A candle for happiness.

This is a short homage to my late husband, Elliot who died 14 years ago today. I lit a memorial candle at sundown yesterday and it will continue to burn until sundown today. It is interesting about those candles, because they begin to flicker in the last few hours. Just as our memories flicker with the passage of time and life flickers near its end.

Elliot was possibly the most loving man I've ever known since my father. He had a soft and gentle inner core that was at complete odds with the masculine ideal of the last century. He grew up in Brooklyn in a middle class Jewish family who came over in the diaspora from Eastern Europe between the two world wars. His father was also a very dear man, an optician with a serious gambling habit. His mother was a great beauty of limited intellect. She was smart but not wise.

Elliot was identified as gifted with an IQ of over 140. When the school recommended that he be transferred to a school for the gifted his mother said no. Why? because he had persuaded her he would miss his friends. The one thing he really needed was to be moved away from his friends. This was his chance but Rose didn't recognize it. At twelve he was already starting to gravitate to the wrong people.

By 15 Elliot was trying to be cool, talk tough and do drugs. It was the sixties and doing drugs was pretty commonplace. The turmoil over his father's gambling losses was so severe that nobody was noticing the trouble Elliot was getting into.
The more angry Rose was with Paul the more she clung to the myth of her beautiful sons. She would indulge them, encourage rivalry between them, and try to make allies of them against their father. She smothered those "beautiful" boys with her need to be needed and both were escaping reality at every opportunity.

Paul lost their home and his optometry business to gambling and their lives went from posh to poor in a matter of months. The humiliation was huge and the sons ran away into the world of sex, drugs and rock and roll. Rose became the classic enabler, covering for Paul and rescuing Allan and Elliot from school truancy, from jail, and from themselves. Alan managed to finish his apprenticeship and became an Optometrist, but Elliot being younger, slipped through the cracks and never finished college due to the drugs.

By the early seventies, Paul had opened a new small optometry business with the help of a Shylock, and in return he become the Shylock's bagman. Alan functioned briefly as an optometrist while Elliot worked in clubs, partied and narrowly escaped being drafted to Vietnam due to drug addiction.

As I arrived in New York to begin Grad school, Elliot began bouncing in and out of drug programs and apprenticing in the Film Industry as a negative matcher. I had some serious problems of my own. Our paths didn't cross until 1974 when I was Assistant Editor to Laurence Solomon and he was a Negative Matcher with Jim Lenkowski whose cutting rooms were in the suite next to ours. We worked in the Brill Building which had become a film industry headquarters, after a glorious past as Tin Pan Alley in an earlier era.

I met Elliot when I brought our edited footage to him for negative cutting. He was a gorgeous, Semitic looking, dark haired, quick witted Al Pacino type of guy with very mischievous eyes. He was brash and very Brooklyn. He apparently thought I was a fox, but was told to "forget it" by his boss. Over time we became work friends, having lunches together and sharing our stories. We were each seeing other people but it became very clear that we liked being with each other more. We also confessed that we were both in recovery programs: he for drug and me for alcohol addiction. No wonder we had so much in common. We shared the struggles of trying to climb back into normalcy from lives of dependency and escapism. With that confession, our fate was sealed, we belonged together. It was a love of such passion and tenderness there was no turning back. We went to our recovery meetings together, shared our deepest feelings, our fears and our dreams and we laughed. We laughed a lot.

We shared the love of a lifetime with all of the intensity of recovering addicts. Addicts become addicts most frequently due to a heightened sensitivity and intensity of emotion. We are at odds with the social norms and we use substances to damp down our feelings. The world is almost unendurable unless we encounter others who share those feelings. We found life beautiful when we were together. So we married in 1976. It was the beginning of my happiest period. It was the beginning of a new innocence based in trust and sobriety. It was the start of a commitment that included having a baby, buying a house, and settling down to a good life together. We gave each other the courage to believe in ourselves. I will never regret loving and marrying Elliot. It was a gift. Most people never have such an experience.

I was never so happy in my life.

To this memory I pen my remembrance. To this love I dedicate my candle.

There follow other memories. But later for that.

I don't want to whine - honest

The excitement of my last post has become less exciting and a lot more work. I have been working steadily at completing the sculpture bases, finishing the pieces and culling my paintings. I have since learned that my exhibition will be in March instead of April which suits me fine. It just means I have to be ready sooner. All my publicity material has to be done by early Feb. and out to the media by mid February.

I spent the last few days studying my paintings. It is quite easy to eliminate the poor work, and also not too difficult to identify the best work. Most of an artist's work falls in the mid range, not bad but also not brilliant. Like most, I have a hard time sorting out the mid category work because I can form attachments for the wrong reasons. I may like one because it was a particularly nice day when I painted it, or because I saw a beaver swim by, or because someone said they liked it. None of these reasons has anything to do with painterly values or my work standards. So I have to leave them up and look at them in different light for a couple of days.

