Feed the Creative

Depot Road

My paintbrushes were still for most of the break, and that could have made me cranky. This holiday, however, creativity showed up in unexpected ways. 

Two days before Christmas, Covid forced a sudden reconfiguration of our family gathering, turning our house into holiday central for my parents.  Having hosted off and on for almost 30  years now, planning holiday menus is still fun but hardly an adventure into the unknown. 

And then Thing1, our newly-minted adult, and Thing2 gave it a creative twist.  Avid cooks, they asked if they could take charge of the main courses.

I’m no dummy so of course I said be my guest (the forgotten Achilles’ heel in my plan was that neither of them is an avid dishwasher). Turning them loose on the main course menu, meant reconfiguring side dishes, and suddenly planning a holiday meal was an adventure again.

I thought the rest of the break would be in the studio, but my sister, having been cheated by Covid out of a family gathering, invited us to Connecticut for the next weekend. I am as outgoing as a slug in the winter, living under the electric blanket until the cats wake us up to be fed, but knew we should go.

It turned another lesson in the value of letting fate run things. 

Each of us running half an empty nest, my sister and I found our families creating new traditions as adult siblings without our parents. The pay off was a reminder that sometimes the family you choose is the family you grew up with, but the weekend had just begun.

We used the trip to catch up with the Big Guy’s sister and our other adult nephew at his music production studio in the same town. It was a chance for Thing2, an increasingly serious musician, to a few hours as a studio musician while the adults caught up over coffee. 

Thing2 rarely lets me videotape his playing. All my brag videos are concert bootlegs and snippets of impromptu shows, but suddenly we were blessed with hours of unguarded music. 

I hadn’t painted a drop in weeks, but creativity had permeated every minute from all directions. And therein lay a lesson that I recognized only as I was walking to my car after work the day after break, energized and ready to return to my studio. 

Sometimes finding your creativity as much about the feeding of your soul, as it is in the exercising of an idea.

Practice What You Teach

Unreal

Saturday morning I came across a Facebook post by a musician friend describing the “unifying breath” taken by a choir or orchestra before they begin to make something beautiful that brings them and their listeners together. It was still in my head later in the morning as Thing2 and I were driving to Home Depot and talking about his college plans.


Thing2 plays guitar for several hours each day. He’s been playing with that intensity for a few years now, and that intensity seems to be leading him to audition for one music program or another. 

Thing2 has other interests — often a sounding board for friends, he has thought about going into mental health counseling or psychiatry – but, as we talked, I sensed that something other than passion for the subject was driving this recent career exploration.

Thing2 also has an older brother who found a more traditional field (computer science) and is now earning more money than both his parents put together.  Thing1 loves his new life, but he also loves the work of problem-solving. He has found his passion.

“I like the idea of helping people,” Thing2 said. 

I reminded him that when musicians bring people together to enjoy music, they are creating moment of communal peace that no other art or craft can achieve. Painters can’t do it. Writers don’t do it. Doctors and teachers don’t do it.  Yet, even in our small town, a kids’ concert or an impromptu band can bring together people with wildly different experiences and viewpoints for the sole purpose of enjoying music together. 

“I know,” he said. He started to say something and then was silent for a bit. We talked about music education and music therapy as career paths. Then he said, “When I listen to my favorite musician, I think about being able to make something that so many people will enjoy, but…” 

We walked through the lumber aisle, and he said again how great it would be to have people responding to his music the way he responds to others. I reminded him of one cousin who is making their life in music and another is making his career in music and music production. 

“I’m just afraid,” he said. “What if I put all my energy into a dream that is really unlikely and then find I’m in my thirties wishing I had done something else?”

“Creativity takes courage,” I blurted out, knowing that, in recent weeks, I had been ignoring the words of Henri Matisse, retreating to realism out of fear that people who have bought my art in the past won’t like my abstract work. I knew my response was trite. 

I could have told Thing2 about coworkers who started with creative careers that took them in unpredictable directions and different fields where their creative natures and backgrounds were integral to the successes.

At that moment, however, I wanted more than anything for him to to understand, at the age of 17, the big and improbable dreams are just as important as the practical ones. He needed to understand the value of his art in his life and the difference it could make in others’. He needed, especially as adult life gets closer, to be willing to take that leap of faith in himself.

We were still talking as we sat in the drive thru waiting for a coffee order. 

“I won’t give up on abstract if you don’t give up on your music,” I said. 

“Okay,” he said as he extracted a promise to have first pick on paintings he likes.

We shook on it, and I gave him a music writing assignment inspired by my painting teacher. 

