66 on the 7th

You know those days when you are rushing to leave because you are almost late, and then something happens to make you definitely late?   Like you are just leaving, rush back to fill your water-bottle, and as you sweep past the counter the glass of water left there last night leaps off and smashes on the floor, so that there is now a large area of wet broken glass and a puddle to clean up.  And then you are finally on your way, and around the corner at Bothways Farm, the trees are dressed in the finest coats of lacy rime, glinting and glittering in the early morning light, and you are arrested in your car as it attempts to drive on past, and you stop and get out in the -13C air and try to capture this beauty.  And eventually you get back in the car, after several people have slowed and almost stopped to see if you are alright, crazy woman without hat nor gloves, and your hands are now screaming for warmth, and luckily around the next corner the heat finally comes on and your aching fingers unstiffen, the sun shines its best to try to warm you through the window, and the highway is kind, as it usually is on a Friday morning for some reason (does everyone work from home on a Friday?), and you reach your destination in perfect time.

 

Shining.

So just to bring me back to reality, to realise that my art room is not a magical kingdom where everyone has partaken of angel-dust, today I had a sixth-grader say something completely disgusting about another sixth-grader’s older sister, and it must have been pretty bad because no one would tell me what he had said, and the little brother was crying his eyes out on the other side of the table.  Why would a little kid say such a thing?  I remember Nicholas and Matthew, the new foreigners in sixth grade, similarly defending their sisters, who weren’t even in the same school, who the insulter had never even met!

And then in my other class these four little boys (over whom most of the girls tower) who are eleven and twelve years old, but honestly two of whom could pass for nine years old, were talking in a very disgusting way about pictures of naked women and making very rude gestures indeed.  I couldn’t understand everything they said because they were speaking low and in very rapid Parisian French, but I thought, “Why are you even talking like this, you barely have balls to speak of, you’re only 4 foot high, it's ridiculous!”

There must have been something in the air today, because even my older kids were being mean about people and had to be called out on it. 

It is the 7^th March, the wedding anniversary of my Mum and Dad.  They were married on the seventh because it was my mother’s lucky number.  (It is apparently the lucky number of many people, and the number 7 features prominently in all world religions and mythologies – a few examples out of hundreds: in Christianity, God took seven days to create the earth; in Islam, when you are a pilgrim to Mecca, you make seven circumambulations around the Kaaba. In Judaism, Shiv-a is another pronunciation of the number seven, hence one sits shiva for seven days.  Buddha walked seven steps when he was born, etc. etc.)    

Seventy-two years ago Joan and Jack were married in Sea Point, Cape Town, where my mother had grown up. Several months earlier my dad had come over on a troop-ship from England, a member of the RAF, and met my mother who was working as a WAF, handing out uniforms.  He fell in love with Joan, my mother, and with South Africa, and always maintained there was nowhere else where the sun warmed you “to your bones’.  

Mum and Dad on the beach in Cape Town - circa 1941

 

It is so strange to see images of your parents so happily in love, long before you were born, long before they became your parents, when they were young and beautiful and had few worries.  When you are a child you can’t even imagine such a thing, it is inconceivable that the world of your mum and dad did not always revolve around you. 

They were married for 64 years, a huge number, quite unusual in our world, and a good example of how hard you have to work at a marriage, how making a promise means keeping it for a very long time.  They had great ups and low downs, grand arguments and great joys, awful despondencies and happy reconciliations.  They had three children, ten grandchildren and three great-grandchildren in their lifetimes.  Now there are four more great-grandies, of which my little Luna and Ella are two!

Mum and Dad on the beach in Winthrop, Massachusetts, circa 2002

When my parents had been married for fifty-five years, I made them a wall-hanging, showing them standing in front of their beloved 10 Forest Drive, and there are their three children with their families, and of course it was not ready for the anniversary (yes Emma and Jess, you know me well – but what a lot of embroidery and sewing went into this wall-hanging), so it was finished by July of that year, when we went to Cape Town to deliver it, where it hung in pride of place in my parents' little lounge until they died.  I have it now, but, like their ashes, I still have no idea what to do with it.

Applique and embroidery wall-hanging for 55 years.

