Bread: a memory

I was standing in my kitchen the other day, doing dishes and listening to the radio, when I heard Neal Conan announce that “the maker of Twinkies and Ho-Hos has filed for bankruptcy.”  I still can’t get over the strangeness of that remark.  It’s like finding out that Santa Claus is an alcoholic, or that the Keebler Elf has a veneral disease.  And it made me think about how important those Hostess cakes – and all soft baked goods – were to me as a child, how they became my version of the “secret eatings” MFK Fisher writes about.  Except that I was not allowed to eat any of these things, and so they were even more furtive than secret eating: they became obsessions which haunted me day and night, teasing me with their voluptuous charms but never letting me have my way with them.

Which perhaps explains the rather unsavory habit I had back then of squeezing Hostess cupcakes and Twinkies in the supermarket aisle, as a form of protest and revenge.  I am ashamed to admit that I got an almost psychotic thrill from feeling their round spongey bodies smoosh and flatten under my fingertips (I thought of this when I got my first mammogram at age 40, what torture those innocent cakes must have went through under my grubby little hands).

It might also explain why I felt compelled, at the tender age of six, to break into a neighbor’s house and steal a loaf of Roman Meal bread.

I wish I could say it was a random act of foolishness, but in fact the whole thing was premeditated.  I even had an accomplice – a scrawny girl named Peggy who lived around the corner and went to my school.  Peggy  had ears that stuck out, and a sad gray face that reminded me of a frog – but she followed instructions well and wasn’t a tattle-tale.  God only knows why she was willing to follow me and wait outside while I climbed into an open window to steal a loaf of bread, but she did.

It was a beautiful Saturday afternoon in Northern Virginia.  Dogwood, daffodils, and cherry blossoms, like illustrations from a children’s book.  Peggy lay on the grass next to me, atop a small hill which faced down onto my neighbor’s kitchen windows.   We were both itchy and hot from the grass and it was hard to stay focused on our stake-out, and not keep turning over to lie on our backs and look up at the sky with its edible clouds.   Finally we saw the ragged blond top of the neighbor boy’s head as he followed his parents out of the house and into their brown and blue station wagon.  Mostly what I remember about that boy is that kept me in a steady supply of Saltines.  Saltines were my methadone in those days, when I couldn’t get my hands on the hard stuff, by which I mean of course, the soft stuff, of Wonder Bread and so on.  The boys’ handsome loaves of Roman Meal remained untouched on the counter while the salty, sharp-edged crackers tore up the flesh inside my mouth, as I ate them whole, one after the other, while we sat watching Gilligan’s Island on his parents’ La-Z-Boy.

I thought of that now, pulling myself up onto the ledge and then pushing open the already ajar window, stepping inside and carefully placing my bare feet on either side of the sink.  The kitchen was quiet except for the sound of the refrigerator humming. I was aware that I was breaking into someone’s house and I really shouldn’t be doing this.  But the bread was too tempting to forego.  I thought of my mother’s hard square German pumpernickel, which crumbled like tree bark and left a sour dark taste in your mouth for hours afterwards.   No, I had to have the real thing (by which I mean, the fake thing, the commercial thing, the thing made in a factory, designed by evil men to make me fall to my knees before its empty calories.)

Stealing is the easiest thing in the world, when no one is around to catch you.   All I had to do was pick up the loaf by its little plastic choker, step back up on the sink, and then jump out of the window – almost hitting Peggy, and causing her to screech with surprise.

I fell on the ground and rolled a bit before standing up, then I grabbed Peggy’s hand and we ran up the hill and behind a row of apartments and up another hill, to the farthest tip of our housing development, finally landing under a large maple tree.   We were out of breath, sweating and laughing, pulling open the bread’s package and dividing up the pieces without talking.  I rolled the pieces into little balls and stuffed them in my mouth, feeling their glutinous slime dissolve and slide heavily down my throat.  I ate one, then two, but couldn’t finish the third.  I was already full.

