Seeing Red

Too dark, too cold.

It’s only November and already, too dark too cold. You’d think we, or I, would learn to adapt eventually. But we don’t, or I don’t, and remain perennially irritated and amazed by the weather. I suppose this keeps the snow shoveling to come more enjoyable, if it remains a kind of surprise each year.

Watching the Cargo

I am useless about time. I don’t have a very good sense of time, my internal clock is broken, my watches run slow and then die. One is in the process of dying now. I don’t seem to care. Perhaps it is the depressive’s sense of futility or resignation—the work will have to get done eventually and I will be working another weekend, so why hurry? Why worry? It does matter in cooking, and for collecting children from school, and for those things I pay attention. The world functions on time clocks independent of mine; people have their own schedules and they synchronize with mine briefly or do not, and I seem to keep floating on, trying to get done the things on the list that have been there since it was warm. Someone always wants something else done, now, on their time. I can imagine unhooking from this carousel, flipping the clasp on the leash and slipping free of time.

Not really, of course. There will always be seasons, and I will always count days if not hours.

Triumph of the New York School

The light in fall changes as the angle of the earth’s rotation alters, a different emphasis of light by color. Everything seems redder, even here; in St. Louis it was as if everything had been encased in amber (or beer, perhaps) so warm was the light.  As I sifted through old photographs I was amazed by how really red they were, soaked in the hue of bricks, and remembered those chilly afternoons of rosy light, the aesthetic shock of a Bingham sky flying overhead. I thought those painters were making it up, following a convention, the way Mark Tansey does, though Tansey uses the conventions to subvert them. Thinking of Tansey and Bingham while gazing upon a riverside sunset, I realized I was trapped by post-modernism. I could no longer see the world as it is (if that were ever possible), and no longer see the world as it has been imagined for me, but saw it instead and presume that it is already several steps removed from simply being, and is now interpreted, re-interpreted, and parodied. The sense of wonder and joy is easy to lose, especially when mediating visual experiences through previous visual references. It’s a tricky hall of mirrors and images.

Fur Traders Descending the Missouri

The funny thing was, seeing the river and knowing the Bingham (from an 8×10 color transparency we’d ordered for an illustration in the historical society’s magazine), I got excited. Finding out that Bingham was painting what he saw, and that what he saw was sublime, was transporting. It was not necessarily authentic. If my experience of the sunset on the river was made more enjoyable by understanding that Bingham’s vision was true, it does not mean that assuming Bingham’s vision was pure would make my vision pure. It would only mean that in my specific time and place, near a place that he saw, we experienced, saw, similar skies and colors, and presumably found joy in those scenes. We probably ought not to assume that Bingham felt joy on seeing and painting those skies, but it is hard to imagine that an artist could create paintings that caused joy in the viewer and not feel some joy himself. One hopes that even the academic forms transmit some truth about the artist’s passion and vision; one hopes to find an echo of humanity in the material.

Japanese Maple

Whether or not Bingham found joy in those Missouri skies, I did, and I miss their openness and warmth. In Providence, even though light is bluer, there are still pockets and surprises of red. Outside an office window, a tree turns salmon with feathery ochre fronds; in the front yard, carmine leaves shake from the slender trees and in the back, the neighbor’s Japanese maple hangs its scarlet head over the fence.

From the window of the ugliest kitchen in Providence, the tree is dull red in the morning when I make lunches; in the mid-afternoon, sunlight filters through the leaves in a palette of reds and oranges and yellows that curve over the dull brown fence, flashing the colors that painters get only with the expensive heavy metal paints. I love the tree, even as the leaves fall and curl and I know that winter will come. Animal that I am, I forget each year, and each year find the joy again in seeing the reds.

The Rabbit Died

No, not mine and not an old VW (those never die, if they’re diesel).

The Maggot’s rabbit died, Aslan run down on Sunday or Monday while Mr. Silver Spoons watched, or so I am told.

Who lets a rabbit run around on College Hill? The rabbit had three adoring owners, a cage, a leash, the run of the house, and they let it out.

“Oh, I think he goes under a bush when it rains,” Silver Spoons said to me, lifted her head and arced her nose through the air, stretching to let her blonde hair trickle down her neck. “I saw him the other day while the boys were at school. He was with the squirrels, I think the rabbit wants to be a squirrel.”

She looked at me with those strange uninhabited blue eyes, and blinked.

I did not say, “He’s going to get squished and you’ll break the boys’ hearts. How can you be so irresponsible?”

Because she’s not irresponsible, she’s unconventional.

