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Make a mark!

/ marydpierce / 9 Comments

September 15th is International Dot Day.  This excites me to no end.  Dot Day is all about being creative, and fearless, and thinking outside the box.  It’s about inspiring children to make art, to learn and to connect by sharing their art and their vision with one another.  It’s based on the book The Dot, written and illustrated by Peter H. Reynolds, and published by Candlewick Press in 2003.

You can find out more about Dot Day by clicking here.

Teachers and librarians and children all over the world are participating.  You can watch the video, “Two Libraries, One Voice Dot Day Celebration,” a collaboration by Shannon Miller and the always amazing John Schumacher here.

And for the occasion, I have made my mark, which you can see below:

Dots, lots of dots. This makes me happy.

So, let’s celebrate.  Children – and all those who used to be children – go out and make art.   I think the world could use some dots today.  Don’t you?

Not waving, but drowning . . . .

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Not Waving but Drowning

Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.

Poor chap, he always loved larking
And now he’s dead
It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,
They said.

Oh, no no no, it was too cold always
(Still the dead one lay moaning)
I was much too far out all my life
And not waving but drowning.

Stevie Smith

I had planned on posting a piece about the end of my summer.  But, then I was reminded that today is World Suicide Prevention Day.   And I thought about how on May 6th, fourteen years ago, my brother, the baby of the family, sat in the same lounge chair that he often slept in, and ended his life.

Depression is an insidious disease.  Statistically, more people in the world die from suicide than from war and murder combined.  I can understand why:  Life is full of misery and hardship.   There are moments in almost every day that I think this.  But there are also moments in every day when I find something to feel good about or laugh at, and that is enough for me.  That, and having a wonderfully funny son, a loving husband, family, and friends.

My brother and I talked about a lot of things, but we danced around the possibility of suicide.  I worried that if I said the word aloud it would make the possibility more real.

So, let’s talk about it, people.  You can find help and resources here.  Or call 800-273-TALK (8255) now.

Let’s not be afraid to say it:  Don’t die.

Please.

My brother, Tom. Taken on my last visit with him, a few weeks before he died.

A prophetic Yogi tea tag

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Today is August 1st and it’s a perfect day. The sun is shining, it’s 77 degrees outside. I’m pretty sure that every year on August 1st the weather is glorious. I know for certain that it was twenty-five years ago, which is why I chose that day to marry the love of my life.

It was 1987 and we were busy. LOML and I were building a house with the help of a few family members and friends. I was an art major at URI and had the summer off. LOML worked second shift at Electric Boat. We were on a very tight budget. When we decided to marry, a fellow art student offered her back yard with its apple trees and pastoral setting. Another art student friend offered the use of her husband, an Episcopal priest, to perform the ceremony. My siblings arrived from various parts of the country and helped prepare food for the reception. My brother Tom, who had worked in the restaurant at a New Hampshire resort, awed us with his skill at carving veggies into decorative shapes. Our biggest splurge that day was the string quartet I hired to sit under the apple trees and serenade us. It was bliss.

We have marked the day in many ways since 1987. On our first anniversary I was pregnant with our son. For our twentieth we spent the night in the same room of the same Providence hotel where we spent our wedding night. Last year we did a segway tour of Newport. This year we’re going to wing it. Just get in the car and head towards Providence and do wherever we fancy. The only real plan is to end the evening with dinner at our favorite Newport restaurant – Yesterday’s. We’re not big on gift-giving for our anniversary. We already have what we’re happy with and would rather save the money for our yearly Fforde Ffiesta/England trip.

Yesterday I was exhausted and crabby. This morning I awoke well-rested and feeling grateful. Twenty-five years is a long time to spend with the same person. One who snores like a fog horn and chews his food so loudly I wonder how it is his jaw doesn’t snap. The same person I instinctively felt, the moment I saw him, was a kind and gentle man who would always accept me as I am. After breakfast I boiled water for tea and when I dipped the tea bag into my cup, I read the back of the tea tag. And there it was — like Robert Frost and his poem about roads diverging in a yellow wood, and making a choice of which to follow, my tag said:

Together we can do what we can never do alone.

And that, indeed, has made all the difference.

LOML and I saying, By Gosh, YES! we certainly do!!

LOML, moi, my Maid of Honor, & my brother, who was the Best Man.

$5 in a wallet, or a forgotten notebook. . . .either way a find

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As so often happens, I was looking for something and found, instead, something else. In this case a spiral-bound notebook from ten or twelve years ago. I am a notebook hound. They’re everywhere – piled up on shelves, crammed between stacks of books, on the floor beside my bed.  Technology will never completely replace my love of a notebook and the perfect pen.

