Friday, July 02, 2004

Palette

I hung out with my mother last week. Not the physical one, the one who did all the pushing and the puke-cleaning… my spiritual one, the one in the blue robes and the halo. They both have fairly tough jobs. All mothers do.

Here in the swamp, even churches are tourist attractions, and I just discovered that a painting with great emotional significance to me resides here. But this time I was able to see 'n' marvel without mortgaging a major organ. (It was free! NOTHING is free around here. The Mouse pretty much charges you to breathe within a fourteen mile radius of the city limits.) It is the original of Bartolome Murillo’s Assumption of the Blessed Virgin. If you’re Catholic, you’ve most likely run across a reproduction of this at some point in your life. There was one by the main office of my high school; there was one in the great hall of my college. Wherever I have made a major move in my life, this painting was there to greet me.

Our Lady is lifted on a silver crescent moon to Heaven with the help of optimally clothed cherubs. The cherubs, I could do without. Some of them are just floating heads, which is, to say the least, somewhat disconcerting. But what has always arrested me in this work is the expression on the Lady’s face, which is absolutely serene and loving. This is quintessential Catholic art, depicting the Virgin as holy and powerful, and yet yielding her entire being to the almighty omnipotence of God.

(That inspirational elephant crap-smeared painting that caused so much controversy about a decade ago at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, btw? Burned down in a warehouse fire last week. The Lady always sets things to right, even if it takes her a while.)

I have been moved to tears by art before, fully wrapped in the difference between an original and a facsimile. The fingerprints of the artist rest in the original, light touches of DNA poured into the work. There is no glossiness in the original of Assumption, the uneven whorls of the oil glowing on the canvas. I leaned into the painting as closely as the guardropes allowed me, standing over the shoulder of its creator over a space of nearly four hundred years. It was rough and it was uneven and it was breathtaking.

I examined it from every angle, tipping my head, walking back and forth. Everywhere were the marks of humanity, except for the Virgin’s face. The face of the Lady was smooth, was perfect and even. I cried and cried and stayed and stayed. They had to turn the lights out on me.

“Are you lost?” the curator said when they kicked me out.

“Almost always,” I said.

I do, however, have a rising glow to aim for.

Tuesday, June 29, 2004

God, Flag, and Country

Last year at this time, I was walking down a Main Street parade route at the Magic Kingdom hoisting a gigantic American flag with some 200 other people who had attained the stringent requirement of owning a pair of white sneakers and checking in anywhere over 5”3.

“Wear sunblock,” a co-worker warned me. “That flag isn’t going to protect you much.”

O irony! O symbolism! Beneath her words, was she telling me that my political ideals, strong as they were, could never shield me from strife and pain…. or did she mean that patriotism was blinding me from the problems of my country…. or was she implying that we as a nation were hiding behind America’s greatest accomplishments, resting on our laurels when we should be striving forward?

Or perhaps she was merely saying: You are the whitest woman I have ever met; perhaps the palest person in the universe, and without a minimum SPF of 4128 you are going to fry your ass.

I think we are ready for the Fourth again, peering cautiously around the looming terror of 9/11 and prepared to simply let summer be in all its lemonade and bottle rockets. We are weary; we have been torn and bleeding and are just now checking beneath the bandages to find that the scars aren’t so crimson anymore. Battles over affirmative action, gay marriage and abortion loom, along with another election year (already?), but for now, I think, Americans just want to… be.

Most people with a conscience or the merest glimmer of spirituality have gained a new appreciation for normal life over the past two years. We drive to work in a traffic jam and think, “Isn’t it wonderful that I have a job.” We inhale, feel the strong breath and not the shaking gasps of fear. We automatically slip off our shoes in the airport security line, delayed but not disgruntled. We hurry to pull out of the way for a wailing fire truck, less annoyed, more grateful.

Go ahead and hoist a corn on the cob on me this weekend. Make the cold beer your own and leave the fretting for another day. Inhale. Rest; for sometimes a gigantic American flag is merely a gigantic American flag.

Sunday, June 27, 2004

Last Week in June

This week was, in my childhood, what kept me alive throughout the other fifty-one. It is what pulled me through nine months of hell in grade school. It was The Week, the Week of God and All Joy: One week in Colorado, horses and dust and pine trees and creeks of freezing mountain runoff. Even if I've been conducting my June unconsciously aware of the anniversary, I suddenly will feel a strong rugged pull as the Fourth of July approaches and look at the calendar and realize, "Oh. The Week."

From the year I was six until the year I was thirteen, this was It. I have never known a place I was happier. College comes a close second, but four years are impossible to conduct without at least some semblance of tears and heartbreak. There were no tears in Lost Valley except for the following Sunday, when there was always near-hysteria. One year I sobbed as the plane departed from Colorado Springs at the thought of another twelve months of waiting in Cincinnati: Were we going to Ohio for a funeral? the woman sitting behind me wondered to my mother's horrified humiliation.

A part of me is literally seared there, burned into the walls of the main dining room. Each family creates its own brand as it passes through, adding checkmarks each returning year. Our brand sits high on a far wall overlooking the mountains and the hummingbird feeders. The brand is a boot representing the brief fact that we all rode that first year, even my mother, who bravely lasted until Wednesday, when she gripped the saddle horn of Colt 45 so tightly that tendinitis followed. Our initial stands in the middle of the boot over wavy lines representing the Ohio River (my civically proud suggestion).

When I grew up and went to live with my then-boyfriend in Colorado Springs for a month, he drove me there along a narrow shelf road I thought wondrous at the time and now, returning as a driver myself, recognized as terrifying. On one side is a drop of many thousands of feet through trees and jagged scenery; on the other, pure mountain. When two cars meet going opposite directions, one driver has to back up, slowly and with much tense cursing.

"This place is kind of cheesy," the ex announced as he got out of the car and looked upon cabins named "Jessie James" and "Diamond Lil." And I knew then, somehow, although the end was yet months away and much sobbed over, that I could never, ever marry this person.

It is kind of cheesy, in a City Slickers sort of fashion, the way the wranglers greet the suburbanites at the cattle guard entrance on horseback and canter away in front of the car to guide these unleathery dudes to the check-in lodge, but when you are six and you are miserable, this is wondrous to behold. It announced horses to me, the very ones I write about today, and it brought seven days of the social acceptance I never found in the classroom. I heard God in the pines and I inhaled; this was where my soul has lived for so long. This was where the kid picked last for the kickball team won rodeo awards for booting her quarter horse around the barrels the fastest.

Terrible fires raged two years ago all around this little green valley I have always thought of as cupped in God's palm. The ranch was evacuated, the horses herded to safety. I was reunited via phone with one of the kiddie supervisors who cared for me twenty years ago and have exchanged Christmas cards with ever since (it is that kind of place) and she described to me what happened.

"The fire got to the cattle guard," she told me, "and it split. Burned everything around it, but the ranch was untouched. The areas in the mountains where you rode as a child are scorched, I'm afraid."

I would be scorched, too, if I returned right now. I know towering pines and thick tangles of wildflowers, and I prefer to keep them alive inside of me rather than replacing them with black and charred reality.

The regeneration has already begun, I know. It will be well underway six years from now, when my nephew Jim will be old enough to ride with a plastic cowboy hat on his head and a face full of sunblock. We will go, I think, the last week in June.

Oooooaaaaah at: blondechampagne@hotmail.com

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