Again and again
Some people in the crowd wake up.
They have no ground in the crowd
And they emerge according to broader laws.
They carry strange customs with them,
And demand room for bold gestures.

The future speaks ruthlessly through them.


-Rainer Maria Rilke translated by Stephen Mitchell

I'm landing here back in my life after a month away- the summer intensive work for my teacher training.  I spent all of July communing with mountains, occasional beaches, and anthroposophists from all over the world-working my tail off actually- all in the wilds of southern New Hampshire. 

It's a funny thing to leave your life.  I've not been a big vacationer in mine so this month away has been an event.  Away.  My sister-in-law lives in Maine. I visited her while I was in New England.  The locals refer to her as being from 'away'- not a native.  The longer you don't really leave your life, the bigger and more profound 'away' becomes.

I learned a lot when I was away.  I learned about teaching and art and anthroposophy.  I learned about longing and independence and freedom.  I learned about choices.  I learned about perspective.

So here I am back from away, tippy toe dipping into the life I left waiting even as it splashes me full in the face. 

It was good to get away. 

It's good to be back.

At some point in the not so distant past (depending on how you look at things), the old brown piano in my small dining room was a rollicking player piano.  I have to imagine it was quite the novelty, quite the excuse to party.  At some other point, the player mechanism was removed and it became just like all the other pianos.  At that I have to imagine, as well- was it irreparably broken?  Too impractical?  Too heavy?  Since then, though, it has been owned by music-minded folks who have admired it for its sheer pianoness and have kept it well- tuned and maintained.

So we got lucky when someone offered it to us, free- just come get it-so our kids could practice and plunk around. 

I was sick when it moved in.  I remember the phone calls and arrangements that I would normally have made being made around me as I looked on through a haze of pain, numbed by strange, powerful drugs.  Our house filled with men from all corners of our life one night.  They schemed and plotted and finally escorted in the brown piano.  Those brave enough patted me gingerly before they left to drink beer on the porch.

Many years ago, someone painted it.  Brown.  It had been the brown of cherry- stained wood but now is more deliberately brown- umber-y in the dappled light of our home.   It travels these days with a small mismatched bench, also brown (but ever-so-slightly-differently brown) that gamely opens to store sheet music. 

I find periodic inventories of the debris attracted to the piano pretty darn amusing.  It moonlights as a sideboard at certain extravagent meals which overflow from our table.  It also plays double duty as a rather large music stand for a young cello player who likes to use the piano bench when she practices.  When young folks set about table setting, they move all the mail, magazines, and unfinished drawings from the table to the top of the piano so if you lose something important, that's the place to look.  And if you happen to leave one of its hatches open, it may temporarily house a cat (until some inspired musician strikes his or her first chord!).

Right now the brown piano accomodates

- one china head, rag-patch-body doll, more recently dressed in silk, that belonged to a little farm girl named Adaline in Kentucky in the mid 1800's (my great-great-great....?)

-an abandoned robin's nest cuddling two blue eggs, from our front porch, on its way to the education director at the museum where I work

-a vase of slightly wilted flowers hanging on from Mothers' Day

-Suzuki Cello School, volume 2

-xeroxed sheet music for "Ladies Dance" and "Gypsy Tent"- cello, too, I'm guessing

-someone's Physics Main Lesson book on the floor under the bench

-a white paper and cellophane tape sun dial

-a clay/mud handprint slab made at some raucous sleepover

-a photo flip thingy with kid beach photos from a trip to Long Point 5 years ago

-a fishbowl containing a few handfuls of bright marbles and glass jewels for no apparent reason

-a multi-colored paper chain

-a zip lock bag of craft wire I brought home from the museum to wire the hamster cage closed

-two tinny bells from some cat collar or Christmas stocking

-a newly repaired marionette of a wizard

-a wittled stick

-a blue water bottle

It's a funny tally this- a wacky still life.  A collection of collections that our whole family adds to and takes from and walks past without noticing over and over every day.  Some days I bustle and clear and make sense of it only to have it filled again by dinner time. It takes a moment or two to see it as more than just clutter collecting on a vulnerable clear surface.  If I push really hard on the sentimentality button, I can love this mess.  I can write blogs about it.  Other days, it bugs me.  Most days, it just is.

