Prepared for Mid-July Subway Platform
Stay cool! And hydrated! (If you are thirsty, breathe deeply–there’s more than enough moisture in the air.)
Have a nice weekend.
Archive for the ‘children’s illustration’ category
“Marching Orders” From My Dog Pearl
March 8, 2010
Pearl Being Exuberant
T.S. Eliot said that April is the cruelest month. I tend to think it’s March.
March is a teaser. You step out in the mornings into air that feels suddenly, caressingly, warm. Your heart lifts. Then, after maybe a minute, you become aware of a damp undercurrent. You realize, unless you manage to collide with an angle of absolutely direct sunlight, that the caress was like the touch of a best-selling vampire wearing gloves. All it truly is, is warmer than it’s been.
It’s dark when you get out of the subway after work–still dark. Your eyes fixate on the big hard mounds of extremely gritty snow in the middle or on the edges of certain pubic spaces.
You just know it’s going to start raining soon (probably on the weekend.) You imagine big pools of water collecting at street corners, pools so murky that people will risk injury by veering taxi cab rather than get close to them, even people who have spent monsoon seasons in Calcutta.
You tell yourself that this is March, predictably unpredictable, that Spring really is coming. But, since you are stuck inside for the nice parts of the day, it’s hard to feel good. In fact, you feel pretty lousy.
At times like this, I tell myself that I should emulate the one great sage I know, that is, my dog Pearl.
Pearl is a very old dog. She seems, unfortunately, to be going blind. She sees my shape moving from living room into kitchen with absolute clarity. But once she tracks me into the kitchen, she can’t always tell if I’m holding a treat in my hand or if I’ve dropped it in front of her, or if I have dropped it in front of her, where exactly. On evening walks, she’ll almost bump into things (like park benches) or halt in sudden fear or disorientation.
That part is pretty sad.
Most of the time Pearl is beyond sedentary. (Sedentary derives from the word “to sit”; Pearl doesn’t bother with sitting; she’s generally stretched out flat.) But there are moments, on a nearly daily basis, that still bring out a joyful puppydom. These often follow that difficult evening walk. There is a stretch of carpeting in my building’s hallway, between elevator and my apartment door, that she has always found to be an irresistible running track—the carpet is firm, and at that point in the walk, she’s free–of leash, of whatever “business” took her outside, of any further duties for that day.
She goes, to put it mildly, bananas—running back and forth, circling, grinning a weird canine side grin. She will run until she’s almost choking, and then (she’s not the smartest creature in the world), run a little more.
What Pearl seems to understand is that new energy comes from the expenditure of energy, new joy from old joy, from jumping into joy, and that joy doesn’t need to be saved up, it just needs to be savored.
Some might say I’m anthropomorphizing. Some might say that I’m not, that what Pearl does is simply easier for a dog. Either view seems to offer me something palpable: to find exuberance, be exuberant (even about the routine, the mundane, especially about the routine, the mundane); to get through March, march right on through it.
Of course, once Pearl is back in the apartment, she usually collapses again. (After one more quick exploration of the kitchen.)
That part sounds good too.
PS – for a poem about Pearl’s exuberance, check out this.
Cherry Pie (Not Like George)
March 6, 2010
Cherry Pie With Cellophane
Thinking about greed today. And urges.
Early this morning, bleary-eyed and blind (I was stumbling around my apartment without my glasses), I tore a frozen cherry pie from its box and put it on a baking sheet. I have been thinking about cherry pie ever since President’s Day, the modern stand-in for George Washington’s and Lincoln’s birthday. (See e.g. portrait of GW with Cherry Pie.)
As I turned on the oven to pre-heat it, I delighted in the home-made aspect of the frozen pie—that is, the lopsided puff of its upper crust, the slight pucker to one side. It took me a minute, with my uncorrected vision, to realize that the pie box must have been bumped slightly (there was a crimp on one side of the aluminum pie plate) which seemed to be what was responsible for the asymmetry. I told myself that the pie still looked wonderful. I was absolutely determined to like it.
I hurriedly stuck the pie in the oven, deciding that it was preheated enough.
