Face Lifts

   The above statue of Evangeline reminds me of my mother, Virginia Packard.   She was blessed with strong cheekbones, a lithe body and a wicked sense of fashion.  I, on the other hand,  am saddled with thin lips and a thick body.  My sense of fashion is relatively good (I read Vogue, watch Project Runway etc) but tend to wear whatever fits.  My husband once believed the adage that a man should look his mother-in-law for a preview of his wife's future.  Who was I to  dissuade him?
  Lately, I've noticed that women who are my contemporaries look a lot younger than I.  My jiggly bits are sagging.  By next year, my breasts will be even with my elbows.  I could do something surgical, but who am I kidding.  My father repeatedly told me when I was a teenager that "Beauty is as Beauty does."  I still don't know what that means, but I assume since I was applying makeup when he said it, he was referring to my weight.  I only wish I was now as fat as I was when he thought I was fat.
   I watched a documentary about face lifts years ago.   The surgeon put his hand between the skin and the deep fascia to remove the tissue sheath.  I've done the same a hundred times, clearing the membrane of a chicken to add herbs.   The documentary  put me off surgery and roasted chicken.
   My mother had a face lift when she was 58.    My parents rented out their home in New Canaan every summer. One year, my mother's face lift coincided with an open house. I came home with my fiancé to visit her.  My father had stuck my mother in the smallest room of the house so as to not frighten potential tenants.  I thought him a cad.  Until I saw her.  She looked nothing like my mother but an enormous blue and black Kabuki mask, tottering on narrow shoulders.  My fiancé gasped.
   Two weeks later, still swollen with the blue fading to yellow and purple, my mother gamely went to the Yale Club in New York City to meet my fiancé's parents for the first time.  I've never admired her more.

Free At Last!

                                   "Color Echoes"© 2015

    I started this painting to be in my usual style, but the left half reminded me of Diebenkorn's Ocean Park Series, so I went with it.  The finished image is far superior to what you see here.  The camera angle was so skewed that even Photoshop couldn't remedy it.
   The 'free at last' refers to my retirement.  I quit my day job.  Granted it was just one day a week, but still.  I was a sales clerk in the Art League's Supply Store.  It was a great job.  I loved my boss, interacting with other artists, learning from some, teaching others.  Most of the customers were great.   But after 15 years, clerkdom has lost its glamour.  And I really hated fighting rush hour traffic.
   So what will I do with this new freedom?  As it happens, nothing good.  I cracked my patella (spontaneously) last week.  No surgery required, just 6 to 8 weeks in a 30" brace.  Walking, or rather galumphing, with it for one day skewed my back.  Shortly after I am released from the brace, I am having a total ankle replacement.  Months of recovery, I'm told.
   At least I won't be stuck in beltway traffic on my ankle scooter.

Unexpected Gifts

A good friend, Judy Yavit, is a world traveler.  She has brought me many gifts.  In hindsight, my favorite was a blank notebook she gave me in 1992.  Now, it is nearly full of  quotes, political cartoons and things I found funny, odd or provocative.  Today I am going to share lighter fare.

The above image is from the Washington Post, from February 2011.  As the caption states, an anti-government protester in Yemen "with pieces of bread taped to his head shouts out slogans."


From Pam Houston's, Cowboys are My Weakness: "He'll be gone six weeks.  I asked him if he wanted to make love.  He was just lying there, you know, staring at the ceiling.  He said, 'I was just trying to decide whether to do that or go to Ace Hardware.'"

Bumper sticker:  "I love animals.  They're delicious."

Richard Russo in Nobody's Fool:  "She had married a man whose idea of luck was road kill."

Zanne Early Stewart, of the late Gourmet Magazine: "He's like the man who knew how to spell banana but didn't know when to stop."

Alice Thomas Ellis, The Sin Eaters: "Ermyn was asleep on her back and Lilliputian insects were considering how best to break her up and carry her away."

