More memories...

. . .
Once, when my mother was watching a Jacques Cousteau special on TV, she turned to me and said, "It's kind of a shame that people like that have to die, isn't it? I mean, he has such an interesting life". I remember being rather speechless.

The truth is, I think, that my mother didn't think that people like her were entitled to expect much of anything from life. She didn't resent it; she simply accepted it, and if something she considered fortunate came her way, she looked at it as a gift. I think that's how she felt about her last job, at the concession aboard the Orient Point ferry. I think the ocean represented freedom to her, or maybe I'm just projecting my own feelings on her.

A few more ramdom memories:

When my son Adam was about seven, he walked in on a conversation between his sister and her father and me. Bizzy had read the phrase [to give someone] 'the third degree'. She wanted to know what 'the third degree' was. Adam stopped, looked at her in surprise, and said, "The Ph.D." How could you not know that?

I remember once when Bizzy was about three, she was riding next to me in her carseat (legal in those days), very quiet, which was somewhat unusual for her. She suddenly asked me in an agitated manner, "Mommy, how can there be a biggest number, 'cuz, there's always one more?" Her concept of numbers had obviously grown, since not too long before saying that, she had been riding in the back seat, and had told her father and me, "You and Daddy must be really old". "You think so?" "Yeah...you must be--NINE!!"

I remember old post office boxes, skating behind the mill, wearing snow pants under my dress to school, walking down to Harriet's Open Kitchen to buy paregoric (opium!) for my mother, scratching the trees to find the black birch so I could cut off a tiny branch to chew on, and dutifully taking my 25 cents to school each week to learn to save, only to have the account emptied periodically by my parents to pay some overdue bill. To give my mother credit, she did ask, but... I'm still no good at saving money.

Finally here's the piece I entered in the Hygienic Art Gallery's breast cancer show. I put a fairly high price on it, so I can convince myself that that's why it didn't sell.


It's called--can you guess? "Stage IV". It actually looked pretty respectable there among the other pieces.

Back soon,
May
. . .