“We’re supposed to be here at ten, right?” I ask. Amanda nods, stepping carefully around the palm fronds and fractured conch shells littering the front yard. We climb the steps to the front of the house. The door is open, and the house is silent.
“Miss Lassie?” I tap a tentative staccato on the door frame. “Hello?”
An ancient dog pads across the floor toward us, quizzical, rheumy eyes glistening. “Not much of a watchdog, are you?” I say, scratching his haunches, unleashing a cloud of shedding fur. Clothes and newspapers are piled everywhere, and the close smell of fried food is sliced by the tang of turpentine.
“Maybe she’s not here,” Amanda says. “Strange. She doesn’t have a car.” I say her name again, louder this time.
A tiny, copper-skinned, silver-haired woman shuffles, stocking-footed, into the room. She motions for us to sit. “I needed to close my eyes for a moment,” she says. She smiles at the dog, who is busy burrowing his nose into Amanda’s thigh.. “You needn’t be wary of Comfort. He loves visitors, ‘specially pretty ladies.”
Amanda and I have been working on a book about the Cayman Islands. We are here on this warm June morning to photograph and interview Miss Lassie. Miss Lassie is a nickname, given by her doting father to his youngest child. Her formal name is Gladwyn Bush. She is eighty-seven years old, a fourth-generation Caymanian and acclaimed visionary intuitive artist. Lacking any formal training, she began to paint twenty-five years ago. Here’s the story: one auspicious day, at the age of sixty-two, Miss Lassie was lying in bed half-awake and something took hold of her. “I knew it to be Divine Inspiration. I knew I had to paint.” She grabbed the only paint in the house- standard house paint- and commenced. “I rendered my vision on my front door, top and bottom.”.
Miss Lassie’s small stucco house- the house her father built, the house she was born in, the house she shared with eight brothers and two sisters, the house she loves and will never leave- has become a testament to the ferocity of what she terms her calling. Virtually every surface, every object, has been anointed in vivid pigment. Angels, birds, scrawled scripture passages, and the Holy family, always smiling, are common themes. Word of the transcendent simplicity of her work has spread beyond the four walls of her home, and beyond the shores of her beloved Cayman Islands. In fact, on a chair across from us is a wrapped canvas, addressed to the organization who commissioned it- the Mormon Tabernacle in Salt Lake City.
Miss Lassie sits for Amanda’s camera. She smiles, leaning against the arm of the sofa in a housecoat made of shiny synthetic fabric featuring a pattern of big pink orchids. Spatters of oil paint dot her arms.
“Come, let me show you my place,” she says. Comfort lopes ahead. As with most old Caymanian houses, the kitchen is outside, joined to the main house by a covered breezeway. A stove, a set tub, racks for dishes, it is all out there, the turquoise sea a backdrop, just yards away. A rope hammock chained between two causarina trees sways in the breeze. Miss Lassie, still shoeless, takes us through the sandy yard, with its scattered accumulation of artifacts; tires, plastic bottles, old buoys, half a rowboat
She tells us about her husband. “Edward was a seaman. He served on eleven vessels in six years, from 1939 to 1945. When he came home after the last voyage, it was plain to see he was not in his right mind. His soul was strange. My son and I took care of him, though. We walked with him as he walked.” Miss Lassie dismisses our sympathetic murmurs. “You grow used to something you don’t bring on yourself.”
She leads us down to a yellow cinderblock guest house. “I had this built for my son, but he doesn’t live with me. He is my main sorrow. He is too fond of the rum.” She points to a broken window, now boarded up with plywood. “Thieves took my air conditioner. The Lord struck down my pride. But still… we have always been good neighbors here on Cayman. Now, it is the drugs and the drinking.” She shakes her head, then laughs. “I am still too full of sin myself! But by and by, when it is time for me to meet Jesus, I will walk through the Valley with a fearless tread.” I write down every word. To me, they sound charmingly archaic. To this near-ninety-year-old native of a tiny island where everyone attended church five days a week, it is just the way she talks.