And so the tree grows new branches,still standing on firm roots, although the great trunk is composed only of spirits now, and new saplings are springing up all over the world. 

300 more days to go!

And up at 5.55am and out of the door by 6.15 and down the highway to school in the cold cold COLD!, for parent/teacher conferences!

And a lot of smiling and saying warm and interesting things about your students, which parents love to hear.  Three mothers told me that I had made their days, because although their children struggle with “ordinary lessons”, I report that they are creative and cheerful and enthusiastic and full of life and ideas, all of which augur well in an Art room.  One parent was absolutely shocked to learn that his child focuses intently on each art project and works diligently until its completion!  

And many of the parents who come to see me are of course those who love Art themselves, those who know that there needs to be a balance between the various subjects taken by one child, that Art, Music and Theatre are just as necessary as Math, Biology and Social Studies.

I am so glad that my school values the Arts so highly.  I read this interesting fact about the history of art education in American public schools: ‘The study of art appreciation in America began with the Picture Study Movement in the late 19th century and began to fade at the end of the 1920s. Picture study was an important part of the art education curriculum. Attention to the aesthetics in classrooms led to public interest in beautifying the school, home, and community, which was known as “Art in Daily Living”’.  –wikipedia.  What an amazing idea!  I want to know why it faded.  And carried on fading a century later …. Since 2010, 25% of American public schools have dropped their Arts programmes altogether. 

 

I am consistently contented with my job.  I love to teach children new skills, enjoy training their wonderful brains to really look at things, to see more deeply.  I appreciate guiding their research, exploring the role of the artist in society.  I love to argue with them, or listen to them, considering every subject under the sun.  I want them to know better how to live in the world, how to make sense of it through artistic expression.  This type of education animates self-awareness and with this comes a growing awareness of others, which is the beginning of empathy, the glue of a society. 

 

War and Peace - group project inspired by a study of Picasso's Guernica

Place

The promise of spring

When I was fifteen the SS Wafra, an oil tanker travelling with a full cargo of crude oil from Saudi Arabia to Cape Town, ran aground at Cape Agulhas (which happens to be the geographical southernmost tip of the African continent).  Most of the tanks were punctured on the rocks and at the time it was the worst oil spill in history.  Of course there were millions of marine animals affected by this spill (which is a truly pathetic word to describe what happens when crude oil spreads out over a wide area, kills everything and affects so much for decades!).  

(The SS Wafra was eventually towed way out to sea to be sunk.  A Buccaneer tried to bomb it, unsuccessfully, until a Shackleton was brought in to do the job, a fact which my sister will definitely enjoy immensely, it being her favourite aeroplane.) 

One such little animal was deeply affected but there were things which could be done to try to fix them, these quaint little characters, the African penguins. These small creatures used to be called Jackass penguins, because of the sound that they make, but their name has been changed to the more polite African penguin, which also goes to show that this is where they live.  They should really be called the Southern African penguin, because they actually only live on a few islands off the coast of Southern Africa, with a couple of mainland populations having been established in the 80’s.   

In the newspapers and on the radio (tv was still banned in South Africa at that time, Hendrik Verwoerd, the architect of apartheid, having compared it to the atomic bomb and poison gas in terms of its danger to the population), a call went out for volunteers to help bathe and feed these incapacitated flightless sea-birds.  I volunteered at the Southern African Foundation for the Conservation of Coastal Birds (SANCCOB) (where is the F in that acronym? In fact quite a few words are in the wrong order!) in Sea Point or Camps Bay, I can’t remember quite where it was, although now their headquarters are at Rietvlei Wetlands, which didn’t even exist at that time.  My dad used to drop me off there in the mornings every weekend, and pick me up in the evenings.  All day we would take turns bathing the oil-soaked birds in a special type of detergent, which had to happen many times, over many days, so that the birds didn’t go into toxic shock. Eventually, numerous washes later, the feathers and skin would be free of the bad oil and the penguins could preen themselves with their own good oil and in this way many were rehabilitated and released.  

