Living With Art

Last night, I stood in the presence of art. Art. Capitol A Art. My nose was inches from a Picasso ceramic. I put my hand on the frame of a Matisse. The room hummed and thrummed with energy, with life, with beauty and statement and meaning and history and emotion. This is why people create, isn't it? So that all that life inside them gets transferred to some other vessel, and when they die, some part of them is left behind. And when a group of art is gathered in a room, the room sings as if the artists were there, having a party.

Madame Pampadour, Henri Matisse.



We were just a group of people at a holiday party. There was wine and beer and food and laughter. But the party was in the former gentleman's homestead of Mr. And Mrs. Harry Lynde Bradley, and still houses the collection of work Mrs. Lynde Bradley amassed that has not been donated or loaned to museums.

Vase, Pablo Picasso



It is an amazing, incredible, uplifting, giddy feeling: to be in the presence of art, of Art, without glass or sensors or security personnel watching silently and with hawks' eyes. It is a rare thing, to be able to reach out and touch and feel the buzzing from the canvas, the cool porcelain regal and domineering and utterly self-contained. I could have spent hours, days, months in that room. I could have gently placed my fingers on each and every piece and slid it carefully from its place in the rack made of two-by-fours. I could look at each of those paintings, each of the Toulouse-Latrec lithographs, forever.

Every moment is eternity in the presence of art. In the presence of Art.

But, as I was discussing with a fellow adventurer prior to being overawed by Mrs. Bradley's collection, living with art is a very different experience than visiting it in a museum or a gallery. There is a subtle pressure, when you go out of your way for something, to experience it fully or to appreciate it all, and immediately. It's the Mona Lisa syndrome: visiting the Louvre inevitably means a trip to see the Mona Lisa, even though the painting is small, and the crush of people around it so thick and intense that you don't get to look at it for more than a moment before the tide of humanity carries you away. And this generally leaves one with a sense of ennui about the whole experience: "All this, and just for that? Sigh."



Treasures at the Lynden Sculpture Garden.



But living with art is different. Matisse in your living room can be sat and stared at for hours, just you and it and the quiet of your home. It can be absorbed, in slow sips rather than great gulps. It can be taken in fully.

And, Matisse in your living room can be ignored. It can be pushed to the back of consciousness while you read, or entertain, or play the piano, or eat a midnight snack, or chat, or write, or whatever it is you like to do in your living room. And then, at some point, you look up from what you were doing, and Matisse is still there, and you are struck anew, and you want to devour all that beauty again.

I want to live with art.

Playground Revenge

A few weeks ago, I took  my daughter to the park on a sunny Sunday afternoon. Honestly, it was a truly gorgeous day and the Packers weren't playing until later and my mom needed some quiet house time, so I tossed her in the stroller (ok, ok, she climbed in herself) and off we went.

A few disclaimers, before I go further. I was probably dressed like a celebrity trying to hide from photographers, complete with inappropriate dress, oversized sweater, scarf and hat. G was probably also inappropriately dressed, and by that I mean barefoot and not wearing her own sweater. And I am known to be pretty sensitive to condescending and/or patronizing behavior. I have been since I was a wee bairn. And I may have been moderately hungover. Hangovers make me cranky.

But it was a beautiful day! Check it:

So there we were, happily at Lake Park playground. G is running about like a mad thing, sliding on slides and digging in sand and climbing on dangerously unstable chain ladders and I am happily parked on a bench in the sunshine, checking twitter and occcasionally snapping a picture of her and often letting my head fall back to rest oh-so-gently on the back of the bench while I try to banish the throbbing knot of having drank too much last night from my temples.

I turn my head to the right. And there I see them, a group of parents from G's school. including the principal and his wife, sitting on a picnic blanket together and talking loudly and raucously as they share organic snack cakes and keep vulture eyes on their various children.

Oh shit, I think. At least they are over by the little kids area and we're over here on the other side  of the playground.