She insists on serving refreshments. She pours tall glasses of Sprite and Comfort sits with us on her front steps. The ice melts faster than we can drink. We watch lizards sun themselves on rocks and abandon hope that we’ll catch even the smallest breeze. It is time for us to leave. We have another interview at one.
“Thank you so much for letting us speak to you,” I say. Miss Lassie looks almost bewildered.
“It gives me such pleasure, why shouldn’t I let you in? I thank you for your kindness.”
As we drive back toward George Town, I notice that the sunny day looks oddly dull. Perhaps it is by contrast to the place we have just left, a small universe both insular and expansive, a riot of line and color. It is a place free of ego, province of a woman who calls her art markings and cites God as her source. She names this force that speaks to her in her dreams, rousing her from her bed in the middle of the night and sending her scrambling for a paintbrush, a calling. I find myself beginning to contemplate what Miss Lassie already knows: the need to create art doesn’t begin, or end, with the artist.
Monday, November 5, 2007
Sunday, November 4, 2007
Reflections on a Lack Thereof
Reflections on a Lack Thereof
I believe that we all need a break from reflection. Literally.
Every summer for the past fifteen years, we have rented the same house in Nantucket. It’s one of the oldest houses on the island, built in 1724, with precipitous staircases, massive hand-hewn wooden beams, and six live-in fireplaces. Modern conveniences, apart from indoor plumbing, are in short supply. The television is tiny, though only slightly smaller than the family room which houses it. The stove and the coffee maker may operate whimsically, but the profusion of roses arching over the door and the salt tang of the ocean breeze eclipses the draw of appliance reliability. Not only do we forgive the house its tics, we have come to cherish them.
The house does lack something that is not so easy to embrace: functional mirrors. Sure, there are mirrors over the sinks in the bathrooms, but they are crazed and clouded. Ditto the mirrors in the bedroom, which hang, slightly askew, on ancient frayed wires. Not only are these mirrors essentially non-reflective; they are situated at impractical heights, and not even remotely near an adequate light source. Not one of them exceeds twelve inches in length. In short, they are useless. Time and circumstance has reduced them to nothing more than frame inserts.
When we arrive in Nantucket, transitioning away from our normal level of mirror-based behavior is a gradual process. We always spend the first day trying our best to discern our reflections in the motley assortment of murky, wavy glass. We travel from room to room, eyes narrowed, heads tilted, all in a desperate effort to see ourselves. It’s comical, or maybe just pathetic, but ultimately, it’s ineffectual. All we achieve is frustration. We finally move on to taking a blind stab at making ourselves look decent but it’s clear we are still tentative. Over the course of the first few days, passersby can spot us, furtively skulking out into the driveway to the car’s sideview mirrors to make sure we are properly tweezed, flossed, and blemish-free.
Then, there is a shift. Days pass. We spend lazy afternoons at the beach. There are heated games of setback to be played, and corn, fresh from the farm, to be shucked. The tug of the mirror weakens. Gradually, we begin to let go. Freckles pop. Stray hairs, gray hairs, peeling noses, our bodies’ natural processes march on, unobserved and unchecked. We worry a bit, wondering just how bad we must look, but it’s a worry that ebbs and flows like the ocean tide and finally falls away. We get caught up in the sweet smell of the honeysuckle, or the frantic sprint to the beach to watch the sun set.
We return home, only to come face to face (literally!) with everything we have been unable to see over the past two weeks. At first, I am incredulous that I’ve walked around Nantucket with conjoined eyebrows that can best be described as Kahloesque. I let people see me like this? What was I thinking? But then, I take a deep breath, and regain my balance. I know that my eyebrows played no role in our runs along the Cliff, or the rainy day we all got addicted to Law and Order. It is then that I am most grateful for the time spent in a house with no mirrors. By derailing attention from appearances, we are encouraged to inhabit the richness of life, real life, blooming beneath the surface. Every summer, the lack of mirrors starts off feeling like an inconvenience, even a sacrifice, and every summer, we discover it is anything but. It is a lesson, and a great gift. I try to hold onto this, but inevitably, I find myself drifting back into the mirror’s pull.
