Colour

I love color. I love colour – spelled with a “u” everywhere else except the US, it seems.

I love deeply pigmented, saturated colors. I could rather do without pastels and those various other hues that are wishy-washy and can’t seem to make up their mind as to what shade of purple or green or red they will be. Eggplant purples. Emerald greens. Suburst oranges. Midnight sky blues. Colors that you could dive into they are so deep and rich.

Spirit Trail Fibers in "Harvest"

The 2009 Rhinebeck NY Sheep and Wool Show was fantastic, if a bit overwhelming for a newcomer like myself. The whole place was a riotous palette of color from wool, to buttons, to ribbon, to pots of dye. There were richly hued hand-spun wools dyed from natural plant extracts that produced such vivid feasts for the eyes. Even the browns, whites, and greys of the animals were appealing as they rolled about in hay. Of course, one can hardly fail to mention the foliage! It’s hard not to spend a good deal of time craning your neck towards the sky to take in the massive spread of leafy canopies as you drive and drive and drive along the NY interstate. It’s magnificent the way those fiery colors are illuminated against the backdrop of clear blue, cloudless skies. You’d think you’d happened upon some large conflagration of sorts with all of those yellows, reds, and oranges – pure and beautiful and profoundly natural in a world where most beauty is fabricated. Now it won’t be Autumn for me without the anticipation of a trip to Rhinebeck, the explosion of Northeastern Fall foliage, and the smells of wet leaves, wood smoke, and hand-spun wool.

It's just not a fair without the Kettle Corn

A little trim before the judging.

A ram if I ever saw one.

Goats, too!

For the Honeybee Cardigan

Someone's going to need to wind all that yarn...

Socks that Rock

Cormo wool

A drop spindle and roving for yet another hobby

Magic

Adulthood, unlike childhood, holds little magic. Life becomes a steady routine of rules and responsibilities that you rinse and repeat day in and day out. It’s hard to find excitement in the simplicities of the every day the way five  year olds can. When the wind blows away the seeds of a dandelion puff, it seems much less mesmerizing.

Fireworks, though, are one of those things that never cease to amaze me. They are spectacular forms of pyrotechnic genius whose fleeting nature forces you to sit up and pay attention, eyes widening millimeter by millimeter so that you can take in every last ephemeral skyward burst.

Growing Up Is Hard to Do

I had intended to enter a recent essay contest sponsored by Real Simple magazine, but time got away from me and the deadline for entries has passed. The topic for the contest was “When did you first realize you were an adult?”. I’ve got no chance of winning $3,000 now, but I still want to put forth my own thoughts regarding that question.

I used to think that I’d feel like an adult when I left Philadelphia, drove off to New York City with a car full of belongings, and made my new home at Barnard College. I was 18 and, at that time, being an adult really meant one thing to me: being able to do whatever the hell I wanted without needing to solicit my parents’ permission. I pretty much figured that college would provide a plethora of such opportunities. But, like I said, I was 18 and pretty stupid.

In college, I ran into all sorts of obstacles and challenges that had me whipping out my cell phone – sometimes in hysterics, other times in tears – to call home and beg my parents to tell me what I should do. “Should I be pre-med?, What major sounds best? How much vodka constitutes a trip to the ER for stomach pumping?” and so on and so forth.

When being an adult at 18 wasn’t quite working out, I figured that age 21 was the magical number and I’d just bide my time as an adolescent until then. Shortly after turning 21 and consuming a few alcoholic beverages legally, I found myself thousands of miles from Philadelphia and New York City in South Africa. “Now,” I thought “I am truly an adult.” Afterall, what kind of child lives alone in a foreign country where she doesn’t know another soul? Things went swimmingly – I went to classes, learned how to drive a stick-shift on the opposite side of the road, dated a man from Cape Town, and traveled the Garden Route all by myself, all without managing to get myself killed – until I ended up horribly ill for the last 3 months of my stay. Instead of whipping out my cell phone this time, I was trudging down the stairs to my residence hall’s public phone in the wee hours of the South African morning to, yet again, consult my parents on whether or not they thought I had some life-threatening plague. When all was said and done and I was safely returned to the United States, an Infectious Disease specialist diagnosed the tiny parasite that had been causing me – and my parents – months of long distance agony.

