The sport of my mad mother...

Michael Nunley and me...

Looking through an old photo album today, I came across photos from my high school play, the one I 'acted' in. The one I helped with, Henry V, was a much better play, but I only helped with makeup and costumes on that one. I can remember speeches from Henry V - the ones my friend, Nancy Lee, as Chorus had - but none from TSOMMM. I don't think I did a very good job of remembering them at the time, come to think of it. As I recall, it wasn't the best play in the world, but I love these costumes... And the make up!

Wendy, John Samford, Phyllis Wheeler (at bottom), Joyce Fischer at left.

Don't we all look like vicious thugs? The costumes were made out of fake fur and were very hot, as I remember. As I recall there was a lot of snarling in the play. And here is one of my favorite photos from the play. It wasn't at the time, but somehow the image is oddly reminiscent of a more recent one. At least I didn't have to stand on a box and worry about electrodes being attached to my genitals...

visitation

Last night I went to the visitation of an old friend of mine. Let's call him George. He was in the Optimist Club with me, and was my mentor, so there was no way I could get out of going.

I'm not big on visitations, you know, where you view the deceased. I don't think it's a Unitarian thing, at least I never remember one as a kid. We're more the 'burn 'em and urn 'em' types.

There were a lot of other folks from our club there and we stood around and told stories about George and the things he had done. He was the resident pessimist in the club, and as such, will be sorely missed. At a certain point I went over to one of George's sons to offer my condolences. He's a nice man, and we chatted briefly, and then I guess he assumed I would want to view his dad, and so he sort of shooed me into the viewing room. I didn't want to duck out, so I walked up to the casket and looked.

George looked very, umm, well, dead, which was to be expected, I suppose. Normally the people in coffins look a bit more like waxed fruit and I guess that's what I was expecting, so it was a bit of a shock. There was another man also viewing George just to my left. He turned to me, stuck out his hand and said "Hullo, I'm Alan H. How did you know George?" (The names here have been changed a bit... Perhaps.) I said that we were in the same club. He told me that he and his parents had rented some property from George over on 6th Street. "My parents were So and So H. and Such and Such H. Did you know them?" he asked. I allowed as how the names sounded familiar. His father, he told me, was a famous physicist. "Ahh," I said, having no idea why the name was familiar but that wasn't it.

He said that, in their decline, his parents had lived in a nursing home. They had died in 2000 within five months of one another! George used to come visit them. There was a 95-year-old woman in the nursing home named Laverne, which is only odd because George's wife is/was named Laverne. One day Alan asked George if he wanted to meet 95-year-old Laverne. "There's only one Laverne in my life," George told him.

The whole time we were having this long and somewhat bizarre conversation I pretty much had to stare at George. The very dead George in his coffin. It was either that or stare at Alan, and, frankly, I didn't want to encourage him. I wanted to run. Finally I had the brains to look to the other side and saw a long line of people waiting for their chance to view George. A very long line of polite people, people unwilling to interrupt the tete a tete that Alan and I were earnestly having in front of the coffin. And I knew one of the people in the line, another Optimist, and could turn to Alan and say "Dear me, I see a friend I must go say "Hullo!" to, " and dash off.

It was only when I'd entirely escaped the funeral home and was driving home that it occurred to me that the reason the name 'H.' sounded familiar was that this very same man had buttonholed me at Laverne's funeral five years ago, where we'd had a very similar conversation.

dream images

Pages 92-93, Through a Glass Darkly

Sometimes images come to me in dreams, as both of these did this week. The one on the right came first, and the one at the lower left, second. They're both mixed media: watercolor crayons (Caran d'Ache Neocolor II), watercolors, including metallic ones, gloss medium, and varnish. 

There's some marginalia, too. The bindery got in a lovely little book of hours, written out and illuminated in Paris in the 1470s. The calligraphy is gorgeous. The illuminations are gorgeous. The marginalia is gorgeous. The page size is about 5x7", and the text area is really tiny, maybe 3x4," so there are BIG margins. The illustration on this page is about double the size of the one in the text. I'm using cheesy gold pens; the book's pages are, of course, gilded. Oh, it is a thing of beauty! 

new images

Image from Through a Glass Darkly, pages 78-79

Here are two images from my journal, a jaguar and Abner. This is me messing around with photo transfers, gold leaf and crayons. You can't really see the gold leaf, but it's there, in the eyes.

I put a lot of goopy stuff on the page, shoot, I don't know what all... Light modeling paste among other things.

small joys...

Spotiswode, on the stove...

