pomegranatesandpaper

List Friday (flash from the past or deja vu all over again)

 

Coherent sentences seem to be beyond my ken these days. Work is hammering me and allergies are flaring.  Lists capture the staccato in my head:

In no particular order:

• Friday! Enough said.
• 'Cept pouring down rain - basement flooding type.
• Wet dogs find it appropriate and necessary to sit next to me on the sofa, in case, y'know, I happen to get up to eat a cracker and then it is easier to trip me up and play capture the crackers.
• Claritin D has drained my throbbing head; trade-off is super caffeinated sleep-robbing buzz.
• Mr. Pom was annoyed that I would not go to the cottage this weekend but I am validated by the flood watches up the New England coast and he is consoled by
• Moneyball. (And I get to stare at Brad Pitt and eat popcorn.)
• Every art/creativity book in the house is piled on the floor as I get ready for Art Is in two weeks. I panic ever year and somehow always manage to pull The Cat out of The Hat (at least this year).
• I feel like sewing. Something.   
• First I have to rearrange the art room, sewing room, and all the closets.
• Seriously.
• Did I mention that The Princess is on vacation in southern California for a few days?
•  Or  that my diamond wedding band went missing?
• Since Memorial Day weekend.
• Have torn the house apart every other day searching.
• Cried a lot. Prayed to all various saints of lost things and causes. Called upon departed relatives.
• Even consulted a psychic (convenient to have one in the family)
• Decided to move a heavy bookcase to make some room in the art room.
• And there it was, on the floor up against the molding.
• Now I touch it a million times an hour.
• I can't believe it's back on my finger, where it lived for twenty years.
• Still haven't figured out how it got there.....

NOTES TO SELF CONTINUES

I am deep in the midst of reviewing all my blog posts and culling the ones about Cape Cod into a huge folder. I had a little brain spasm the other day when I was bemoaning how sketchy my journals from the Cape are and where are all my photos and ranting about how I would have to spend two weeks on the Cape doing nothing but taking new photos (as if this would be as if this would be a hardship).

And then my brain kicked back into gear: it's all on the blog, doofus.

Right.

So that's where I am. Right now I'm deep into 2005. Besides noting how much more creative my posts were back then, I am also having a great time rediscovering links to blogs that somehow have fallen off my radar, and other delightful tidbits.

I bring you this splendid poem by Barbara Ras that I posted some 6 years ago. To me it is all about memory and writing, and it still takes my breath away:

October 24, 2005

You Can't Have It All

This wonderful poem written by Barbara Ras was sent to me on a writing list. I challenge you to read this poem, then write your own lists of what you can have and what you can't. Link back to me so we can all read what you come up with:

 You Can't Have It All 

But you can have the fig tree and its fat leaves like clown hands

gloved with green.  You can have the touch of a single eleven-year-old finger

on your cheek, waking you at one a.m. to say the hamster is back.

you can have the purr of the cat and the soulful look

Of the black dog, the look that says, If I could I would bite

every sorrow until it fled, and when it is August,

you can have it be August and abundantly so.  You can have love,

though often it will be mysterious, like the white foam

that bubbles up at the top of the bean pot over the red kidneys

until you realize foam's twin is blood.

You can have the skin at the center between a man's legs,

so solid, so doll-like.  You can have the life of the mind,

glowing occasionally in priestly vestments, never admitting pettiness,

never stooping to bribe the sullen guard who will tell you

all roads narrow at the border.

You can speak a foreign language, sometimes,

and it can mean something.  You can visit the marker on the grave

where your father wept openly.  You can't bring back the dead,

but you can have the words forgive and forget hold hands

as if they meant to spend a lifetime together.  And you can be grateful

for makeup, the way it kisses your face, half spice, half amnesia, grateful

for Mozart, his many notes racing one another towards joy, for towels

sucking up the drops on your clean skin, and for deeper thirsts,

for passion fruit, for saliva.  You can have the dream,

the dream of Egypt, the horses of Egypt and you riding in hot sand.

You can have your grandfather sitting on the side of your bed,

at least for a while, you can have clouds and letters, the leaping

of distances, and Indian food with yellow sauce like sunrise.

You can't count on grace to pick you out of a crowd

but here is your friend to teach you how to high jump,

how to throw yourself over the bar, backwards,

until you learn about love, about sweet surrender,

and here are periwinkles, buses that kneel, farms in the mind

as real as Africa.  And when adulthood fails you,

you can still summon the memory of the black swan on the pond

of your childhood, the rye bread with peanut butter and bananas

your grandmother gave you while the rest of the family slept.