It's a challenge and now I must think about framing and what I can afford. The Blue Tomato is an unpretentious gallery. The artist currently exhibiting there has hung unframed canvases and it looks great. I work on paper and must frame them, but do I go cheap (poster frames) or better (under glass). Peterborough generally does not buy original art, so I'm not counting on selling. Tomorrow I'll visit framers to get ideas and estimates.

I have drafted an artist statement, invitation and cv. Maya doesn't like the CV but has not offered me an example of what she would like. Obviously, I'm more involved than she is but I miss sharing thoughts and ideas with her. This is an important and exciting step in my life and I'm feeling somewhat abandoned by her.

Maya's life is on another track moving farther and farther away from me. I have to learn how to detach myself from her and not be hurt as she goes her own way. This is the chapter of my life nobody prepared me for. I have gone through all the others as she grew up. I taught her to be independent and encouraged her to take risks. I supported her decisions and helped in whatever way she needed. I let go bit by bit as her life needed. It was hard at times and emotionally I sometimes still hid behind trees like when she walked to school on her own the first time. I was prepared to let go. What I was not prepared for was her letting me go. I always believed there would be room in her life for two loves: that the loves would be different but in balance.

This is not what I'm experiencing alas. Just at the point in her life when her partner has become her confident and best friend, I'm realizing a loss. I am no longer needed. I never thought I would become one of those pathetic mothers whining "so why don't you ever call me?" Now after all the years of caring for and about my child, how do I learn to care for and about me? This is an intellectual question about an emotional condition and I'm not convinced there is a suitable emotional answer.

So back to my thoughts about the show. The preparations are keeping me busy and my friends are excited on my behalf. But all the while my heart wishes for my daughter.
It's sometimes really sad growing old, even as you should be happy.

Scared and excited.

I got the word today - I'll be showing a sampling of my work at the Blue Tomato Upstairs Gallery in April. This means I have to select and organize my work, get the paintings framed, mount the sculptures properly, write a bio and artist statement, design my invitations and write the publicity. The gallery will do some but I'll develop the concept.

Oh my sweet God, what have I gotten myself into?

Maybe my daughter the curator can give me some guidance.

Tale of four cats - Twee and Choco, Willy, and Matty

WOW, where did 2009 go?
I left Peterborough for London, ON, December 23, spent eight days in a whirlwind of holiday and moving activity and arrived home yesterday afternoon, Jan.3 2010 more tired than I realized. Between Europe and London,ON, I've been away from home over a month and I'm completely disoriented.

Willy and I had a wonderful time. Willy partied with the cousin cats and Glenn's cat Matty added to the mix. Miraculously all the cats really got along well in the new digs, chasing each other up and down stairs, under furniture, around boxes and packing cases, and flopping down in their tracks from exhaustion.

The three adults also were very busy and flopped in their tracks from exhaustion too. It is very difficult to consolidate two households into one, empty two apartments and leave them clean as well as trying to organize the new space. We managed to celebrate Christmas Eve complete with small tree and a star lighting a festive corner in the living room. We spent Christmas day happily eating and playing Trivial Pursuit at Glenn's family home, and he treated us to a wonderful dinner on New Year's Eve. We concluded the feasting with a roast beef dinner on New Years Day.

Meanwhile as he hooked up sound and tv systems, Maya organized book shelves, and I hung drapes and curtains. A new dishwasher and refrigerator were delivered and connected. New coat hooks, door latches and shelving were installed while still allowing time for me to hear Glenn perform (a rewarding experience) and meet a lot of their friends at the pub. Glenn Stanway is a superior musician and his friends are a great group of young men.

We all worked very hard and, it seemed, at cross purposes occasionally. Maya and I did argue at times, but never in front of Glenn. We have very different working styles and can drive each other crazy but we get over it fast. We relaxed each night with laughter, watching old Muppet Shows.

There was a new balance in the relationship between M and I this visit and it requires some adaptation and acceptance on my part. I am no longer her primary confidant, Glenn is. This is as it should be as my parental role takes second place to his partnering role. They are now a team together and I'm the outsider (all be it a beloved outsider). This role shift demonstrates the maturity of their relationship and is very healthy. As I must now learn to graciously occupy my new place, I also feel relieved. I feel she is in a very safe place with Glenn.

It is now for me to find my safe place on my own. I still am not sure where I'm heading when I grow up.

Yes, it was a wonderful visit in so many ways. So much change for this old girl to take in and so short a time. I wonder what the New Year will bring.