There was still over half a loaf of bread when Peggy stood up to leave – her mother was calling.  It was time for dinner, the afternoon sun had slid down and was now casting shadows around us.  And I realized in that moment what a horrible, tragic mistake I had made.  How foolish I had been to believe that a whole loaf of bread eaten at once would bring me happiness.  I was a thief, and the worst part was I couldn’t even keep my prize!   I couldn’t bring it home with me (my mother would find it, she had ways) and leaving it here it would just rot.   My euphoria turned to misery on the spot, and I jammed the bread under a tree root, angry at it for seducing me.  I didn’t want a loaf of bread under a tree, I wanted that bread to be on my kitchen counter at home, to have whenever I wanted, given to me by a mother who understood my secret eating, and wanted to share it with me.

In Darkness and In Light, Part 2: Casting Shadows

“Everything that we see is a shadow cast by that which we do not see.”
― Martin Luther King, Jr.

A week has gone by since the dramatic events of last Wednesday night, and while things are mostly back to “normal,” my mind is still full of unanswered questions:  Who were those kids?  Was that their first crime?   Where did they get the gun?  Was it a real gun?  Because now I’m not so sure.

Two days after the incident, I got a call from the police inspector assigned to the case, an affable-enough guy named Pomatto, and he told me that “of the 12 kids I’ve found with stolen phones recently, all of them were carrying plastic gun replicas.”

Apparently, these kids paint toy guns or bb guns, and use them to steal phones from unsuspecting citizens (like me).    The inspector said they do this to avoid the hard jail time.  With plastic replicas, they usually only get probation.

While this knowledge doesn’t make the event (at the time) any less scary, it does diminish the overall fear in my head about our neighborhood streets being infested with gun-toting childen. But fake or no – as a friend pointed out, the fact that I took it dead seriously (and still would, on any street in America), “speaks volumes” about the place of guns in our society, and how much we are held hostage to them.

One of the things I most liked about living in France was that I never once thought about the threat of guns.  Speeding cars, yes.  But guns, no.  I was more worried about dying of a broken heart than I was of getting a bullet to my chest, if you want to know the truth.   It just wasn’t part of the culture.  Perhaps that will change, with “globalization.”  I sincerely hope not.

I do feel that events are connected, as people are, and I cannot look at this incident without also questioning the many factors that may have helped create it.  The division between rich and poor in this country, the color line that still exists between black and white, the entrenched poverty that lives alongside us and which we have chosen to ignore or sweep under the rug.   And I have to question my own part in the chain of things, what role I play by owning a phone made in a factory in China by underpaid workers.  Etcetera.

My thoughts coincided this week with the celebration of the birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr., who was assassinated in 1968.  I remember a time when such a day of remembrance didn’t exist.  I remember (vaguely) when Martin Luther King himself was still alive.  I even remember (also vaguely) hearing about riots related to his death, chaos happening just across the Potomac from our home in Arlington, VA.  In my mind I can see fires, smashed windows and stolen television sets, people running in the streets.  I don’t know what part of that is from watching TV back then, or hearing about the riots from adults, or seeing images later, in Life magazine and elsewhere, and then attaching those to my own memories.  But I do remember.

How do children make sense of these things ? How does anyone make sense of these things?  I was small and my brain was still forming.   The world was a mystery I had to solve every day.  I listened to my mother and her friends talk about what was happening, and I listened to other children at school, and later I watched my second grade teacher, Miss Taylor, who was black, show me with her straight posture and stern words that she was a survivor – of something, I didn’t know what, but I respected and feared her.