There is the voice you can still summon at will, like your mother's.

It will always whisper, you can't have it all,

but there is this.

 
 
                -- Barbara Ras 

 

In addition, referencing back to my Saturday post about using the blog as my personal diary, the way my Mom used her calendars, I discovered by reading the old posts that I began writing for Cloth, Paper, Scissors 7 years ago, not 6, and that it did begin with the inaugural issue, not the third one as I had mistakenly thought.

Moral of the story: If you have a blog, reread your older posts; you'll learn a wealth of information that you've forgotten.

July 19, 2004

Shameless Personal Promotion

There's a new arts magazine debuting in October by the publishers of Quilting Arts magazine, called ClothPaperScissors. If you are interested in mixed media art, journals, collages, assemblages, fiber art, and more, you will love this new quarterly magazine. And I'm pleased to announce that I will be writing a column for the new magazine. Check it out and subscribe!

Memo to Self: Drink More Cheap Wine

 

In the house we grew up in, my mother's command center was our small kitchen. In the drawer under the red counter she kept her address book, a soft covered blank phone book handed out by the telephone company. On the metal backsplash above the stove, magnets held daily notes, like "doctor's appt/kids Tues  3:30" or "defrost meat for gravy". And in the narrow pantry closet, she kept a calendar,  slid in next to the cans of corn and tomato sauce.

She wrote in all the family birthdays and appointments in the small daily squares, and even kept a grid of initials that I could not decipher until I got older and realized it was the initials of my older sisters on the days when their periods started each month.  When I came of age, my initials went were pencilled in also so  she would know when to buy the new box of Kotex.

 

 

What has stayed with me through all these years is her habit of making notes in the current year's calendar  to use as reminders for the following year.  She'd write in notes about household management, such as how long the turkey took to cook on Thanksgiving, of when and where she'd planted the tulip bulbs, and where in the attic the Christmas lights were stored. If the church hadn't handed out the calendar for the coming year yet, she'd just write her notes on smalls scraps of paper, which she'd paperclip to the current month, until she could transfer onto the applicable month once the new year's calendar was secured. 

If I was as organized as my mother, or even in the habit of keeping a paper calendar somewhere other than at my office, I'd adopt her habit of writing reminders to myself. I do erratically keep a written journal, but it's not as accessible for me as having a calendar staring me in the face to remind me of whose turn it is to have Thanksgiving this year (Maria's?).

Since I do not have a worn, paper calendar from our parish church  tucked in next to my shelf of canned soups and gravies, I will  beg your indulgence to use this post to make a few notes.

 

Notes to append to  July and August:

 

 

• We were always running out of  hand towels
• Ditto beach towels
• Never buy a large, heavy chaise chair to carry to the beach
• The kids were right that the super-sized marshmallows will remain half raw or fall off the sticks when roasting
• Bring Boars Head or Sabretts frankfurters from home or we'll be stuck with the spongy supermarket franks or paying 7 bucks at the fancy farm market for 10 hot dogs
• Basil bought by the sprig never lasts more than a day
• Heirloom tomatoes are worth their weight in gold and that's what they cost, so don't leave them on the windowsill for 5 days and then shriek when you pick one up and it's leaking all over the sill
• Schedule pest exterminators to come when the husband is there so baited traps can be emptied on a DAILY basis
• You will never wear a cute dress to walk around Chatham so stop packing one
• It is physically impossible to read 21 books in 2 weeks, so spare your back or buy a Kindle
• Off roading over sand dunes may ruin your car's suspension (ahem)

 

September

 

• Expect to be really depressed and edgy the week after vacation, and worse the week after Labor Day
• Which is why you need to lay  in a case of Cupcake Chardonnay before you go away
• Don't go away for 5 weekends in a row and expect to return to work each Monday morning  able to make intelligible sense of how to handle ten cases in court that morning without expecting to screw up at least one or two
• When your job at a magazine ends, your classes at an art retreat don't fill up, and you decide to start not one but two books at once, you will spend inordinate amounts of time catching up with all the Housewives of (fill in the venue) rather than walk into your studio
• Eating excessive amounts of chocolate and drinking same of coffee in reaction to above will only give you heartburn, gas, and all your suit pants will be uncomfortably tight, thus making going back to work even bleaker, so cut it out

(Note: The Empress would never write notes of this content. Anywhere. )

 

Lastly, the very most important note that I would write right on the cover of next year's calendar in big, bold black marker in as large as the letters will fit is the following:

 

2012

You have the best blog readers in the world whose words never fail to buoy your spirits, ease your mind, quell your troubles,  chide you for doubting yourself, remind you to be nice to your husband, and shake a finger in your face when asking, , "when are you going to actually finish that book??", and for that you are the luckiest middle aged, pudgy, frizzy haired, frazzled, messy, distracted woman in the world, so don't forget to thank them up front and at the beginning  posts rather than making them slog through an entire compedium of random post-its.