This particular notebook was at the bottom of a stack of books I read years ago which have languished, untouched, on a shelf in my studio. I wish I could say I had at least dusted the pile occasionally, but that would be a lie.  Finding a notebook you haven’t seen in a decade is like finding an old wallet and discovering a five-dollar bill inside. It’s not something that’s going to change your life, but it is kind of fun. I found poetry in this notebook. In particular, this one:

There is no comfort in the country
when a farm fails.
My father wanted to move us to Florida.
My mother cried.
“The kids won’t need shoes there,” my father said.
So we packed the car
with clothes, a hamper of food, and ourselves.
Roads unraveled before us, ribbons of dirt and tar,
rolling past fields whose owners we didn’t know,
every mile pulling us farther away from the hope
we gave up too soon.
My father hummed while he drove.
My mother set her face in stone and would not be moved.

I hadn’t finished the poem, but I remembered right away why I wrote it. During the last years of her life, my grandmother lived in a nursing home. Her short-term memory was shot, but she could remember everything from her childhood. Asking her questions about those years was a great way to have a conversation with her. I’d sign her out for the day and we’d traverse the area where she grew up. On one of those outings I learned how her father had tried, and failed at farming, and then decided to move his family from upstate New York to Florida, where he thought life would be easier. It wasn’t. They ended up back where they started.

I guess the poem was my attempt to imagine what it must have felt like all those years ago for my grandmother. I’d forgotten that I wrote it. And I’d forgotten my grandmother’s story until now.

Which means, that sometimes, finding a forgotten notebook is way better than finding a wallet with money in it.

My grandmother, Pearl Crawford, age 5, with her brother Ken, age 10

How my mind works – in case anyone besides my husband cares

/ marydpierce / 17 Comments

My brother took his girlfriend to the area in the Adirondack mountains where we grew up. She in turn posted photographs on Facebook. I looked at these two and thought – blog post.

Photo by Peggy Houlihan Bielecki

Photo by Peggy Houlihan Bielecki

This is the footbridge in Wanakena, NY.  Population: So low I can’t find it listed.  (Maybe 100 or so, if you don’t count students of the New York State Ranger School.) I remember calling it the swinging bridge because that’s what it did; kids walked out to the middle of it and rocked it back and forth.

The bridge photos reminded me of this photo which was taken by Mr. Vickers who lived in a house at one end of the footbridge.

Me with my two sisters, and our brother. I’m the tallest one.

Remembering this photo made me think that I should blog about the houses on each end of the bridge.  How different they and the people who lived in them were.  The one we were standing next to in our bathing suits, with the nice older couple, and the house at the other end of the bridge with the boy who liked to dunk smaller kids under the water when we were swimming.  He terrified me until one winter when I discovered that he, too, liked to pretend to be an Olympic figure skater gliding gracefully around the frozen river.

Then I looked again at the first picture and remembered the summer my grandfather was hired to paint that footbridge.  The best summer of my life.  I should blog about that.

Every afternoon that summer, he would drop by our house when he had finished for the day.  He sat at our kitchen table and drank a beer before heading home.  Besides being a painter of footbridges, he was also a magician.  He could pull coins from our ears.  Then he’d make them disappear on the top of his beer bottle.  When he picked the bottle up, there was the coin on the table where the bottle had sat.  He was quiet, this magic painter man.  And he was well-loved.  He had blue eyes and a bemused smile, but he didn’t talk much about himself.  What I knew about him, about his life, I learned from my mother and others who had known him for a long time.  Which led me to these photos:

My grandfather in his Army uniform taken just before World War I when he was sent with his company to fight in France.

This was how I remember him.

One of the things I’d heard about my grandfather, was that he had an operatic voice and had trained in New York City after the war.  Thinking about that made me remember sitting beneath the window of a particular house in Wanakena listening to a woman we all called Madame Tweedy do her vocal warm-ups.  She was an opera singer, a summer resident, and the closest thing Wanakena had to a celebrity.  I don’t know if she was really famous anywhere outside of Wanakena.  I wish I would have asked more questions then.

My husband doesn’t always follow my train of thought, which is usually because he hasn’t been privy to the circuitous route said train has taken inside my head.  But now that I’ve explained it, it all makes perfect sense.

Doesn’t it?

Finding a Vantage Point

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My husband and I were on a mission yesterday. I love watching fireworks, but this year I wasn’t up to dealing with the massive crowd during the show. The crush of people leaving afterwards. The long hike back to the car, the traffic jam. The noise. Our task was to find a spot that afforded a decent view of the fireworks but far from the madding crowd, and where we could make a speedy get-away.