It's a perfect place to hang one of those punchy homemaker plaques with some slogan or another, spunky as the next, about housework or family or women.  But you know, I'm not that kind of girl.  

So I'll just leave it.  Maybe I'll remove the bird nest and wire today, add something new tomorrow.  I started to recycle the now forgotten paper sun dial- but then I decided I liked it, so it's still there.

Not that we need it or anything.

It just is.







 

Those of you even slightly techno-savvy are liable to be underwhelmed by this but I'm pretty excited to be launching my first website:

www.annfrankart.com


See what you think :  )

I'm still here even though it must not seem like it.  Life just grabs on sometimes and runs with me in its mouth, twinkle toes fluttering in the breeze behind as we race by. 

Here I go co-opting someone else's writing again- this time it comes from Rob Brezny.  Whether he compiled it all himself or co-opted it from another someone else- I have no idea:

MIRABILIA REPORT
(Mirabilia n. events that inspire wonder, marvelous phenomena, small
miracles, beguiling ephemera, inexplicable joys, changes that inspire quiet
awe, eccentric enchantments, unplanned jubilations, sudden deliverance
from boring evils; from the Latin mirabilia, "marvels.")

* The National Center for Atmospheric Research reports that the average
cloud is the same weight as 100 elephants.

* The seeds of some trees are so tightly compacted within their
protective covering that only the intense heat of a forest fire can free
them, allowing them to sprout.

* Thirty-eight percent of North America is wilderness.

* Anthropologists say that in every culture in history, children have played
the game hide and seek.

* With every dawn, when first light penetrates the sea, many seahorse
colonies perform a dance to the sun.

* A seven-year-old Minnesota boy received patent number 6,368,227 for
a new method of swinging on a swing.

* As it thrusts itself into our Milky Way Galaxy, the dwarf galaxy
Sagittarius is unraveling, releasing a thick stream of dark matter that is
flowing right through the Earth.

* A chemist in Australia finally succeeded in mixing oil and water.

* Except among birds and land mammals, the females of most species are
bigger than the males.

* The South African version of TV's Sesame Street has an AIDS-positive
Muppet named Kami.

* The sky not only isn't falling-it's rising. The top of the troposphere, the
atmosphere's lowest layer, is slowly ascending.

* To make a pound of honey, bees have to gather nectar from about two
million flowers. To produce a single pound of the spice saffron, humans
have to handpick and process 80,000 flowers. In delivering the single
survivor necessary to fertilize an ovum, a man releases 500 million sperm.

* Some Christians really do love their enemies, as Jesus recommended.

* Kind people are more likely than mean people to yawn when someone
near them does.

* There are always so many fragments of spider legs floating in the air
that you are constantly inhaling them wherever you go.

* "The average river requires a million years to move a grain of sand 100
miles," says science writer James Trefil.

* Because half of the world's vanilla crop is grown in Madagascar, the
whole island smells like vanilla ice cream.

* Your body contains so much iron that you could make a spike out of it,
and that spike would be strong enough to hold you up.

* In his book *The Physics of Immortality: Modern Cosmology, God and
the Resurrection of the Dead,* physicist Frank J. Tipler offers what he
says is scientific proof that every human being who has ever lived will be
resurrected from the dead at the end of time.

* In the Ukraine you can buy Fat in Chocolate, a food with a layer of dark
chocolate covering a chunk of pork fat.

* Robust singing skill is correlated with a strong immune system in
songbirds. Male birds with the most extensive repertoire of tunes also
have the largest spleens, a key measure of immune system health.

* Bali has 80,000 temples.

* Romanian physicists created gaseous globes of plasma that grew,
reproduced, and communicated with each other, thereby fulfilling the
definition for life.

* In an apparent attempt to raise their volume above the prevailing human
din, some nightingales in big cities have learned to unleash 95-decibel
songs, matching the loudness of a chainsaw.

* There is a statistically significant probability of world-class athletes and
military leaders being born when Mars is rising in the sky.

* Some piranhas are vegetarians.

* In the pueblos of New Mexico, bricks still measure 33 by 15 by 10
centimeters, proportions that almost exactly match those of the bricks
used to build Egypt's Temple of Hatshepsut 3,500 years ago.

* Childbirth is often joyful even though it's painful.

* In hopes of calming flustered lawbreakers, Japanese cops have
substituted the sound of church bells for sirens on police cars.

