I am not exactly writing to the prompt because I am simultaneously exhausted and behind on so much. But -- game made me think of The Westing Game, which I mentioned before. I have a copy coming, but I read the plot synopsis and it is bonkers! But what's interesting about it to me is that it involves a "mysterious benefactor," which I am a slut for! My current WIP has a woman who thinks she has a mysterious benefactor for decades and finds out something different later!
TINY BABY SPIKE! I just want to give her a hug. You look to be about 6 or 7 here— my little nephew and niece are 7 & 8, so that's my reference. Also, your eye brows and lashes are GLORIOUS— as are the pigtails! ❤️
Oh Joy, Joy, Joy! Another marvelous installation. Thank you. Once again I thought I might highlight some lines I especially liked but then, also once again, I wanted to highlight the entire piece. I did get this one line copied to tell you how much I love it: “ Nancy, my new hero, had chosen to not call CPS on me.” I remember losing Henry in a library on UT campus—I’m pretty sure I was there to do research for one of the term papers I used to write for UT students so I could stay home with him when he was little. What a PANIC. I love the backwards peddling and the gaggle of sister wives just going along with another chick in the brood. Such a delight, all of it. Well, not the depression part. The more I look back on parenting a young child the more I wince—sometimes the wincing is remembering something I’d rather forget. Some very bad choice. (There were so many.) But other times I can muster a little self-compassion as it dawns on me what an utterly insane task it is to take care of small children. I don’t like that I didn’t quit drinking until Henry was 8, but on the other hand, I do understand how, in its own fashion, the drinking helped me through those early years. One day let’s have a long conversation about the over-zealous breast feeders. I think I maybe went to one La Leche league meeting once and felt a little overwhelmed by all those breastfeeding fifth graders in the room. Hahaha. Okay okay, that’s my hyperbolic contribution for the day but I’m guessing you know what I mean.
@WRITEWITHSPIKE My response to Prompt #8 is here. Wow, I'm S...L...O...W this week. At so many things, ugh. Why do I seem to get slower the more I have to do? <whine>
Prompt 9 is unstarted, but is probably going to need to be about baseball, which was also a child thing for me, so I probably should have combined 8/9. But then I wouldn't have spent the last week gazing again at Lucie Berard again, and I would have been the worse for it.
I’m absolutely positive I will not be able to capture in words what your words are stirring up in me. Let me try by beginning with this: “It calls the past for context and immediate associations, it does not need conscious effort to mine memories wired deep from past encounters, these are instantaneous.”
On one of my trips to London I had a particular day where everywhere I went I could see and feel connections between/among EVERYTHING in my life that had ever happened. So many things I’d learned and seen and heard and felt over DECADES all came rushing in, totally free association, zero active thinking. Flow like I don’t think I ever experienced before or since. I was ALIVE and my mind was ON FIRE. And though I did try to capture this in a social media post, mostly I just enjoyed the sustained feeling of wonder as everything seemed to align as I walked for miles and miles and people watched and visited museums and popped in and out of shops. What a heady experience.
That you are able not only to remember this long ago experience with Lucie, but also drill down so deeply and express all of those feelings that you felt in a way that comes through so palpably for the reader (ME!) is astonishing. I felt like I was in the gallery with you.
A couple of weeks ago my stupid PTSD got triggered. I knew from far too many past experiences that I was in for a stretch of days where my knowledge that this was a short circuit that would have to be gotten through—that I WOULD get through— was no match for the darkness consuming me, suggesting otherwise, trying to convince me the darkness would never recede. It just so happened that during this period I went to the Blanton. I have mixed feelings about art museums. I sort of love them. But I also sometimes think it’s so weird and pretentious that we rank art, and this thinking finds fodder in pieces that seem so, well, stupid to me. Still, there is that love I mentioned which clearly beats out any cynicism because I always find something to love in museums I visit.
I was with a friend and we spent hours wandering the galleries. I was glad to see the current temporary installations but I also knew that eventually we’d make our way to my two favorite pieces in the permanent collection. There is Cildo Meireles’s *Missão/Missões [Mission/Missions] (How to Build Cathedrals) , 1987* (https://utw10658.utweb.utexas.edu/items/show/2722) which is one of my all-time favorite art works and calls to mind one of my all-time favorite books, Willa Cather’s *Death Comes for the Archbishop.* Also I saw another favorite, *Woman on Trapeze.* (https://blanton.emuseum.com/objects/13937/woman-on-trapeze?ctx=6833d4fc69ea7e937bffb50f3c26060f55e140a9&idx=0). It seemed to me the trapeze painting had moved from a different location in the gallery but that might not be true. Whatever the case, on this trip I saw it at the end of a spacious hallway, beckoning to me, standing out even more than the first time I saw it. I associate this painting strongly with my last divorce, for during that first viewing it I was in the midst of that awful time in my life. I think my original reaction was feeling like that woman and I don’t mean that in a good way. I felt very dangling maybe?