By this time, I felt that it was obvious that I was still miles away from being a real, live adult and conceded to wait for college graduation. College graduation was all about entering “the real world”, or so I was told over and over and over again by the long ago graduated, so-called adults I encountered. The short of it is that neither graduating from Barnard, nor entering the “real world” made me feel any more like a capable adult. I felt like a pubescent boy, occupying a body that didn’t really fit. I was all gangly and awkward limbs that I hadn’t yet grown into.

If I still thought that being an adult had anything to do with age, I would say that I was thrown headlong and rather unceremoniously into adulthood at age 24. The exact age I am at this moment – give or take a few minutes, seconds, or whathaveyou – and the age I was when my father died. I realized that I was an adult the exact moment I stepped foot into my father’s hospital room and knew that he was no longer breathing. The initial feeling was like being stranded in a vast ocean only to realize that your life boat has just deflated. I could bail water as furiously as possible, but that still wouldn’t change the fact that I was on my own in a way I had never been before. There was no longer any man in the world who would always put me before himself. It was a slow realization, actually. When I found myself getting through the viewings and the funeral and the burial without breaking into millions of tiny pieces, I began to feel that I had finally grown into my capable, adult self. I was making my own decisions, forging my own life path in school and at work, and being a supportive sister, daughter, and aunt to my family. Despite unimaginable heartbreak, I was still standing on my own two feet and all with my cell phone tucked quietly away in my purse.

Philosophy of Nursing: An Assignment

I wanted to be a doctor until I didn’t. That is to say that I had always planned on becoming a doctor.  It seemed the most natural way for me to emulate my father, whom I have always idolized. That was the plan until, one day, the whole idea seemed completely wrong. When my father was diagnosed with cancer, my view of the health care profession radically shifted as I found myself occupying, or rather coping with, this new caretaker role. I experienced a rather fervent conversion: Nursing is for me. Just like that – no more medical school.

Some say I “settled” for Nursing. Settled! What kind of egregious accusation is that? Do they know how hard this is? I could cry every day for the rest of my life doing this job. I didn’t settle; I stepped up to accept awesome responsibility and privilege – the privilege of being able to lay hands on another human being, to become a participant-observer in their most intimate and excruciating moments, to navigate them, like a wayward ship, through the complexities of illness and wellness. Nursing is not about virtue or piety or maternal instincts or whatever Johnson&Johnson claims in their commercials. These characteristics don’t keep people alive; don’t keep people happy and healthy. Nursing is so continually sentimentalized and trivialized that it has become a veritable Hallmark Card in the health care industry. Somehow, Nursing is about “all the ways you care” and not about highly complex and skilled knowledge work.

Nursing is what results when a highly educated and motivated young woman, like myself, says, “I want to be present in another person’s life. I want to participate collaboratively in that life in order to effect changes. I refuse to merely view another human being as a disease model. I will recognize that people are not just the sum of their parts but complex individuals situated within ever-changing environments. I will take risks for the sake of a greater good, allowing myself to become open to criticism.” I imagine that such a philosophy was most important to my father in his practice of medicine – his primary goal being to relate to a patient human to human, not doctor to patient. So, really, my desire to emulate my father has nothing to do with my becoming a doctor, but it has everything to do with my becoming a good person. Nursing is my opportunity to achieve such a goal. It is social justice.

Present Tense

No one laughs at god in a hospital / no one laughs at god in a war

Regina Spektor is right, especially about the first part.

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I’ll be the first to admit that I am a detail-oriented person. Perhaps obsessively so. I like organization because I am perpetually anxious when I cannot find things. I keep a box of life’s minutiae – postcards, business cards, ticket stubs, photos, pieces of my parents from before I existed, pieces of myself.

I remember birthdays. I send hand-written thank you notes. I remember the story behind that little scar on your chin. I know whether you are a cat or a dog person and the name of your favorite dish at your favorite restaurant.

