We live in the lap of luxury, don't we.  So many things to be grateful for.  

For example, what greater luxury is there than a well-stocked public library?  I briefly lived in a small community which lacked any library at all.  While many brag about fleeing the metropolis, I found happiness by moving to one. The movers had barely backed down the driveway when I went in search of the closest branch.  Nirvana.  Staggering out of a big public library with armfuls of books and magazines has always made me feel as rich as Croesus.  

Ian Brown hit the nail on the head recently.  He took a lap year at sixty to observe his older self and discovered something interesting:

​(R)eading has become the single most important activity in my life. I always read a lot, but it’s crystal meth to me now. I turn down dinner parties to read. I can’t wait to get back to the book I’m reading; I wish I didn’t have to sleep. I tend to read classics, because I don’t want to waste the shrinking reading time I have left.
The problem with reading Moby Dick is that once I fall down into it again, I don’t want to come out. I have chores to complete, people to meet, deadlines to climb and I just keep reading, regardless – because the day will come when I will no longer be able to read like this, to suck in the light of the world that runs through words and books and writing, fiction and non-fiction alike. I don’t think I am exaggerating in describing it that. 
(...)
Perhaps you can understand why I wanted to keep reading (Moby Dick). It suspends your expectations, which is what you most want to happen after you turn 60, which is why reading feels so priceless now. It’s the internal freedom good writing offers that I value, the chance not to have an opinion or a set of convictions or even an expectation of where the story will go: a good book is a decoupling zone, where you leave what you believed behind....

I too read incessantly, happily, and widely.   Just not indiscriminately for,  like Brown, I am chased by time's winged chariot.  I guess everybody is.  So my meth dealer is the New York Times Book Supplement, which I inhale on Sunday morning because it reliably points me to the best of the best.    Sunday also hosts the arrival of my second dealer:  I have become addicted to the website "BrainPickings," , the work of the brilliant Maria Popova, (thanks, Toby, for sending  me the link).  I spend Sundays in the presence of great minds, semi-delirious with the pleasure of their company.

Lest you think that Jon is the sober one in the family, I have to tell you that his addiction is no better.  When he's not combing the internet to teach himself to make giglee prints or to rebuild one of our four (four!) canoes, his crystal meth takes the form of listening to books on physics.   Occasionally he mutters the names of sub-atomic particles in his sleep.

I can think of worse things.

Travelling the universe in first-class seats.  Now THAT's what we call luxury.

 

Mid-meditation last evening, I had a thought. Exactly what you're not supposed to have, but no matter. What struck me is that my poor brain seemed to be in the middle of a custody dispute.

​Let’s begin with the good angel. My Muse Headband is wonderful. Every day I sit down for twenty minutes of “listening to the boidies,” as I think of it. The biofeedback takes the form of birdsong when my monkey brain goes calm. Progress is being made. I am averaging 82% calm and only 1% active. The only risk, as I see it, is falling into a swoon in the park, where lusty spring songs abound.

But fighting for custody of my Muse-besotted brain is a tendency towards self-inflicted injuries. I walk into low hanging branches if I’m wearing a ball cap (and I always wear a ball cap because blue eyes are really light-sensitive); I occasionally step on a rake; if in a great hurry I have been known to crack my skull on the staircase as I pass under it. I could go on. So let me be clear. I harbour no ill feelings about the mud. Mud is good. It speaks of spring melts and hikes, of tadpoles and germination. Irving Layton called it "fertile muck." Our world has washing machines.

But last week when we returned from a long river walk and started up the ravine path as usual, I executed a face plant in the mud. A perfect three point landing -- my two knees and my nose, to quote Daffy Duck. No damage except to pride and cleanliness. So two days later, when I had lost the trail of two deer wandering around in the park, I headed back to the path, thinking "Just watch the mud at the bottom. " This section was successfully negotiated, and I relaxed.

I was warned at my mother’s knee that letting down your guard tempts fate. Just below the brink of the hill, I began as usual to step over the huge downed white pine that has blocked our path without incident for the last twenty years. This time, however the weight-bearing foot skidded forward and I shot backwards, landing nimbly on my head. On another fallen tree.  Log: 1 Z’Anne: 0

An endless twenty-four hours later, after measuring and comparing my pupils’ dilation, not to mention setting the alarm to wake up every two hours to walk and count backwards by sevens from a hundred, we concluded that I would probably live.

So the question remains: what exactly is left under the hat? Am I gaining or losing ground? Jon has threatened to tape me into a hockey helmet. I think I know which conclusion he's come to. I’ll leave it to you to decide for yourself.

Peonies make me think of Aunt Ethel.  She would arrive on the train with armfuls of them, always pink,  carefully moistened and wrapped ( I wonder now how the ants made out).  These fragile beauties were so like her — she was bountiful in a way that few are,  a miracle of harsh weather.