 

And so you all are.

Amen

 

Generic, No Name Blogging

 

 

 

Branding is a very big subject - an obsession - really at all the blogging conferences and seminars. It is not enough to present a folksly, newsy blog to the world. Not  if you want to use your blog as a springboard to a career and a sustainable income.

Image, presentation, and a narrow point of view is what makes a blog a brand, a commodity, an income earner, an entry to articles, speaking, a book, licensing, employment, and a career.

And the most important commandment in the branding handbook is: No negativity!

As I was leafing through a very popular blogging magazine at Barnes and Noble today, the very first thing that I saw in an essay written by a woman with an absolutely beautiful and highly artistic blog was this, "There is no room for negativity in a blog".

I felt a warm flush release up my chest onto my face. My stomach clenched and I shifted from one foot to the other. I shot a furtive glance around the magazine rack to see if anyone noticed my guilty behavior. It was not bad enough that I had felt uneasy the past few days about sharing my recent unrest with the world, but now I felt reproached by someone who did not even know I existed.

What can I say? I started writing this blog in November 2003. No one I knew in real life had ever heard of the word "blog" let alone read one. I had no rule book, blueprint, or grandiose ideas of making a living and becoming the next Martha Stewart from the pages of this portal. It was simply a lovely way from me to have a place to publish my thoughts, reach an audience, and make some friends. It was a natural extension of the many email lists I was on at that time where we shared our passion for art and writing, for food and family, and for living a life where we could examine and celebrate  the sacred particulars of our days.

When I began writing for Cloth, Paper, Scissors, I had to rein back on my writing about art and creativity. I needed to save the very best of that for the magazine. As the children grew, I wrote about them less and less. What is cute in a 12 year old is not as easy to quantify and relate in a 20 year old. They didn't want to read about themselves or have them friends do the same. I have an aging mother, and lots of family who read the blog. I didn't want to have people calling me to ask what was wrong or when did that happen if I chose to write about something emotional or upsetting.

Pretty soon, the blog became all pictures of sunsets and meals in restaurants.

And you know what, others were doing that better than I was.

Now that my tenure at the magazine is almost over, and my kids are almost all living elsewhere, the family life that I once had is slowly coming to an end. I find this a difficult transition and I am writing about it. A lot. Just not here for now.

I hesitate to post too much and too often about that. I worry about too many pictures of the Cape and too many posts about comings and goings. This is my life now, however, and I am struggling to find my way in this new "twosome" world. Sometimes I am fine with it, even celebrate it. Sometimes, just going into the supermarket and seeing the "back to school" aisle caps filled with school lunch snacks fills my eyes with tears. The Halloween themed pancake maker in the Williams Sonoma catalogue plummets me into sadness when I realize I'd have no one to make them for.

My poor husband talks to the dogs like children. He asks them how they did in "school" (doggie daycare) today. We discuss dressing Bella Sera in a pink tutu for Halloween and making Cucciolo a pirate. We laugh at ourselves, then fall quiet. We find ourselves talking about the dogs too much when out to dinner with friends. We learn that friends are more likely to criticize dog behavior than they were to criticize children's behavior in years past.

My kids walk past on our room where we are cuddling with the dogs and remark sotte vocce "Boy, do you need grandkids!" Duh.

The brand of this blog is reality. A real life, human, 50-something mother, wife, lawyer, artist, and writer who struggles to be all things to all people, who resents that many of her friends have found the way to retirement, who blanches at the number of years she will have to continue to work at a pedestrian career, who finds increasingly that all she wants to do is read, write, and draw, and no one is offering income for that lately, and that she doesn't even have the stomach anymore to enter the fray of pursuing an art career on the mixed media art retreat circuit.

 I'm not alone in this. There are some extremely well written blogs examining the emotions and trials of the empty nest.  Andrea Scher, one of the most popular bloggers around, had a post recently about sharing what it's really like to be a parent of small children,  entitled, "How Real Do We Want To Be".  And the Wall Street Journal had an article about post-Labor Day blues that could have been written by me (uh oh, another sign of career failure).

