairs, hunched over, back towards me. And I am afraid of the dark. She gets up again, and the dialogue and moves are repeated a couple more times. My brother and I decide to play a different game.
I was also deathly afraid of ticks. My brother and I would help Mawn in the Spring pull their swollen, gray-brown bodies off the ears of her show boxer dogs and watch as they bubbled and turned black when she set fire to them in a green glass ashtray. Even though I’d occasionally find one crawling on me, never one attached, I knew that one day there’d be a tick with my name on it in that house.
Papa had left Mawn long ago (I barely remembered them living together), but he’d left behind a closet full of his clothes and shoes smelling like him, of leather and Camel cigarettes. Sometimes I go stand inside that closet to feel close to him. Mawn never threw away his clothes.
Mawn has a much larger, walk-in, cedar closet full of beautiful clothes she saves for the ghost of her past to wear. Pink lace, linen, green velvet and wool jackets and skirts and dresses, all with matching shoes. When I got older, the clothes fit me, but the shoes were too small. She also has a collection of wild, eccentric straw hats ornamented with butterflies, or giant plastic dice, or little stuffed bluebirds, or a little stuffed plastic boxer, that she wears in the ring at the dog show, so people will ask who is that crazy lady with that beautiful boxer dog.
a portal to the underworld
My brother and I understand that Mawn’s house is a portal to the underworld, frequented by ghosts from the past, ghosts of champion boxers, the ghosts of her father and mother. She has pictures of her mother and unidentified relatives in a box under her antique, horsehair mattress bed. Her father’s cremated remains are in a closet on the third floor, in a box wrapped in brown paper with a string tied around it, and a mailing address and name on it which I did not recognize. My brother and I occasionally visit that closet and take down the box, thrill to feel its weight, and shake it, hoping to hear bones rattling, but only hear SSHHH – SSHHH, the sound of ash shifting side to side. Cremated remains of her deceased champion dogs are there, too, in plain little cardboard boxes in a drawer in a black, dusty antique dresser in the same room that had the closet with our great-grandfather’s ashes.
She decided a long time ago for us to call her “Mawn,” because it sounded French – so “chichi.” She had played with the ideas of “Mawn and Pawn,” and “Moppet and Poppett,” for herself and my grandfather, but when I looked up at my grandfather and called him “Papa,” that moniker adhered to him, and my grandmother had content herself with “Mawn.” My father knew a little French, but my siblings and I never got very far beyond “parlez-vous français?” My grandmother also says, “treasurely,” and “toote suite,” a lot, too. I don’t think my grandmother was, at all, French, or had ever been to France. Unfortunate, for I’m sure she would have turned heads in Paris.
My father, her only child, is a classically-trained pianist who can play anything from Beethoven to Broadway classics, but my grandmother plays by ear. She bangs out her own parodies of showtunes at the expense of her rivals [most notably Jane Kamp, a prizewinning handler) and always finishes with a flourish and a laugh. One was, “You Must Have Been A Beautiful Doggie” after “You Must Have Been A Beautiful Baby.”
Oh, you musta been a beautiful doggie
You musta been a beautiFUL pup!
Prancin’ around at shows, way upon your toes,
Holdin’ your beautiful boxer HEAD up!
And when it came to winnin’ blue ribbons
You really showed the other DOGS how,
And now you’re a champ, and you didn’t need JANE Kamp!
Oh, doggie, look at you NOW!!
Mawn is a hard worker, tirelessly taking care of her dogs 24/7. We always see her in grimy khaki shorts or skirt, and white button-down blouse and scraggly gray-blonde hair. She is cleaning the dog pens, or feeding the puppies, or training the young dogs on lead. She keeps pieces of cooked chicken livers in her pockets for rewards. She is smushing the ground dog meat through her strong, leathery fingers with thick, chipped red fingernails, mixing it with cottage cheese, powdered “pablum,” and vitamins and serving it in stainless steel dog dishes to her weaning babies.
My grandmother has a green Amazon parrot named Mike, who can imitate exactly her greetings, exclamations, and phone conversations. He also takes special delight in calling her special pet brindle boxer, “U.S.” (short for “U.S. Male”), who comes running into the kitchen and looks frantically around, every time. U.S. and I were born on the same day, and same year. We shared our birthday cake and ice cream together until he died after we turned 13.