The late Molly Ivins described Arnold Schwarzenegger as looking like "a condom stuffed with walnuts."

Gravestone in Kilmarnock, Virginia: "I told you I was sick."

Mark Helprin decrying modernist art as a function of totalitarianism,'there are a thousand abstract segments in a Raphael, but not a single Raphael in an abstract.'

Richard Russo, Empire Falls: A maitre d' in an upstate New York Italian restaurant, "Do you have reservations?"  "Who wouldn't?"

Michael Holroyd's autobiography of his life as a poor little rich boy: He retreated to the world of books, "which the family borrowed from the local library and baked on principle to kill off the germs."

My husband: "Is there stress after death?"

Zoe Heller Everything You Know: "Lately when I lie on my back, I have noticed it (her stomach) swerving away, settling in a puddle of flash at my side.  In the mornings, I wake to find it lying next to me, gazing up at me like an affectionate haggis."

Ford Motors hired poet laureate, Marianne Moore, to come up with a name for what was ultimately called the Edsel.  Some of her suggestions; Resilient Bullet, Mongoose Civique, Varsity Stroke, and my favorite, Utopian Turtletop.

Howard Stern referred to George W. Bush as "Hop-a-long Apathy."

The National Tartar Association has decided that men should wear underwear under their kilts.  One indignant Scot said if he were to wear any underwear, it would be made of twigs.

Eric Newby, Slowly, Down the Ganges: the author approaches a group of Indians warming their hands near a funeral pyre.  He says, 'It's a good fire.'  One replies, 'Yes. It is a woman."

And lastly, Willem de Kooning: "An artist is like a man at the circus, standing off by himself, trying to balance on one finger.  The point is, no one asked him to do it."

Goodbye, Old Friends

                                                    "Sink, Sank, Sunk II"  © 2011

  This piece has been a crowd pleaser.  For years, people stopped on their way out of my studio, surprised by this piece.  People revisited the painting.  Some brought friends back to see it.  The sink is part of the antique plumbing in the Vineyard house.  The animals are mostly wind-up animals I got off ebay.
   I didn't expect the painting would ever sell, but on Thursday a  family from Los Angeles was smitten.  Part of me was sad to see it go, but another part was revving up a new windup toy scenario.  Stay tuned...

What are Memories Made of?

What are memories made of?  Puppy dog tails, bakery smells, the feeling of sun on your face?  I only know for sure that memories are not made of megabytes.  For the second time in eighteen months I have had a 2 terabyte external hard drive go belly up.  We lost power last night and I lost about 30,000 images.  Apparently, I am supposed to have backup for my backup.  It puts me in mind of Bertrand Russell who delivered a speech about galaxies.  A woman in the audience said that was nonsense, everyone knew that the earth sat on the back of a giant tortoise.  Russell asked, "ah, but what is the turtle standing on?"  Her response, "it's turtles all the way down."  To be data safe in this brave new world, it seems we need banks of external hard drives, 'all the way down.'
   The above photo is my new granddaughter.  (Baby picture removed at the request of her parents) I hope to have many memories of her that don't require backup.  I have kept a journal since 1976, a reassuring hardcopy of my life.  I am missing the year my son was born.  He was a very fussy child.  Not his fault, as it happens.  The pediatrician prescribed warm water with karo syrup for his colic.  He was allergic to corn syrup, so I was pouring gasoline on the fire.  Now I wonder if things were so bad I contemplated infanticide and tossed the journal destroy the evidence.

What's In A Name?

