20th Century Woman

When I was 12 years old I spent the summer with my grandmother, Julia (called Julie by her family including all her grandchildren), in Maine.  My grandmother had lived for years in Italy but left because of WW II.  She and I were staying at the house of her friend, Elizabeth Holt.  Elizabeth wrote books on art history, and my grandmother made herself useful by translating Italian articles and documents.

By the time she was a widow, Julie had gone through most of her capital – some was lost in the depression.  She was a good-looking, witty and charming woman (sometimes known in her family as the Duchess) and she had many friends who found it agreeable to have her stay for extended periods.  She found it convenient and profitable to live on friends when possible.

I am not sure I was a desirable adjunct in Elizabeth’s household, but they found uses for me.  I was supposed to baby sit Elizabeth’s two pale, skinny kids, and every few days I rowed the garbage out to a channel in the bay where it could be dumped overboard.

I don’t remember actually doing much babysitting, but I really enjoyed the second chore.  As soon as I pushed off in the row boat swarms of sea gulls would glide over and follow me out to the channel.  When I threw the garbage over the side they screamed with excitement, fighting and diving for the delicious treasures, like orange peels and fish heads.

It was a wonderful summer.  There was a boy who took me sailing, and the last evening of the summer we walked together on the beach and we held hands.  I can’t remember his name.

The house was a summer place, simply furnished and minimally equipped.  My grandmother had a few gramophone records which she sometimes let me play, and I grew to love the music from the Cosi Fan Tutte, an opera by Mozart.  There wasn’t much to read, but I found an old textbook of geology.  For some reason it fascinated me, and I learned about igneous, sedimentary and metamorphic rocks.  Maine had plenty of rocks for me to examine.

When I went to college I remembered my early love for rocks.  At Northwestern, where I began, I took a class in geology.  It was deadly boring.  We spent hours measuring things on relief maps.  I got mono and dropped all my classes.

As a biology major I made another stab at geology and signed up for a class in paleontology.  That was another interest killer.  The professor was writing a paper, so he made use of students for the tedious parts.  The paper was about small changes in fossil clam shells over time.  Students sorted and classified fossil clam shells.  That was the entire content of the class.  I dropped it.

All this was before the discovery (really rediscovery) of plate tectonics and continental drift.  That set the world of geology upside down. There was seething controversy: what had been dry and plodding became dynamic and fast changing.  People got furious with each other and called each other names.  Some actually came to blows.  But by that time I had moved on.  Babies and biology had taken over my life.

Half a century later I am reading (bedtime reading aloud to Jerry) a book by John McPhee: Annals of the Former World.  The book is over 600 pages and we are almost to the end.  It is about the history of the world, how it formed, how it changed, how the oceans and land masses came to be and how they change over time.  How life came to be on earth, how the physical world affects life, how life changes the physical world and how they are actually parts of a single whole. It’s about eruptions and earthquakes and unimaginable catastrophes and periods of time so vast that a human life is no more than the blink of an eye.  It’s about rocks: how they form, what they are made of and forces that bend them, fold them, destroy them and recreate them.  Now I am really hooked on geology.  I have to know more.

Geology has an enormous special vocabulary, much of it new to me.  Words like ophiolite, gabbro, diabase, peridotite, syncline, unconformity, zone of subduction, pillow lava and many many more.   I look them up on the Wikipedia.  But I have to know more.

I have bought 2 courses from The Teaching Company, both video college courses on geology.  Jerry and I watch one or two lectures every night.

The first course, which we are about half way through, is taught by John Renton of West Virginia University.  I learned from the internet that Bill Gates likes this course and says it is “phenomenal.”

Dr. Renton is a plump, down to earth fellow.  He presents his material in simple folksy language with concrete examples and explanations.  I am slightly distracted by his luxuriant and shiny red toupee, and his Dali moustache (I found out from Wikipedia that those twirly moustaches are called that).  But I am enjoying the course, and firmly planting in my head all sorts of new (to me) knowledge.  Some of these things I sort of knew, but now they have a structure.

I know that the earth began from a cloud of cosmic debris about 4 ½ billion years ago, and that life began about a billion years later.  In another billion years plate tectonics began, and the continents and oceans formed and began their cyclic breaking apart and coalescing a billion years after that.  These things are happening now, and the Atlantic Ocean is expanding at about the same rate as our finger nails grow.

I know something about the inside of the earth, something about volcanoes, and I know that Yellowstone Park is going to explode any time now with such force that it may destroy civilization as we know it, and perhaps the human race.  There have been great mass extinctions in the past that have killed large numbers of species from just such catastrophes.

Sometimes I ask myself what good it is to learn a lot of new stuff at my age.  My head is already quite full of unused knowledge.  I think of the inside of my head as an endless collection of caverns connected by tunnels and crevasse.  Some of what I knew has fallen into the crevasses.  Some of it is in remote caves but still retrievable.  But I will never again have any practical use for it.