It’s easy to get lost in the details and forget to take in the forest for the trees. Details are what lay between the lines. You have to read a little more deeply to keep track of them all. They’re what make us more than human.

Dad was a detail man. His details were just different. He didn’t write lengthy personal notes, but usually signed his cards with the ever brieg “Dad” in his cramped hand. His preference for details weren’t necessarily about finding you the perfect birthday present, but a preference for the things that made you feel special in a world where few people take the time to remember how to properly spell your name.

He was really good with names. He knew the moniker of just about any person he ever met. He usually knew their kids’ names and where they went on their last vacation, too. This made everyone feel that they were more than just a fleshy face he passed in the hallway.

I worry about forgetting the details now that he’s gone. I wish I had held his hand more. Especially during those days when he had already moved on to some other place that I couldn’t reach. Dad had perfectly oval nails at the ends of long fingers. No hang nails either. His index finger was the longest and his skin was smooth, soft, and warm. They were good hands for shaking. They were good for holding, too, but I was afraid. More afraid than I’ve ever been. More afraid than watching all those women whom I’d cared for die, more afraid than bungy jumping.

It seems silly, but I don’t want to be the girl whose father died when she was 24. That realization is perhaps the most excruciating thing I have ever felt – more painful the two broken wrists, the 14 stitches, and the tonsillectomy that I’ve had. I don’t think this pain will necessarily characterize who I am from this point forward, but it is always going to be part of the story I tell to those who weren’t already part of my life.

These days, the details are all about verb tense.

In conversation, I catch myself saying “was” instead of “is”.

“My dad was…”

It’s not a conscious thing at all. My brain seems to have been reprogrammed to account for the new vacancy in my life. I always end up correcting myself because the verb tense puts that question mark in people’s eyes – “What does she mean ‘was’?” And I don’t like the answer that comes after that question mark. It’s that answer that gets me labeled “the girl whose dad died when she was 24″. I’d rather be someone else.

T – (minus)

There is a scene in the HBO John Adams mini-series of last summer where the Continental Congress has just decided to declare independence from Great Britain. After all the huzzah’s and much applause, the representatives slowly come to fully realize what this decision means and the camera pans over faces that have fallen from joy into concerned frowns about what the future now holds.

My Nursing program begins in a matter of hours and I feel much the same way. The excitement has boiled down to “what the hell was I thinking!?” Just as you can hardly recall The Declaration of Independence, there is no taking this decision back.

Father’s Day Special

This American Life is on NPR (WHYY in Philadelphia) every Sunday at noon. Every week Ira Glass narrates the life story or stories of rather ordinary Americans – people few others would be interested in except for the complicated themes that highlight their lives in ways no one would have previously expected.

This week?

“Go Ask Your Father”, a broadcast about a man and his father and a big “what if…?” What if we could choose our parents? What is truly wonderful about This American Life is that you can palpably feel the characters’ emotions in these stories in ways that tend to make me physically uncomfortable, upset, anxious, or undeniably optimistic and hopeful. This is a lost art – storytelling. This week there is confusion and anger, sadness and suspense, capped off by a DNA test where the man opens an envelope while tape recording himself. The paper crinkles audibly on the tape, the man tentatively reads the results, and, then, there is nothing but static-y radio silence when the news hits him like an atom bomb. I can sense the outward ripples of his emotions as they come over him, one by one, in waves.

If I could have chosen my father, I would have chosen someone who wouldn’t have died when I was 24 years old. It sounds cruel, but it’s one of many truths regarding how I feel about my father. I would have chosen someone exactly like my father, but a younger version of him – someone who would still be around to give me advice, tousle my curls, and call me by secret nicknames even when I am 40.

The Library

The library is greatly misunderstood in the 21st century.

“Why don’t you just buy the book so you can keep it?”

This may sound judgmental, but I just don’t love every book I read enough to want to provide it with a permanent home. I wasn’t always this way, though. I’v bought books by the armload from plenty of national chains only to read one or two from the expensive stack at my bedside. It wasn’t until graduating from college and having to move many boxes of books that the whole thing began to seem ridiculous. In the years since, I’ve meticulously pruned my collection to include beloved classics and anything that made me feel as if I’d lost a good friend when I got to the last page.