Approximately fifty minutes later when I pulled the pie out (with my glasses on), I found a crumpled partly-melted ripple of plastic sticking to one side of its top crust.
I lifted the large crumple of melted plastic off first, hardly able to believe it. Concerns about both my vision and idiocy filled my mind, but, then as I noticed suspiciously shiny bits on the ripple of outer crust, these concerns took second place to worry over the pie.
The pie!
Does plastic get smaller when it’s melted? Could those bits and the big piece really be all there was?
I pictured a residue of cellophane dripping down through the beautiful slits in the golden crust, throughout the ruby of cooked tart cherry. I felt sick (besides blind and idiotic.)
My husband, more of an optimist than I, was sure the pie was fine. Especially after we lifted off the whole outer perimeter of crust, even the parts that didn’t have shiny bits sticking to them. Even after we took a bunch of plastic off the bottom of the pie plate.
“What’s if some of the plastic’s melted down?” I asked.
“It hasn’t melted down.” he insisted.
With the confidence of a mother, that is, a woman who feels like she can try anything (even poisonous or boiling things) as long as she is doing it fast and supposedly to protect someone else, I tasted one of the upper cherries.
I was sure I felt a soreness instantly start in my throat, though I was equally sure that the cherry tasted absolutely delicious.
Even though I said, repeatedly, that the pie should be thrown away, that I would get another, my husband served himself a big piece with vanilla ice cream. (We are still talking breakfast. He has an excellent metabolism and really likes pie.) And then I ate two or three bites of his piece. (Since bites of someone else’s food have absolutely no calories, they are very hard to pass up.)
Then my throat began to hurt some more. And then, a few minutes later, I became convinced that a bitter aftertaste of plastic coated my tongue.
“It’s the tea,” my husband said.
“I drink a zillion cups of tea a day,” I insisted. “How can it be the tea?”
“It’s the…tannins,” he said, “in the tea.”
But, now his throat was hurting too. “It’s my cold,” he said, “and the tea.”
He went back to the kitchen to throw out the pie.
“My throat really hurts now,” I called after him.
“It’s psychosomatic,” he called back.
“It’s melted cellophane,” I replied.
“They can’t possibly allow them to put poisons in plastic like that,” he said. “People must eat it by mistake all the time.”
“We didn’t do it by mistake. We even saw it. We just wanted that cherry pie too much.”
“Yes,” he agreed.
“George Washington wouldn’t have eaten it,” I said ruefully. “He would have resisted.”
“Yes,” he said. “George Washington would probably have resisted it.”
There didn’t seem to be much else to say.
Sometimes The Batteries Just Run Down
March 3, 2010
Tonight is one of those times.
(PS–the above painting is from “Pantoum”, part of A Definite Spark, a sometime-to-be-published guide to formal poetry for children, parents, and pachyderms, by Karin Gustafson. In the meantime, please check out 1 Mississippi on Amazon.)
Multitasking in An Elliptical Age (Filling In The Blanks.)
March 2, 2010
Blogging on Elliptical Machine
I’m at the gym right now, trying to write this blog post on the elliptical machine. One good thing about blogging on an elliptical machine is that it is far safer than blogging while actually jogging, especially at night.
We live in a multitasking world, especially those with Blackberries or iPhones. (Such devices are a bit like young children at the beach—you feel a strong need to keep at least one eye on them at all times.)
Human life has nearly always required an ability to juggle. Women in particular multi-tasked long before it was a word— carrying a baby while doing almost anything, watching toddlers while doing almost anything, soothing male egos while doing almost anything. (Okay, I’m sure traditional men multi-tasked too—trying to keep women subservient while doing almost anything.)
(Sorry. I guess I’m not in a great mood tonight. After all, I’m blogging on the elliptical machine.)
Certain types of multi-tasking feel quite natural: talking with your mouth full; thinking while scratching your head (or, if male, your…..) ; gorging while going on a diet. Some combinations are difficult–cleaning up while you cook, for example–but others can be achieved by just about everyone. (Gerald Ford really could walk while chewing gum, no matter what some historians say.)
Typically, tasks which combine well are performed in different quadrants of one’s being, such as the physical body and the mind, or two separate parts of the physical body (mouth and feet.)