FYI, NEVER think that. Because your toddler will immediately run over to you, dump her shoes in your lap and tear off barefoot toward the people you are happy not to be interacting with. She got to the swing set and called me over at the top of her lungs to push her. But she said "please" so I didn't really have grounds for refusal.

I get there and realize that my fear of being forced to interact with these people is completely unfounded, as they all ignore me. Completely. Even after the kids make the connection that some of them are in the same kindergarten class and some of them are in the class next door.

Whatever, I'm cool with that. All these parents are between fifteen and twenty years older than me, and I guarantee you that none of them were out drinking too much the night before. Also that none of them finished their evening at three ante-meridian with take-out nachos from the delightful Mexican-Californian biker* on their front porch. Interacting with them would probably be painfully awkward for everyone involved, so I'm quite happy to be spared the increase in my head pains.

But then things start to happen. A group of boys (dark skinned, which I must point out since I live in the whitest-white-bread neighborhood ever) with toy guns appear as if by magic and start pretending to shoot each other as they chase all over the playground area. A grizzled, old white man in a USMC baseball cap sits in a camo-print camp chair on the very far edge of the playground and doesn't really watch them.

Ok, now, yeah, a bunch of eight- to fourteen-year-olds running over the toddler play area is a recipe for disaster. Some eighteen-month-old will get run over, or some four-year-old will try to climb and jump like the big kids are and break something. I get it. So the principal of my kids' school asking the boys to go play somewhere else is not really out of line.

BUT THEN. HIS WIFE. This woman has got to be the most loud-mouthed, judgmental, politically correct, condescending thing in the ENTIRE WORLD. Before the boys leave, she starts talking (at the top of her considerable voice) about the inappropriateness of guns as toys. She bullies all the other parents in her little picnic into acquiescing to her superior viewpoint. And she openly (and still loudly) wonders at parents who "dump" their kids at a playground "with weapons."

First of all, the kids can hear you, lady, and you're not exactly showing them any kind of respect. Second, the other parents in your little clique are aware of how disrespectful you're being but you've got them cowed because you treat life like middle-school and you have to be the Queen Fucking Bee. Third, the guardian of these kids, probably a foster parent or grandparent, can hear you, and I guarantee you he doesn't need your moralizing from the high-and-mighty throne of your affluence. Being well off and liberal doesn't give you the right to passive-aggressively tell everyone else in the world how to live.

It took most of my self-control not to whirl around and tell her off. But I do try not to swear in front of my own kid, and I don't think I could have accomplished the verbal tonge-lashing this woman needed without dropping at least two f-bombs. Also, yelling at people is no way to solve anything, and berating this woman loudly for berating the state of these kids loudly would have been ineffective at best. So I held my tongue. It was hard.

But then I got my sweet revenge. You see, by this time, I had tamed the hangover (we'd been at the park for close to two hours) enough to be playing with my sweet little girl. We were sitting in the sand, raking it into a pile and smoothing the sides, digging a circular hole around it, placing rocks and sticks. The whole thing was actually quite soothing, building this mountainous castle, and the feel of the sand slipping over and through our fingers was delightful. I started making a rock garden outside the castle as she kept working on the walls, and suddenly other children were there to help us.

First, the daughter and son of Mrs. Judgmental Loudmouth. Then another boy from the playgroup.

AND THEN: the youngest three boys of the gun-toting group came to see what we were up to. Two were six-year-old twins; one was an eight year old. They came and sat down with us, wondered what we were doing. I told them. They asked if they could help. I asked them to please put the guns down somewhere else and join us.

And they did. We spent a solid forty minutes, the group of us, coming sand into a pile and then another pile and building a bridge between them. We put flags on top and dug a ditch around. We created an entire rock and stick garden around the exterior, and raked the sand in into patterns that included the first letter of each kids' name.