At the end of our day at the museum, followed by a long, lovely meal at a French Bistro, I noticed something. The darkness enveloping me had not fully dissipated but it certainly had retreated for most of the day. I was fully, fully immersed in taking in all that art, my head was bursting with art, there was little room for the looping trauma memories, and I was exhausted in a good way, like my mind was (is) this super rowdy, overly excitable dog and in taking it to the dog park known as the art museum and letting it fun free, I had done it a great service. “Go ahead, race around all you want with your thoughts, but do it in a space where many others have captured their wild thoughts on canvas, in textiles, in printmaking, etc.”
I am always so moved by your writing Jon. This piece struck a particularly deep chord. Thank you so much. Please, please: keep writing. Thank you.
I really like this essay, especially the exuberant "than the background that I now (at last) began to perceive as dozens of blue hues in the background of the masterpiece, azures and cobalts and sapphires and navy and sky and robin’s eggs and also highlights of sunny golds playing as reflections, auras even, of the little girl’s blonde hair."
And the contrast between the other painting's hellscape and the child....
My husband and I don't have children. I never wanted children, and neither, he says, did he, though he's really good with them -- and, for that matter, with people in general. His empathy does a lot to push him past his introversion.
I didn't play with dolls as a kid -- though I did have ONE Barbie whom I treasured because she was brunette, like me.
I'm pretty sure I never wanted kids because anxiety.
Also, the thing about living in the past—probably because I work at an historic museum my passion for relatively recent history (mostly 19th century America) has caught on fire. I think part of my burgeoning love for history relates to my love of dollhouses. I feel a sense of control. I can see an entire dollhouse and all of its contents. Looking at history—while it’s true there’s always room for analysis and interpretation, the truth is that all past events are past and so somehow in my mind more manageable.
well said. And I, too, love miniature things and am considering making dollhouses -- or dioramas, or "Joseph Cornell" boxes, as a thing to put on my ridiculously long "try this" list.
I am sitting here at work, weeping, moving toward a full on cry. I’m sorry it took me so long to get to this—see critically ill dog. But I am savoring every word of it. I feel ten thousand responses coming up. So many lines floored me. This is just one of them: “ Children are by definition all future.” And Angry Phillip!! Hahahaha. Oh I remember him. My best friend in high school had two siblings who were “mentally retarded”—as you know the terminology of the day. One was more profoundly disabled than the other, but they were both very involved. I had a ringside seat to how this affected family dynamics. Later, for ten years, I was a caretaker for a boy who had autism. I was with him from the time he was 8 - 18 and we are still in touch. Again I got to see how his differences shaped his family. My own son was born neurotypical. He is a delight and the joy of my life. He was also a fourteen year old who told me to my face to fuck off. (I’m sure I returned the favor). Now at 60 sometimes I’ll think about parenting—how ill-equipped I was, how many stupid choices I made, how despite my dream of not fucking up another human as I had been fucked up I still managed to pass along the intergenerational trauma (because I didn’t even know IT was a thing). It all remains so very confusing and I try hard not to dwell on my mistakes. Thanks for another piece chock full of food for thought. I am so very deeply moved.
My favorite paisley shirt is buttoned all the way up so that nobody can see any hint of underwear. This was very important to me, because five-year-olds can be brutal underwear critics.
I am not exactly writing to the prompt because I am simultaneously exhausted and behind on so much. But -- game made me think of The Westing Game, which I mentioned before. I have a copy coming, but I read the plot synopsis and it is bonkers! But what's interesting about it to me is that it involves a "mysterious benefactor," which I am a slut for! My current WIP has a woman who thinks she has a mysterious benefactor for decades and finds out something different later!
What a pig-tailed cutie! What's your age in that photo, Spike?
I'll have to upload my Mom's favorite photo of me as a kindergartner.
Thanks for the prompts, boss!🤓
I’m not sure what year that was taken. I’m going to guess I was between 8-10. And yes, always with the pigtails!
