The grilled cheese sandwich I ate for lunch today made my day. So did the rocks I found down on the lake. But the best part of my day was discovering the work of British collage artist, Jo Waterhouse. I’m not sure that I’ll ever have the good fortune of owning one as they sell out fast but I’m happy to know they exist. It’s her wonderful women –– all a bit grandma-witchy –– that I adore. And just as good, are their brilliant titles; “a sturdy woman on a mission to do something important involving some branches,” or “a sensual woman in the sheerest of dresses invoking the power of the piscean.” Please watch her short introductory videos. I bet they’ll make your day, too.
Today was one of those days that make you wish it was September all year around. I was lucky enough to spend a lot of it on a patio. If not for the intermittent breeze, I might have forgotten I was even outside. Not too hot, not too cold. This thinking always brings me to the same place: if there were no sweltering Augusts and frigid Februaries would I appreciate September as much as I do? Would I become complacent to the joys of warm and breezy if I felt it all the time? Are periods of “grace” that much sweeter when we know what it is to struggle? “The way I see it, if you want the rainbow, you gotta put up with the rain.” Sing it, Dolly. One of my favourite summer pastimes is to sit on the bench on our front porch until it goes dark. Every year around this time I start to lament the loss of this simple pleasure. The days are shorter, the evenings are chilly. I retreat inside to baked potatoes. To Netflix. I try to get cozy. Prepare for Winter. And whatever it has in store.
Between a nasty infection in my chest, a vicious wasp sting on my son’s ring finger, and a skin infection that left a constellation of flaming red sores across the right side of my teenage daughter’s face, I’ve spent a fair bit of September in a doctor’s office. The upside of sickness was a chance to read books and watch films, two things I don’t do nearly enough of. Kerry Clare’s latest book, Asking For A Friendhit home in so many ways. Just as relatable, was Julia Louis Dreyfus’, You Hurt My Feelings. What I was drawn to in both, and what I’m mostly drawn to, is material that’s familiar and accessible and that helps us better understand and connect with the human experience. I related viscerally to Clare’s portrayal of post-natal anxiety and the unspooling that her protagonists undergo in early motherhood. And watching Louis Dreyfus cry on camera after her character overhears her husband, her greatest champion, admit that he hates the book she’s written, is shattering. The characters’ beautiful, relatable and unavoidable flaws make the stories so true to life that we can’t help but reflect on our own life experiences. “The secret of the Great Stories is that they have no secrets,” writes Arundhati Roy. “The Great Stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. They don’t deceive you with thrills and trick endings. They don’t surprise you with the unforeseen. They are as familiar as the house you live in.”
My daughter, Luma is an avid beader. This aerial view of Labbezanga, a small riverport village in Mali, photographed by Georg Gerster in the early 1970s reminded me of our kitchen table when Luma’s at work. One of the magical things about aerial photography is the multitude of textures, patterns and visual references that reveal themselves when we shift our perspective. We see a whole new world. “I see my best aerial photographs as a kick-start for flights of thought. The aerial picture is a tool of reflection. From high up, one sees not only what is, but just as well what could be – the inventory of our possibilities.”
Given that my grandmother didn’t cook, it’s ironic that so many of my memories of her are attached to food. I think it’s partly because we ate things in her home that we didn’t eat anywhere else. Ice cream sandwiches. Hot dogs. Cinnamon donuts. Cracker Jack cereal. I grew up in England in the 80s; our junk food was limited compared to what was available in sunny Bermuda. While my grandmother appreciated fine dining, she was happiest eating a tuna sandwich on the golf course. Or a freshly battered corn dog at LaGuardia Airport. “They’re the best in the world.” One of my favourite things to do together was to go grocery shopping at Miles Market and load up the cart with ice tea, Kraft slices, sugary cereals and mini marshmallows that I’d eat by the handful on the way home. Years later, once I lived in Toronto and I was able to visit her more often, either in Florida or Manhattan where she then lived, she’d always send me home with a stash of English muffins, Entenmann’s cookies, or a honey glazed ham in my carry-on. On our last visit together in New York right before she died, I remember her asking me to get her a chicken salad sandwich while she got her chemo infusion. I went to five different places near the clinic searching for the perfect chicken sandwich and came back with some Gourmet thing slathered in a Caesar-ish dressing and alfalfa sprouts. She took one disdained look at it and shoved it straight back into the bag. Who brings alfalfa sprouts to a chemo patient? As is so often the case in these moments, the gussied up sandwich was what I wanted to give her, not what she wanted to eat. A few weeks ago, I was travelling through a new and improved LaGuardia, and I felt a pang in my heart when I saw that her corn dog stand is gone. “I mean, the cheek of it. They were the best in the world.”
Somewhere between 40 and 45 it became painfully clear to me that much of my identity hinged on what I thought other people thought of me. And that many of my efforts at self betterment, this blog included, were in service of an imagined ideal. It’s an impossible way to live; it gets in the way of everything, not least, one’s ability to know and be themselves. Start where you are. Write about what you know. And the best advice of all, write like nobody’s reading. Thinking about what someone is thinking when they’re reading your work is the surest way to suck the life out of it, specifically your life.I love writing. And I needed to take a break from it this summer so I could remind myself who I am writing for.