I guess it all comes down to a couple of sweet weeks each year, when we stop being motes in, to quote Sylvia Plath, “the eye of a small god, four-cornered.” Instead, we live in the breathlessness of that first plunge into the Atlantic and in the plans we make around the dinner table. I believe that in a house without mirrors, we are us, ourselves, at our truest, and I dare to think, most beautiful.
I believe that we all need a break from reflection. Literally.
Every summer for the past fifteen years, we have rented the same house in Nantucket. It’s one of the oldest houses on the island, built in 1724, with precipitous staircases, massive hand-hewn wooden beams, and six live-in fireplaces. Modern conveniences, apart from indoor plumbing, are in short supply. The television is tiny, though only slightly smaller than the family room which houses it. The stove and the coffee maker may operate whimsically, but the profusion of roses arching over the door and the salt tang of the ocean breeze eclipses the draw of appliance reliability. Not only do we forgive the house its tics, we have come to cherish them.
The house does lack something that is not so easy to embrace: functional mirrors. Sure, there are mirrors over the sinks in the bathrooms, but they are crazed and clouded. Ditto the mirrors in the bedroom, which hang, slightly askew, on ancient frayed wires. Not only are these mirrors essentially non-reflective; they are situated at impractical heights, and not even remotely near an adequate light source. Not one of them exceeds twelve inches in length. In short, they are useless. Time and circumstance has reduced them to nothing more than frame inserts.
When we arrive in Nantucket, transitioning away from our normal level of mirror-based behavior is a gradual process. We always spend the first day trying our best to discern our reflections in the motley assortment of murky, wavy glass. We travel from room to room, eyes narrowed, heads tilted, all in a desperate effort to see ourselves. It’s comical, or maybe just pathetic, but ultimately, it’s ineffectual. All we achieve is frustration. We finally move on to taking a blind stab at making ourselves look decent but it’s clear we are still tentative. Over the course of the first few days, passersby can spot us, furtively skulking out into the driveway to the car’s sideview mirrors to make sure we are properly tweezed, flossed, and blemish-free.
Then, there is a shift. Days pass. We spend lazy afternoons at the beach. There are heated games of setback to be played, and corn, fresh from the farm, to be shucked. The tug of the mirror weakens. Gradually, we begin to let go. Freckles pop. Stray hairs, gray hairs, peeling noses, our bodies’ natural processes march on, unobserved and unchecked. We worry a bit, wondering just how bad we must look, but it’s a worry that ebbs and flows like the ocean tide and finally falls away. We get caught up in the sweet smell of the honeysuckle, or the frantic sprint to the beach to watch the sun set.
We return home, only to come face to face (literally!) with everything we have been unable to see over the past two weeks. At first, I am incredulous that I’ve walked around Nantucket with conjoined eyebrows that can best be described as Kahloesque. I let people see me like this? What was I thinking? But then, I take a deep breath, and regain my balance. I know that my eyebrows played no role in our runs along the Cliff, or the rainy day we all got addicted to Law and Order. It is then that I am most grateful for the time spent in a house with no mirrors. By derailing attention from appearances, we are encouraged to inhabit the richness of life, real life, blooming beneath the surface. Every summer, the lack of mirrors starts off feeling like an inconvenience, even a sacrifice, and every summer, we discover it is anything but. It is a lesson, and a great gift. I try to hold onto this, but inevitably, I find myself drifting back into the mirror’s pull.
I guess it all comes down to a couple of sweet weeks each year, when we stop being motes in, to quote Sylvia Plath, “the eye of a small god, four-cornered.” Instead, we live in the breathlessness of that first plunge into the Atlantic and in the plans we make around the dinner table. I believe that in a house without mirrors, we are us, ourselves, at our truest, and I dare to think, most beautiful.
The Life Apocryphal
My grandmother was born in Altoona, Pennsylvania, the daughter of a coal miner. Which coal miner was a matter of speculation; her mother ran a “boarding house for gentlemen” – undoubtedly a polite euphemism for a bordello. It was the turn of the century, and times were tough in hardscrabble mining country. My grandmother’s father designate was a miner by the name of Will Dorning. Will was a drinking man. One night, he was on his way home from the pub when an irresistible urge to sleep seized him. He lay down in his tracks, which by tragic coincidence were the same tracks traversed every two hours by the Norfolk Southern freight train on its run to Pittsburgh, and that, to quote my grandmother, was that.
