Chantepleure Reincarnated

I got a call from a woman at the Huron Valley Council for the Arts. She said she was calling about an author luncheon. Great! Who's the author? Well, you are. There were several more minutes of me questioning whether she had the right Linda Robinson. There is another Linda Robinson who has several books. No, she was pretty sure she wanted me and my book. I told her I could ask a couple of other real authors I know. Did you call because I'm a member of HVCA? Oh, are you? How nice! There may have been more but I'm embarrassed enough already. She named the book (pronounced it correctly) and told me what the word means. At the end of the call, I said sure, I'd be glad to participate. Then I waited for the call telling me their original choice was now back in town and said yes. Then the announcement showed up in my facebook feed, with my mug right in the center. Chantepleure was written during NaNoWriMo in 2007. 60,000 words thrown in a document. For the next year, the Sweetgrass Writers wrestled it into a story. We thought it was two books maybe. Perhaps it still is, but I'm not the dividing this after 10 years. We printed it, handed out chapters and segments to each other to edit, question, clarify and finish. Part of the ongoing endeavor was to figure out best way to get it into the hands of readers. I don't remember if it was submitted to traditional publishers: I doubt it. I'd gone through that years before with children's books I wrote and illustrated, only to find that traditional publishers don't want authors illustrating their books. They want their illustrators. Most authors don't ever meet the people who draw their stories. So, we self-published. Lulu for a printed book (very expensive still) and Smashwords later for an ebook. I filed the book with the Library of Congress, had our local librarian stick it on Ingram (where libraries can order) and then forgot about it. I wrote Chantepleure to bring to life a closed, boarded-up shop in our little town. The Artcraft Shop had lived as a bits and bobs arty store. I still have a couple of packages my mother bought there. The Artcraft Shop was in a series of decrepit storefronts that included the South Lyon Herald offices on one corner. The Herald moved out and Grande Trunke moved in. High end home decorating. Kathleen's was a nice clothing store on the opposite end, and then the whole block was bought and Kathleen was forced out by 200% increase in rent. That became a remodeling company. An auto paint store opened in the middle. Then The Artcraft Shop was rented, renovated and lives now as The Lemon Tree. I also wrote Chantepleure to gather my dead friends in one place, so I could visit with them again. This surprise reincarnation of Chantepleure fits beautifully with the restored Artcraft Shop. My friends are content.

Three:Two Story Life

Back the way it was. We're early in the 2nd year without Dad, and Scott still has this verbal tic. My response changes. I know, honey. It is the way it is. I do too. No response, depending on how the day's rolling. Scott is taking prozac now - I imagine he's depressed. The doctor agreed although I am the only reporting individual. She takes my word for it and writes a script. The carers report that he is more responsive (although I still don't know what to do with the one who coaches him to say praise Jesus!) I notice that Scott has stepped into life a bit more. (The fact that he can repeat praise Jesus! is one example.) This return to life shows up in making choices about his environment. He's picking up his dish from the table more often. He makes his bed. Moved his record albums into the living room from his bedroom. Decides when he's going to put on underwear instead of a diaper.

I have to be faster. He picks up his dish, but turns it upside down in the well I put the clean dishes. Then I need to rewash those. He makes his bed over wet sheets. Then the comforter is wet, too. Scott will toss underwear around until he finds the pair he wants to wear, and then I feel like he should be allowed to wear his choice, until the laundry basket is half full with wet underwear. I've had the plumber in 3 times in 60 days because Scott now wants to use toilet paper when he pees. A roll at a time. If he flushes, we're plugged. He doesn't always, so I have to be alert to what's up in the bathroom. Every time. Ten twenty times a day.

My handler with the State DHHS confirmed there's no way to timestamp this. Constant vigilance. No line item. I don't know why I brought it up with her. Looking for some affirmation that this is hard, unrewarding, depressing so that translates to a spreadsheet in the Capricorn corner of my brain.

My therapist used to instruct me to ignore stuff. Just la di da while stepping over scivvies tossed on the floor, toothpicks embedded in the carpet, twist ties strewn around the house. Back then it made some sense. Back the way it was meant arguing with Dad every week about allowing Scott his own life, his own agency, his own quirks. Now I am pushing back at that agency, a quandary for personal growth and peace.

All this stuff is just stuff. Whinging about the mundane. Because that's what it is. It is what it is.

Dad was a support on this three-legged stool of our stories. Scott spent all of his life with Dad in his story. That's a huge loss for him. Scott is finding his way in this new world order without the brain power and memory to find a way through. I question every hour if there is someone or anything that would be a comfort to him.