The kennel is spacious, windowed and airy, and has long runs that are meticulously hosed down. The dogs are free to run in and out of the building. It has fans and air conditioning (we don’t in our house), and a grooved rubber-topped grooming table with a noose, and with drawers fragrantly full of grooming supplies. It is partially shaded by a large maple tree in front. Bright yellow ribbons of Shell No-Pest strips hang from the ceiling, covered with flies. My grandmother keeps fresh newspapers and cedar chips in the dogs’ large beds. She also regularly exercises them individually outside, although on one occasion, two escaped together and ran off to kill some of our neighboring farmer’s chickens.
I remember one of the boxers getting a tomato juice bath after an encounter with a skunk.
In one half of our garage were several columnar stacks of newspapers my grandmother and my parents collected for her dogs’ beds. My brother and I would browse through and take out the comic sections.
birthing suites for puppies
The pregnant boxers are brought into the bathrooms of her house, and special birthing suites are arranged for them there. My brother and I run down from our house to hold the little ones, feel their squirmy soft bodies in our hands, smell their milky puppy breath, and let them suck on our fingers with with their little square toothless pink puppy mouths as their mother watches anxiously, but still trusting.
Sometimes my brother and I help Mawn with chores and training puppies, and are treated to barbecue potato chips and tomato juice with celery sticks, which we never have in our house. (Our parents didn’t drink Bloody Marys.) These treats were also available whenever she threw large afternoon soirées on her stone terrace, inviting all the well-heeled dog people she knew. Then, she’d wear stylish clothes with large red plastic earrings, red pumps, and jangly silver bracelets, Chanel #5, dark red lipstick and painted-on eyebrows. She’d greet us at the door with a strange sideways kiss – she’d pucker up her crinkly mouth and come right at our mouths, then at the last second, her mouth would swerve to the side and she’d go, “mmmMWAH!” with a loud smack on our cheeks. Maybe people did that in France.
Sometimes Mawn relaxes on the front lawn, kicking back in her lounge chair with a Scotch on the rocks, slathered in QT suntan lotion, in her dirty khakis and bra and white sunglasses, flexing her red-painted toenails. If we go out with my parents (we lived up the hill in another house on the same property, and shared the gravel driveway), my mother is always mortified to see her sitting out there like that. We live way out in the country with only occasional passers-by, still, SOMEONE might see her, almost topless!
My grandmother never moves her own furniture. Every chair, every lamp, every picture, every little knick knack has its own fixed, perfect position for all time. But every time she babysat for us, she rearranged my mother’s furniture. Then, when she went home, my mother moved it all back.
my grandmother never moves her own furniture.
First Mawn and Papa, then just Mawn, lived in the main old Dutch Colonial house on the partially neglected 60-acre estate way out in the backwoods of New Jersey, but within commuting distance of NYC. My parents and my younger siblings and I lived in what used to be an old carriage house up the gravel driveway.
After my grandparents separated and divorced, they never spoke to each other again. At family get-togethers, we could never tell if one was even disturbed by the presence of the other by their animated, cheerful conversation with everyone ELSE.
Then we got it worked out so, during a holiday, we would see Papa in the morning, and Mawn in the evening. My mother would cook something and we’d all walk it down to Mawn’s house. Here and there at Mawn’s house, my siblings and I would find strange exotic candy never featured at my parents’ house: peppermint curls, licorice sticks, mints, candied citrus, petit fours, fruitcake, and turkish delight.
Mr. Conover lived alone, way down the street. You couldn’t see his house from her house, or our house either, for that matter, but my grandmother would get calls from him late in the evening to please shut up her barking dogs. She, being heavily in her cups by that time, would turn on the outside floodlight, go out to the kennel, and from the safety of my bed, I could hear her slamming 2 metal garbage can lids together like cymbals, and yelling at the dogs, “SHAAADAP! SHAAADAP!”, probably more for Mr. Conover’s benefit than the dogs. Probably this could have been avoided had she brought them in every night, but sometimes she left them out in the runs to bow-wow at the moon or deer or whatever was nocturnally rustling in the apple orchard.
the party line
We have a telephone party line with my grandmother. Sometimes the lines get crossed, and we intercept Mr. Conover’s calls to my grandmother, and can tell by his slurred speech that he is just as heavily into his cups as she was into hers. They must have some lively conversations.