As a young woman, my grandmother was wildly beautiful. She was tall- five foot eight, which was Amazonian by turn of the century standards- with strawberry blond hair and a rakish cleft in her chin. Her beauty is a matter of record; the details of her young life, however, were sketchy. My grandmother’s history was subject to her own interpretation. Growing up poor, fatherless, and disenfranchised, she traveled light, or with baggage she’d rather not claim. Her life was not relayed in facts and details, but lore.
One story took place when she was still a child. My grandmother was at the window, watching as her neighbor stood outside in her yard, hanging clothes. The neighbor suddenly turned and started to run. “Like in slow-motion,” my grandmother said. “Then, POP, POP, POP, she fell into the grass, just like she was taking a nap.” She paused here, for dramatic effect. “She was shot dead by her lover.”
Then, there was the night my grandmother was driving down a mountain. It had rained, and she made a detour because the bridge had washed out. The road was treacherous and the fog was thick. “You couldn’t see your hand in front of your face,” she said. Suddenly, a man appeared in the middle of the road. She stopped- she had no choice, unless she aimed to run him down- and the man climbed in. “Take me down the mountain,” he demanded, pulling a hunting knife out of his pocket. He began cleaning his fingernails. Glancing over, my grandmother saw the iron shackle around the man’s ankle. “I knew he had escaped from a chain gang,” she said. When they reached the base of the mountain, he told her to stop. She was about to beg for her life when the man opened the door. “Lady, a word to the wise. You ought to never stop your car for nobody.” And he was gone.
For all of us, the human experience is an amalgamation of the significant and the prosaic. In life, we often dwell on the prosaic, but is that how we choose to be remembered? My grandmother is immortalized in the drama, grace, and mystery of the stories she told.
My grandmother was born in Altoona, Pennsylvania, the daughter of a coal miner. Which coal miner was a matter of speculation; her mother ran a “boarding house for gentlemen” – undoubtedly a polite euphemism for a bordello. It was the turn of the century, and times were tough in hardscrabble mining country. My grandmother’s father designate was a miner by the name of Will Dorning. Will was a drinking man. One night, he was on his way home from the pub when an irresistible urge to sleep seized him. He lay down in his tracks, which by tragic coincidence were the same tracks traversed every two hours by the Norfolk Southern freight train on its run to Pittsburgh, and that, to quote my grandmother, was that.
As a young woman, my grandmother was wildly beautiful. She was tall- five foot eight, which was Amazonian by turn of the century standards- with strawberry blond hair and a rakish cleft in her chin. Her beauty is a matter of record; the details of her young life, however, were sketchy. My grandmother’s history was subject to her own interpretation. Growing up poor, fatherless, and disenfranchised, she traveled light, or with baggage she’d rather not claim. Her life was not relayed in facts and details, but lore.
One story took place when she was still a child. My grandmother was at the window, watching as her neighbor stood outside in her yard, hanging clothes. The neighbor suddenly turned and started to run. “Like in slow-motion,” my grandmother said. “Then, POP, POP, POP, she fell into the grass, just like she was taking a nap.” She paused here, for dramatic effect. “She was shot dead by her lover.”
Then, there was the night my grandmother was driving down a mountain. It had rained, and she made a detour because the bridge had washed out. The road was treacherous and the fog was thick. “You couldn’t see your hand in front of your face,” she said. Suddenly, a man appeared in the middle of the road. She stopped- she had no choice, unless she aimed to run him down- and the man climbed in. “Take me down the mountain,” he demanded, pulling a hunting knife out of his pocket. He began cleaning his fingernails. Glancing over, my grandmother saw the iron shackle around the man’s ankle. “I knew he had escaped from a chain gang,” she said. When they reached the base of the mountain, he told her to stop. She was about to beg for her life when the man opened the door. “Lady, a word to the wise. You ought to never stop your car for nobody.” And he was gone.