But today’s multi-tasking often seems to involve doubling up in the same corporeal or mental space: talking on the phone while reading one’s email, constantly updating Facebook status while also doing homework, driving while texting.
In performing these new multi-tasks, people don’t use different quadrants of themselves, but different quadrants of reality—both the “right here now” reality and the virtual reality of the screen, satellite, busy distracted mind.
For many, virtual reality is more mentally compelling than “right here now”. Our physical bodies, however, are stuck in “right here now.”
And now I suddenly notice that I’ve been stopping my elliptical gait for whole sentences at a time. Which makes me think that, when the mind is trying to double-up in one quadrant of activity, it is often not true multi-tasking, but instead switching rapidly between tasks, turning off to one thing as it turns to the other. In other words, it’s a series of changing gears, each of which brings with it a kind of ellipsis. A blank of inattention to at least one of the tasks, and maybe to all of them.
On the road, in the street, in the real world, that can, of course, be very dangerous. But in the world of the gym, which is kind of a mechanized limbo between “right here now” and the virtual world, it’s actually seeming to work. I notice suddenly that the elliptical machine is really quite relaxing if you are only doing it in short bits. And this blog post, amazingly, is just about… done.
Yearning For Chopin (Baptismal Birthday)
February 22, 2010
Frederic Chopin Thinking About Sand
Frederic Chopin’s 200th birthday, as measured by the date recorded on his baptismal records, is today (February 22, 2010). Chopin himself always gave his birthday as March 1. Poland, playing it on the safe side, is celebrating the birthday from today through the beginning of March. That sounds good to me.
Actually, what sounds good to me is Chopin’s music.
Actually, what Chopin’s music really sounds like to me is yearning. (Yes, that’s a cliché, but only because it’s true.)
The music sounds like that prickling that you get at the back of your eyes when sad, or nostalgic, or…yearning.
That prickling at the corners of your lips when thrilled, or happy, or ….yearning.
Like cattails by the side of a Northern lake. (There’s a jump.) Not cattails, perhaps so much as autumn, brown and deep and gold clinging to blue and light and green.
Speaking of green, some of the music sounds like thick, slightly damp, grass against young bare running dancing feet. Then like your mother’s hands on your forehead, when, flushed and tired after running dancing in thick, slightly damp, grass, you lay your head on her lap. Only the music is fragile and yearning and sweet enough to sound more like the memory of those things (perfect/gone) than the things themselves.
The lighter chords, especially at the end of a piece, sometime remind me of the light slap of a boat in water, a sound reflecting reflections (the water is glassy, the bright color of the boat shows in its rippled surface.)
The stronger chords sound like justice (never without its somber side, even when triumphant).
And the really really soft chords (as in the Nocturnes) sound like the feel of the nape of your neck, rather, like what the nape of your neck feels.
Sometimes, when I get very specific in my memories, the music reminds of Arthur Rubenstein on a TV talk show (he used to actually be on those ) telling, with a curved rueful smile, of the time he tried to commit suicide as a young man, feeling a complete failure, and failing even in that (his bathrobe belt noose broke), he decided to just live. Playing music, loving life. For a very long time.
Only, the music makes one think of life and love cut short.
I’m being sentimental. (The music can be too. But in the best sense of the word—it makes you feel.)
I’m sounding confused. (There are sometimes an awfully lot of notes.)
I’m all over the map. (How could he write so much, so widely, wildly, creatively, in such a short time?)
It’s hard to think ‘happy birthday, Frederic.’ Too much sickness, too few years.
It’s enough to just sit and listen, awed (and yearning.)
PS–for another watercolor portrait of another great guy who was maybe born on February 22, check out post on George Washington, Cherry Pie.
Sunday Poem (Mother, Daughter, in Father-Son Realm)
February 21, 2010
Script (Poem for Sundays)
A poem for Sundays–perhaps more of a story than poem. Thanks as always for reading.
Script
Pictures hung in the Sunday School downstairs:
men mostly, whose long-haired, but not hippified, heads
were highlit with gold, clouds, doves,
and, hovering above, goatee-shaped
wisps of flame.
In the actual nave hung
only a spare metal cross,
lit by shafts of dust-mote-
dropping day.