I believe there are two main ways in which privileged children growing up in an unjust society react.  One is to be horrified by the injustice, and spend the rest of your trying to understand it and do something about it.   The other way is to accept a narrative which claims that “those people” who are on the bottom rung are there because it’s their own fault.   That the privilege you have is earned, and you are just somehow more special.  I think it is very easy to accept this notion, and most people, on some level, probably do.   It’s hard to constantly be thinking of how unfair the world is.  It’s hard to keep those unpleasant thoughts in your head while you are just trying to live your life.  Especially as a child, when you are learning to make sense of the world, and things are hard enough.

For better or worse, I grew up with a mother who belonged to the first category.  Although she couldn’t completely break the pattern of abuse in her personal life, she was a fighter against injustice in the outside world from the day she was born.  I remember the quote she had tacked to our living room wall, amidst the Picasso and Matisse prints (I think it was by a Spanish philosopher): “And may God deny me peace but grant me victory!”   Not a very Zen sentiment, to be sure, but one which allowed her to weather her own very stormy heritage, which might have broken weaker souls.

So as a child I was not given a choice to turn away from other people’s suffering.  I was not allowed to categorize people and shunt them off to the side.  I’ll never forget walking through Georgetown on a hot summer day with my mother and her friend, a young man who had a condition which made his body movements jerky and twisted, and which affected his speech.  I couldn’t have been more than seven years old.  My mother bought a can of soda for all of us to share; I can still see the green and pink label, Tahitian Treat (you have to live in Washington, D.C. to understand the importance of a freezing cold soda on a summer day, how much meaning those sodas had to my little thirsty self).  But I didn’t want to take a sip from the can after her friend did, and later my mother questioned me about it.  “It’s because he has that problem with his body, isn’t it?”  She had seen my fear, and named it.  I was humbled and ashamed, but I learned.

I also learned a lot from my mother about turning the other cheek, much more than I ever did in our prim little Sunday School.   When black kids stole my sister’s lunch money, my mother didn’t condone what they did, but she tried to put it into a larger context.  She tried to explain to us, two little blond white girls, what was really going on in the nation we pledged allegiance to every morning.  That even though we lived in a small apartment and seemed much poorer than our other white friends at school, we still had more than those kids had.   It took me a long time to fully understand this, and to see it in the same way my mother did, with empathy but not pity, and without giving up my own sense of place in the world.   She always taught us to protect ourselves, but it was never in a hateful way, never at the expense of someone else.

When I start to feel bitter about how things are now in America,  all the many ways in which things haven’t changed since Martin Luther King was shot, I try to remember these simple lessons of my childhood, the ways my mother always taught me to look toward the light, and away from fear.  Even now, at 77 years old, she writes to me, after hearing about the incident last week when I was held up at gunpoint, and offers empathy but not hatred.  She tells me about her own experiences, being young and pregnant in New York City, 1961, witnessing a hold-up in a grocery store (by a young white kid), how barking dogs saved the day.  And many years later, her giving a ride to a stranger in Roxbury, Boston, how he stole her purse on his way out, and how, when she reported it to an Irish cop, he said only, “Why did you pick up a black guy?”

And I remember once, a few years ago, driving with my mother in a dark part of Boston on the way home from her night class in the city, and how we ended up getting lost and the car breaking down near a block of housing projects.  How scared I was, how I looked desperately around for some sort of help (this was before cell phones), and how my mother calmly got out of the car to check the oil, saying, “There’s nothing to be afraid of here.  These aren’t bad people, you know, they’re just poor.”

I am still trying to make sense of all these things, over forty years after Martin Luther King was shot.  Wondering which parts of what I am seeing are shadows, and which parts are pieces of the truth.  Ironically, just before what happened last week, I had been reading (somewhere) about how violent crime rates have dropped in America in the last twenty or so years.   Yet I still can’t stop thinking about what a stage of siege we seem to live in so much of the time.  I am struck by how many well-intentioned people have cautioned me “not to take that street anymore, ” or “take cabs” or “bring your dog with you,” or “get a bike” (as if that was really a safer option in SF!  I’ll take my chances with the gun-toting children, thank you very much).   Or even to move out of the city altogether.