Before Papa left Mawn, she had helped him pull my sodden, lifeless, 4-year-old body out of a partially frozen, slushy, brackish pond. My grandfather gave me artificial respiration, and I survived to become a grandmother myself, and write this little story about her. It has been postulated that had my grandparents not been distracted by their arguing, they would have seen my brother and I coming down the hill (my mother sent us on an errand to borrow a can of beans), and this drama might have been avoided. My mother said that she had called to alert them that we were coming, and had asked them to watch for us.
My grandmother stretches out her arm, demi-seconde. Her dental bridge hangs loosely when she smiles. 20 years later, I come to visit from Houston, Texas, where my family and I live now (I am living with my husband), and find she has lost her mind. She has been eating mayonnaise with a spoon out of a jar. After I took her grocery shopping, she adds sliced bananas covered with sugar to the dog food for the 2 obese dogs in the kitchen, and claims, “But I’ve always done this, and they LOVE it.”
20 years later, I come to visit and find she has lost her mind.
The 8 dogs in the kennel she has forgotten; they are skin and bones, so sad to see. The SPCA comes and puts them down. A friend of hers arranges for this on the 2nd day of my visit, and takes her to get her hair cut while this happens. I stand out in the backyard by the cherry trees and cry and scream when the dogs are put down. I don’t watch. I beg the SPCA lady to let Mawn at least keep the 2 overfed, old dogs that she has in crates in the kitchen whom she afterwards feeds the sugary bananas. The SPCA lady lets her keep them. I show the SPCA lady Mawn’s impressive collection of blue ribbons and trophies. I can’t stop sobbing.
The SPCA also lets her keep her special pet brindle boxer, this one named “Taster,” who runs around free. Turns out that Taster is barely house-trained.
I end up staying 6 weeks. I apprise my father of the situation. He sends a little money. I find a wad of cash rolled up and stashed in a closet, and I pay her utility bills. Now the lights will be kept on, and we can put the trash out by the road for pickup, instead of her throwing it in the brook and watching the water, “Swish, swish it all away!” My father and brother come up for a weekend and clean out the filthy den where she sleeps, watching the old tv with all her clothes on. My father fires her lawyer who was hunting in her woods and ostensibly keeping an eye on things.
I convince her to take a bath, and she does, under my supervision. I buy her new clothes. I take her out to a little hole-in-the-wall in town for a pizza, and she cries while she eats it. It IS really good. There is oregano in a shaker on the table.
don’t feed the dogs bananas and sugar
I scold her for giving the dogs bananas and sugar, and she throws a folding table tray at my head.
She wants me to know there are mice in the house. When we hear them running in herds over the low ceiling in the kitchen, she points upwards, and in a stage whisper says, “The dogs. The dogs.” She wants me to know there are deer in the yard. She points outside and says, “The dogs. The dogs.” She has forgotten my name. She calls me, “My gal” and says, “You were the first.” I nod.
Actually, I wasn’t the first child born to my mother, but I only found that out decades later at my mother’s funeral, as revealed by my aunt. My grandmother never knew. My father might not even have known. Where are you, mystery big brother?
After my father, brother, and I go back home to Texas, where my family had moved when I was 16, after all other arrangements fail, she ends up having to be put in a nursing home. She had to be chased down the street, tackled by the nurse and given a shot before she would go inside the home. When my mother visits a few years later and shows her a picture of me with my new baby, she licks the picture. I don’t know why she was kept in a home in New Jersey and not moved down to Houston where we now lived and could have looked in on her.
Mawn once had her own charm and dance school. She came once to my elementary school and led the kids in a square dance. I didn’t know whether to be proud or embarrassed.
a charmer
She also taught me how to plié and relevé and carry a book on my head. It was a one-hour lesson, then she went to have a drink – I guess I didn’t show much promise as a debutante.
She would run around the dog show ring with her arm outstretched, like a dancer, holding the dog’s head up with the white show leash. She always had muscly, strong dancer’s legs.
