All the Moments: Emily the ER Nurse at MCAD Sale

Sometime in 2017
HONORING Emma who brought you two hot sandwiches after you

had not eaten for twelve hours in the ER 

Honoring the Old Memories

Emily who remembers me from ER so long Ago

Last night I was at the MCAD sale with my work surrounding me like a peacocks tail open around me. The moments and the decades revealed...that's when I painted waterlilies by the Mississippi with Pat..that's the Romanina flower market I found beauty and inspiration in Cluj after my group saw the sign on the synagogue saying the Jews were rounded up fro Aushwitz there, here is my backyard, and the cardinal amid the flowering crab tree in the front yard...here it is all of it! The winter water lilies at Walker Art Center Conservatory long ago

And then Emily stops. I smile as she has my mother's name and then she remembers..

"I know You" I remember you!" You sat and painted everyone in the ER when

you were there with your late husband. And then I remember too.

I am no longer at this nice bustling art sale with a glass of white wine in my hand,

booming music and my memories and art arrayed around me.

I remember those nights.

When I called 911 so desperately 

when the minutes ticked by like hours 

and the siren's shrill call was comforting

because I knew help was close and on the way

after the men in heavy clothes evaluated you

after you were helped out to the ambulance

I ran out the back door with my

sketch book, paints and snacks.

I knew what to pack for these moments.

after the relief of finding you in 9B

or 8C or 7A settled in 
I created a small studio that was the extra chair in the ER room

the ghosts of those there just before us had not left

and we were there to endure the hours.

that's when I drew Emily

She said:

"You just painted and painted"

and I did

It was how I navigated the hours and uncetainties

as the Divine Hand held us.

The years have rolled by

but when an ambulance shrieks by ...

I remember all of it again

Emily and I hug.

I weep for what was

as I sit there in the splendor 

remembering the past

and enjoying those I draw in the moment

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How it was

ER that Time.  ER this time.  ER that time

                                                        

          
 

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Drawing My Way Through:Musings and Moments Week of November 15 to November 23rd

 Drawing My Way Through:Musings and Moments November 2024

• By returning to this Blog I hope to communicate my inner life of drawing in the moment and 
• paying attention to how my life flows by in an often lyrical way.

Ongoing Meaningful Relationships at MCAD

PAINTING WITH BELLA

Over the last year and a half I have been able to renew my relationship to MCAD and the students there. I leap effortlessly through the 50 years since I graduated from there in 1974 and continue to have meaningful experiences there including being a part of Art Sale, and Auction.

Once upon a time I set up art projects for dear Bella at the private Jewish Day School I taught at. She is a student at MCAD and invited me to paint with her and others last friday. So it was poignant to have her set up a project for me as I had once done for her. The small paintings we did are being given to residents at Ebenezer Nursing Home. A very weary place I once worked.

But I know these paintings will bring Joy!!

As always I feel like a water lily that has spiraled up through the complex waters of the years to Bloom on the Surface in Splendor once again!

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Balance and Beauty

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Visit to the Wound Clinic

Wound Clinic Waiting Room

There at the Wound Clinic each person is wrapped in their own suffering and problems.

I felt like we got a Front Row Seat with Struggling Humanity.

It was sobering...and yet as hard as our situation was there was .a man in wheelchair nearby...

 He was on oxygen...with a catheter..his poor little feet wrapped in foam.

His shirt draped over him... his wild hair all asunder..

I tried to say something and comfort him but he brushed me away..

He looked dazed by his pain and isolation

I drew him,  the oxygen, the tubes, his feet in the foam...all of him except his face so as to preserve his privacy and somehow to honor him in that moment of difficulty...so public and so private.. all of his needs on full display and he so obviously in discomfort and even more so suffering so much isolation and lonliness...

Later as he got into the van I saw him look at me with such a lonely ache.. and need.

I realized he was so blockaded by pain that he could no longer reach out or recieve

My heart broke quietly for him... but at least I tried to give him a moment of comfort.

His situation was So Much Worse than ours...so much worse and he was so obviously alone and lonely.

Despite all of Joshs challenges he has me by his side and he comes home with me.

Even if the Bickersons make an appearance... I am there for him and our love sustains us.

So once again... just as we were wrapped up in our situation like in a cocoon, what gave me wings of insight and empathy was seeing how our struggles paled in comparison to others... and then empathy opens even more..like a peony in full blossom releasing its scent...

We made it home, passing the Wall of Forgotten Natives and saw again..even if from a distance..true need...

I come home to the beautiful fragile structure of my sukkah and sit in the sun all afternoon painting and drawing and musing...

realizing how despite the fragile structure of our lives..somehow we endure... we are resilient and we survive....

Visiting Paul Wellstone's Grave November 9, 2002

 

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New Years Day in Vienna…then and now 1/1/19 for my mother Emily

                                                                                               My mother and grandmothers favorite Opera.

                                                                                                     "Tosca" one they heard often in Vienna.

       This New Year’s Day morning is terribly cold. My car shudders and barely wants to start. The engine clatters reluctantly and I wonder if it will make it. I dash off because Josh is being released today after a week in Cardio Renal. On Christmas night I called the ambulance because he had shortness of breath…kind of another wild week…but we held on …Now insights pave the path ahead and I trust he can find some stability for his health for a while.

