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Part One – In the Beginning
Chapter One……Let There Be Light
I was raised in a row house…I’m still looking for the oars. Our household (consisting of my mother, father, brother, grandmother and myself) seemed to function as a type of vaudeville. We didn’t waste time in conversation. It was mainly one- liners, followed by exits stage right or left.
However, when I think back, I realize that there was another more dramatic form of communication: The Belch. Its meaning was complex. It was more of a statement about circumstances beyond our control, loaded with discomfort, disappointment and loss—the only explanation for why my grandmother’s digestion had reached the state required to emit such a loud shattering of reality. The sudden eruption could be heard no matter where a person might be in the three storied house. I was usually in the living room when it seemed to come from the upstairs back bedroom—the room where my grandfather had died unexpectedly—in the middle of the night, leaving her a grieving widow for the next twenty one years.
I was only one when he died, and according to my mother, I looked for him in every pinstriped suit. Perhaps because I couldn’t make the sad connection between this room and the catastrophic event, it became my room, the baby’s room.
The baby has always been revered in our family as a source of light. In fact, my grandmother, who was usually reserved and dignified, could sometimes be seen pushing out her false teeth to make some baby laugh!
When I think about the history of this room, I find it easy to understand why I, the current baby, was given the largest room in the house—the room with the attached back porch, the giant bed and the walk-in closet. Little did they know that the room also gave me a taste of the available pain in life. Tucked away for the night, as always too early, with the slatted light of dusk coming in through the lowered Venetian blinds, I could clearly hear the still-at-large children playing gleefully in the alley beneath its second story window. Let there be light, but not too much light.
Chapter Two……Restriction
We lived with restrictions. They were administered through our religious practices of which my grandmother was the enforcer. We kept kosher, and we attended the synagogue weekly. I loved it—the large family gatherings at Passover with all the leaves in the extended table, the heady fast of Yom Kippur with its delicious honey cake ending, and the Sabbath’s endless return when my grandmother made circles over the burning candles, caressing their light with open hands. It was a rich world.
Upon entering school, I realized that living outside our house presented some challenges. I had to put up a certain amount of resistance to maintain my identity. The greatest difficulty came in the form of the Christmas carol which was enticingly pleasant and fun to sing except for the fact that the name of Jesus Christ kept coming up. I dealt with it (as probably many other Jewish kids) by omitting that name. The daily school prayer, “Our Father Who Art in Heaven,” could not cross my lips either. (Certainly it was not the same deity or heaven)!
However, at the same time that I was enduring this interference, I was also truly in love with someone who was Catholic. Jimmy Duffy, in kindergarten, could already draw buildings with rows of perfect windows and farmyards with perfect little animals. He wore open collared white shirts and dark brown pants and shoes that buckled on the side. We were even born fifteen minutes apart in the same hospital! Verilly, the path outside our house lead to the less restricted life.
Eventually, I wound up in Rome in Art School, surrounded by crucifixes and paintings as enticing as Christmas carols luring me into their fervent realms. Somehow, I had to figure out how to factor out Jesus from the Italian Renaissance!
Chapter Three….Before the Flood
I consider my life before painting as life Before the Flood (BF). The flood, which manifested itself at first as a stream of consciousness trickle of small watercolors, was precipitated by my brother’s first divorce. We were together again, and we drove around by day holding the backs of our necks and feeling tense. At night, to unwind, I began to paint some whimsical scenes, the most memorable being a pig on the beach.
However, the real source—what made the trickle into a river was my grandmother’s death. She died in 1971, 2 years before the huge outpouring of work that has really never stopped. I believe she has carried on in the role of the enforcer (from the Other Side) as The Muse. One reason I think this is so, is because a year before her death, when I was doing a painting in our kitchen while she cooked, she kept telling me to paint faces on the figures whose facial features were just shadows. When the flood really began, the face was all important.
I guess I should say that her most constant part in our vaudeville theater was that of set dresser. The furniture was hers, the food was hers, the religion was hers…Her presence in my life was very strong. My role as baby was to always try to make her happy. In exchange, I got her example of perfection in everything she did, from executing my tight braids and recreating a coat I had admired in a store window, to taking a piece of dirt out of my eye with her tongue and shaking our dog by his hind legs until whatever was caught in his throat was dislodged.
Coming from the Old World, she had taught herself to read English. She could be found on the toilet every morning in the bowels of the house—(the basement bathroom)—reading the Washington Post by the yellow bare light bulb. This was a strange room with a large glass window at the far end of our universe. Actually, it was not unlike a lit stage (in the darkened basement)! It had a big claw foot tub which had efficiently captured numerous cockroaches, keeping anyone else from even thinking of venturing in. This was her study; it was her sanctuary.
In the ongoing drama upstairs, I was her best friend, but everyone else fought with her. When not arguing with my mother, she took the part of silent adversary in the cold war with my father. I really didn’t know the reason for their behavior.
Most of the time, when not participating in the silences, my father was quite audible. I think he yelled a lot because he thought it was the only way my brother and I would hear him. He had a great singing voice and a tremendous sense of humor, yet he was known to us as “The Fuehrer,” mainly because of “The Look” which was a riveting glare. We ridiculed “The Look” because we knew ourselves to be too good for its severity.
My brother and I had a lot of fun that made our father nervous, so whatever gaiety we were engaged in, whether it was my brother yelling bedtime stories from his room at the other end of the house or our laughter from the backseat of the car, it was swiftly terminated.
My father’s life had been steeped in the pain of his mother’s death when he was twelve and we were made acutely aware of it. We really couldn’t help him and there was a disconnect because of it. But he was a good and honest man who provided well for us and I loved him very much.
For as long as I can remember, he brought home reams of white paper from his government job. In the midst of all the tension and conflict, my brother and I could always escape into our drawings for an assured good time.
But the best of times was provided by my mother. She was the buffer between me and the world and she showed me the beauty all around us in a poetic way—from the white roses cascading down the back of a house on 16th street to the patchy sunlight of summer mornings.
One afternoon, unbeknownst to her, I had fallen out of the pussy willow tree at the far end of the long narrow yard. I was sitting silently with my dog on the back porch steps with a gash down my back, holding my breath so as not to cry, when she entered from stage left at the top of the steps, punctuating the scene with her one line: “A girl and her dog.” Although it wasn’t precisely the scene we were playing, her words, as always, were comforting. Without her soft cushioning, I may not have kept my eyes open to all the wonders in life.
One of my earliest recalled wonders is that of the spinning rock. I was with a group of kids in the back alley, standing at the entrance to a darkened garage. We were taking turns hurling a small rock to the back of it. To our amazement, every time it landed, it spun like a top. The miracle happened over and over again that day. For me, only painting can recapture that moment.
To be continued…….
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