Our new bargain is way more better deal that others I’ve made with them over the last few months (a Faustian bargain to give up my favorite diet soda, for example). It’s also the most important deal I’ve ever made with him. 

It reminded me of the first rule of teaching, which is that we teach what we model, sometimes, without even knowing it. And now at this crucial time in this wonderful kids life, it’s more important than ever that I start to practice what he needs me to teach.

No Regrets

North

With one of my kids, recently grown and flown (Thing1), and the other, starting to contemplate his life outside the nest (Thing2), I find myself thinking more about what might have been if I made different choices.

I used to wish I had made different choices — better choices. 

I am not naïve enough to think of my life is anything other than a journey filled with missteps, redirections, and spectacular mistakes of my own making. Some of those mistakes were due to circumstances I couldn’t control for a long time, but others were simply bad choices.

When I was Thing2’s age and going for college visits, I desperately wanted to go to art school. I let a tough but fair portfolio critique and well-meaning but off-target input from my parents derail further attempts for art school or even a fine art major at a college. 

Even now, however, a conversation with one of the art professors at the school I did briefly attend for another major rings in my head. “You should do this only if you need to paint,“ he said. I needed to paint then and still do. 

If I had been stronger or braver, I would have done more of the type of drawing that would’ve led to getting into those schools. If I had been more sure of myself, and willing to confront my bipolar disorder, (or even realize what it was) I had a younger age, I might have stood my ground and picked the fine art major.

But even as I think about those mistakes, I don’t have regrets. Those mistakes inform the advice I give my kids.

My mistakes eventually brought me back to art. They brought me to teaching, which is one of the most fulfilling experiences of my life even as it is shaped by, and then informed by creativity. Mistakes they brought me to these conversations with my chicks as they are leaving the nest.

Without my mistakes, I wouldn’t have the big guy I married. I wouldn’t have an adult child, who comes home to geek out with me over the latest happenings in Tech. I wouldn’t have a soulful, introspective Thing2 who is a sounding board for his friends, and art critic at large.

It makes me realize that the best advice I can give to my kids is to start making their mistakes as they find and live their truths. 

Picture this…

I told myself to find something, anything to draw while this virus has me couch surfing for a few more days.

The master’s degree is done, and I’ve set my sights on writing and illustrating books kids in my classes can read. For now, as ideas and word lists germinate, I’m practicing by picturing my life in doodles again, and Thing2 gave me the perfect tale to doodle.

My second pride and joy sat down on the couch to figure out a new song on the guitar for school. The incoming storm made the lights flicker in and out, and I started to draw as I listened to the unelectrified strains of Stevie Ray Vaughan’s Pride and Joy.

The drawing was terrible — even for a first after a hiatus -but the picture it saved in my mind is priceless.

Some Things Stay the Same

Not belonging to any religion — organized or not- our nuclear unit reconfigures most holidays to fit our wants and needs. The fourth Thursday in November is no exception, especially this year.

Like many Americans, the Big Guy, Thing 2, and I have been recreating, working, and schooling from home since March. Thing 1, needing a break from being parented, decided to run away from home with one of his cousins and quarantine in an apartment Connecticut where they did their classes online all fall.

Our autumn of isolation followed a summer devoid of our usual family reunions in Michigan or even a day-trip to see siblings in nearby Connecticut. My septuagenarian parents and the Big Guy’s sister have also been staying home to avoid becoming disease vectors, so when Thing1 and his cousin announced they would join us for Thanksgiving, we knew what this holiday would be about this year — and probably for the next twenty years.

Twenty-year-old Thing1 and my twenty-one-year-old niece (the pig-tailed tyke featured in my first and only book, A is for All-Nighter) drove up Wednesday afternoon. Thing1 and his brother had put in their request list of favorite side dishes. We had all agreed to keep everything but the food casual, and I had most of the meal prepped and ready to go into crockpots by the time they arrived.

The crowd at the Thanksgiving-eve dinner table was half the usual size, and the kids took advantage of a dearth of parents and complete absence of grandparents to indulge their inner eighth graders (much easier for Thing2 who actually is an eighth grader). By the time Thing1 went to the kitchen island for thirds, Thing2, who had been saving up his best fart jokes for an appreciative audience for nine months, had our tiny crowd roaring.

I played Exploding Kittens with the kids after dinner for a few hands before turning in. Thing1 and my niece, now used to studying until dawn, played cards with Thing1 until the wee hours of Thanksgiving morning. Their shrieks of laughter occasionally penetrated our bedroom door, and as we quietly laughed into the darkness, the Big Guy and I tried to recall experiencing a better holiday.