At the library, books are important. Books are important to me. I can’t read just anything. I rarely choose titles from anyone’s bestseller list. The only book bandwagon I ever jumped on was Harry Potter’s. If I don’t feel some connection to the story or the characters or the themes I feel let down. I tend to choose books like I choose friends and I am most certainly not ever going to be friends with the Twilight series or anything by Danielle Steel.

Going to the library is an exciting event. Sometimes I go and browse the shelves and run my finger along the crinkly spines. Other times I have something on the “requests” shelf and there is nothing better than knowing something that you have been waiting for has finally arrived. I love the smell of library books, the sound of the book jacket. If it turns out I just can’t get through the pages, I simply return it with no detriment to my wallet. If I love it, I just may buy it from the independent bookstore I love so that I can keep it forever to reread.

The library is about preserving a legacy of knowledge for generations. Barnes and Noble is about trying to sell you cheap paperbacks that can’t even be qualified as anything remotely resembling literature. The library preserves the simple pleasure of reading for reading’s sake as opposed to reading because Oprah endorsed it, because it’s 20% off, or because you think it will change your life.

The best part about the library is the people. Instead of being rung up by some hipster whose actual knowledge of literature is most likely eclipsed by their preference for skinny jeans, I get excited little librarian comments like “Oh you’ll just love that!” It’s always nice to be able to take home something that’s been a good friend to someone else.

Corners of the Mind

A mind is a terrible thing to waste so they say. But that’s exactly what happens – the thing just wastes away, bit by bit. Just as you are born, you just as readily begin your inevitable, imperceptible decline. Apparently, the mind isn’t the steel fortress of filing cabinets and reel-to-reel movies that we’ve made it out to be. If you listened to WYNC’s Radio Lab you would know this.

Instead, it’s a rather delicate membrane. It is permeable in some spots, though not in others. As soon as you witness something and lock it away forever as the happiest day of your life, the mugging on 65th street, a college graduation, or summers by the sea, your memory has already gone and fractured the whole thing into an impossible kaleidoscope of nuances. Sight, sound, color, faces, places, and words are continually rearranged every time a memory is recalled. This is why trial witnesses often make or break a case – condemning or setting free individuals based on the possibility of having seen or heard something somewhere some place in time.

Memories are little more than reimagined vignettes that we replay for ourselves behind closed eyes. My own are like little films that are silent in some parts where the dialogue has faded to all but vigorously moving mouths because I’m not sure who said what several years down the road. I never remember the superlatives – the most embarrassing thing, the funniest thing, the scariest thing, the best thing. How does one choose when with a mere flick of the wrist the kaleidoscope shifts the pieces into a completely new pattern? Memory is a razor’s edge of truth with vast emptiness on either side. Overtime, the mental picture degrades and the details become vague generalizations.

My sense of smell or hearing is what brings most of my most favorite memories to the surface. Late summer nights when the cicadas are humming loudly in the dark remind me of the blackness of the South African night, lying awake in the heavy, humid heat. The smell of honeysuckle reminds me of hidden Manhattan gardens, Central Park in the spring, and Savannah, Georgia.

Memories of people are the hardest to hold on to. There are many things about humans that are ephemeral: the sound of their laugh, the smell of their skin, their handwriting…We go to great lengths to preserve moments with photographs and recordings and home movies, but nothing is as sweet as the vision you hold for yourself, even if it’s flawed by the workings of millions of tiny neurons.

Geneaology

Richmond is old. So old that it almost creaks under the weight of modernity as if catching up with the 21st century is just too much to bear after 400-some years.

The life blood of Virginia’s capitol city flowed steadily from the James River – English settlers, slaves, tobacco. The city and it’s inhabitants witnessed revolution, civil strife, deconstruction, and rebirth. Driving through Richmond provides a cheap tour of history in America – unwritten stories are featured in the massive statues of war heroes lining Monument Avenue, the nouveau-riche grandeur of Byrd Park and the West End, the remnants of Jim Crow segregation on the Southside, the long legacy of African American business and entrepreneurship in Jackson Ward, the recollection of bellowing steam engines and canal barges with their industrial cargo in Shockoe Bottom, and the possibility of new era that trails the students at Virginia Commonwealth University.