When I die it will all be wasted.  So why bother?  I guess because it gives me pleasure, and that is what is left in old age.  It is something that Jerry and I share and enjoy together.  As we drive to Alaska soon we will look at the mountains and rocks with new insight into their origin and dynamic, knowing that they are always changing.

On the way to Alaska

On Saturday I got up at 6:30 Eastern Time in Charleston at my son’s house.  He and I walked to the nearest open coffee shop where I bought a large cup of coffee for my daughter.  I woke her with the steaming coffee, and in an hour we started the drive to Atlanta to catch our plane for home.  That was the beginning of about 20 hours of travel.  I crawled into bed at my daughter’s house on Whidbey Island at midnight Pacific Time.

It was good to see my sons and their families.  The trip was too hurried and we interrupted the lives of working people, but still, I’m glad we went, and I’m glad we went together.

On this trip I had a flash review of the stages of life.

It has been years since I have traveled with daughter 3, Lawyer Daughter (Deborah).  When she moved out west to go to law school I drove across the country with her and the two kids, Bridget, 4 and Julian, 2.  That was almost 20 years ago.  Bridget has graduated from college and Julian is at the University of Washington.

First Deborah and I visited my youngest son, Ben, in Atlanta.  She is 11 years older than Ben, but they are both loving people and were glad to see each other.  Ben is 38.  He married his childhood sweetheart, Katie, and they have 2 enchanting children.  Jamison is in 1st grade and I went along to her teacher conference.  She is bright and verbal, understands “math concepts” but doesn’t always remember “math facts.”  I think this means that she knows what addition and subtraction are about but doesn’t always remember that 9 + 9 = 18.  I suggested flash cards.  Oh, dear.  Flash cards are apparently out of favor with educators.  The teacher, a nice woman, said we should play games about numbers.

Ben is young enough to feel that life has unexplored possibilities.  He would like to change careers.  He is now the executive chef at a country club, a job he dislikes.   Because of company policies he is obliged to order and serve a lot of pre-prepared food, while he believes that the best meals should come from fresh local ingredients.

Since he was a small child he has been fascinated by the natural world, and especially by snakes and reptiles.  He would like to go back to school, become a field biologist, and perhaps be a forest ranger.  He still has time.

Katie, his wife, is back in school studying to be a nurse anesthetist.  She works long hard hours and the two parents juggle child care.  Katie is home on weekends while Ben works.  Ben is home 2 weekdays while Katie is in school.  The other 3 days they are helped out by Katie’s parents who live nearby.  It is a frantic schedule and they are temporarily short of money without Katie’s comfortable income as a highly trained ICU nurse.

Katie’s parents stopped by to say hello.  I have known them for many years.  We have watched each other grow old.  Bonny said to me, “You look wonderful, Anne, you never change.”  Sweet words, but we both know not true.  I thanked her and thought, “Bonny, you are still a good looking woman, still look like yourself, still look natural, intelligent, and loving.  But older.”

Ben and I took the 2 children to a local nature center where there was a good collection of snakes and a few other reptiles.  Many of the snakes were active so I got lots of movies of slithering snakes with Ben’s non-stop commentary in the background.  For kids everything in the world is new; they were full of excited interest.

Granny (that’s me) took everyone out for Asian food and the next day Deborah and I drove a rented car to Charleston to visit my oldest son, Stevie.  The drive is about 4 ½ hours through gently rolling country with low pine forests and brown fields.  It seems monotonous compared to the dramatic landscape of the west.

When I first saw Stevie I thought he looked thin and pale, but actually I think he is well, though he eats mostly funny sorts of health foods. He constantly exercises at his gym when he isn’t at work treating people who suffer from chronic pain.  Every morning he gets up early and rides his bike to his favorite coffee shop where he sits at his favorite table for 2 hours working on math, physics and biology.  He is writing a paper on something about the physics of cell responses.  I think.  It is full of equations.

Stevie is 19 years older than Ben.  He has already done his career change.  He started as a professor of mathematics.  Now he is a medical doctor.

Steve and Michelle are a devoted couple, but both of them find that aspects of their work and their lives make them unhappy.  They look with trepidation to coming years of late middle age and retirement.  If only they could momentarily share my vantage point of old age they would see lots of time left to do so many things.

Michelle works for the state of South Carolina.  A big part of Boeing is moving to Charleston, and she will be working on finding local people for the new Boeing to employ.  She will have a fine new office with a fine view.

Because Steve and Michelle both had to work while we were there, Deborah and I spent a lot of time together.  We reminisced about years past, and she talked about the law practice that she has with her husband, Chris.  They are now doing well, after the first years of struggle.  Chris is gradually limiting his practice to Social Security, which he enjoys, and Debbie is hoping to specialize in personal injury.  Their youngest child, Clare, is still at home.  She will be 13 soon.