My grandmother stretches out her arm, demi-seconde. She smiles her raggedy smile as I dance to the radio around the kitchen while I cook. It had taken me 2 days to clean the rat turds out of the oven. She had tried to clean the dirty, green linoleum floor with a little scrap of toilet paper. Mawn says, “I used to do that” as she watches me dance, then she makes a single gesture with her arm so graceful and eloquent, I stop, breathless, and am deeply, deeply moved.
Slideshow: Pages from The Book of the Boxer, by Joan McDonald Brearley and Anna Katherine Nicholas.
©1977 by T.F.H. Publications, Inc. Ltd. I. The book is inscribed to me by Billie McFadden (last slide), who gave me the book and helped me with my grandmother when I came for my unexpectedly extended visit.
It disturbs me that I’ve never heard of Joan Didion, celebrated author and journalist who died recently, at 87, so I’m trying to catch up. The authors of every documentary and eulogy I’ve read so far, all journalists, seem to feel it’s important to include that she once interviewed a 5-year-old child on acid, maybe to deal with that unpleasantry up front, in case it’s posted in the Comments section by an outraged parent. I am uncomfortably reminded of the 1976 movie, “Network,” about a tv news show in the hands of ruthless executives who will allow any tragedy to play out in front of the cameras as long as the ratings are high.
Joan Didion submerged herself in the Haight-Asbury hippie scene at the height of 60’s free love counter-culture, in order to write “Slouching Toward Bethlehem.” Submerged, but emerging intact, she tuned in, but did not turn on or drop out; she wrote about it. Her 2005 work, “The Year of Magical Thinking,” explored her “secretly crazy” inner life after the tragic deaths of her husband and her daughter. I have not read it. She also had a diagnosis of MS. She wrote about her onerous personal challenges with similar journalistic detachment.
Let me halt here, with the disclaimer that I am not her biographer, nor am I, in any way, a journalist. I simply wanted to set the GPS for a little solipsistic digression of my own.
Why had I not heard of Joan Didion? I read, I am college-educated, I sing in choirs sometimes, I don’t really hang out with people, but I enjoy following on social media both literary types and the people who make their living with their hands, feeling more kinship towards the latter than the former. I am in awe of people that build and make things, and of first responders. They are the ones who best know how to make gravity work for them.
But I do love to watch the charmed literati at work creating conflict and resolution with words, charts, and figures, circumventing gravity like weather balloons, giving readings far above the grunting and sweating populace.
Being bound by gravity as I am, I feel that I am fairly representative of a good-sized population that barely has time to skim the headlines and gulp down a cup of coffee before they are off resolving the crises of the day. Is my opinion important? Most definitely YES, because daily I make decisions that could impact me and others associated with me.
I did not hear of Joan Didion, perhaps because I am a member of that generational slice that did not quite make it into Generation X, but who were under-qualified to be Boomers. We were too young to scream at Beatles concerts, too young to go to Woodstock, and when we finally came of age to protest, suddenly the music changed overnight and the dress code switched from torn jeans and beads to preppie skirts and jackets during the day, and boogie oogie bling at night. I briefly sung in a disco band in a little sparkly black dress, but often could not remember if I had sung the chorus yet or not. Later, I dabbled in performance art, and though it was deeply meaningful for me personally, it was no longer in vogue.
I’ve never been ahead of the trend; I’ve always been 5 or 10 years behind. I love the classic old movies, because their value is immutable. I’ve never quite learned how to dress for success. I’ve only recently become fully outraged over the Vietnam War, and the Civil War, and the West, having seen Ken Burns’ documentaries on Netflix over the last couple years of the pandemic.
I, like many, are not ignorant by choice, but because our daily concerns weigh us down, suffering from gravity as we do. It is an act of courage to just make it through the day, for a lot of us. I am grateful for any time I have left, to reflect, to continue to learn, to question, to do my art and take care of the people and animals that depend on me.
And here’s my latest animation:
While my peers in the 60’s were screaming over the Beatles and the Monkees, I quietly nursed a painful crush on actor Patrick McGoohan. McGoohan played Beethoven in a Disney tv show. (I also had a crush on Beethoven, perhaps because my father frequently played the Moonlight Sonata on the piano as a lullaby for us.)