And we wanted ice cream.

We had a few places in mind. At the second spot on our list we were greeted by a line of orange security cones and a traffic cop. The field we hoped to watch the sky from was on the top of a hill behind a new development of houses. We assumed the guy was there to keep non-residents from doing that. Still my husband asked: “Is this a good spot to see the fireworks?”

“Perfect”, the cop said, surprising us. “As long as you park your car on the side away from the orange cones.”

I leaned across my husband and told the cop, “Okay. We’ll be back. We’re going for ice cream. Would you like some?” He smiled and said sure, that would be nice. Surprise him on the flavor.

Being kind costs so little. In this case, $4 for a double scoop of ice cream which was well worth the price of the smile on the guy’s face when we really did return with it.

We were back within fifteen minutes. A few other cars had arrived by then. A few more came after that. The evening was humid, but a steady breeze across the top of the hill cooled our skin and kept the bugs away. We chatted with the other people. I met a girl whose name was also Mary. She was nine. She was with her mother and their new dog Bella, a year-old yellow lab rescue dog who was timid with people.  Unless they were eating ice cream. Then she had no fear at all. Three other people came from a party they’d been to. An older couple brought their daughter and her two little boys who were three and six. A family with two teen-agers and a long-haired dachshund name Luigi came last. Bella and Luigi made eyes and barked at one another. I’m pretty sure it was love.

And then, the fireworks began. The cop was right. The view was perfect.

(I forgot to bring my camera, but my iPhone is pretty good in a pinch.)

Unlike the snafu in San Diego, we had a twenty-two minute show.  It was sublime.  It’s amazing how a common cause — the search for a spot with an un-trammeled view — brings out camaraderie in human beings.  As we walked the few steps to our cars, we congratulated one another on our mutual find.

And then we booked it out of there to beat the crowd.

Few tail lights in front of us (as opposed to the usual bumper-to-bumper) = a quick ride home. Score!

Applied Danverology

/ marydpierce / 13 Comments

My husband and I got diplomas in the mail a couple of days ago. In Applied Danverology. I was so proud of mine that I scanned it and posted it on my Facebook page for all my friends to see. Lots of them liked it, and some commented. More than a few were a little confused. In the interest of clarifying, AND in my perpetual promotion of the previously blogged-about Fforde Ffiesta, I will herein attempt to explain what this diploma means. (Don’t I already sound smarter? My diploma does say With Honours, after all.)

This is what my diploma looks like.

Applied Danverology Diploma

Danvering is a verb based on Mrs. Danvers, the antagonist in the book Rebecca, by Daphne du Maurier.  She’s a formidable character.  Scary, even.  In Jasper Fforde‘s Thursday Next series, she is cloned and the resulting multitude of Danvers are used as a special forces team to thwack the Mispeling Vyrus .

This is the the letter that accompanied our diplomas.  We are really happy that we didn’t have to take out school loans for this course of study.  Phew.

This is a photo of the Danvers Brigade mustering for inspection.

Please note that the The Legion of Danvers is an equal opportunity movement.  All that’s required for membership is a black dress, a grey granny wig, dark glasses, and a fearsome demeanor.  Oh, and you must learn the following marching song:

We are Danvers, we are clones . . . we will never be alone . . .

That’s all there is to it.  Follow those simple steps, spend a lovely weekend in Swindon at the Fforde Ffiesta, and you, too, might one day obtain a Higher Diploma in Applied Danverology.

You will be the better for it.  Trust me.

Up All Night

/ marydpierce / 18 Comments

A couple of days ago was the first scorching hot day of the year. We don’t have central air conditioning, so in the summer my husband throws a couple of air conditioning units in a few windows and we make do. The problem is he was rushed for time and didn’t seal the window in our bedroom properly so when I went to bed I found bugs swarming through the thin opening between the window panes. They were everywhere. I tried to ignore them, and then there was this flickering light like Tinker Bell had come to tell me that Peter was in trouble – come quick – and I realized, oh, wait, it’s not Tinker Bell, it’s a firefly. And there were three of them. In my room. Like beacons. Flashing. On and off, on and off, on and off. And I knew that unless I got up to catch them, there would be no sleeping for me.

Sleep has never come easy. As a kid I was the one reading beneath the blankets with a flashlight. Early morning is not my friend. I’ve learned to cope in a world that gets started at the crack of dawn, not always cheerfully, but I try. Sometimes, though, my propensity for staying up late lurches into the realm of insomnia, which is beast of another kind. When I cannot fall asleep no matter what I do.