The first time I heard of Wolfgang Tillmans was in my early 20s when I happened upon a photograph of his in Vogue. An editor had singled out “Sandcastle” as her favourite photograph, adding that it was the hopefulness of the image that she was most drawn to, “that we build them, even though we know the tide will wash them away.” There’s nothing remarkable about the image, but it’s what it represented to her that made it meaningful. It resonated with me and so I tore out the page and stuck it in a scrapbook. And up until recently, my only association with Tillmans was that one sandcastle and the uplifting ideas that came with it. I knew that he was enourmously prolific, and that his work was raw and real, but I hadn’t looked further than this one image. So, when I walked through The Tillmans show at the AGO recently, it came to me, somewhere between the black and white salacious club scenes and still lives of mangled crab legs that, “to look without fear” means to see the whole picture, better yet, to look beyond the picture and see that it’s rarely as frightening as we think it is. Just as significant as seeing the light, is seeing the shadows cast when something gets in its way. “I want to invite the audience to approach my work without fear but also to not be afraid of their own eyes and how they see,” says Tillmans. The show is a shining example of how seemingly unremarkable moments, when strung together over time, can tell a story that is as painful and complicated as it is beautiful and celebratory. His images, some 4 x 4 snap shots, are stuck to the walls with clear tape like one might see in a student dorm. It’s so crude and quotidian. So brilliant. The mundanity of it all. The gritty, tender, miraculous mundanity of it all.
As a kid, we had a cat that pooed in our bathtubs when we went out for long stretches or forgot to feed him. He was cold and aloof. If not for the fact that he made for a beautiful foot muff — he was a Persian Chinchilla — I’d have nothing nice to say about Mowgli. To be honest, I’ve never had much nice to say about cats, in general. Sure they’re pretty to look at, especially those Russian Blues, but for the most I’ve always found them self serving, unpredictable and arcane. It’s a running joke with one my best friends, Izabela that I am, in fact, part cat. “But they’re so neurotic,” I say scornfully, to which she always smiles and says something like, “umm,” or “uh-huh.” If I’m a cat, she’s a toad. Then a few weeks ago, I happened upon this description of cats by The Colour Purple author, Alice Walker, that made me re-consider my view on cats. “Cats, in particular, teach us to be ourselves, whatever the odds. A cat, except through force, will never do anything that goes against its nature. Nothing seduces it away from itself.” As someone who has too often abandoned her true nature for the sake of acquiescing others, and/or an image I would like others to have of me, I have great admiration for anything and anyone that protects theirs. If Walker’s right about cats, then living like one is gutsy as hell. It means risking being disliked, dismissed and misunderstood — are cats selfish or self aware, aloof or deeply sensitive — in exchange for a freer and more fulfilling life. “Contemplate ways we can strengthen our resolve to live our lives as who we really are,” writes Walker. I can be selfish, solitary and very sensitive, all common cat traits that most humans resist in themselves and yet no feline ever makes apology for. More and more so, I’m trying to do the same. There’s a cat in me, after all. I text Izabela with the news. “I always knew you had it in you.”
It’s my daughter’s birthday, and as is always the case when one of my children celebrates a birthday, the day was a smorgasbord of feelings, from nostalgia and regret to gratitude, pride and pure joy. Throw in some smoked ham and a boiled egg for good measure. It’s hard to celebrate your child’s next spin around the sun, without reflecting on the fourteen that have already spun. FOURTEEN. That’s a lot of highs and lows (hers and mine), spilt milk, exploding diapers, tears, laughter, jaunts around the shopping mall, to reflect on. That’s a lot of expectations not met (you will fall in love with her the second you see her) and so many that exceeded your wildest dreams (when the love comes it will be so immense that your heart will have no choice but to triple in size). That’s a lot of firsts; first steps, first stitches, first time away from home. It’s Iole’s birthday today, and I watched her open gifts and eat carrot cake with too sweet icing from our local bakery –– all the lovely, mundane things –– while quietly remembering and marveling and wishing her the universe.
Rolling out a slab of clay is satisfying. So is making something from it. And just as satisfying is waking up the next day knowing that the thing I made yesterday is waiting for me today. I am in a flow. Maybe I get to smooth down all the lumpy surfaces, add handles or carve into the rim. Maybe I get to paint the whole thing blue. But the point is, I am not starting from scratch; I have something to return to, something that’s alive and emergent. It’s like planting flowers in garden beds that you prepped the day before or lathering a crumb coat on a cake that’s been in the freezer since last week. Of course, in order to have work to return to, there have to be many hours spent wedging clay, tilling soil and cracking eggs. It’s the ground work, the grunt work, and the rewards are precious and fleeting. Soon enough the bowl will be fired, the cake will be eaten and our hands will once again be filled with raw clay, flour and the hope of what might be.