After the poor things had lost all their dignity being scrubbed, we would have to force-feed them because penguins don’t eat dead fish.  This was the hardest part.  The penguins all stood around looking desolate after their baths, like helpless little old ladies, turning about this way and that in an aimless confused way, holding their little arms out stiffly.  To feed one you first had to reach in and pick up the sad figure, settle yourself down and wedge it between your legs, where the strong ones would fight violently.  Once you had it more or less under control, you would then grab the beak, force it open, somehow keep holding it open with one hand, seize a slippery silver fish and shove it halfway down the bird's gullet.  Once you had done this the penguin generally swallowed, and after a few more fish, you set it down again with its fellows, where it shook itself a few times in a half-embarrassed, half-irritated way, and then went back to looking terribly sorry for itself just like all the others. 

These penguins were the guinea-pigs (yes, I know that sounds silly) for rehabilitation, as quite a number of them died in the process, little being known at that time about what constituted a good programme to successfully clean oil-soaked birds.  It is a tragic fact that organisations like SANCCOB have had too much practice dealing with increasingly common oil spills and have therefore come up with ever better cleaning methods.  It is heartbreaking that there has been the need, and will always be a need, for such work.  Four years ago almost to the day, when I was writing my other year’s blog, the worst “spill” happened in the Gulf of Mexico.  And yet, and yet, we maintain all the usual ways of doing things, it is not if another disaster happens, but when.  Mankind is pretty stupid when greed and global corporations are involved.  

My first-friend Trish put up a post about knitting little coats for penguins being rehabilitated in Australia, which is an ongoing process, just as it is in South Africa.  So I have resolved to knit one little jacket a month. 

http://www.abc.net.au/local/audio/2014/03/05/3957423.htm#.UxfkKvmfH-8.facebook

Penguin doing interpretive dance as a teapot in a tea-cosy.

Day 64

Getting weak-willed in my old age!  Couldn't quite get it together to go out into the snow to gym early this morning before school, so did a few exercises at home instead.

I had an avocado for lunch.  We always call avocados the food of the gods, because they are the most delicious fruit, although they are not like apples and oranges and the rest.  Botanically, the avocado is a large berry! 

When I was about sixteen I went to a winter-school at the Space Theatre in Cape Town, recently opened and run by Yvonne Bryceland and her husband Brian Astbury.  It was the first non-racial theatre in South Africa, defiant of the apartheid laws of the time, and we were about 50 school students, mostly white, but a few of different races, learning to trust one another, with strange trust-building exercises that I had never experienced before, and so at lunchtime I would leave the building and walk down through the Gardens in Cape Town and buy an avocado from a vendor for my lunch.  I would sit alone on a bench under the beautiful avenue of trees, and savour the deliciousness of the avo, cutting it open with my penknife and eating it off the blade like my dad had taught me to do.  I would think about all the huge and difficult things in my life, and then I would go back, to try again. 

In the magical 16 Cross Street Bouwer-house, we had a huge avocado-tree that was prolific in its fruit-production.  We had a constant supply of avos, and a fat black labrador called Skye who loved avocados even more than we did.  Sometimes the high ones were impossible to pick, and so we would wait until they fell down themselves, but we rarely got any of those ones, as Skye would sit and wait for them to fall on the ground and then pounce on them and consume them rather like a hippopotamus attacking a bunch of grass, with great happiness.

(The closest relative to a hippopotamus is a whale.  They diverged from cetaceans about 55 million years ago.   They are very aggressive creatures, and are known as one of the most dangerous African animals.)

We used to call Skye the canine seal, because she was this little fat black waddling creature who loved water and wallowing.

My friend Cindy had made a wonderful avocado dish for a dinner party, and told her little daughter to carry it in carefully and give it to the host, and say, "Here you are, this is the food of the gods!"  So the little girl went off very proudly, balancing the dish very carefully, and announced, "Here you are, this is the food of the dogs!"

I have to get up very early for parent-teacher conferences, and I am so so tired, my weak will has continued into the night, and so my man-made thing today is an old painting, called Childhood.