Dad was the person I could talk with, share his love of sports, my love of art. He was funny when he wasn't grouchy. Just like me. There are entire days when Scott and I have no direct communication; days when he's roaming the corridors of his inner life, and he does not hear me speak.

I'm mad and sorry most of the time. My freedom is curtailed - if I need to leave the house, I either have to take Scott with, or pay for support. I am not as agile, nimble, or interested as I was a year ago. Feeling isolated, I've isolated myself more. Quit the art commission. Stopped painting. Writing, creating, anything. I don't want to get dressed, shower, or rise from the bed to do neither.

I keep thinking this is the day it turns around. This is the day I reengage with life. This is the day my story will take up where it left off. And on that day I'm wrong again.

I am stuck in a groove of being unable to console myself because so many other people have it much harder than I do.

And I still can't cry.

Dollhouse Beginning 1992

My sister was cutting my hair in her kitchen in Detroit, while my other sister talked about what needed to happen in that house before the arrival of the baby, due in 2 months. Crib assembled, supplies laid on, daycare acquired. Susan quoted some prices, having 2 children of her own in daycare. So much money! I peeked around my hair - for an infant? What do babies do? Sleep, eat, eliminate, sleep some more. I told my pregnant sister - if I don't have a good job by then, I'll watch the baby. A week later, my niece was born prematurely. We started running. Paint the room, assemble crib, lay on supplies, get to library to learn how babies really do work. That tiny girl changed my life. She didn't sleep in a crib for a year. I had to watch her breathe. In out in out. I called her mother to report every new skill - working mothers miss all that great stuff. And when my other sister figured out I wasn't going to abandon this lovely role, she brought her 2 out of daycare. My day started at 5 a.m. and ended at 6 p.m. when I dropped the baby off at home. Three years of love and learning and joy. And I banked every nickel I could, because a divorce was in my near future.

Playing with a New Word for Aging

I got to this age the way everyone else does - by hanging around on this planet for X amount of time. What do we call being over 65? I read a couple of comments today without active participation until I decided to make up my own word for an older person. Making up words is more fun than aging. A word's power gets muddied in perception. Evidence crone which has slumped in popular usage over the centuries. Elder, some object to as too Druish. Senior? OK if there's a golf league to join or a discount to be had. Old. Nobody cares much for that because. Flowchart. That person with the wheelchair? Not me yet. If we think of this process of hanging around on earth for X time, (or for the math fans Earth+Time=Old. Maybe X=ET?) as spiritual growth or wisdom plus physical decline that gives me a place to word search. Wax and wane don't quite do the job because the etymology of those words is too close to make a word that's interesting or simple. Wax can mean grow in intensity, whether light in the case of the moon; or power in the case of potential energy (like a wound watch spring). That gives us aug. Augere in Latin, or Olde English, although that leads to augment and that leads to ED junk and I'm not going there. Wane gives us Latin vanus (empty) although I don't believe that etymological root. Ah, Yahoo, so not a root but a word itself. Combine spiritual growth and bodily decline. We're already in the realm of philosophical. Philosophy is not an antidote to science. Started reading a book by a philosopher which I then stopped reading because philosophy + science gets into the realm of gobbledygook. Holding two opposite thoughts in your head at the same time=bonkers. And getting a PhD in philosophy seems redundant to me. So trying to combine spiritual growth, which is potential energy (philosophy), but not applicable to every human's bodily decay over time, which is science and inescapable for everyone born of woman. That doesn't feel as much like bonkers. While the words are fun and highly entertaining for those of us old people who are terribly fond of words, old is old. No judgment on whether there is spiritual growth attained, or wisdom cultivated (and then, even more difficult: prove applied.) Judgment vs. discernment. Adding one more thought into this cauldron. So I'll stop here and go do something simple like laundry. Haven't even touched on the gobbledygookiery of adding anti-aging culture into the hopper. On to laundry...although...Latin de (to turn aside) as in decline, combined with a Latin word for growth silva is cool. Desilva. Turn aside from green? Maybe silva on its own. I am old. I am silva. [Photo: Detroit Bold is excellent coffee.]

