Apprentice of Wonder

Off to Seek (and Hopefully Find) an Attitude Adjustment

This next week was supposed to be the week we took off to someplace tropical to celebrate our 20th anniversary, which occurred on December 28th.  It won't be happening next week, due to a wide variety of "life gets in the way" things that have occurred in the last month, including my husband's brief trip to New Orleans last month to attend the funeral of his aunt, who died during Hurricane Katrina.  She died in Memorial Hospital, the place that's being investigated by the D.A. for rumored "mercy killings" of its near-death patients.  That's one blog entry I've been putting off making, but I do have many photos Dave took when he was down there, and a myriad of stories to tell related by his aunts, uncles and cousins, who are all still living there.

There are so many things I want to write about here, but Phenix's death, even though it was not a surprise, has really saddened and sapped us, and I haven't felt like doing much of anything except reading, painting, and watching Netflix movies!

Instead of the tropics we are off to this very same cabin in the winter woods at which we spent 3 days last January.  We will do some snow-shoeing and cross-country skiing and wine-drinking, eating, and I'll be doing lots of painting and relaxing too.  We'll return to Denver on Tuesday, and on Wednesday I'll take off on a short solo road trip down to Santa Fe, to visit my dear friend Christina.  We'll attend the annual Edible Art Tour, wandering in and out of galleries at night, eating gourmet finger foods while gazing at art.  And I'll visit all my favorite Canyon Road art galleries, and eat at my favorite restaurants where I'll burn my mouth on the hottest red chile I can find.  And return with hundreds more photos to add to the thousands I already have from Santa Fe and northern New Mexico.  And I hope I find the attitude adjustment I so desperately need.  I promise to write about it all upon my return.

Rest in Peace Phenix: 1988-2006

It was exactly a year ago that I wrote on this blog about how near death our precious then-17-year-old Phenix was, asking how does one know when it's time?  Through the miracles of medicine we learned she had kidney failure and it was just a matter of time until her organs shut down, but that if we injected her daily with fluids this would flush her kidneys out each day, and we could prolong her life for an indefinte period. 

One year ago to the day, almost, I began giving her daily injections of fluids with several vitamins and other medicines, and within days she had risen from near-ashes to become an active, older version of the cat she'd always been.  She did well for several months and at times we were able to live in the illusion she might go on for years.  But in the last two months she began going downhill fairly rapidly, though she still had some good days.  We doubled her fluids and began feeding her baby food and fresh chicken.  She was up and down constantly until 2 weeks ago when she quit eating, and from there her downhill was rapid.  Toward the end I couldn't even give her fluids because there just wasn't anything into which to inject them. 

All week we asked ourselves "Is it time?  Is it time?" and we simply couldn't make the decision to take her in.  Yesterday I knew it was time, and had made an appointment to take her in late yesterday.  But when Dave came home he said he just couldn't do it; he just couldn't take her in.  He slept next to her on the couch all night, his head touching hers, waking up to hold her when she shook and quivered, and this would calm her down.  He said it was the least he could do since he hadn't been able to make the decision to put her down.

At 5 a.m. this morning Dave picked her up as she began to twitch, and she died in his arms with 2 long sighs.  We brought the kittens over to see her, but they'd known all week what was going on, and were even taking turns lying with her throughout the day.  We buried her in the backyard next to her favorite mousing spot, and are more grateful than ever to have the kittens to focus on.  Here's a photo of Phenix's old friend Rajah sleeping next to her, with Smokey on the left (and Cade, Phenix's teddy bear below).  Rajah, now 19, will be following Phenix soon.  He still eats a lot, but can barely walk these days.

We've now done cat deaths both ways:  taking one into the vet, and letting one die on her own, and I can say that each one is equally as horrible, and you can never know "the right thing to do" until the moment is upon you.

Memorable Possessions

A couple of weeks ago I met with my writing pals Liz and Linda at a new (for us) coffee and wine bar:  Michaelangelo's.  We staked out a corner table by the window where we proceeded to gulp down mugs of strong latte and, later on, a glass of Spanish wine for me.  The warm golden-brown walls and photos from Italy had all of us wondering when our next trips to Europe might be.  After catching up on several weeks' worth of news and making up stories about the comings and goings at the S&M clothing store and head shop across the street, our discussions inspired us to write on the topic of "memorable possessions."  Here is an edited version of what I wrote, complete with photos of some of the possessions mentioned.

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Since I have a pathological aversion to throwing ANYTHING away, I still have almost everylittlething that I've collected or that anyone has given me over my 50 years.