Sixty-three

On Sunday I was wandering around A C Moore, looking for a particular sized frame, listening to my book, far away, when I realised that a woman was trying to attract my attention, and had perhaps been speaking for a while, not realising that I had earphones in my ears. She was saying, very loudly, as she had probably supposed that I was deaf, "I JUST LOVE YOUR HAIR!  It looks exactly the same as that movie, you know, Tangled?  Exactly the same colour and everything!  Just lovely!"  So I thanked her and walked away feeling a bit perplexed, because I was pretty sure, it being Angelina's favourite movie, that the heroine in Tangled is blonde?  She must have meant Brave, but confused the title because of the state of my hair - tangled!

I am quite partial to my hair actually.  When the boys were born 21 years ago I started going grey, and as I didn't want to be mistaken for their grandmother, being a relatively old new mother, I decided to henna it, which I had done once before when I was still naturally blonde and had given my mother the fright of her life by turning up on her doorstep one university vacation with bright light-orange hair!  

Henna is natural, just crushed leaves, basically, so it doesn't destroy hair like regular dye, and actually keeps it well-conditioned.   I have been doing it ever since, and now I am kind of stuck with it as I would have to cut my hair short-short in order to let it grow out grey, and I have no desire whatsoever to do that.  So I'll probably be that old 80 year old woman walking around, all wrinkled and bent, but with copper-coloured hair to the end!

When I was little I couldn't have long hair because I suffered from asthma and the doctors said that short hair was best because it couldn't hold dust and whatnot, so while I envied the beautiful long wavy ponytail of my best friend Trish, my hair was always cropped short like a boy's.  As soon as I became a teenager I rebelled (against almost everything) and grew my hair long and have only had short hair one other time since then when I cropped it in a moment of madness, tired of the two babies pulling on it! 

Anne and Jess, the henna-girls.

So so cold to get up and begin in the morning, -14C, a ridiculous temperature, and dark, cold and dark.  I can't wait for spring, really can't wait!  Of course it is not -14C in our room, but still feels frigid!  The alarm goes and I just want to turn over and curl up in the warmth left by Tim's good body, as he leaps up to go and play squash at some unearthly hour!  I want to sink back down into the interesting dream I was having, float off into that warm dark ocean...

To actually get out of bed and find an outfit for the day, then take off your warm sleep-clothes, and put on the cold clothing, is torture. 

But it has to be done, and a breakfast made, and a lunch packed, and as the first light emerges weakly, tentatively, through the trees, and the birds come out and sing happily, having survived another freezing night, telling everyone there is fresh seed and water here, I gather all my school things and pick my way down the icy path to the car, and off I drive to the city.  Today I listen to WBUR National Public Radio, because my book is finished and I can't bear to begin a new one yet, the last one was SO good. 

So I have the radio on and I think.  And there is Ukraine, with Russian troops poised, and later in the morning my ninth graders discuss this fact, and debate which forces run the world, while they are creating beautiful flowing tissue-paper collages of seascapes and landscapes and water-lilies, and they come to the right conclusion, that it is weapons, the sale of weapons.  This is what makes the world go around.  How sad it is that they should already know such things.  But also good, how they talk, discuss, and then are not submerged by it all, but dig in to the colours, splash on the mod-podge, fashion a composition, enjoy, ride high on the beauty of their creations, and eventually clean up, organise themselves, and stride off to the next class. 

Students often remark how slowly all the other subjects go, and how fast the art class flies by, and I have to almost physically push them out of the room sometimes, they are so caught up in it.  It is so sad, that we lose all the art we just take for granted when we are young.  Art is in every subject when you are little, every little kid thinks they're an artist, they believe it with all their hearts.  And then as you get older it is gradually squeezed out of you, you are told that it is unimportant, science and math are paramount. Art is for people who can't do those things, art is beneath the intelligent ones, and soon, very few young adults believe they are artists.  Our happiness leaks out like air from a forgotten birthday balloon, imperceptibly at first, but a part of our soul withers.

Sixty-two

I went for a very long trek through the snow with my ghost-dog Molly.  It was very very cold (-8C), but I became so hot that by the time I was halfway along I had stripped off my coat and hat and gloves. 

It was very disconcerting to come across two sets of human footprints, perhaps a man and a woman, one smallish, the other large.  And a dog or several dogs.  I consider this land MY meadow, and have rarely seen a living soul on my daily trails through field and forest for the past nine years.   Of course I followed the prints and they even knew the best place to cross the wall, so obviously have a knowledge commensurate with mine.  I felt almost violated at first, and then the meadow calmed me down, because if the meadow had accepted them then I would too.