Years later, I felt that same vestibular sensation watching old reruns of McGoohan in his existential tv series, “The Prisoner.” According to Wikipedia, “The Prisoner” addressed issues of individualism vs collectivism.
That spooky feeling arose again just recently while binge-watching Netflix’ provocative Korean “Squid Game.” While the protagonist keeps asking, “Who is behind all this?”, I’m asking, “What is the key to understanding this series?” Not being an intellectual with hefty philosophical terms readily at my disposal, I had to go away and think about it for awhile.
In “Squid Game,” people who are at the end of their rope, who have burned all their bridges and have nowhere else to turn, are presented with the opportunity to win an unfathomably huge sum of money, however it is not made clear to them at first how horrifyingly high the stakes will be. Like “The Prisoner,” they are gassed and brought to an unknown island where this life-and-death drama unfolds.
The games the players sign a release to play are games they might have played as children, as children play, no holds barred. “When you lose, you die,” literally. They are games of permanent elimination. However, wryly, at any time they can choose the “democratic” option to vote whether or not they want to leave the game and return to their real lives, where disaster surely awaits. Majority wins. It’s only fair.
Human relationships are put under the blowtorch. Who will be on your team? Who will be your best friend? And when the blood-soaked chips are down, will your old, ingrained instinct for self-preservation supersede your new-found love for fellow man? And who is dispassionately watching and enabling these wretched, horrible games? Is it the super-wealthy, corrupt, disinterested, “VIPs”, given a lavishly furnished suite from which to anonymously view and bet on the proceedings, cocktail and gigolo in hand? Or, is it even us, the Netflix viewers, hiding behind the safety of our tv screens?
“Squid Game,” released in 2021 was written and directed by Hwang Dong-hyuk, and stars Lee Jung-jae, Park Hae-soo, O Yeong-su, Wi Ha-joon, Jung Ho-yeon, Heo Sung-tae, Anupam Tripathi, and Kim Joo-ryoung.
There are only 9 episodes – I binged them all almost in one sitting – 5 in one night and the rest the next morning. Now maybe I need to learn Korean to hear what the actors are REALLY saying.
Just lately, I’ve ventured into making tutorials and demos. So far, I’ve made 5 of them. My personal favorite is “Create a Fairy” – a conventional tutorial devolves into a heated confrontation between creator (me) and creation (fairy). The first two videos demonstrate what you can do with digital painting in Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Character Animator CC. The last 3 are strictly digital painting – all screen recordings of digital painting are sped up to hyper-warp speed.
I’m still working on some long-term animation projects, but these short projects were a welcome, temporary diversion, and I do hope some people might find them useful. I know I learned a lot from the process, for sure.
These 3 videos are strictly digital painting. Each one took around 4 hours to create in real time, but I greatly sped them up so that each is compressed to 4 or 5 minutes.
This story has been told so many times in my family that we all are numb to its horrors. There are many things of which I always had to be reminded, because I had no memory of it, such as me being pulled out of the pond by my hair because I was so heavy, in my waterlogged snowsuit and boots, that I could not be picked up, and that later, after resuscitation, my teeth were chattering so hard that I had bitten my tongue all up.
I don’t remember hearing my little brother’s screams as he stood on the slippery snow-covered edge of the slushy pond. He told me later that he was afraid that he would fall in, too. He was still clutching his icicle. My icicle had slipped out of my hands into the pond after I had stuck it in the deceptively smooth, white surface, hoping to discover that the pond had frozen over and that we could play on it like we had slipped and slid hilariously around on it last winter.
But for the record, for those of you that have never heard this story, I’m putting it here, hoping in the retelling that I might find some art in it. “Art is long and life is short, and success is very far off,” as Joseph Conrad once said.
Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, later “Joseph Conrad” was a Polish sea captain who did not learn English until he was in his twenties, and did not start writing until he was 35. He wrote prose like J.M.W. Turner painted seascapes. He wrote unparalleled descriptions of sea meeting sky, the solidarity of human experience, and of the darkness that can overwhelm the individual soul. He wrote “Heart of Darkness,” which was later made into the acclaimed Coppola 1979 Vietnam war film, “Apocalypse Now.”