Richmond is easily one of those places where everyone knows everyone else and their business. Especially on the Southside. The Southside really started out as farmland in an area called Swansboro. My earliest ancestor, Rebecca Howlette, was a slave on the cusp of the Civil War. She was mother to 6 children and keeper of the “old place” for Mr. John Howlette – a wealthy landowner and father of Rebecca’s 6 mulatto children. We all trickled down out of her line like little tributaries from one, strong river – the Moons, the Martins, the Logans, the Howelettes, and so on.

According to Auntie Eva, Daddy came down to Decatur Street talking all proper after being born in New Jersey. They could practically smell the North on him. Auntarie – my grandmother Marie – ran a tight ship, though, and nothing pleased her more than knowing her home and her child were clean as a whistle. She had love enough for 4 or 5 children that she squeezed into her one and only. Grandma Marie stuffed him full of all the hopes and aspirations and dreams that she had had for herself but were dashed by racism and segregation. Her “angel baby” wouldn’t have everything snatched out from under him. She was a force to be reckoned with.

There used to be a grand house at 29th and Hull Steet where he lived with his parents and grandparents. It used to have a lovely porch. Grandma Marie surely thought that cleanliness was next to godliness as she mandated that daddy bathe in the deep metal tub on Saturday evenings. She used the left over water from boiling corn, strewn with husk silk and a large, scratchy bar of Octagon soap. When you were rubbed nice and raw, you were ready for starched Sunday clothes and the minister. Auntie Elaine says that Grandma Marie was a “fly chick” in her day with nary a heair out of place. She wore her thick, silky hair long, refusing anything resembling pickaninny braids. If you had any ounce of respect for yourself, you didn’t dare show your face to the public with a head full of curlers. She always longed for a daughter with whom she could share these lessons.

When Grandma Marie and I first had occasion to meet, I was a squirming infant and she, an old woman whose mind had been turned to swiss cheese by dementia. In pictures, she holds me stiffly, not seeming to understand what I am or from whence I came. Her greyed hair is cut short and leaves little trace of the glamourous woman she had always been. I arrived decades too late to be any sort of dream-come-true for her.

A squat carwash now occupies the lot where my daddy and his cousin used to mow the grass on Sundays for a quarter until they fought so much over splitting the money that Big Pa Howlette – my great grandfather – decided to give each boy 25 cents. The rest of the clan was spread out over 28th/29th Streets and Midlothian Pike – a veritable Howlette beehive. The clapboard shack on the corner of 28th Street and Midlothian Pike still stands with its lonely barber pole adorning one wall. So does one Howlette residence whose green awning bears a large, stenciled “H”.You could walk up any one of the major thoroughfares to the Five and Dime or Miller and Rhoads. On summer evenings, Big Pa would send daddy down to the corner store and pharmacy for nickel smokes.

Over in Newtown South, at Decatur and Pilkington, is the 2nd Baptist Church. Rebecca – being a fierce Christian and community advocate – pushed for the opening of a church that would be closer to her home. A stained glass window near the pulpit quietly honors her memory and contributions. Maybe if I stare through the fragile light filtering through the colored glass long enough, Rebecca just might appear, mother of our generations, like a vision of the Virgin Mary.

The memories, the stories – histories and herstories – triumphs, tragedies, and the germane goings-on of many a person are palapble here. Richmond is the wellspring from which many a black family poured out. Death seems to always be an event that leaves the living with more questions than answers. I’ve lost many years in learning these family intracacies, of knowing people who look like me, of being able to put an answer to the classic life questions: Where did I come from? Who am I?

Sometimes the answer is simple. It’s not wrapped up in all the superficial things we think distinguish us as individuals. You can’t really be defined without the “other”.  So you realize that there has been a place for you all along, among these others that exsited and continue to exist: I am a Howlette; daughter of Bernett Logan, born through a long lineage of capable women – Rebecca, Fannie, and Marie.