Birds sang in the March sunshine, which is almost warm, beautiful whistling songs from cardinals and tufted titmouses. 

When I got home I hauled wood for half an hour until all the storage spots were full. 

I was cleaning out my drawers today and found an old diary from 2012, when we were in England for Emma and Stuarts' wedding.  We arrived a few days early so that we could go to visit our friend Stephen in Manchester for a few days.  We got on a train feeling like death from all the travelling and no sleep.

Diary excerpt 04/12/2012

On a train - fast one, travelling to Manchester.

A sign that said, "Tubular Erectors Ltd."

Subway, sitting waiting underground, an overhead walkway with a grille through which you can see people's legs walking, with a sign saying WAY OUT with an arrow pointing straight up, as if you had to climb up and get through the grille somehow to be able to get out.

Such beautiful rural landscapes in England, the green and pleasant land, sheep by the dozens with all their new little lambs. (sheep with twins, how does she feel, lying down and twins nuzzling)

Gorse, hedgerows, magpies, fields and fields of startling yellow rapeseed.

The man in front of me is having conversations on his cell-phone with all different people, his work, men, then he talked to his two little daughters, then his wife, quite friendly and helpful, no "love you" at the end though.
Then talking to a woman from work, laughing and laughing, a low scurrilous kind of laugh, and then at the end, a kind of whispered "Looking forward to seeing you tomorrow, it'll be..." and I couldn't hear the rest, whispered as though someone relevant on the train would hear him!

It's so usual, isn't it?

Barges on a slow little river/canal, locks, everything like Postman Pat's countryside, but in many happy-looking houses there are very unhappy people, cruelty is occurring, people are ambivalent about their sexuality, people are treating their old ones abominably.  But also there are people being kind to their children, being patient with their husbands. 

We feel like zombies, running on empty, Tim and I.

Beautiful clouds.

People talking loudly on cellphones, saying "Sorry?" intermittently in that very British way.

A cow-shaped cloud above a field of sheep.

Lots of nests and hawk-like birds, especially in one field, must be good mouse-hunting there.

So much history - ruins - so different from South Africa.

Taking pics from the moving train with my phone.

Black clouds hastening towards us with Black Angus cows in a large green field, calmly curled up at comfortable distances from one another, taking notice, or not, of our train whooshing past.

Only 5 stops on this train:  Somewhere, Stoke on Trent, Macklesfield (pouring with rain), Stockport, (getting bleaky), Manchester.

I hate golf-courses.

Ivy like a hand creeping color up a grey dirty railway embankment wall.

So interesting to read what you wrote a long time ago.  Writing it down makes it real, brings it back into focus, makes it easy to relive. 

Day 61

Our mothers were the sisters Joan and Nora.

 Today my cousin Brent sent me a photograph of their children, the eight cousins, when we were much much younger.

 
Joan had three children, Nora five.  They lived in the same suburb and helped each other a lot when their children were small.  For example, when I was just a couple of months old I lived with Nora for about a month, when she was pregnant with my cousin Carol, while my mother was in hospital, desperately ill with pleurisy.  Another time my mother had my cousin Carol and little Michael to stay with us for a few weeks when my uncle was very ill.  And before I was born, when my brother was struck down with polio, my sister went to stay with my aunt's family so that my mother could nurse him full-time. 

In the picture, my big sister Brenda is the eldest, sitting in the middle, already a young woman, aged about 17, holding our cousin Michael, the newest and youngest.  Our mothers had two of their children just a few months apart.  The two cousins at either edge are the same age, Rose on the left and my brother Timothy on the right, about ten or eleven at the time.  The two little girls on either side of my sister are my cousin Carol on the left and me, Anne, on the right, born five months apart, aged about four.  My aunt had two dear little boys in between Rose and Carol, Alan on the left and Brent on the right.

I always notice hands, and what are we all doing with our hands?   We were obviously all told to sit down on the ground and arranged in a triangular dynamic, ready to be photographed.  The two at the edges seem the most naturally comfortable, although their hands are still consoling one another.  They are old enough to be responsible and smile while they look at the camera.  (My cousins are all impeccably dressed and shod, while my brother and I look like barefoot urchins.) 