Whenever the minister made an important point, he cupped
his hands together,
the fingers separate but clenched, the pinkies nearly throbbing
with tautness. He used the gesture
to symbolize a knot. But also growth.
Tense knotty growth. How hard
it all was, how simple.
I watched the terse bend of knuckle closely, the extended
half-wound fists. But, as the sermon droned, I turned to
other hands: my own inside short white gloves, the worn seam
tracing their perimeter,
like a railroad track en route to itself;
my mother’s, bare, cool, soft.
I picked up her fingers,
one by one, as if to find beneath them,
a way of passing time.
Then, just as my father’s shaved crust of chin
nodded over the crisp edge of Sunday shirt collar,
she quietly rotated
the bulletin on top of a hymnal and
modeled my name in script.
She used one of the short pencils stored in the pews
for new parishioners. I, taking off one glove
to firmly grip the wood,
copied her letters slowly,
feeling each curve
as a blessing, a secret blessing,
for we were interlopers in that
realm of fathers/sons/ghosts,
the ones who snuck beneath the shafts of light,
then basked in them,
we women.
(All rights reserved. Karin Gustafson)
Elephants in Vancouver (Maybe)
February 19, 2010
On the Half-Pipe, But Not Quite as Confident as Shaun White
Happy Friday!
(P.S. If you like elephants and watercolors, check out 1 Mississippi by Karin Gustafson on Amazon.)
3-Ton Manning
February 7, 2010
Peyton Manning as Elephant
Despite the drawing, I have to confess that I’m not much of a football fan.
I’m not sure that I’ve ever watched a full game.
Oops.
Maybe this (the middle of the game) is not a good time to write that.
I do understand that this particular game is an exciting one. I did miss a whole bunch in the middle, but as I write this, there’s just one point between the teams. (Beginning of 4th Quarter.)
Still, well, there are an awfully lot of commercials. Which are not really that great. (Okay. Yes, I just might go take a course in Paris soon.)
And who knew that The Who still performed? Or were pyromaniacs?
Oops… Just look up to see Saint intercept, run down field pointing his finger in triumph. I’m happy New Orleans is happy.
P.S. I do not mean to cast any aspersions on Peyton Manning by calling the elephant 3-Ton Manning; only pointing out that if, in fact, Manning were an elephant, he would weigh at least three tons. (Or more.)
When the “Cool Crowd” Becomes the Absolutely Freezing Crowd
January 30, 2010
Question Is: Will She Make Room For You?
Last week, on a relatively balmy day, I wrote about being part of the “cool crowd”. That is, those people who, out of carbon, monetary, or logistical concerns, keep their indoor heat low (or nonexistent.)
Today, temperatures in downtown Manhattan have sunk to the teens, and the cool crowd is likely to be shivering. (At least anyone in my apartment is.)
Here are some tips as to how to handle these low temperatures without losing cool crowd status:
1. Huddle with your dog in a small closet which is out of the wind and layered with clothing (both hanging and fallen to the floor.)
2. If the dog won’t make room for you, bake. Bread, pies, cookies. (This uses some fossil fuels but is at least productive of something besides heat.) People say that chopping kindling warms you twice, first when chopping, then when burning, but baking goodies warms you three times: once in the hot oven, secondly, when supplying you with calories, and third, as an extra layer of flab.
3. Tape a hot water bottle to your stomach, under the down blanket. (If you are like one of the followers of this blog, try one of those toasted rice or corn cloth bags that you can heat up in a microwave.)
4. If you don’t have a hot water bottle, or a toasted rice or corn bag, sit with a turned-on laptop on your bare stomach. If your ears are cold, try calling your mom on your cell phone. (That’s a joke, Mom.) (Seriously, Mom.) (I like long phone conversations too.)
5. Drink hot caffeinated beverages (perhaps while talking to your mom) until you get such a splitting head-ache that you really do crave some nice cold air.
6. Turn on James Brown. Dance. Make sure to close your blinds.
7. Spend as much time as possible outdoors. Preferably in some cozy little café. Or, as the evening chill falls, bar.
Yes!
ManicDDaily 
Recent Comments