The darkness I remember, but I do not remember feeling horror or cold as my waterlogged clothes pulled me under. I do remember watching in wonder as exotic tropical fish swam inquisitively around me, a vision conjured up by my brain as my oxygen ran out.
My icicle was beautiful and sparkly and longer than my brother’s icicle. The 2 longest icicles had been broken off the roof of my grandparents’ house and given to us by an adolescent neighbor boy that did odd jobs for my grandparents. I had held it up to the brilliant sky and admired the refractions and the sunlight trapped in it. It was a thing of power and beauty. I gave it a lick with my tongue. “Let’s check on the pond,” I said to my brother. The pond was down the hill, on the other side of the house.
I also remember reciting an “oral report” that I had carefully composed about this experience several years later in elementary school (4th or 5th grade?). Our class was graded on the sophistication of the vocabulary words we used in these weekly reports. I used dramatic phrases like “as I slid down into the murky depths…,” as I bounced up and down nervously on the balls of my feet while synchronously bouncing the fingertips of both hands off each other. I’m sure my performance was hypnotic, but not for the right reasons.
My brother and I had been sent down to my grandparents’ house from my parents’ house to fetch a can of beans. We all lived out in the country on an old estate, with no visible neighbors. Our mission was immediately forgotten upon the gift of the icicles. Thus armed, we turned towards the pond. Was it frozen over yet?
So I lay down in the snow on the edge of the pond, and stuck my icicle in the water. The slush curled back from the thrust, revealing for a moment the cold, brackish, dark water underneath. I smelled the cold, black water, my icicle slipped out of my glove, I made a grab for my beautiful icicle, then I slipped into the pond after it.
I came up for air once, trying in a level-headed way to swim towards my red-faced brother, whose screams I could not hear, then was pulled under and saw the fish. I was told later that my grandparents, drawn my brother’s hysterical sirens, came running out of the house in their bathrobes and fished me out, then my grandfather resuscitated me. I remember opening my eyes under a heap of quilts, seeing a blurry circle of worried faces around me. I was told to drink a glass of revolting, brandy-laced warm milk, or “the doctor will pump your stomach out.” My brother, 3 years old, was left outside, alone in the snow, just outside the door, while this was going on.
Decades later, the sensations remaining in my alligator brain from this experience are the shock and dismay of first sliding into that dank, unreflective water, then the jolt of regaining consciousness later. And the loss of my beautiful icicle.
It was an innocuous, very small, stagnant pond in which this drama occurred. No one has ever remarked on its beauty, for it has none, and it does not care. It quietly gurgles on to this day. Without memory or feeling or even art to it. Just frogs.
I’ve recently discovered online jigsaw puzzles. They are a great way to relax, so I made one of my kitty, Eadweard. You can play it, too. You can also make your OWN puzzle with your own photo, which you might find even more enjoyable. It’s ridiculously easy to do on that website, so no excuses.
Go here to play my puzzle, and let me know what you think.
One of my favorite bosses once accused me of being a little “zany,” and at times I suppose I am, however one of the things on my serious side is choral music. I have loved singing with choirs since I was a kid. The feelings that are generated while standing shoulder to shoulder with singers on either side run very deep.
Dance does the same thing for me.
When I was a kid, my brother and I would make a big deal about making a hike up the ridge to visit the “springhouse” deep in the greenly moving, tall woods. I suppose this was our well, but not too clear on this. We’d pack a snack of raisins and candy or something to sustain us on our journey (it really wasn’t THAT far away). It was a small, decaying clapboard structure with a door held shut by a simple hook and eye.
When one lifted the hook and swung open the creaky door and peered inside (after the daddy long-legs scrambled over each other to get out of the way, clumsily and annoyed) over the ripply surface of the dark, bottomless water would puff a mysterious, woodsy, minty smell, cool air would caress your face, and you could hear a faint gurgling. We’d stare in, silently and reverently, for a couple minutes, then close the door, and, spiritually refreshed, make our way back down the ridge.
This springhouse experience is how I would describe my feeling of singing in choir. That gentle stirring of cool, dark, fresh, sweet water deep inside.