I'll never be a brand. I'll always be second-guessing myself. My blog will never be more than a pastiche of art and writing, photos and family, longings and fears. As, I'm beginning to think, will my life. My husband and I will continue to be overly attached to our dogs and each other, to pinch ourselves with happiness when we walk on an empty beach, to fight and brood when we come home to an empty house, and I will buy more books than I could ever read, and more paints than I could ever use.

Keeping it real here in Pomegranateland,

 

Yours truly,

 

Loretta Benedetto Marvel

 

 -------------------------------------------------------------------------

Post Edit:

Somebody just emailed me directly to ask why I would post such a solipsistic post on such a day. They asked it in a nice way, not nastily, but with some criticism.  I have to reply on the blog because others may be wondering the same thing. I didn't post this in spite of the day, I posted this in reaction to, as a result of,  and in the midst of the difficult emotions of this day.  I'm a New Yorker. I am a twenty five  minute train ride from the city. I don't need to remember as I will never forget.

 

Paper Beats Rock

   

Such dramatic changes as the season ages. The yin and yang of out back and forth lives is knocked out of balance by the assault of autumn banging on the door before check in time. Hallo? Room not ready!

The week rushes forward after the holiday like a kayak in the rapids. Struggle to stay afloat in the rapids, dodging court, flooded roads, the queasiness of sinus pressure, and  boulders of work strewn everywhere.

Bags half-unpacked, shoes strewn, piles of laundry and dry cleaning, scarves tangling like snakes on the back of chairs.

Tempers simmer then flare, unexpected fireworks. Distemper displays, lashing out, retreating, and then that half-baked resolve to remain hurt though heads hanging at what all the fuss is about.

Do we need another dog? A six year old with eyes of liquid sadness. Dumped at animal control when her owners moved away. A small Bermese Mountain dog,  call name of Jennifer.  Injured leg, bad teeth, matted fur. Eyes of pathos.

Perhaps making inquiries is a wiser course than bringing yet another large dependent into our midst. Not with no one home but the dust bunnies each day.

Art bag abandoned somewhere on the first floor. A shield for a snit, carried against my heart up the stairs.  No questions asked or answered; I have work to do. Nose slightly tilted, feelings bruised.

I worry about being mad. I worry about these evenings and nights. I worry about being alone, really alone. I worry about achieving balance as we try to live this half and half life.

Pencil, watercolor block, photos uploaded. The challenge to recompose the scene, select one element and reposition it over another.  Scale, design, line. Concentration.

I worry into the drawing, the evening playing in a loop in the back of my mind, until the constant motion of eyes and hands takes over and blots out all else. Silence quietly fills the room.

Though the straggly, dirty tail of worry quietly curls up in the corner, unnoticed but aware.

Life as a work in progress.

 

 

And So It Goes

 

We left in mid-afternoon, after a morning of off-roading with the dogs. They were delirious with the freedom and adventure, looking back at us over and over as they ran down the sand road that plowed through the dunes and came out onto the wide outer beach. Heading straight for the water, they both flew in and let a wave roll over them before they remembered that, although Labrador Retrievers, they don't do water, and emerged with clam shells in their mouth. Later, we made bacon and eggs on the beach with The Princess and The Fiance.

Coming home is always a crash. The grueling ride off Cape, and yesterday, the added surprise of the locals waving good bye at all the overpasses - a genuine thank you for spending our money there or a virtual finger at us as we left them to the quiet and beauty of the autumn Cape? A little of both, The Princess decided.

Tuesday masqueraded as Monday, making picking dates a mass of confusion for all. Of course, I overslept, being awakened all night with what I thought was a dog with digestive issues, only to discover at 2:30 a.m., after none of the dogs expressed any interest in going out, that what I was smelling in my sleep was the bag of Organic French Roast that I'd brought home and unpacked onto my dresser. Makes my addiction to coffee lessen somewhat with the realization that a certain aroma of dog flatulence shares some aromatic molecules with coffee brewing.....

Some form of summer defiance had me wearing flat sandals, ankle pants, and a short sleeved blazer as I walked to the courthouse. A baseball cap was my only concession to the 59 degrees and pouring rain.

 

 

 

The sun will return, I know it.

Goodnight Summer

Good night lanterns hanging like moons

 

Good night Empress on the deck

 

 

 

Good night Stanz In a Blanket

 

Good night stargazers

 

 

Good night starmakers

 

Good night mischief makers

 

 

Good night summer

 

 

----------------------------

Photo credit for the last three photos: Marietta Benedetto