My husband doesn’t understand that at all. He thinks that falling asleep is simply a matter of self-discipline. I have tried to describe for him what it feels like — sleeplessness even in the face of bone-deep fatigue. It’s like there’s an electrical current running through my body that I have absolutely no control over, and there’s no switch I can flick to shut it off or slow it down. Odd thoughts and words slam around in my head, disjointed and meaningless; sometimes seemingly profound or so applicable to something I’ve been working on that I debate whether I should get up and write it down. I don’t have to be worrying about anything – other than going the hell to sleep. The insomnia is just there, waiting, in the dark, taunting me like a fiend from a horror story. Honest to God, my first conscious thought yesterday was the line: Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary. . . .

And before you offer, just let me say I have run the gamut of sleep aids. Antihistamines, lavender oil, warm milk, herbal, homeopathic, ayurvedic, over-the-counter PM versions of Tylenol, Motrin, or Advil. None of it really works, or works for long. It’s annoying as hell, but I’ve learned to accept that some of us are just wired differently. It’s how we were born. In fact, who knows, maybe that’s how vampire stories got started. Maybe those people were nothing more than poor schleps who were also wired differently and couldn’t sleep at night. So they made up for it by sleeping a big chunk of the day away and were persecuted by the early-to-rise citizenry. If that’s the case, I consider myself lucky. At least no one has tried to drive a stake through my heart.

Yet.

No lie, I tried to get a photo of the fireflies in my room, which was obviously an impossibility from the get-go. It just shows how sleep deprivation robs you of the ability to think logically. Besides, I like this picture of purple irises. And I’m in BIG love with Instagram.

Fforde Ffiesta, Deconstructed

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There’s this thing I like to do:  Once a year I pack suitcases with, among other stuff, some black dresses, a couple of grey granny wigs, dark glasses, and the lyrics to “Leaning on a Lamppost.”  This year I also packed a tattered lace wedding gown and a plastic skull.  The first four years I packed for three of us – my husband, our son, and myself.  This time, it was just my husband and I, as the boy couldn’t go.  I left the mammoth and the dodo behind, too – luggage allowances and all.  You’d be amazed at how much room a froufrou wedding gown takes up in a suitcase.

My family and close friends know that this bizarre ritual is part of our trek to the Fforde Ffiesta.  Not all of them understand why we go, but they accept it.  They accept that the rest of the year we don’t go out much, we don’t visit often, because we’re always saving our money so that we can instead spend a weekend in Swindon, a smallish nondescript city in England, most noted for its Magic Roundabout.  But, Swindon is also the literary home of Thursday Next, heroine in a series of books written by the extraordinary Jasper Fforde.  And therein lies the allure.

Jasper’s books are difficult to describe. They’re a riotous genre-defying amalgamation of fantasy/sci-fi/fast-paced mystery thriller filled with wit, social commentary, and literary references.  The Ffiesta is a literary festival celebrating all things Fforde, organized by a small, but brilliant group of Fforde fans – the Fforganizers.  Attendees are passionate about the books.  They’re a friendly lot, fun and full of words, and just a little insane – but in a good way.  Having been at all five of the Ffiestas now, I am happy to number them among my friends.  There is something exhilarating about spending a sleep-deprived weekend amongst like-minded souls who totally get your dorkiness and even embrace it.  How can you not make friends with that?

The weekend was jam-packed with non-stop goodness.  There was the Friday evening pub quiz; hunt the lobsters; cipher-solving group puzzles; a village fete; a rousing game of Lobster Space Invaders; croquet (it is, after all, England); a bus tour of Swindon with Jasper as tour guide and Derek (a Fforganizer) as the mustachioed ice cream peddler; Nanowrimo hours; literary karaoke; Royal Angst poetry writing competition; Hamlet soliloquy speed-reading competition (for which the plastic skull was needed); Name that Fruit; a murder mystery performed by the Fforganizers; formation of the Danvers Clone brigade (53 members this year – a record!); fancy dress parade in which participants dressed up as characters from Jasper’s books.  And throughout the goings on Jasper was everywhere.  Reading from his latest not-quite-yet-in-print book; talking, answering questions; presiding over competitions; auction-erring; and at the end of it all, awarding prizes.  That’s a lot to pack into a weekend.  And, yet, we were all a bit sad when it was time to leave.  There’s talk of extending the time a few extra days next year, for those who can, with a group road trip.  Itinerary as yet to be determined.

And I, my friends . . . I am SO there.