I also enjoy creating my own multi-harmonied improvisations which you can listen to here.
So I’m beginning an archive here to which I will add, from time to time, as they occur to me, some recordings of choral music that I love. Enjoy!
Beginning with “Sleep,” by Eric Whitacre.
“Let My Love Be Heard” by Jake Runestad
More to come.
This is an email I composed immediately after the 2005 Hurricane Rita evacuation. I was exhausted. The evacuation was horrendously mismanaged. Some lost their lives on their arduous routes out of the city of Houston if they didn’t leave far enough in advance. Since Rita, which was not a direct hit, there’s been other hurricanes, most notably Ike (2008) and Harvey (2017), that have grievously impacted my former community.
Saturday, September 24, 2005
This is a “pre-positioned” email. In other words, I’m writing this before I am able to send it, as the house that is sheltering me is not wired for the internet. This is much like the relief forces that were “pre-positioned” (in the words of Houston Mayor Bill White and Texas Governor Rick Perry) to alleviate suffering post-Hurricane Rita. But for some reason, no politician in charge had the foresight to “pre-position” relief agencies along the evacuation routes taken by the 2.8 million that were asked to leave Galveston and Houston, and, like us, were forced to either drive continuously for 24 to 34 hours to reach safe destinations, or forced by the hundreds to stop at the side of the road in the 104 degree heat, out of gas or broken down, many seen with babies on their hips and small children and animals.
On the road to Palestine
Wednesday, September 21, 2005
We leave at 5 p.m. from Galveston to travel I-45 to my husband’s Aunt Ruth’s house in Palestine, TX. The sun sets. At 3 a.m. we had only gotten as far as FM 1960, a little north of downtown Houston. The bright streetlights bathe the congested freeway and service road with surreal yellow light, illuminating all manner of vehicles bumper to bumper as far as the eye can see, all inching their way out of town, all carrying their most valued possessions.
Earlier, we had passed a huge trailer transporting Arabian horses, and a pickup carrying birds in birdcages. We rarely go faster than 5 mph. My husband is driving our Toyota Tacoma truck with our computers and financial records and extra containers of gas, and I am driving our Camry with our 12-year-old son and two corgis. We are separated before we reach Beltway 8. He stops to call me from a Mobil station, as I am the only one with a cell phone.
It’s a bumpy ride, and we are still driving
Thursday, September 22, 2005
The sun rises again. We are still driving. A sharp pain cruises down my right leg. I haven’t taken my shoes off since I left home. We listen on the radio as, incredibly, Mayor Bill White is still urging people to leave town. But the contra-lane is not opened up till 3 p.m. By then, it’s too late for many people. The freeways and service roads are fatally choked with traffic.
It was surrealistic to witness such a scene, even more so to be a part of it. After 20 hours of driving and knowing the hurricane was gaining on us (the hurricane is moving 14 miles an hour; we are hardly moving at all), everyone starts falling asleep and bumping into each other. Someone in the middle lane bumps into the car in front. The front car doesn’t even acknowledge it. Later I bump into my husband’s truck in front of me. An hour later outside of Huntsville, someone bumps into me. We pull over to the side, there is no significant damage to my bumper – “I fell asleep…”, the other driver says – we shake hands and move on.
Two minutes later, my husband falls asleep and his radiator rams into the trailer-hitch of the pickup truck in front of him. The people of the rear-ended truck (who turn out to be Christian missionaries) load our stuff into their truck, our computers into the back of my car, and my son and our two corgis into their van, and, leaving our totaled little truck on the side of the road, our now 3-vehicle caravan continues onward to Palestine, TX.
We call Aunt Ruth and tell her we are almost there. We’ve been calling her every 4 hours or so and telling her this. We really believe that this has to break up soon.
We lose track of our child and dogs for 6 hours
The sun sets again. It becomes very hard to see. People are pulling off to the side of the road in droves to get some sleep. My car and the missionaries’ truck ahead of me become separated from the missionaries’ van containing my son and dogs (they were leading) and our cell phone service has shut down. The driver of the truck with my husband as a passenger pulls over; I pull over. The driver walks back to my car. I roll my window down. He asks, “Did you see the van? We’ve lost sight of the van!” So we head off towards Palestine again, hoping that we all know we are supposed to meet up there.