Deep in the bowels of the basement, a battered trunk sits untouched and unopened for a decade or more, propping up a black and white darkroom enlarger that is equally as old and unused.  The trunk contains a scrapbook of my earliest things like the playbill from the 7th grade trip to New York City where we saw the newly-discovered Dustin Hoffman in a bad play called Jimmy Shine; a menu from Ruby Foo's where I had my first flaming PuPu platter (ordered primarily because of its name); a ticket stub from the elevator to the dizzying top of the Empire State Building; and snippets from the 8th grade trip to Washington, D.C. including stubs from various Smithsonian museums and presidential memorials and a now-brown but once glorious pink cherry blossom. 

The scrapbooks from the high school years include every ticket to every one of the dozens of rock concerts I attended at the Syracuse War Memorial with accompanying dark photos of each band.  Neither the Jethro Tull nor Yes ticket stubs show the astonishing worlds where this music I so loved took me within the confines of my mind.  There's a photo of me laying on the floor, head propped up on a pile of many coats and purses, my long shiny hippie hair floating on my body shirt, with the sweetest smile ever seen on my face.  Music could be everything in those years.

I hold onto countless intangible memories of those early years, but possessions?  There are a few photo albums and 2 scrapbooks from my first plane trip to Paris in 1973 with bad green photos taken by the cheap Kodak Instamatic I used until I discovered 35mm in my freshman year photojournalism class.  A small box with a roll-top drawer in which I kept jewelry bits and glittery buttons from Grandma's house sits on a bookshelf next to the porcelain Chinaman figure whose head bobs up, down, back and forth with a touch, that sat on Grandma's curio cabinet until she died and I snatched it up immediately.  I still have the handmade and painted box Pam brought me back from Germany when we were 17, the first of what has become two dozen or more hand-carved boxes from around the world. 

And I also have the small Lane cedar box/chest all girls were given in those years at high school graduation, inside which are many old memorable possessions, including the small rock my long-distance high school boyfriend Art gave me that he'd held in his hands all day once when hitch-hiking 200 miles to come see me.  There are my college IDs, and one of my first gay friend who took me to all the south Louisiana gay bars and discos; introduced me to poppers, and who just smiled when I asked "where were you?" after he returned from one of his frequent disappearances into those "back rooms" where women were not allowed; and who told me I was "the most normal person" he knew, and meant it as a compliment during the 70's when no one and nothing was normal.  There's a "Nixon Now" button in here from the brief time in which I was a registered Republican, and a "Remember Oct. 9th" button from who knows what?  I wonder what happened on Oct. 9th that I no longer remember?

And finally, on the tiny shelves of my first shadow box, next to the Czech doll I bought in Montreal at Expo '67 for 65 cents, and below the little troll doll (called "wish-niks" back then) sits a mini bottle of never-opened "Forbidden Fruit", another gift from Art because he knew I loved the round bottle with the gold crown, and because everyone sold us beer and booze in those days without asking for I.D. at 17. 

Also in the shadow box is a shiny mother-of-pearl fish I wore on a white silk cord between my breasts during my first 15 minutes of fame in 1977, reading my favorite and best poems from my final creative writing project 2 weeks before I graduated with a too-easily-earned B.A., the first and last time I read poetry in front of a small but adoring classroom audience of my peers and professors.  28 years later I still remember how beautiful, how powerful, perfect and RIGHT I felt in those 15 minutes.  Each of these memorable possessions has the power to rush me back decades in time to a sweet, ancient memory, and really, it's those memories that are my most cherished possessions.

Painting Outside the Lines

Today is my fourth art class (of six) with the wonderful local art teacher Jackie McFarland.  The class is called "Spontaneous Expressions" and that is exactly what we do each week.  This week we all did paintings that were supposed to go, literally, outside the lines.  Beginning with a photograph on the paper, we were told to extend the painting beyond the photo, doing our very very best to match the colors as exactly as we can.  So painting outside the lines was literally the exercise of the day.

My painting above, of one of the quaint side streets in Valparaiso, Chile, is not finished.  I need to add more detail to all the windows, obviously, and fix the rooflines; add in some wires; and darken the street and bring out the cobblestones.  But it's amazing, from a distance, how much the photo blends in with the rest of it.  I never thought I could come close to doing this exercise, so I'm proud of myself.

Here are photos of all of them from across the room.  In each painting you can see where the original photo is, but I'd say we were able to match the colors quite well indeed.

   

These all looked infinitely better to each one of us from across the room as opposed to right in front of us on the table - yet another reminder of the importance of stepping back, stepping back, stepping back away from your paintings on a regular basis.  We all agreed, unanimously, that our fellow classmate Carolyn did the best job in this amazing painting, which illustrates our goal for this class perfectly.  I want to paint like Carolyn when I grow up.

To see last week's paintings go to the January 26 entry.