While it is tempting to want to pack up and leave after an event like that, how does that really solve anything in the long run?  I don’t want to be naive or unsafe, but I also do not want to live in fear.  I would honestly rather be dead than become someone whose life is dictated by fear.

The good thing about living in a fast-paced, attention-deficit world is that there is always plenty to distract us from our own reality, more than enough information and input to eclipse whatever might be troubling us.  In fact, for me to sit and think and write about last week is almost like conjuring up events that happened in another century.

And indeed, it does feel like another season.  Because incredibly, the rain has finally come to San Francisco.  We had so many gorgeous sunny days in the last month, it seemed there could never be another type of weather.  It was like a relentless chorus which kept singing, Here comes the sun, here comes the sun.   But now – here comes the rain.  I am watching it from my window, watching as it wraps the city in a mute gray cast.  And I am relieved to see the shadows disappear along with it.  Making the world, for now, a little smaller, and a little less complicated.

In Darkness and In Light, Part 1: “The Hour of Lead”

Once again, the post I thought I would write (about teaching art) has been usurped by the post I need to write: about what happened last night, on my walk home from the studio.

They say hindsight is 20/20.  But even at the time, I realized I was taking a risk, by choosing the dark route along Hampshire Street instead of the noisy, car and light-filled route on Potrero.   I rationalized the choice by telling myself that it was still early evening, not even 6 pm, and people would be coming home from work (which is usually true).  However, for some reason last night the street was almost completely deserted.  And very, very dark.

During the day, Hampshire Street doesn’t feel the least bit sinister; on the contrary, it feels almost bucolic compared to the bustling Mission streets around it.   It’s actually my favorite stretch of the 20-minute, mile-plus walk from home to the studio, a perfect prelude to making art.  I am inspired by the street’s quiet little patches of beauty; its hummingbirds and shaded succulent gardens, its rows of modest but pretty houses lined up neatly like obedient schoolchildren.  I say Hello to the old man who sits on his stoop, and dodge the kids playing ball on the sidewalk on the weekends.  It feels like a real neighborhood.

Darkness changes everything.  Especially in San Francisco, where the stores are often few and far between, and there are huge swaths of neighborhoods which are not only completely residential, but feel more remote (and less lit) than many suburbs.  (On a side note:  What is up with the lack of proper street lighting in San Francisco?  Is there not enough funding, or what?   Where we live on Potrero Hill – which has a fair amount of crime – there are areas with no street lights at all, giving those so-called crimes of opportunity a whole lot of room for, well, opportunity.)

Anyway, so there I was.  Walking alone, not late at night, but still in darkness.  There was a moon, almost full, but it hadn’t risen yet.   And yes, I was talking on my iPhone.  I was telling my friend Shannon about a youth arts program that I am helping organize with some other friends.   I was excited about that, and about something else I’m thinking of doing: namely, volunteering to teach art to prisoners at San Quentin.  I had even gone to sleep the night before thinking about it, about whether I would be able to handle seeing men in captivity like that, but how I feel like it is just something I have to do.  Some kind of karmic debt I feel I owe, which I can’t even explain to myself.

The irony of these thoughts, appearing so soon before what happened next, does not escape me.

There were two of them.  Walking toward me, in that careless, slouching style of pretty much every young male adolescent in America right now.   But there was something a little too purposeful about their stride,  and I felt my body tense.   Thoughts and feelings flew by at light speed, like shadows in the air.  Should I cross the street?  Turn around?  Stop in my tracks and assess the situation a little better?

For the record, I do not suspect every black teenager of being a criminal.  I have spent a big chunk of my life working with all kinds of young people, and I can tell when kids are just being kids (as in, ridiculous baggy pants riding at mid-thigh which I desperately want to pull up), or when they are being something else.  I haven’t lived to be almost half a century old, with forty of those years spent walking alone around cities, without having developed some pretty strong radar about people, especially males.