TINY BABY SPIKE! I just want to give her a hug. You look to be about 6 or 7 here— my little nephew and niece are 7 & 8, so that's my reference. Also, your eye brows and lashes are GLORIOUS— as are the pigtails! ❤️
Blush. Why thank you!
OMG. That took awhile. Here's a private link to my response to prompt 8.
https://joybaldwin.substack.com/p/05cf957a-1a72-424c-b891-60cfe1218c77
Oh Joy, Joy, Joy! Another marvelous installation. Thank you. Once again I thought I might highlight some lines I especially liked but then, also once again, I wanted to highlight the entire piece. I did get this one line copied to tell you how much I love it: “ Nancy, my new hero, had chosen to not call CPS on me.” I remember losing Henry in a library on UT campus—I’m pretty sure I was there to do research for one of the term papers I used to write for UT students so I could stay home with him when he was little. What a PANIC. I love the backwards peddling and the gaggle of sister wives just going along with another chick in the brood. Such a delight, all of it. Well, not the depression part. The more I look back on parenting a young child the more I wince—sometimes the wincing is remembering something I’d rather forget. Some very bad choice. (There were so many.) But other times I can muster a little self-compassion as it dawns on me what an utterly insane task it is to take care of small children. I don’t like that I didn’t quit drinking until Henry was 8, but on the other hand, I do understand how, in its own fashion, the drinking helped me through those early years. One day let’s have a long conversation about the over-zealous breast feeders. I think I maybe went to one La Leche league meeting once and felt a little overwhelmed by all those breastfeeding fifth graders in the room. Hahaha. Okay okay, that’s my hyperbolic contribution for the day but I’m guessing you know what I mean.
Not a parent, but this essay made me feel a bit what it must be like to be one -- in a good way.
@WRITEWITHSPIKE My response to Prompt #8 is here. Wow, I'm S...L...O...W this week. At so many things, ugh. Why do I seem to get slower the more I have to do? <whine>
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1gruj9wMTdBjTin4tSNHLf09EYmsx-GTy7UHGUAFDndo/edit?usp=sharing
Prompt 9 is unstarted, but is probably going to need to be about baseball, which was also a child thing for me, so I probably should have combined 8/9. But then I wouldn't have spent the last week gazing again at Lucie Berard again, and I would have been the worse for it.
I’m absolutely positive I will not be able to capture in words what your words are stirring up in me. Let me try by beginning with this: “It calls the past for context and immediate associations, it does not need conscious effort to mine memories wired deep from past encounters, these are instantaneous.”
On one of my trips to London I had a particular day where everywhere I went I could see and feel connections between/among EVERYTHING in my life that had ever happened. So many things I’d learned and seen and heard and felt over DECADES all came rushing in, totally free association, zero active thinking. Flow like I don’t think I ever experienced before or since. I was ALIVE and my mind was ON FIRE. And though I did try to capture this in a social media post, mostly I just enjoyed the sustained feeling of wonder as everything seemed to align as I walked for miles and miles and people watched and visited museums and popped in and out of shops. What a heady experience.
That you are able not only to remember this long ago experience with Lucie, but also drill down so deeply and express all of those feelings that you felt in a way that comes through so palpably for the reader (ME!) is astonishing. I felt like I was in the gallery with you.
A couple of weeks ago my stupid PTSD got triggered. I knew from far too many past experiences that I was in for a stretch of days where my knowledge that this was a short circuit that would have to be gotten through—that I WOULD get through— was no match for the darkness consuming me, suggesting otherwise, trying to convince me the darkness would never recede. It just so happened that during this period I went to the Blanton. I have mixed feelings about art museums. I sort of love them. But I also sometimes think it’s so weird and pretentious that we rank art, and this thinking finds fodder in pieces that seem so, well, stupid to me. Still, there is that love I mentioned which clearly beats out any cynicism because I always find something to love in museums I visit.
I was with a friend and we spent hours wandering the galleries. I was glad to see the current temporary installations but I also knew that eventually we’d make our way to my two favorite pieces in the permanent collection. There is Cildo Meireles’s *Missão/Missões [Mission/Missions] (How to Build Cathedrals) , 1987* (https://utw10658.utweb.utexas.edu/items/show/2722) which is one of my all-time favorite art works and calls to mind one of my all-time favorite books, Willa Cather’s *Death Comes for the Archbishop.* Also I saw another favorite, *Woman on Trapeze.* (https://blanton.emuseum.com/objects/13937/woman-on-trapeze?ctx=6833d4fc69ea7e937bffb50f3c26060f55e140a9&idx=0). It seemed to me the trapeze painting had moved from a different location in the gallery but that might not be true. Whatever the case, on this trip I saw it at the end of a spacious hallway, beckoning to me, standing out even more than the first time I saw it. I associate this painting strongly with my last divorce, for during that first viewing it I was in the midst of that awful time in my life. I think my original reaction was feeling like that woman and I don’t mean that in a good way. I felt very dangling maybe?