During the next six anxious hours on the dark road, my bloodshot eyes are riveted on the tail lights of the truck driven by a stranger with my husband as passenger, and worrying about the lost van with the other strangers carrying my son and dogs. I don’t even know their last names!
The adrenalin this fear produces keeps me awake until our cell phones connect in Palestine and we are finally reunited at Applebee’s and proceed on to Aunt Ruth’s house. We call her. She is awake.
We’re almost there, Aunt Ruth!
Friday, September 23, 2005
Aunt Ruth has been waiting for us for two days, for the duration of a trip that normally would take about four or five hours. We had left at 5 p.m. on Wednesday, an hour before mandatory evacuation of Galveston Island was announced, already exhausted after spending all day strenuously boarding up our home and packing our valuables and hauling them out to the vehicles and upstairs. We arrive at Aunt Ruth’s at 12 midnight on Friday.
We thanked the strangers, who are now our friends, who gave us the lift, and they told us they would drive on to Tyler, TX, [which was hit by the storm on Saturday, the 24th]. We don’t know how to contact them (they have my business card), hopefully they will call us and let us know how they are doing. Palestine only had rain and some wind.
By the way, Aunt Ruth was quick to correct our pronunciation of “Palestine”. She said, ” ‘Pal-eh-STEEN’ is in Texas. ‘Pal-eh-STAHN’ is in the Middle East!”
Recovery
Saturday, September 24, 2005
We took two naps Friday, and two naps today. I’ve drank gallons of fluid to rehydrate. Yesterday night Aunt Ruth took us to eat at Applebee’s and we feasted on steaks, shrimp, potatoes and vegetables, the first sit-down meal we’ve had in three days.
From the parking lot, we could see the calm, lenticular clouds of the hurricane, quietly stacked like a pile of pancakes, belying its ferocity as it raged through Southeast Texas.
On our trip, we had only stopped briefly for two bathroom breaks. We were fortunate to find a convenience store that had remained open, so we stopped there on the way up, and on the way back. Many other stores were boarded up. We stopped at a Kroger, and the manager stood behind the locked glass door and shook his head as I pleaded entry. For two days, we had eaten only cereal and rolls my husband had made a few days before. I had been afraid to drink much because I knew there would be few, if any, bathrooms along the way. People relieved themselves in parking lots. I had carefully nursed a 2-liter Sprite for 31 hours. We kept thinking, just a little further, and we would arrive. We never dreamed that we would just be driving…and driving…and driving.
Yesterday morning, we microwaved pizza my husband had packed in the cooler, then slept most of the rest of the day.
I have been unable to reach most of my friends by cell phone – I’m hoping I can find a hotspot somewhere in Palestine tomorrow so I can send this email!
Wednesday, September 28, 2005
One week later, we make it back home in 4 hours
I am sitting in the coolness of my home in Galveston. Our power is on, our water is drinkable. We have not had any damage, other than a chink in the fence and plant matter strewn everywhere. We left Palestine at 10 a.m. today and arrived in Galveston at 2:30 p.m. – a normal drive time. There were no hotspots in Palestine to use my laptop; there were laptops very considerately set up in Palestine Public Library for refugees’ use, so we were able to at least check our email and send short replies.
Our windows are still boarded up, and black plastic trash bags containing our most precious belongings clog up the house. A Bird-of-Paradise plant that my husband has had for years greeted us with it’s very first bloom! We are glad to be home. The corgis are glad to be home too. Our son is back on my husband’s computer playing computer games. He returns to school tomorrow, and soccer practice tomorrow night.
What infrastructure?
We are glad to have a home to return to, but we are unhappy with the lack of evacuation preparedness exhibited by authorities. We are also unhappy that we were charged $500 for a routine tow and storage of my husband’s truck during the hurricane, but very grateful to the others who stepped forward to help. Our hearts go out to those who now have no home, or who became ill during that long drive, or who lost family members during this extended brutal summer.
We are also glad and grateful to have family, friends and associates like you all to return to. So many have lost their entire communities. Our relationships make our work and recreation meaningful. We are glad you are there.
Wendy Aldwyn
Wendy Aldwyn 