HOWEVER.  I was on the phone, and probably not as alert as I could have been, should have been.  My street smart radar’s signal was being crossed with other signals: 1), the conversation I was having with someone who wasn’t in my physical reality, and 2), the part of me that is still a guilty white liberal who didn’t want to be seen crossing the street to avoid black youth, even if that is exactly what my gut told me to do!

(Silly, silly bleeding heart liberal.  Get your head out of the sand – or off the phone!)

You can probably conjure up the scenario that swiftly unfolded after that.  The two boys separated, effectively flanking my path on the sidewalk, and the one on my right stepped toward me and pulled a handgun out of his waistband.  There were no words, and the gun wasn’t toted menacingly.  It simply sat there, in the boy’s hand, resting on the laurels of its own god-like strength.  Pointed toward my heart.

Up until that moment I hadn’t really believed that it would happen.  But the minute the gun appeared, it was like a foregone conclusion.  Oh right, of course. This is exactly what is supposed to happen.  I’ve seen this in the movies.  Middle-aged white woman mugged by two young black kids on a dark, deserted street.   Why am I so surprised?

But I was surprised.  Surprised, and overwhelmed.   There is a part of me which has remained stubbornly Pollyanna-ish all these years, refusing to be cynical about human nature, believing in people’s natural goodness, despite all the evidence to the contrary.   In my sunny happy pretend world of beauty and love, young boys don’t carry guns (even though I know they do).  Also – and I sort of hate to admit this – even though I am aware of local violent crime and even read statistics about it, the fact that I have never been mugged, in any city, has made me complacent, made me believe that it’s something that happens to someone else, not me.

Once it was happening to me, of course, my body went into survival mode.  I looked away from the gun (too terrifying) and away from the boy’s face (to not make eye contact – something I didn’t consciously think of, but later realized was a survival mechanism).   All I could say was “Oh my god oh my god” as I dropped the phone to the ground.   And then, “Take it, take the phone!” (In a horrible side note, my poor friend Shannon on the other end of the phone just heard “phone” and the sound of running footsteps afterwards – she thought I was being pursued by attackers.)

I just wanted the experience to be over.   I was ready to give them everything: the computer on my back, the purse at my side, the heavy cloth bag holding my bible-sized agenda along with a half-eaten piece of homemade radicchio quiche and various odds and ends from the studio.  But the boys had already taken off running.  All they wanted was the phone.  My shitty, first generation iPhone which might get 20 bucks on Craigslist.  Whereas the computer I was carrying was worth almost 100 times that.  But there is where the darkness gave me an advantage – they couldn’t see what was on my back when they were facing me.  And they obviously didn’t want to stick around and possibly get caught.

To be honest, I don’t want to second-guess any of my actions last night.   Other than perhaps the choice of walking down a dark street alone, I don’t feel like there was anything I could have done differently (and even then – these crimes can – and do – happen in broad daylight).  Several people now have told me that I need to be “vigilant” while walking, as if somehow that might have changed things.   But what could I have done, on a deserted street, other than turn and run?  Would they have chased me?   And how easy would it have been to catch me, someone three times their age, carrying so many heavy bags?  I’m not sure that crossing the street would have made me safer – what if by doing that, I would have called their attention to the backpack?  And maybe being on the phone wasn’t such a terrible thing to do after all – maybe the phone was the decoy which saved my real valuables from being stolen.  Who knows?

There is an Emily Dickinson poem which I learned in high school, and which has come back to comfort me throughout my life, during times of despair or loss:

After great pain a formal feeling comes–
The nerves sit ceremonious like tombs;
The stiff Heart questions–was it He that bore?
And yesterday–or centuries before?

The feet, mechanical, go round
A wooden way
Of ground, or air, or ought,
Regardless grown,
A quartz contentment, like a stone.

This is the hour of lead
Remembered if outlived,
As freezing persons recollect the snow–

First chill, then stupor, then the letting go.