* Scientists believe they'll be able to figure out why cancer cells are
virtually immortal, and then apply the secret to keeping normal cells alive
much longer, thereby dramatically expanding the human life span.

* Clown fish can alter their gender as their social status rises.

* When she is born, a baby girl has all the ova she will ever have.

* Bluebirds cannot see the color blue.

* Gregorian chants can cure dyslexia.

* Bob Hope donated half a million jokes to the Library of Congress.

* Bees perform a valuable service for the flowers from which they steal.

* "Leafing through Forbes or Fortune [magazine]s is like reading the
operating manual of a strangely sanctimonious pirate ship," wrote Adam
Gopnik in *The New Yorker.*

* Revlon makes 177 different shades of lipstick.

* Your tongue is the strongest muscle in your body.

* The most frequently shoplifted book in America is the Bible.

I, May I Rest in Peace

by Yehuda Amichai

I, may I rest in peace--I, who am still living, say
May I have peace in the rest of my life.
I want peace right now while I'm still alive.
I don't want to wait like that pious man
who wished for one leg of the golden chair of Paradise,
I want a four-legged chair right here, a plain wooden chair.
I want the rest of my peace now.
I have lived out my life in wars of every kind;
battles without and within, close combat, face-to-face, the faces always
my own, my lover-face, my enemy face,
Wars with the old weapons--sticks and stones, blunt axe, words, dull
ripping knife, love and hate,
and wars with newfangled weapons--machine guns, missile, words, land
mines exploding, love and hate.
I don't want to fulfill my parents' prophesy that life is war.
I want peace with all my body and all my soul.
Rest me in peace.

I grew like a weed when I was a kid.  I see my son do the same thing now.  I watch him untangle his newly long body and I remember that feeling of gawk, stumble, lope.  I remember changing physically faster than I could make peace with. 

And like my son, I was kind of a dreamy kid so that constant bonk and shamble of a rapidly growing physical body was rudely unwelcome distraction from what could be imagined, or pondered or doodled.  Damn big feet trippin me up.  In a way, though, it balanced my daydreams to have to maneuver my awkwardness through space.  It pulled me back to earth every time I got too far out in the ether.

It's funny, isn't it, this relationship we have to make with the physical manifestation of who we are.  How fully do we inhabit these bodies?

I learned to manage the gawk to some extent.  I used to be a runner.  That constant rhythmic pounding of big feet on pavement kept me shaken down into physicality- compact and settled, a little more peaceful after every outing.  With every step, I landed a little more firmly on the earth.  I am here.  I am here.  I am here.

It was almost a restless need for me, to run, to kick, to play- gawky or not, I needed to be jarred a little.  I wanted something to push against, something to bounce off of. 

Even well into adulthood, I maintained this itch to charge around- well after the soccer years ended, walking fiercely through 3 pregnancies, hiking steep trails with babies in backpacks, almost desperate to make footprints at my pace.  Enough with the babysteps, sweet though they were.

I got sick a few years ago- sick enough to have to stop moving for a while.  And it was funny, the peace that fell in through that convalescence.  Once I was better, I could sit still.  I could step lightly.  I could slow down in the woods long enough to notice beautiful things I would have previously marched so purposefully past. 

It was odd at first.  Unfamiliar.  Then slowly, it became the way I am now.  It just is.

This week we moved furniture around in the office at the museum- file cabinets, shelving units, partition walls.  I am the youngest by a bit, tallest by a lot, strongest, heaviest person on this staff of mostly petite women and I run the exhibits department so I have all the power tools. My collegues made up for their physical tininess in fiesty will, but when it all came down to it, I was the ballast on many a treacherous move- balancing out and holding up thousands of pounds of museum importancies.  I felt like Chewbacca, pulled in for the grunt work.  I didn't mind one bit.  It was nice to throw my weight around again for a change- to overcome some pretty worthy opponents in these willful cabinets and that uppity gravity (sorry, corny pun I couldn't resist there- it's a sickness).  But what was different this time, now, is that I was glad when it was over.  I didn't need to keep pushing. 

Yesterday, we went skiing.  As I glided back and forth over a bowl in an easy trail, I realized how happy I am now to just skim over the surface of the earth like this.  I don't need to pound and pound to land myself anymore. 

I am finally really here- not in danger of floating off anymore and that is a fine feeling.