     The moment I turn on the reluctant car New Year’s Day music from Vienna fills the cold sunny air. A soft German voice tells the selection and I hear my mother’s voice with her ever present Viennese inflection. Her youth in Vienna shaped her life and she brought to the pedantic Midwest her European culture, love of music and grace in entertaining.

    As I near the hospital a particularly beautiful piece lingers.  I park and listen. Amid the harsh pragmatic buildings delicate music all the way from Vienna fills the air coloring it with nuance, feeling and ethereal emotions.

     I ride the elevator with a woman in a wheelchair wearing a beautiful scarf. These 20 seconds with a stranger reveal so much. She frustrated with not getting in the door. Still elated from the music I bend low and comfort her for a moment. My mothers empathy in my DNA making the moment easy.

     Josh is sleeping and on oxygen when I arrive. His room mate moans. All of a sudden I realize I forgot to bring the green pants he wanted to wear home. I know he will be irritated and he is when he awakes. For a moment I look down at my brown velvet pants thinking they “might”fit. He is impatient and frustrated. I decide to go home and get the green pants. I am mad at myself and then I am not…as a silver lining glints in the harsh winter sunlight. I realize that driving back and forth will allow me to hear this special Viennese New Year’s Day concert.

   Driving south on ordinary Hwy 55 the music from Vienna lifts me.   Then January 1^st 2011 comes into view. I have hurried over to see my parents. My mother has been visibly and slowly declining for a while. Everything feels tenuous and anxious as we sit on the couch. I can tell it’s time to change her diaper. Life has been fraught for a while and I feel a deep foreboding. Old friends come by and we have a kind of sort of New Years Day party. So unlike other years when the old table from Vienna would be pushed against the wall and my mother would have the silverware laid out in that particular way of hers. She would have made a yellow box cake and proud of her efforts it would be front and center on the table. Her lack of cooking plainly evident. There would be those funny little round boxes of cheese with cows faces on them. Emily presided and we were all welcomed in.  But January 1, 2011 was bleak. Death sat sulking in a corner…waiting. I wept as I drove recalling that last New Years for her with the silvery Viennese music weaving a net of memory in the air.

      I got home, found the green pants and the fuzzy brown ones too. I drove back to the hospital on the same ordinary Hwy 55. But now my mothers youth opened up before me as I heard Strauss’s “Artist Life”. She led a full life of painting, poetry, and Jungian insights. Somehow I could see my mother walking to school in Vienna past magnificent marble statues of composers. It was easy to imagine her at the Opera with her parents and then playing the piano with ease. Her Viennese life opened up as I drove along. She grew up  surrounded by music, art and culture as my father picked cotton on an East Texas farm listening to his sister tell stories of Scarlet O’Hara from “Gone with the Wind.”

    I drove along  in my old 1995 purple Saturn car filled with the flotsam and jetsam of my busy life. But my car and that little radio took me on a journey past the sad memory of my mother’s death to wander the streets of Vienna with my mother in her youth.. before life changed. before the Anschluss happened. Just waltzing in the carefree life of her youth in Vienna.

    I lingered with the music when I got to the hospital. Once again the silvery notes held me. I did not see the metal and stone structure before me but looked up to see my mother in her heavenly realm gazing down at me as the waltz played reminding me that beauty, music and harmony endure despite the hardships that life brings.

I brought Josh home. We resumed our complex life together as the temperature hovered about zero. The radiator thumped to life and we were warmed.

The Letter . November 2, 1946

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 The Letter…November 2, 1946 from my Dad to his his mother in Texas.

   This morning as usual I went out to get the paper..reluctant to read todays bad news about incendiary speech and devices…. I brought the paper back to read in bed and noticed a letter on the floor…dated 1946 it was a letter written by my father James White to his mother back in Waco,Texas…describing what he saw in Olympia, Washington as he was in military training…(later stationed in Japan)

“at sunset I was alone on top of their Capitol building and never saw a more beautiful outlay of forms in my life..Mt Rainier could be seen to the east just a pinnacle of sow and mist..the moon with its half orb of soft tints and glows to the South and the Sun settling down into its bed of rosy hues in the west..their legislative building was of streaked granite and white limestone-with a touch of white marble as cornices..Such beauty-by man and the Architect of the Universe is not understandable to me.It is an unfinished desire which seems to have no answer: a mere long for which I must ever conjure up faulty reasons as final answers”…..later on in the letter he speaks of trips planned to Seattle and Vancouver…”I get so saturated with the present that I forget too much of the past Good Life I shared with family, friends and those whose aspirations I shared. This world was not made just to to be probed into and ogled at: Friendship and Home Life are the true aim. I will not cheat myself by passing lightly over these things: they are everthing!”Love JC

Ps This leaf is an elm whose descendents George Washington stood under and took command of US Army July 3, 1775) (actual leaf long crumbled and gone now)

So thank you Dad for reaching out to me over 72 years. Once again I know where I got my search for beauty and connection to others…I got it from you. Thanks for  reminding me to always affirm beauty in this world and to build rich relationships with others. Thanks Dad