My heart is not filled with fear, nor is it filled with hatred, as I suppose it could have been by this experience.   No, what I am feeling is more akin to what Dickinson describes: it is a formal feeling. something very still.   But I do not feel only numb; it is not a “quartz contentment”, but rather a huge sense of relief combined with an equally huge sense of sadness.  That a child holding a gun can carry so much weight in the world. That all the beauty and the art I have seen, that I have made, all that I would share with him – freely, if he asked! – is worth nothing in the face of that gun.  And that he and so many others like him might never know anything else but the cold power of that piece of metal.  Might never know the power of the written word, for example.  Or the amazing things a brain and body can do without ever needing a gun to do any of them.

I realize that what happened to me last night could have been far, far worse, and I am nowhere near to feeling the pain of what some people have lived through as a result of violence inflicted on them from other human beings.   But I will not pretend that the experience did not shake me to my core.  I will not pretend that I didn’t wake up this morning under five heavy blankets, feeling like I was freezing to death.  The sun is out, it’s a beautiful day in San Francisco, but I’m still cold.

(to be continued)

Tyranny Begins at Home

I was all set to write a warm and cheery post about clove oranges and Christmas memories, and then something happened this week which made me unable to think about anything else but … well, about what happened.  So here goes:

I was sitting outside a cafe in Berkeley with friends, chatting and enjoying yet another beautiful sunny December day, when suddenly all conversation was drowned out by the noise erupting next to us on the sidewalk.

It was a woman, screaming over and over at the top of her lungs: “ARE YOU GOING TO STOP?  ARE YOU GOING TO STOP? ARE YOU GOING TO STOP?”  She was crouched down and clutching the arm of a  little boy who couldn’t have been more than 2, who was also (not surprisingly) screaming hysterically and crying.  The scene was so dramatic, so emotional, that it almost seemed unreal.   But it was happening so close to us – literally within reaching distance – that it was impossible to ignore.

The three of us froze at our table, like prey animals, and listened while the screaming continued.

“ARE YOU GOING TO STOP?” soon morphed into “YOU HAVE TO STOP! YOU HAVE TO STOP!” repeated again and again until it seemed that the phrase filled the air and crowded out the oxygen for miles around.   People on the street had paused, in the same frozen state that we were, watching with worried eyes, not knowing what to do.

And this went on for over FIVE MINUTES.   The woman kept screaming, the little boy cried and wailed, and we all just….sat there.  Like lumps of clay waiting for someone else to shape us.   A Berkeley hippie woman rode by on a bicycle and shouted out, “Hug your kid, lady!” but that was the extent of anyone’s intervention.

Finally, after what felt like a lifetime, the woman hoisted the toddler into her arms and walked off,  disappearing around the corner, out of our earshot and out of our lives.   At our little table, we resumed our chatting, but in a darker mood, sharing notes on what we had just witnessed.

Why hadn’t anyone – why hadn’t we – done anything to intervene?

Various reasons floated around:  it was too unexpected, we weren’t prepared, it was awkward, we didn’t want to add to the hysteria, we didn’t want to become targets of her anger ourselves, etc etc etc.      There were a dozen ways to rationalize our passive behavior.   But later, when I went home, I felt angry and ashamed.

The fact is, not one of us had the courage to stand up to the violence unfolding in front of our eyes.   And what that woman was doing was a form of violence, with no gray area -  and we had all stood by and let her do it.   If she had been yelling at a dog like that, I bet someone would have intervened.    But there is still this unspoken agreement that parents are allowed to do what they want to “their” kids.   We have emancipated slaves, but not children.

What’s worse, my friends and I call ourselves “liberals.”   We support the fight against injustice around the world, we feel strongly when it comes to human rights, to people standing up for those rights.  We cheer on the Occupy movement, and complain about the big, bad corporations who are destroying the world.