Some things were the same. My niece and I still managed to burn the bottoms of the crescent rolls (I felt like I was literally passing her a torch of some sort). Thing1 still insisted he wanted me to make a quart of cranberry relish. Thing2 assured us he’d be taller than Thing1 by Christmas. And, even though it was a much smaller gathering, the weekend was still about family.

We Zoomed with parents and siblings who had to stay in their states, missing the warmth of a large family gathering, but the fact that any of us could gather at all made this weekend special. I know American Thanksgiving (along with much of our history) is fraught with controversy, but, for our family, any event marked by four days in a row of gathering and giggling with our kids, especially over burnt crescent roll bottoms, is a holiday worth celebrating and being thankful for.

Partners in Crime

Thing2 has been experimenting with the digital projector I use for presentations at school. He’s been projecting video games and Avengers movies on the ceiling and underneath the TV. here’s an idea man, so it should’ve been too much of a surprise when the two of us looked at each other and said, “let’s have an outdoor movie night.“

The other family members were out of the house when the idea got started, and, by the time everyone else got back we had collected a makeshift screen and two plant hangers from which to hang a curtain rod.

Immediately we agreed that we should all watch the original Star Wars. The kids have never seen it on “the“ big screen, but I think this one will be just as good. We just have to rig up THX in the yard before we screen Empire.

Common Creativity

When Thing1 was still a pea-picker, he hunched over his Matchbox cars for hours, watching their wheels and gears as he drove them around carpets and vitas he created and telling them their stories. I wish I had written them down because sometimes I think he needs proof as to just how creative he is. I think a lot of people do.

Thing1 is about to turn twenty. He knows how to fix cars and program computers. Anyone who watched him studying the movements of cars as a toddler would say it pretty accurately predicted his mechanical aptitude. 

His love of discovering how things work, however, often translates him putting high value on common sense and things that can be proven. When I tell him of the spaceships he conceived and drew, of the stories he told, he answers, “I’m just not all that creative anymore, Mom.”

Yesterday proved him wrong, and this time I got the photos to prove it. 

When Thing1’s college closed, his first action, over our strong objections, was to go job hunting. He received two offers as soon as the state closed down both businesses, but his employment history from the previous year earned him the ability to collect benefits during the pandemic (he wasn’t eligible for the stimulus because he’s too much of an adult and too much of a dependent to fall into any category the government considers visible).  He’s saving some of that money but, still a teenager for another two months, money can burn a hole in his pocket. 

Thursday he announced he was buying a hammock to use at school when it reopens. Then he announced he’d like to test drive at home. He asked the Big Guy and then me if we could think of any appropriately socially distant pairs of trees from which to hang it and, despite being surrounded by trees, we just scratched our heads.

Friday, Thing1 and Thing2 traced our normal route around the house, making incursions in to the forest when this or that pair of trees sparked their interest.  They showed us a few ideas, but the Big Guy and I just couldn’t see the right trees for the forest.

Saturday, Thing1 disappeared again and then took his machete and power saw to the woods behind the house. We heard some hacking and then a familiar buzz. Thing1 came back to assure us that the tree he’d taken down had been punky and about to fall anyway and then to invite us to the clearing he’d made. The Big Guy and I started our usual afternoon route and went to where the boys were waiting, Thing2 dancing from foot to foot to show us Thing1’s work.  

The boys had found a perfect opening into the forest and created a more defined path to a pair of trees that, somehow, the Big Guy and I had missed the day before. Thing1 had felled one tree and cleared some rosy bush between the two that would support his hammock. Then he indicated the tree-filled slope leading down to the river that will be the view for anyone sitting in the hammock.  

Thing1 had pulled a paradise from the mass of trees and rosy bush. When the hammock arrives, he’ll assemble it and give credit for the completed project to his common sense. I’d like to think that it was actually good old fashioned common creativity that helped him identify the perfect spot to meditate on the question.

Walking to Paradise

I Wonder What Would Happen

The great thing about having raised teenagers is that, when your perpetually adolescent cat puts his front paws up on your plant shelf and starts sniffing the various items that are ‘in his spot’, you know exactly what he’s thinking.

There’s a plum tree right outside my window, and the late spring has produced an explosion of blossoms (and hopefully plums) along with a squad of visiting chickadees. A chickadee chirp woke Jim up. He drew himself up into pounce position, turning his head this way and that as the chickadee hopped from branch to branch. Every few minutes he tried the cat equivalent of bunting — pretending to jump at his prey but not really doing anything.