And Mrs. Judgmental Loudmouth sat on her fat ass on a camp chair not five feet away from me, and looked slightly aghast the entire time I played with her children and the gun boys and my kid. And she couldn't say a word. Because we were all quite happy together.

When her husband came to collect the kids into the minivan to drive home, he smiled at me and said hello and thank you and I smiled back and said hello and then I turned to her and with all the courtesy I could muster I sat up straight like a steel ramrod and looked her dead in the eye and gave her my most mega-watt smile ever and doffed my cloche to her. I totally saw her teeth clench. It was a beautiful moment.

(I'm totally a bad person and I'm going to hell but what the fuck ever.)

*I am going to get that awesome old biker hippie to teach me how to make tortillas if it's the last thing I do. Serious.

It just doesn't work. For me.

It's pretty much a cliche. A friend of mine even has a joke about it. A girl who tells you she got pregnant on birth control is a liar. Because she was never on birth control.

Only, sometimes, she's not. I'm not.

I got pregnant on birth control. Twice.

The birth control pill is not foolproof. For all the things written about how the sexual revolution would never have occurred without access to easy contraceptive methods, I think it's high time that it's acknowledged that the birth control pill is not a goddamn silver bullet.

For starters, you have to take the pill every day, at the same time, to get those 95% effective rates. I suspect that's probably the source of the joke: telling a guy you're on the pill but neglecting to mention that you've forgotten to take it for the last three days.

However, the other issue is exactly what the pill does. The pill is not a condom or a spermicide or a diaphragm or an IUD. It does not physically prevent sperm from entering your uterus and possibly meeting a nice egg that it would be nice to settle down with. The pill messes with a woman's hormones, tricking the body into thinking that the woman is already pregnant, thus preventing a fertilized egg from implanting in the uterus and becoming a pregnancy.

Sidenote: this is the reason for Catholic condemnation of birth control. Morally speaking, the Church holds that a fertilized egg is life, since it contains all the genetic material. Stopping the egg from implanting in the uterus, thus causing the "life" that is the fertilized egg to be discarded, is tantamount to murder. While I find this position untenable in terms of actual living, it is a morally principled and logically sound position.

But it's universally acknowledged that most biology is not exact. Particularly when it comes to biochemistry, there is massive and statistically significant variation across the population. So trying to artificially alter that biochemistry is going to be a hit-and-miss proposition. Think anti-depressants: they don't work the same for everyone. Not even close.

Birth control pills are not much different.

I happen to be one of those people who's hormones fall waaaaay outside the norm. I should have known this, considering all the trouble I had getting through puberty and the ways in which my reproductive system still decides to punish me every month.

But I was a teenager and I bought into everything.

And I got pregnant at the ripe old age of 18. While I was on birth control. I had an abortion. And for those of you keeping score at home, my Catholic upbringing still asserts itself over that decision. I still sometimes cry for no particular reason and then realize I'm still processing a lifetime's worth of guilt and shame over having killed someone. But I do not doubt that it was the right decision, regardless. If I'd had that child, I'd still be married to an unmedicated, obsessive-compulsive control freak that liked to tell me I was worthless, didn't like me leaving the house, and had a penchant for trying to kill me. And there'd be a child in the household to worry about.

So, good decision. Even if it kills me now and again.

I put that experience out of my head. I told myself that I must not have been vigilant enough about taking my pill at exactly the same time every day. I set up a system with alarms and carrying extra packs of pills in all my purses and all manner of elaborate schema to ensure that it didn't happen again.

Well, I've got a two-and-a-half-year-old, so obviously that didn't work out as intended.

I love my daughter. I love her fiercely, dearly and unconditionally. But she was an accident, and I do wonder what my life would look like right now if I'd had the emotional wherewithal to go through a second abortion. Looking back, I think that her father wanted that, which may explain his current absence from our lives. No matter. No one should be forced to have a child they don't want, and men aren't an exception to that.