Shit. You just cannot be excited - about the weather, anyway - when it's 37 when you wake up and the high expected is 38, AND the fucking bouncy stuff is bouncing off the frozen grass in your back yard... Alternating with freezing raindrops... They're not actually freezing, they just feel that way when they slide down the back of your neck when you're out feeding cats. Nope. Just not very exciting weather.

It's a good thing I'm working on the beadboard panels today for the house, because flinging paint around IS exciting. And I'm mostly flinging around red and yellow paint, so it's primarily exciting. The baseboard trim is mostly done. It's not nailed in because I don't have a nail gun, but I'll borrow one soon. For now it's in place and looks like it's been put up and gives me a feeling of small joy and accomplishment every time I walk in the house. I'd take a picture but it's nothing really, a truly small joy. 

On top of that, it's Thursday, the day Mi Madres has tortilla soup. The special is a huge bowl of tortilla soup and a beef taco, which I always get to go. They have good hot sauce. Today is a perfect soup day. Plus, I have a cat on my lap, one who looks up at me every now and again with a look that says - to me - "I absolutely positively adore you." It probably more accurately is saying "When are you going to feed us our warm cat food?" but everyone needs their little illusions to get by.

From that, you can infer that the cats are in the house today, or in and out, as they choose. It's too cold on the porch to leave them there all day, although some of them like it. That, too, is lovely, if you like cats.

Abner goes away

Abner!

I had to have one of my favorite cats, Abner, put to sleep today. He's been diabetic for about 3 years and was having a lot of bad days recently, days where he wouldn't eat. But he would purr for me, and talk to me. Saturday was a bad day, and, if the vet had been open, I would've taken him in and had him put to sleep. As it was, I went out and lay down in the grass in the backyard next to him and talked to him. It was a beautiful day. No rain. Warmish and a blue sky with nary a cloud. Yesterday he perked up and ate some of my special food for him: canned salmon (people salmon) pureed with water. I had a heating pad and blanket rigged for him and made sure he was sleeping there. Went out a couple of times in the night and moved the other cats so he would have the prime spot. But sometime this morning he got down off the bedding and snagged his claw in it. He couldn't get it loose and lay on the deck in the rain until I found him. I don't know how long it was, but, in his condition, any time was too long. He meowed several times when I picked him up, and I took it to mean that he knew it was time and wanted me to know. I put him back on the heating pad and wrapped him in blankets and fed everyone and called the vet and off we went in the rain.

I had to wait almost an hour at the vets. I didn't want to wait inside with the other animals and cheeriness, so I sat outside on a bench with him, cradling him and talking. The sun came out and I held him so that it shone on him. I called jc and put him on speakerphone so he could talk to Abner and tell him how much he meant to him. And then they came and got me and we did it and it was over.

It was the right thing. I know that.

Abner was one of those cats who establish a mind communication with you. I've only had a couple in my life that I felt that way about. I could tell Abner, who lived on the front porch, to 'bring' me another cat, a standoffish one, and Abner would siddle up to him or her and head butt them and start working them over towards me, rubbing his head against theirs, but looking up at me every so often to make sure I knew they were coming.

So I'll miss him very very much. 

New stuff

Pages 46-47 of Through a Glass Darkly

I had been meaning to write about how I bind the split boards books, but somehow that hasn't happened yet, so I thought I'd show you some of my recent pages.

I went to NC just after xmas. I had to go to Barnes and Noble to buy a gift certificate for my sister-in-law, and, of course, I got sucked in by the bargain books. (I always do, I always do...) This time it was The Tudor Chronicles by Susan Doran for only $19.98! t's a coffee table book with lots of pics that goes year by year through the reigns of the various Tudors. There are a lot of cool examples of calligraphy, but, most excitingly, this is the time of the Northern Renaissance, and there are a lot of Hans Holbein the Younger's portraits illustrating the book.

Just seeing them put me on a Hans Holbein kick, so when I got home I had to get a couple of books on him from the library and one on the Wars of the Roses, which preceded the Tudors. It's the most amazing thing. The pictures of all the kings before Henry VII (the first Tudor) are caricature-ish stick figure Gothic things...  And then blam! Along comes the fine, realistic portraits by Hans Holbein!

I decided I wanted to do a portrait like one of Hans Holbein's. And who would be a better person for me to do a portrait of than my Dad? There are only a couple of problems here. One) I can't draw portraits. Two) I can't paint like Hans Holbein. But I'm not going to let little things like that stop me...

Here's another image. This one came to me in a dream. It wasn't part of the dream story, it was just there. It lingered when I woke up, so I decided to put it in my journal.

Speaking of dream images, here's a detail from the first image, another one that came to me while I was dreaming but not part of a story. It's a cat's eye on a pedestal. Does it mean something? Who knows?