For all of us, the human experience is an amalgamation of the significant and the prosaic. In life, we often dwell on the prosaic, but is that how we choose to be remembered? My grandmother is immortalized in the drama, grace, and mystery of the stories she told.
Journal of the Plague Year
The title of this essay might seem overdramatic, but this past year has tested the limits of our family’s collective endurance. True, there may have been nothing Bubonic involved, but we did suffer our share of missed deadlines, inaccurate transcripts and endless financial aid forms. Applying to college is not for sissies. And before you dismiss me as your garden variety neurotic, there’s one thing you should know: I have triplet high-school senior daughters. So, whatever your college preparation travails may be, unless you have quadruplets, I’m unimpressed.
When the girls were babies I would dress them in matching outfits. Old ladies in the grocery store seemed to think it was cute and the girls didn’t care- they were pretty much oblivious to anything that didn’t come with a nipple. Then, around the age of two, they began to assert their individual wills. Rachael ate nothing but peanut butter while Eliza ate everything in sight, including, on one particularly appalling occasion, a live tick. Sarah refused to wear shoes, or wait, was that Rachael? Keeping their idiosyncrasies straight was so confusing! While I pretended to applaud their distinct personalities, deep down I longed to just toss them in front of the same Barney video. When they started to mutiny against group activities, my initial inclination was to bully them into conformity. This approach was ineffective then, and when it came to their college searches, it still didn’t work. I asked them- quite reasonably, I thought- why couldn’t they all just go to the same college? I’d given up my plan to negotiate a volume discount, though at the time I thought it sounded like a brilliant idea. By now I was only thinking in terms of simplification: one visit to Mapquest, one massive tuition bill. But the girls ignored me, choosing, instead, to huddle over voluminous Guides to Colleges, attaching individualized color-coded Post-its on schools they found appealing.
I guess that’s okay. Most colleges seek diversity, and clearly, the triplets would be at a grave disadvantage, considering they share the same gender, ethnicity, and gene pool. Then, there’s geographical distribution. Forget a common zip code, they just recently got their own bedrooms. Triplehandedly, my daughters could skew the percentages of an entire entering class. I thought briefly of relocating a couple of them. I mean, how many kids hail from, say, Uzbekistan or Burkina Faso? It seemed like a promising strategy, but I decided to drop it when the State Department got involved.
It’s not as if this year has been without good times. Road trips, for one. Think about it, would you rather be killing the mildew in your shower or driving down the highway listening to NPR? Not to mention you can almost always find a Starbucks. For me, the information sessions provided not only a comfortable seat but, if the lights were dim and the admissions officer not sufficiently strident, a welcome chance to doze. I reveled in the college brochures that arrived by the boatload. Nowadays, schools hire marketing professionals, and some of those brochures are works of art. I would settle into a patch of sunlight on the sofa and peruse each school’s glossy offerings. Based on the brochures, I can tell you this: getting into college requires straight teeth and a kickass sound byte.
But sadly, the whole feel-good momentum comes to a screeching halt when it comes time to actually apply. Applying requires harassing teachers and writing essays and memorizing social security numbers. In our case, times three. Add to that the heartbreak that ensues when a college rejects your child. You consider hiring a hacker to break into the admissions office e files to issue the acceptance letter that you know your child so richly deserves, but the thought of jail time gives you pause, and before you can regroup and figure out exactly how one goes about contacting a hacker your kid is over it. She didn’t want to go to that stupid school anyway.
Gradually, I found myself coming to the realization that while the college admissions process can be arbitrary and unfair, it is also not the end of the world. The rich and the connected and those kids who started training for their SATs in seventh grade will probably get in, and many bright, worthy kids won’t. The deck is stacked for some, and it’s a crap shoot for others, but the important thing to note is that its ramifications extend only as far as the next four years of your child’s life. While the name of her/his institution of higher learning might lack panache at a cocktail party, life has a way of evening the score. That Harvard Early Action admit looks a bit less impressive when he’s middle-aged and out of work than does the public university grad about to perform open-heart surgery on you.