And yet, here we were, with a chance to speak up against an injustice happening in front of our eyes, and we did nothing.

I know, I know.    This was not a scene in Libya, or Syria, or Egypt, or even Wall Street or Davis campus.  There was no pepper spray, no police batons, no guns or pressure hoses.    It was just a burnt-out parent having a meltdown, and taking it out on her child.   No blood was shed, no bones were broken.

But where do we think the pattern starts?   Do we really believe that it is always “out there” in some vague evil menace?  Or is it possible that tyranny begins at home?   That these little scenes between parents and children – the way that people in power choose to treat those weaker than them – might have meaning for the larger world as well?  How much do you want to bet that that pepper-spraying cop at Davis was mistreated as a child?   Or that most abusive, bullying cops were also abused and bullied as children?   What message did we send that kid, by our passive acceptance of what was going down?

So this is what I have been thinking about, instead of the clove orange Christmas memory I had on my mind earlier.   I’m thinking about what our moral obligation is to the people around us, to the things we see unfold in front of our eyes, not just on Facebook or CNN.  I’m thinking about that kid, his sweaty hair and tear-streaked face, terrified, terrorized by a person four times his size.   I’m thinking about that mother, in her expensive clothes and boots, and how the child’s family at least won’t be wanting for material comforts this Christmas.   But all the toys in the world won’t erase that memory from his little body, or from his little, still-forming brain.

I wish, I really wish, one of us had stood up and said to the mother, to the person abusing power in this mini-scenario:  “No.  YOU have to stop.”

Wrap it Up! An End-of-Year Meditation on Decision-Making and the Artistic Process

It’s that time of year again. When suddenly there are a lot of endings and beginnings happening at once, and we feel overwhelmed. Like, shouldn’t there be twice as much time to absorb all this festive energy, all this manic celebration? As my writer friend Jill Stoddard said recently, The holidays are nice, but do they really have to come EVERY YEAR??

I agree that, much as I enjoy this season, it does start to grate on the nerves, with all of its many desires and demands. Time itself feels squeezed, pressed up like a face against the glass, reminding of us of all there is to do. I think of my own pending projects, all those scribbled notes in my (still non-digital) calendar, the psychological weight of ink and promises. If I can just get these certain things done before the next year starts…

Which leads me to the topic of decision-making. It occurred to me recently, while teaching a painting class, that perhaps 90 percent of art-making is really decision-making. Or maybe even 100 percent. The colors we choose, the brushes, the subject we decide to paint, the surface we choose to paint on, all the preparations that are made before we even start – those are all decisions, even if they are by process of elimination or handed down to us by someone else (which is still a decision, the decision to follow – or not follow – instructions. The latter being something my adult students can tell you all about!).

  And then, once we’ve got our ducks in a row, how do we start? With line, color, shape, form? Do we tackle the figure first, or the negative space around it? Which direction do we move the brush? How do we decide to deal with certain areas of the canvas? And on and on and on. Even the moments which feel more like intuition, like leaps of faith or blind swipes of genius, are still, on some unconscious level, decisions.

And after all of this work (and yes, to those who wish to romanticize the artistic process, it actually is work; talent plays a minor role, IMHO) – the biggest and hardest decision of all looms before us: At what point do we declare that we are, indeed, finished with this particular piece of art?

I don’t know who said it first, but there is an old adage which floats around in art classes and among artists, that goes like this: “It takes two people to make a painting: one to paint it, and the other to say when it is finished.” I can’t tell you how many times I have gotten clarity about a piece by the serendipitous arrival of another person (not even necessarily another artist) who sauntered into my studio while I was working, and told me Yay or Nay. There is something beautifully unbiased and fresh about another person’s eye on your work (unless of course that person happens to be a jealous shadow artist – but I’ve mostly learned how to keep keep those people at a distance from me and my art-making, thank goodness).