Deborah is the only one of my children who is religious.  She told me about her religious experiences and feelings, and while I don’t share these, I can understand and take an interest.  What I find more difficult to comprehend (she knows this) is her allegiance to the Catholic Church, which interferes in secular matters and takes political positions that she and I both disagree with strongly.

We got home tired.  I spent the night at Deborah’s where we had bacon and eggs at 11:30 P.M. in Debbie’s kitchen which had been made spotlessly clean by Chris.  The next day, Sunday, I drove home to my Jerry, my poodles and my cat.

The strawberries I planted before I left were sprouting happily.

Since I was a child I have loved to draw.  I wanted to grow up to be an artist, but I didn’t manage to do that until late in life.

My mother was excessive in her praise and delight at my early drawings.  She and my stepfather gave me a blackboard and colored chalks and many other drawing materials.  The blackboard was on the wall of my bedroom where I spent hours making elaborate colored pictures on it.  I had a fat book on how to draw, and a big wooden desk with lots of drawers filled with colored paper and pencils, paste, scissors, glitter, stickers, decals, tape, ribbon and more.  Sometimes my mother would call to me, “What are you doing, Anne?” and I would answer, “I’m making things.”

Then, when I was 10, my sister was born, and I had to sleep on the sofa.  I wasn’t allowed in my bedroom where the baby was because I had germs.  We moved, my stepfather became increasingly hostile to me, and when my sister was about 9 months old I asked to be allowed to live with my aunt and uncle where I had stayed for extended periods in earlier years.

This sounds more complaining than I intend.  That was a difficult time for all of us.  There was a new baby, we lived in a 2 bedroom apartment, the war came and my stepfather was called to Washington for a government job.  He was head of wage stabilization at the War Labor Board.  He was a volatile man who drank too much, but he and I made peace after I grew up, and he eventually became a nice old man.

In Andover, living with my aunt and uncle, I rapidly become adolescent.  My uncle was the director of an art gallery, the Addison Gallery of American Art.  He was quite big in the art world, and for a while was on the board of the Smithsonian.  Famous artists came to lunch and generally hung around.  My aunt had been to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris before she was married, and she painted and drew in a disorganized way, making beautiful beginnings but becoming distracted by futile attempts at housekeeping or serving afternoon tea or taking the poodles for a walk.  I drew with her.

My uncle was very critical of both of us.  In my opinion he had little reason to discourage my aunt.  Her work was lovely and had a delicate, whimsical, feminine strength.  But it wasn’t modern. My drawings were childish and my uncle said I had no talent.  He urged me to become a writer.

When I was growing up progressive thinkers were beginning to advocate that women have independent careers.  I was told I should be able to earn a living.  Artists were supposed to starve so I shouldn’t go to art school.

When I went to college I first majored in speech.  After a year I gave that up and majored in art history.  Then I got pregnant and got married (yes, in that order) and when I went back to college I had 3 babies.  My husband said there was no money in art.  He was a political science professor, so for a brief while I majored in political science.  I really wanted to major in anthropology, but I couldn’t see how I could do field work with 3 babies.  I took zoology in order to satisfy the science requirement.  The first part of the course was the study of invertebrate animals, and in the lab we drew little creatures we saw in the microscope.  I loved it.  The teacher was a tough dry spinster who made no effort to entertain.  She just gave the facts.  I was fascinated by the facts.  I majored in zoology and did graduate work in biology.

I went to art school when I was over 50.  By that time I was married for the third time to a prosperous lawyer who could afford to support an artist.

I have been drawing and painting off and on ever since.  From time to time I have been distracted by other things — house building, gardening, caring for the sick and dying.  And I do not really blame my elders for my failure to persevere in art.  My interests were fragmented and diverse, and I was apt to make sudden decisions, embarking on life changing programs without thinking carefully.  I am still fragmented.  I read science and novels and cookbooks and I visit children and friends and grow plants and take trips.  In between I draw.  But I am lazy, and I never concentrate fully enough to get really proficient.

Now I am taking a course in figure drawing at the local community college.  I am learning new things.  The teacher actually has a method, something I didn’t get in art school.  My drawing is improving.  Here are some of the things I have been working on lately.

mixed media

mixed media

These are 2 pieces I am working on as a birthday present for my British daughter.  I drew the figures from life in ink on paper that I had printed with scraps of ink and old stencils.  Then I drew with colored pencils, almost doodle drawings, to integrate and unify the images.  The process reminded me of times in childhood when I “made things” from pretty junk.

Here are some of the drawings from my current art class.

charcoal on newsprint

charcoal on newsprint

charcoal on newsprint

charcoal on newsprint

I have done no drawing or painting for a week.  I have been distracted again by life, by a whirlwind visit from my friend Gwen.  But that is my next post!