I realized the last time the Maggot stayed with us that I did not have anything but her cell number. If the Maggot became ill, what would I have done? Taken him to the pediatrician (yes, I know about the car issues, we’d have managed) and paid out of pocket but what would I have done if he’d been really, really ill? How would I have let her know? It’s one thing when it’s Vermont and she is at least still within the time zone, but it hit me that she’d gone overseas and left her kids alone on the continent with adults who had no idea how to contact anyone in an emergency.

This is a failure on my part, I admit. So next time, presuming there is a next time, I’ll get the contact information.

I still don’t understand leaving your children behind on the other side of the ocean unless someone is dying. Really, I don’t. I’m too conventional.

The rabbit, poor thing, is conventionally dead.

This is what happens to small creatures in urban areas. They are squished or eaten, so we, who assume the responsibility for them, keep them safe.

Monkey said, “The Maggot said Aslan was happier outside than in a cage.”

I said, “Is Aslan happier dead?” I am a heartless mother.

“No,” he said, and looked at his lap. “He’s just dead.” We have lost several fish and a snail, and although they are not mammals, we have had our pet deaths and understand small losses.

“I’m sorry for the Maggot and I am sorry for Aslan. But I think it was wrong to let him run around and live outside. He was a pet.”

Keep your pets indoors, keep your pets safe was the mantra in my house. My mother’s kitten Mittens was run over in front of her house when she was perhaps 4. There is a snapshot of my mother in buttoned over-the-knee gaiters and a short, full-skirted coat standing on the front step with tiny Mittens. No cat in our family has been allowed outside unescorted since 1944. Nor has any pet been named Mittens.

So this rabbit thing really bothers me. It seems a piece with the leave-the-kids-behind thing. But then, they’re just so unconventional, which now means “recklessly endangering to vulnerable creatures.”

Happy Monkey, Sad Monkey; Well Monkey, Sick Monkey

Poor Monkey. The school nurse called at 2.30 yesterday, Monkey was coughing. And coughing and coughing and coughing. “Please collect your Monkey,” she said, “I can’t put him on the after-school bus.” I lacked the wit to say, “Yes you can and you will, because it’ll put him a mile and half closer to home, and we haven’t got a car.” Too slow to tell her, so I rode over and picked him up at school.

Happy Monkey (Thursday)

It was a multi-stage march home, first from school to the Circus, where the mittens and hat I remembered were still in the lost and found (the Monkey had escaped in the morning without these basics). Bundled up the Monkey, told Curly Top I would not see her in the morning, and started the walk home. We went up Thayer Street, threading our way through the students, some of whom were quite inconvenienced by the woman, the child, and the bicycle, until we got to CVS for cough drops. Monkey says they taste disgusting but they got us home without too much coughing. We had both reached the point where breathing in made us cough if we weren’t careful.

At home we tucked into the big bed with cocoa for Monkey and tea for me, and various stuffed animals who needed their temperatures taken and medicines administered. Lucky Patches (a calico cat) had the highest fever and needed the most medicine, which she kept spitting out until the doctor explained she needed to take it to get well. It’s amazing to me how young 11 can be. Monkey managed to get to sleep propped up with a heating pad on his chest, and this morning I’ve gotten him into the bath—as much as he likes water, he is oddly resistant to baths—and we’ll see how he does today.

Good Health and Good Grades

It wasn’t the worst walk home, I really enjoy walking with him, and I don’t suppose I feel too guilty. My mother walked me up to the pediatrician’s in Chicago, and walked me to Children’s ER when I cut the inside of my eyelid; we had a car, but she didn’t have a license. Thirty-five years ago, there wasn’t the same need for photo IDs and we took the bus or walked almost everywhere we went. She didn’t need a license. Our pediatrician is in Barrington, which is wildly inconvenient for a family with a troubled car. None of the pediatricians on the East Side were taking new patients when we moved here, just as none of the physicians or psychiatrists recommended to me were taking new patients. So Monkey’s doctor is in Barrington, my doctor is an idiot I avoid seeing (the P.A.s are fine for most things), and I worked my way through the Acute Psychiatric Unit at RIH until I found a therapist. That this is the case in a town with a medical school seems odd. At the least it makes seeking and receiving medical care harder.

So the Monkey is home, the cough is somewhat tamed, and we’ll see about school tomorrow. At least he doesn’t like to miss school, an improvement over third grade, though whether this is because he enjoys learning or misses his various Yu-Gi-Oh and Tech Deck trading enterprises I do not know.