                                   " The Offices of Tilted and Askew" © 2007

   Names have been much on my mind lately.  I just finished Suri Hustevedt's The Blazing World.  I found the novel difficult to get into with references to Kierkegaard, Danno and Diderot in just one paragraph.  I felt as if I had been plucked from the couch and dropped  back into one of Carol Dupre's seminars.  They were fascinating but also mentally challenging and discomforting.  The Blazing World deals with an accomplished artist Harriet/Harry Burden who feels her work has been ignored because she is a woman.  She tests her theory by using three male artists (masks) to show her work as their own.  I forced my way through the first half of the novel, only because I am an artist and felt it behooved me to do so.  Midway through I became engaged with the characters and enjoyed the premise.  
   I have always signed my paintings CP Richmond.  Not to pretend I was a man (male artists sell better) but because I never liked my name, Cynthia.  There's not a lot you can do with such a prissy name but shorten it to Cindy.  "Cindy", to me, was a cheerleader.  No one has ever offered me pompoms.  I thought of changing my name to Thia, but that smacked of overreaching.
   I take great care with the names of my paintings.  Lisa Semerad, the artist, once told her class "anything you can do to make the viewer take a second look is worth the effort."
The attached image is of one of my favorite paintings, though I couldn't begin to explain why.  It went through a series of names (ie.,"Pandora Has Left the Building")before settling on "The Offices of Tilted and Askew".
   I am about to become a grandmother which has also fueled my interest in names.  Apparently, singularity is all the rage.  No one should be burdened with a common name.  Nor one that doesn't pose the question, is the addressee male or female?  Parker, Aubrey, Avery, Riley and Peyton are popular girl's names. When I hear some current boys's names I wonder why they don't just stick a "kick me" sign on the kid's back the first day of kindergarten.  A sampling: Usher, Magnus, Ignatious, Banjo, Cosimo, and Draco. I think it's easier for girls to carry an odd name.  One of the top names for girls, according to the Huffington Post, in 2014 was Imogene.  Some of my friends children have named their children  by where they were conceived, i.e.. "Siena."  (I am so relieved she wasn't conceived in Bologna.) 
  It's a new world.  Oddity is the new normal.

The Deja Blues

                                            The Slippery Slope    © 2004

   I have been in a funk, a major snit.  The "Slippery Slope" above seems relevant to my health.  Eleven months ago, I had a total knee replacement on my right knee so I could kayak, bike and be the active retiree my husband wanted.  Five years ago, I had to have my my left one done.  (Twice, as it happens, because the knee became infected.  It was a very rough patch.  Not just the pain, but IV antibiotics that I had to administer through a pic line for six weeks.)  This time, the operation went swimmingly.  My physical therapist said I had the fastest full recovery he had ever seen.
   Then came the Fitbit bracelet,  measuring my every step.  I was so cocky that 10,000 steps seemed half-hearted.  I went for 15,000. 
   Wham! Last May my knee started hurting very badly.  I think if I could have taken NSAIDs or any anti-inflamatory it would have stopped.  But anti-inflammatories are verboten for the colitis-impaired.  And Tylenol is as effective as eye of newt.
  I spent many hours with ice packs and my physical therapist.   It got better.  I could walk up stairs normally.  But I couldn't speed walk.  This went on for many months.  My doctor thought we should check for infection.  He aspirated fluid from the knee.  Four days later I learned the gram stain came back positive but they lost the culture. Not good.
   Silly me, I panicked, thinking this meant a new knee replacement.    There were the dark moments spent on the internet.  If the knee was infected, it would mean two surgeries.  One to remove the infected titanium knee and insert a cement spacer loaded with antibiotics.  After six weeks of pic-line IV injections, if it was clear, I could have another knee replacement.  Basically, I would be sidelined for five months. Surely Medicare would balk at five surgeries on two knees.  And what was the guarantee that the new knee wouldn't get infected? (The doctor thinks I have some auto-immune issues.)  If it did, the next step would be, according to the internet, amputation.
   The doctor aspirated my knee again.  This time the gram stain was negative but the culture was positive for staph.
   The doctor was unhappy with the lab.  The next week he aspirated my knee in the operating room of a hospital.  Several days of anxiety later, I learned the 24 and the 48 hour cultures were negative.  Today I learned the 72 hour culture was also clear.  
  The best Christmas present ever.
  I still don't know why my knee hurts, but I no longer care.  Happy Holidays, and may all of your surgeries be involuntary.