Another quote I hear a lot is from Da Vinci (and he ought to know!): “Art is never finished, only abandoned.” Or, a sunnier variation on the theme, by journalist Paul Gardner: “A painting is never finished – it simply stops in interesting places.”  It’s true that we don’t always get a chance to decide when a painting is finished. Sometimes it’s a deadline which forces us to stop, or we are interrupted by life circumstances, or maybe it’s just as simple as the sun going down and the studio being too cold to work in, and we want to go home and watch old black and white movies huddled under blankets on the couch (not that I’m speaking from experience or anything…).  And then we return to the studio the following day and see our painting in a new light and discover that, even though we hadn’t planned to stop, in fact it is done. There is nothing more to say.

Those are my favorite times – when the painting itself decides to be finished, and I am just a witness. What is harder – much harder! – is when I can’t decide what a painting needs in order for it to be “done”, and so I obsess (OK, agonize) over it, and the end – instead of getting nearer – just slips farther and farther away into some tantalizing neverland, and then I REALLY need someone to walk into my studio and tell me to quit, because if they don’t, I might just hunker down and work on one tiny area (like, say, an eyelid) for 7 hours, without visibly changing a thing. Luckily for me (and my loved ones), those times are rare, but they do happen (and usually require large amounts of mindless TV-watching afterwards to overcome).

Of course, these “obsession sessions” (as I like to call them) are not always without results. Sometimes I need a bout of desperate, pathological hair-pulling to push me deeper into the process of a painting. I just have to make sure I don’t stay there. Because I am convinced that I make my best art when I am relaxed and things feel effortless and flowing (a state which ironically can take a lot of effort to achieve!). It is hard to be both relaxed and diligent about the art process, but I believe there is no other way to keep at it and stay sane.

But back to the decision making: Why is it so difficult, in general, to declare to ourselves that we are done with a certain piece or project? Is it, like another writer friend once said, that we are afraid to finish because it means we are saying, “This is the best I can do” – yet deep down inside, we always think we can do better? Or is it that we fall in love with a particular image we are creating, and we don’t want to finish it because it means letting go and moving on?

Again, it’s those darn beginnings and endings which haunt me. I am always, always happy when I am at the beginning of a painting, no matter what I am painting or how messy or awkward it looks. There is a shining sense of promise and possibility, like the beginning of a love affair, or anything which pulls us out of the known, the familiar. Once we are in it – truly inside the process – the honeymoon is over and all the fatal flaws arise, our own and the artwork’s. And we have to deal with them. How much easier it would be to run away, and go start a new exciting canvas – and leave this old fuddy-duddy behind! And yet, if I’ve learned anything from my decade’s worth of painting (and my over two decades in relationships!), it is that the really interesting lessons, the ones worth learning, are when you stick around….and make it work. And when it’s time to walk away, you can walk away free, with no regrets. You play it out to its full extent. Like listening to a song all the way through, or doing anything fully, with all of your attention and heart, and not just a sliver of it.

And so we approach the ending of one year and the beginning of a new one. As arbitrary as numbers on a calendar may be, they do affect us and how we think. And why not use this time, around the winter solstice, to complete some things, make way for the new?

I started writing this because of a conversation I had in class with some of my adult painting students, and while I am still thinking of them, it is also to myself  that I need to say these words:

 Think of this season as not only a time to wrap up gifts for other people, but also a time to wrap up some of your own projects, some of your own pending promises to yourself. That canvas which has been sitting there, gathering dust on the classroom windowsill? Maybe it’s time to take it down and decide what to do with it, even if it means abandoning whatever dream you originally had for it. There is plenty of time to do all the many wonderful things you want to do – but please, for now, just finish this one. (If, for nothing else, because I am a neurotic neatfreak, and among the many many end-of-year wishes I have for myself, I want my studio to be clean and clutter-free!)

And now it comes time for me to wrap up this essay, and decide that it, too, is finished. So I will just stop. Here.