It’s funny. I started out feeling empowered, and gradually realized the depth of my delusion. Here’s an analogy: Life is a river, and college is the vessel that your child will navigate for the next four years. Because you love them, you hope for the finest, most impressive yacht, but as time goes by, you understand that what you should be hoping for isn’t access to the fancy boat, but a kid (or three!) resourceful enough to sail anything.
When the girls were babies I would dress them in matching outfits. Old ladies in the grocery store seemed to think it was cute and the girls didn’t care- they were pretty much oblivious to anything that didn’t come with a nipple. Then, around the age of two, they began to assert their individual wills. Rachael ate nothing but peanut butter while Eliza ate everything in sight, including, on one particularly appalling occasion, a live tick. Sarah refused to wear shoes, or wait, was that Rachael? Keeping their idiosyncrasies straight was so confusing! While I pretended to applaud their distinct personalities, deep down I longed to just toss them in front of the same Barney video. When they started to mutiny against group activities, my initial inclination was to bully them into conformity. This approach was ineffective then, and when it came to their college searches, it still didn’t work. I asked them- quite reasonably, I thought- why couldn’t they all just go to the same college? I’d given up my plan to negotiate a volume discount, though at the time I thought it sounded like a brilliant idea. By now I was only thinking in terms of simplification: one visit to Mapquest, one massive tuition bill. But the girls ignored me, choosing, instead, to huddle over voluminous Guides to Colleges, attaching individualized color-coded Post-its on schools they found appealing.
I guess that’s okay. Most colleges seek diversity, and clearly, the triplets would be at a grave disadvantage, considering they share the same gender, ethnicity, and gene pool. Then, there’s geographical distribution. Forget a common zip code, they just recently got their own bedrooms. Triplehandedly, my daughters could skew the percentages of an entire entering class. I thought briefly of relocating a couple of them. I mean, how many kids hail from, say, Uzbekistan or Burkina Faso? It seemed like a promising strategy, but I decided to drop it when the State Department got involved.
It’s not as if this year has been without good times. Road trips, for one. Think about it, would you rather be killing the mildew in your shower or driving down the highway listening to NPR? Not to mention you can almost always find a Starbucks. For me, the information sessions provided not only a comfortable seat but, if the lights were dim and the admissions officer not sufficiently strident, a welcome chance to doze. I reveled in the college brochures that arrived by the boatload. Nowadays, schools hire marketing professionals, and some of those brochures are works of art. I would settle into a patch of sunlight on the sofa and peruse each school’s glossy offerings. Based on the brochures, I can tell you this: getting into college requires straight teeth and a kickass sound byte.
But sadly, the whole feel-good momentum comes to a screeching halt when it comes time to actually apply. Applying requires harassing teachers and writing essays and memorizing social security numbers. In our case, times three. Add to that the heartbreak that ensues when a college rejects your child. You consider hiring a hacker to break into the admissions office e files to issue the acceptance letter that you know your child so richly deserves, but the thought of jail time gives you pause, and before you can regroup and figure out exactly how one goes about contacting a hacker your kid is over it. She didn’t want to go to that stupid school anyway.
Gradually, I found myself coming to the realization that while the college admissions process can be arbitrary and unfair, it is also not the end of the world. The rich and the connected and those kids who started training for their SATs in seventh grade will probably get in, and many bright, worthy kids won’t. The deck is stacked for some, and it’s a crap shoot for others, but the important thing to note is that its ramifications extend only as far as the next four years of your child’s life. While the name of her/his institution of higher learning might lack panache at a cocktail party, life has a way of evening the score. That Harvard Early Action admit looks a bit less impressive when he’s middle-aged and out of work than does the public university grad about to perform open-heart surgery on you.
It’s funny. I started out feeling empowered, and gradually realized the depth of my delusion. Here’s an analogy: Life is a river, and college is the vessel that your child will navigate for the next four years. Because you love them, you hope for the finest, most impressive yacht, but as time goes by, you understand that what you should be hoping for isn’t access to the fancy boat, but a kid (or three!) resourceful enough to sail anything.
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