At the end of our day at the museum, followed by a long, lovely meal at a French Bistro, I noticed something. The darkness enveloping me had not fully dissipated but it certainly had retreated for most of the day. I was fully, fully immersed in taking in all that art, my head was bursting with art, there was little room for the looping trauma memories, and I was exhausted in a good way, like my mind was (is) this super rowdy, overly excitable dog and in taking it to the dog park known as the art museum and letting it fun free, I had done it a great service. “Go ahead, race around all you want with your thoughts, but do it in a space where many others have captured their wild thoughts on canvas, in textiles, in printmaking, etc.”
I am always so moved by your writing Jon. This piece struck a particularly deep chord. Thank you so much. Please, please: keep writing. Thank you.
I really like this essay, especially the exuberant "than the background that I now (at last) began to perceive as dozens of blue hues in the background of the masterpiece, azures and cobalts and sapphires and navy and sky and robin’s eggs and also highlights of sunny golds playing as reflections, auras even, of the little girl’s blonde hair."
And the contrast between the other painting's hellscape and the child....
Prompt #9 (wow am I behind schedule) - Games
https://docs.google.com/document/d/14Lb36IQPikQDm5lbpXXhb0qiVodkrHCrk5lYVmxVtsI/edit
Okay finally, here goes:
The child: Like a rose rabbi
My husband and I don't have children. I never wanted children, and neither, he says, did he, though he's really good with them -- and, for that matter, with people in general. His empathy does a lot to push him past his introversion.
I didn't play with dolls as a kid -- though I did have ONE Barbie whom I treasured because she was brunette, like me.
I'm pretty sure I never wanted kids because anxiety.
Continued here:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1IpN7vDvbWXVK733vfuq3Oy5MXq2yvEHTAzPTBbSgXmg/edit
Also, the thing about living in the past—probably because I work at an historic museum my passion for relatively recent history (mostly 19th century America) has caught on fire. I think part of my burgeoning love for history relates to my love of dollhouses. I feel a sense of control. I can see an entire dollhouse and all of its contents. Looking at history—while it’s true there’s always room for analysis and interpretation, the truth is that all past events are past and so somehow in my mind more manageable.
well said. And I, too, love miniature things and am considering making dollhouses -- or dioramas, or "Joseph Cornell" boxes, as a thing to put on my ridiculously long "try this" list.
I am sitting here at work, weeping, moving toward a full on cry. I’m sorry it took me so long to get to this—see critically ill dog. But I am savoring every word of it. I feel ten thousand responses coming up. So many lines floored me. This is just one of them: “ Children are by definition all future.” And Angry Phillip!! Hahahaha. Oh I remember him. My best friend in high school had two siblings who were “mentally retarded”—as you know the terminology of the day. One was more profoundly disabled than the other, but they were both very involved. I had a ringside seat to how this affected family dynamics. Later, for ten years, I was a caretaker for a boy who had autism. I was with him from the time he was 8 - 18 and we are still in touch. Again I got to see how his differences shaped his family. My own son was born neurotypical. He is a delight and the joy of my life. He was also a fourteen year old who told me to my face to fuck off. (I’m sure I returned the favor). Now at 60 sometimes I’ll think about parenting—how ill-equipped I was, how many stupid choices I made, how despite my dream of not fucking up another human as I had been fucked up I still managed to pass along the intergenerational trauma (because I didn’t even know IT was a thing). It all remains so very confusing and I try hard not to dwell on my mistakes. Thanks for another piece chock full of food for thought. I am so very deeply moved.
(belatedly) Well, your reading this & commenting on it made my day, again.
My kindergarten picture. https://photos.app.goo.gl/hesSxdwLfmzGEUvw6
My favorite paisley shirt is buttoned all the way up so that nobody can see any hint of underwear. This was very important to me, because five-year-olds can be brutal underwear critics.
Haircut courtesy of my Dad, 100% sure of that.