Then the chickadee made a truly bold move, moving to a lower branch with a particularly lovely lunch of blossoms, and Jim had to make a move. I though he might forget that a window lay between them as he launched his front paws on to the plant shelf.

Instead he paused.

I let him sniff for a few minutes and could almost see the thought bubble above his head asking the classic question,

“I wonder what would happen if….”

In this case, ‘if’ was a temporarily forgotten chickadee as Jim tried simultaneously to move a hind leg onto the shelf so he could what would happen if he pushed the squash plant in front off the shelf. But, having watched Thing1 and Thing2 ask (and test) this question at various times about anything that could be climbed, blended, eaten, or flushed, I know when to let the experiment play out and when science is about to run amok.

I clapped my hands once . Jim’s hind foot returned to the poof and his gaze to the chickadee. The bird heard my clap, fluttered across the yard, and, for the greater good, scientific investigation was stymied.

Organically Grown

Somedays the wind is howling around the mountains. Other days, the sun is pointing out every new bud in the forest. Even when it’s grey and the back section of our trail is more pond than path, though, at four o’ clock, at least one kid and one adult will ask if we’re all ready to walk. Our walks have attained the ritual sacredness of communion, and, even though they are peppered with swear words when the boys argue about whose turn it is to chase the frisbee into the increasingly green rosy-bush, there is serious communing going on.

The walk around the house is about a tenth of a mile. Thing1 has a goal of getting his parents to do 30 laps walking and then running. I’m treating it as physical therapy for my ankle and, on days when my lungs allow it, have managed 10 laps with a few passes through the garden to talk to the peas and carrots. The Big Guy, waiting for a knee replacement, is less focused on the number of laps than on just walking with the boys. 

The kids will do two laps for each of ours, deliberately tossing the frisbee into the woods or at each other’s heads. Thing1 and the Big Guy will talk car repairs. Thing2 will talk music and life.

We don’t see each other for most of the rest of the day. Thing1 is finishing up classes from college online until late at night. Thing2 has class in the morning and then has creative projects. I write and study, and the Big Guy reads. There’s an implicit understanding that, while we are locking down, we need to have our physical and mental separate corners.

Vermont’s governor is slowly relaxing restrictions that have helped keep our infection rate down, but, with high-risk people in the home, our family won’t relax the current routine until we see evidence of a prolonged absence of a second or third wave of infections. As the rest of the state returns to normal, I’m grateful for these organically grown rituals that keep us close but not constricted, knowing they’re about to become even more important.

Pole Beans

The boys have been playing catch and frisbee on our walks around the house in the afternoons. Lately when Thing2 reaches for a deliberately off-trajectory frisbee, it seems as if his feet barely have to leave the ground for him to grab it out of the sky. The boys adjusted to living apart when Thing1 left for school and then adjusted again when he came back for the quarantine, but, as Thing2 grows faster and taller than a Kentucky Wonder pole bean vine, there seems to be an another adjustment taking place.

Thing1 specifically asked for Thing2 to be born, badgering us for a baby brother for almost two years. When we granted the wish (don’t ask me what we would’ve done if it had been a sister), Thing1 enthusiastically stepped into the role of guardian/teacher/benevolent dictator. He helped coach Thing2’s Little League team. He alternately shushed and comforted him through colicky rides in the back seat.

Thing2 accepted the paradigm and fell into his role of hero worshiper without question or deviation—even when it bugged the crap out of his brother. It’s a tossup as to whether a baby brother or an actor dog is more dogged in their loyalty. He followed his brother from room to room, and even from hobby to hobby. If Thing1 was good at a sport, Thing2 had to give it a go. When his older brother built a computer, he had to build one too.

And then Thing1 left. Thing2 had to find a new hero.

Our youngest has used the vacuum to bond with the Big Guy over a shared love of music and cooking. He has learned how to tech-support himself on computer issues. He has nurtured talents he discovered on his own and become his own hero, and when Thing1 returned home from school early, Thing2 very much wanted to spend time with him. There were no repeats, however, of a little kid banging on his older brother’s door, demanding to be included.

In the mornings, they each go to their corners to work on their academics. We eat dinner in the den together, but after about 20 minutes, the boys go to their separate activities. Thing1 tries to stay in touch with his new college friends as much as possible, and Thing2 will geek out on the computer or come hang out with me.

The one time of day come they really come together if over the daily games of catch. Thing1 is still slightly bigger and much stronger, but Thing2 is now a teammate, not an acolyte. There’s less coaching and more rough-housing, but, despite the extra bumps and bruises, the gaps between my two pole beans are getting narrower.