My father’s family was “tight”, one might say now.  They loved each other full out.  Dad's best friend, Norman Massey, waxed eloquent about boyhood visits to the Keeles;  Norman was always made to feel both important and welcome.  Grandpa Keele would visit with all in the living room  and Grandma, who was quiet, made them welcome through food.  Everyone in the family was musical (Grandpa played the fiddle, Aunt Ethel the piano, and the boys played clarinet or sax) and the house bounced.  As young adults, the Keele  kids formed a band which played all the dances in the vicinity.  


Grandma Keele was the brain trust who had taught when she was young, so it was no surprise when four of five went into teaching.   Although Anne taught for almost fifty years, Ethel seemed the better suited to a long teaching career, supremely gifted with brilliance, diligence, and warmth.  She was beautiful too.  Surprisingly, she didn't marry, breaking off a long engagement  because (as she finally admitted years later) she didn’t want to leave her family.

But her family left her. 

First,  Roy, the eldest boy and a beginning teacher, died unexpectedly of pneumonia at the age of 24.  The family photos of that period are heart-breaking.  No one can even bear to look up at the camera.  My aunt, arguably the most sensitive member of an already highly-attuned family, developed agoraphobia and never after was able to feel comfortable in public.  At 32, she had already taught for fifteen years and even begun university after years of saving but her nervous system simply buckled under the composite strain.  

Then her youngest brother, David, ran off to join the R.C.M.P. and, shortly after, served in England during the war.  The whole family worried about him constantly.  That her beloved father died of a massive heart attack long before David returned safely was another huge loss to Ethel.   The only bright spot was the arrival of David's war bride and infant son, who were sent “home” before the war ended.  Family photos show that Aunt Ethel was over the moon at the presence of a baby in the family.

But when peace returned, neither of the two surviving "boys" stayed in Wadena.   Dad, whose remnants of polio had rendered him unfit for active duty, had already left his rewarding teaching career when it became patently clear that teaching wages would never be enough to allow him marry Mom and start a family.  They had moved to the city, where he immediately found work in the aviation industry and fought the war with his brain.  Uncle David's family in turn moved to his R.C.M.P. posting in Manitoba.

Somehow Aunt Ethel re-invented herself twice during those fifteen emotionally-tumultuous years between Roy's death and the war's end.  Despite being self-taught, she became a highly popular and inspirational piano teacher, and later joined the local  newspaper as a journalist and eventually part owner --  both occupations which allowed for quiet private excellence.  She died in her eighties but not before she received provincial recognition for outstanding work in both fields.   She cared for her mother and shared the Keele home with Anne  but felt most content, I think, when the three of them joined our family.  I cannot remember a school break, Christmas, Easter or summer,  when they were not all with us. ( As Keeles have a tendency to snore, I spent my childhood holidays trying to beat them all to sleep; I consider my survival to adulthood something of a miracle.)

That said, I am intensely proud to be the niece of this talented and brave woman.  So, Aunt Ethel, this one's for you.
​

Some of my bias against faking it comes from my love of portraiture. For the same reason that I wouldn’t paint a forest of identical trees, I choose to individualize portraits; otherwise the painting risks conjuring a portrait of no-one in particular or worse, no-one at all. Predictably, I love Picasso's blue period and nothing much later. It is richly possible to be accurate, even beautiful, and still painterly. For me, that means preparing by taking multiple shots in order to study the subject from all angles, giving me a lot of information about everything from eye colour to characteristic expressions. I often spend longer studying the digitals than in painting. If the loved ones of the person I have painted did not react with warm recognition, I would consider the portrait to have failed. In fact, the hardest portraits I have done have been those of people I have never met and of whom I have only one or two photos. It feels like flying blind.


Not every artist feels this way. Leo Mol, the brilliant sculptor, could tell a big and personal story in a few elegant lines: my favourite Mol sculpture is of Tom Lamb, a renowned bush pilot. Mol solved the problem of evoking a bush plane by portraying Lamb reaching up to pull down hard on a single propellor blade (and thereby start the engine). Mol’s problem-solving knocks me dead; I only wish that Lamb did not look like all of Mol’s other subjects.


Even in the plant family, rugged individuals deserve highly individualized treatment! Old trees are a case in point. Especially when paddling, we pass the odd one who makes me gasp with delight; unfortunately if we pass it too quickly and don’t paddle that section of river soon after, it can take years to find it again. I never stop looking, though, and “The Ancients” series honours the gloriously entangled root systems of those trees who have somehow survived decades (even centuries in the case of white cedars) of extremes; they are my arboreal heroes, painted as faithfully as I can manage. In this one you will even note a few river-smoothed rocks captured in their winding roots many years earlier.


By the way, I expected to have this painting in the spring show (if you didn’t receive an invitation yesterday, please contact me to request one), but I should have read the fine-print for the COAA Juried Show. It is committed to The Art Gallery of Hamilton until the end of April, but will probably be in the July Twist Gallery show.