The teenagers I work with started self portraits today.  They are so ready to look right at themselves-  more solidly here than they have ever been- even the dreamers. 

It's tricky business, though, facing yourself.  I had a feeling they'd get giddy and they did.  Almost disbelievingly, they drew- giggle and burble all the way. Chatter.  Twitter. 

More questions than I expected- earnest questions, anxious questions, "What if...?"  "But how will...?"  And, of course, the inevitable few wisecracks about ninjas (don't ask me why they think that's so funny, but they do).  Nothing like a well-placed ninja joke to blow off  steam.

Blind contour studies blew their minds- connecting eye and hand bypassing judgement- inconceivable.  Some couldn't even fathom.  The idea of 'process, not product' so fundamental to the way they've been taught all these years, was not quite within their reach. 
The final step of the day- a ten-minute sketch looking into the mirror was almost more than they could bear.  I'm glad we have time to work up to longer sittings-we'll need it.  Watching those graphite faces appear on the pages was pretty exciting- some so clearly who sat there drawing, some merely shortcut versions of who they really are. 

How long can you stand to look at yourself- even if you are ready?  How boldly can you mark your form on the page?  How confidently can you call what you have made a true representation of yourself? And how much of this can you stand before you have to start dropping pencils and singing Weird Al songs?   

It takes a lot of ninja humor to balance out a self portrait.

I didn't tell anyone at work where I was going when I cut out early yesterday. No one asked anyway. I hooked out at lunchtime to meet Lucy at the roller rink.

She had called the night before as I was dozing off and said something like, "I'm turning 45 tomorrow and I'm not happy. Let's go skating." How could I refuse?

It was a little short of notice for most of her friends, but three of us including Lucy showed up to skate in the big empty rink. The nice guy who let us in blasted the music and retreated to his office, only lured out briefly, bribed with brownies, to take our picture- three mamas, unsteady on our wheels.

I used to be a roller girl. It was what you did in our town when you were old enough to go out but not old enough to really go anywhere- the preteenage alternative to the disco scene or something. Anyway, I was a a skater girl, long red braids flying behind me as I went.

When I was in college, I worked many jobs. By day, I interned in a design studio around my class schedule, at night I did data processing at a credit union. At the design job, I scored some really good skates, castoffs from a defunct production of 'Starlight Express'- silver leather with red wheels. I slung them over my shoulder to take to my night job. While the cleaning crew buffed the long loops of linoleum hallway, I punched numbers into dinosaur computers. When we all finished, I'd put on my magic skates and fly through the empty corridors of the Federal Building, over the gleaming linoleum, faster than I ever knew I could go in any rink. The cleaning ladies came up for their smoke breaks and cheered me on. The security guys watched on the cameras, and surreally phoned me in the office to ask me out.

Funny, I haven't been on skates in a good twenty years. I don't think Lucy ever had. We put them on, cringing over their rental-ness, nervous about ankles and knees. We didn't cling but did scooch for a few stiff rounds. It felt completely unknown and crazy until suddenly, without warning, my body remembered what to do, crouching down, leaning into turns, legs surer and surer with every pass. I never did master skating backwards, despite Lucy's best efforts to teach us even as she taught herself (our other friend did fine).  I was perfectly happy to skate forwards faster and faster, while my friends wafted backwards, gracefully swinging their hips to move their skates, just like Lucy's former skate-pro husband had advised. By the time we turned in our skates, Lucy felt better about turning 45.

I felt better, too, remembering one of the many things I used to know how to do.

They predict we are having a brown Christmas this year much to the marvel and horror of many.  Doesn't bother me at all- I grew up with weather like this on the holiday- feels like home.  I like the clarity of light that shines through bare branches unencumbered by leaves or piles of snow.  I like the peacefulness of clear passage- the sureness of adequate traction and the straight forwardness of just going where you want without an extended preamble of defrosting, scraping and shoveling. 

But on a different level, I realize how much I've come to take cues from weather conditions on the pacing of days.  I wasn't aware, really, how I depend on the winter weather to slow life down.  Without a snow storm to dictate that we all hole up somewhere until it passes, I find I'm still buzzing along at a time when I have come to rely on the intervention of inevitable precipitation to mandate rest.  If I want it this year, I'm going to have to fit it in myself- no clouds on the horizon promising anything.