Aging Brain Workaround

Cancelled the website I tried to set up yesterday. I could not negotiate the instructions. I had a website with MacHighway (itsamac in 1998), and had to let it go when I no longer had current software needed to update the site, 5 or 6 years ago or more. Then a user could still reach one of the founders on the phone. Today, it's chat tech support. One issue is the knowledge base requires a fore-knowledge I don't have (cpanel is what? –your portal to edit the site, and it's a separate login) and the bigger issue is my brain. I'm so upset by this. I had an immediate empathetic reaction to my father's frustration which may be the source of his rage. So we talked about it. We commiserated. He said he's been trying to come up with the word for not being able to pay a mortgage for 2 days. And he cannot keep in his head the name of the town my sister lives in. Talking about it made us both feel better. I made a joke - foreclosure and Fraser (the town my sister lives in) both start with F, so perhaps his brain has offloaded that letter. Foreclosure is not in either of our futures, so that word can disappear. More good news: my sister is moving so that town name won't be needed. I don't need a website, so I don't need to fret about my lessened ability to make one work. As our brains are less nimble, we need to ratchet up the rationalization. Or take more yoga classes. Or be more Zen. And gently accept what we cannot change, knowing we're in good company.

Artcraft Station

Clutter creep was getting in the way of my new watercolor obsession. I have a large board for 16x20 painting (with an amen to my therapist who asked "when are you going to work bigger?) and I had negative space to play in. What started as organizing the clutter into different clumps became a day-1/2 of doing a good job. Confession: I actually binned some books. For a reader who learned early not to bend corners or deface books I thought it'd be tougher. Threw away my father's massive collection of cords to unknown unowned tech. Relocated the ancient useless tools on the pegboard up and out of the way and moved my tools down and handy. When I was done tossing and stacking, I put stuff back saying out loud "related to jewelry, related to painting, related to tools, related to cleaning, related to bath." I bought online (!) a drafting stool. On the cement floor are two of my grandmother's handmade rugs which have been gathering dust in plastic bags under my bed. My grandmother and my mother are with me in this space - the Greenbrier bag I carry my watercolor supplies to class in was mom's. When I finished painting the particleboard surface, I remembered a piece of glass mom had made to fit her dining table. When the antique went away, the glass remained propped against a closet wall. It fits the work area perfectly. And wipes up with water! A little bit of heaven in the Artist's Dungeon. Maybe I need to start calling it the Artist's Retreat.

The Pez Murder

The victim. Male. Bunny. Broken neck from deceleration trauma (hitting my cubicle wall at speed after I hurled it.) Xacto knife added post death for photographic effect. Crime scene chalk outline and police line tape by me. Between bouts of crazy deadlines and frustratingly redundant edits to enormous documents, we had fun in the graphic design boiler room. During slow periods, some printed graduation and birthday posters on the giant plotter, designed wedding packages, did favors for preferred management consultants. I created 2 lines of greeting cards. Don't know what everyone did in slack times, but we worked fast and well together in busy stretches. Somewhere on the planet there are rooms of graphic designers and illustrators (I hope) hunched over their Big Macs, and I hope they're having as much fun as we did, more often.

The Pez Murder

Once upon a time there lived 10 graphic designers toiling in a small room with the door shut. We had seasonal KEEP OUT signs taped to the door. The empire we served had global offices, and we edited and drew for a couple of shifts until we passed the gigantic overbaked Powerpoint files off to Tokyo or Toronto or wherever there was capacity. Capacity. That meant women sitting doing graphic designerly stuff not related to Powerpoint presentations. Lots of emergencies, plenty of overtime. We were excellent designers, fast and creative and easily bored with the same ol' same ol'. One Easter season, teeth-gritted with files delivered to inboxes that weren't the right version, requests to fit a 200 pg. edit into the schedule, guys in ties standing over our shoulders pointing at monitors, I flipped. I threw my rabbit Pez against the wall of my cubicle, breaking its neck. Wo, I said, I just murdered my Pez dispenser. Silence in the room, then the sound of drafting chairs rotating to the center, designers making eye contact. Then a swelling swish and click of overworked artists on a drawing toot. I stuck my exacto knife in the back of the rabbit's neck and printed a police tape. The printer queue was scrolling printing 1 of 2, printing 10 of 12. Vicki printed a blood pool and a bloody glove. Beckie printed a chalk outline, bloody paw prints heading up the wall of the cubicle so we then knew how the killer escaped. All the kitschy cutesie stuff on monitors got shoved up to the police line, including Marian's picture of her cat. Beckie printed a wanted poster of the empire's VP, who later came by to see what the commotion was about. She used his smiling mug picture from the annual report, which was brave and briefly terrifying while he held it, read WANTED: NICK THE THUMB. He didn't fire any of us. We were able to figure out who ratted to Nick and worked out a long, long season of thwarting his every move. We kept The Pez Murder going for weeks. I'll be posting the pictures here, remembering the spontaneous fire of creativity in a small room with a KEEP OUT sign on the shut door.