My sister has been handed a very unhappy little baby, and sits awkwardly, her hands unbalanced on the small body, doing her best, and also squeezing out a smile, trying to ignore the crying infant in her arms.  Later in life she held and healed (and still continues to do so) thousands of children as a Head Paediatric Sister.

The two little dark-haired brothers look slightly ill at ease, Alan clasping his hands and six-year old Brent playing with something real or imaginary with his fingers, neither of them paying much attention to the person with the camera.

Carol has her hands steepled, a very mature gesture, and sits, legs stretched out, beautiful curls wafting on the breeze, enduring the pose.

And I gaze directly at the viewer with a big camera-induced smile, my hands attached to my leg, making certain it is on properly.

It is always fascinating to look at our families, our relatives, ourselves, and try to remember who we were, or to see where we come from.  It was a sunny place, that time, we ran about together, we were fearless and bold, cruel and kind, children learning how to become. 

Luna examining  her summer family in America

Soixante

I went to a Bridal shower today for the wife-to-be of the son of our first American friends.  (Such a complicated sentence.)

 
It was a beautiful affair.  Everything was laid out with care and affection.  And the groom-to-be was also there, adding his hilarious comments to ensure nothing was taken too seriously.  All the guests were people who loved these two, some of them had known them since they were born.  Cousins and aunts and their mothers and so many helpful and organising people, a huge support group, washing up, serving, attending.  There was someone who would write down the names of all the people, someone who would pack away all the paper, and such a pile of wonderful kitchen appliances surrounded them at the end.  They are indeed a lucky pair.

All these rituals that people go through before the actual wedding, which is decided upon months in advance, and then finally the day arrives and it is this extravagant professing of love and commitment in public, in front of all your friends and relations.  It is a day to remember all your life, with photographs and movies of the day, a day when you are the most important person in the world, and everyone only has eyes for you.

(I think that if it was me, I would use all the money that I would have spent on the wedding to buy some lovely books, and then we would go on a wonderful trip somewhere in the world, starting with the Galapagos Islands.)
 
The other evening I was coming home very late, very tired, my headlights pointing out the mounds of dirty ice-covered snow lining the dark road near our house, when I was suddenly startled out of my reverie as a beautiful fox trotted across the road, its lithe body and magnificent tail illuminated  by my lights.  I always get such a rush of pleasure at seeing a fox.  A sighting implies that things are well in the animal world, everything more or less in balance, a good supply of mice, rabbits, and all the other things these opportunistic feeders eat.

There are both red and gray foxes in Massachusetts, but strangely enough the gray fox is also mostly red, so I have no idea what this one was. I was rather horrified to learn that there is a hunting season for foxes in Massachusetts, when you may shoot them for their fur.  Why would anyone need the fur of a this small creature?  The biggest fox only weighs about 15 pounds!

Studies have shown that there is a direct correlation between lower fox populations and an increase in Lyme's disease.  The Eastern Coyote is a hybrid between a coyote and a wolf, and they have moved into this area en masse, with dire consequences.  The Eastern Coyote out-competes and kills the native Fox population, which leads to a rise in the number of small mammals like mice and chipmunks who would ordinarily be lower in numbers due to the fox's appetite for them.  These tiny animals are the ones that transmit Lyme's disease bacteria to ticks, so that if there are more of them,
there is an increase in ticks that carry Lyme disease.

Foxes are amazingly adaptable creatures.  One night in London my niece came out with us and then went all the way home alone on the bus when it was already very late.  I worried about her, so stayed up until she had arrived safely in her flat, and she texted me several times on her bus-trip home, about the strange people on the late-night bus, how I shouldn't worry because she is so used to doing this (but what about the strange people?), how she was so happy to have my daughter as her cousin, and the last one was to tell me that she had arrived home, and just as she was nearing her building, she had witnessed a beautiful healthy fox trotting away down the street, and it had made her so happy.  I went to sleep thinking of the clever fox, how like dogs they are, but how they are also cat-like, and Paula's fox made me happy too, as she had known it would.