But these days, I put no stock in the pill. I don't even take it. I don't want to risk the temptation to fall back into the idea that I'm immune from pregnancy because I've got a silver bullet called Orthrotricyclen or Seasonique or what-have-you. Because obviously, it doesn't work for me.

Slut.

I was eleven the first time I was called a slut. Sixth grade. I rode a big yellow school bus to school, and it was a long ride, sometimes 45 minutes. There were a group of us that were attending this school that was on the other side of the city, and we were the first ones picked up and the last ones dropped off.

There was a boy on the bus, an eighth grader. Jesse. He was beautiful, and counter-culture, and really, really smart. I was pretty much in love with him from day one. Sometime during that year, he noticed me. And we started to sit together on the bus, bumping legs while we lurched over streets riddled with potholes and talking about everything that an 11-year-old and a 13-year-old can possibly think of to talk about.

One afternoon, we were sitting a bit farther back in the bus than usual; it must have been the first available open seat. About halfway through the ride, everyone left on the bus was sitting in front of us. This girl, I don't even remember her name, came and planted herself in the seat in front of us and started asking questions about our relationship. Were we going steady? Was he my boyfriend?

I had no idea what to say. I had barely even thought about kissing this boy. I just really liked the way he looked, and the way he smelled, and the things we talked about and the confidence with which he made his pronouncements. It was a very quiet confidence. I think he was taken aback, as well, because he also didn't know what to say. He deflected. She would not be deterred.

After five minutes of badgering or so, she reached into our seat, picked up his hand, and put it on my breast.

No, really. We both kind of looked at it there. Neither one of us felt much about it, so after a few seconds, he moved it away, back to his lap.

But this girl whose name I can't remember started screaming and hollering about how I'd let Jesse feel me up in the back of the bus.

By the time I got to school the next day, I was that girl. That girl that let boys feel her up in the back of the bus. I got called a slut a lot that year, and the next.

When I was fourteen, I went on a chaperoned trip to Australia and New Zealand with 40 other kids. The chaperones were four schoolteachers. The senior chaperone was a woman named Mrs. Sphar, and Mrs. Sphar had very definite ideas about how children should behave. I did not conform to her ideas, although by most any objective measure, I was a good kid. I got good grades, I hadn't yet tried any drugs nor had I even gotten drunk. I was a free-spirited little thing, and I had a sharp tongue and a distaste for authority, but I was a good kid.

I dyed my hair on that trip, something I'd done for the first time a year earlier with the blessing and help of my mother. (I have always felt it a travesty of genetics that my hair does not naturally have much red tint.)

Mrs. Sphar did not like the new hair color.

She told me I looked like a street walker, and demanded that I remain in my hotel room, washing my hair, until the dye washed out.

When I was eighteen, I met a man that I married less than a year later who liked to call me a whore when I smiled at grocery clerks and gas stations attendants. He never did forgive me for not being a virgin when we met, and was convinced that I was going to sleep with anything that moved because I was already spoiled, anyway.

Those are just the highlights.

I have difficult time, still, with having my sexual appetites and choices derided. "Whore" will as often as not reduce me to tears; "slut" makes me turn red and shaky with shame and rage.

I know that it's all the rage these days to reclaim these labels that have been placed on women that have taken their sexual lives into their own hands and make them positives. Women are supposed to wear these insults with pride, like precious pearl necklaces bedecking their throats, like pins of platinum pinioned on lapels.

I call bullshit.

The words are meant to be insults. You can tell me not to internalize them as often as you like, and maybe I should hear it, but don't tell me that I'm supposed to like being called a slut. It's meant to cut. It's meant to demean. It's meant to tell me that my worth lies between my legs and every time I let someone in there, I'm demeaning myself and lowering my worth.

So don't use those words. Don't play with them. They are not playful words; they are weapons. And most certainly, don't tell me that I'm supposed to like being bludgeoned with them.