Stopping to smell a cliché

Berthe Morisot, Child in a rose garden
Gabie got home from school today and I made him put his shoes right back on so we could go for a walk. Nora was grouchy because she woke up early this morning. I was grouchy because Nora woke up early this morning. We both needed to get out of the house. Gabie did not want to go for the walk. He said he had already been out of the house and was ready to spend some time in it for a change. He also said, and I quote: “I have been dealing with so many things today. I don’t have time for a walk.” He parked his bum on the steps and refused to go and I finally had to threaten him with a timeout if he didn’t cooperate. I promised we’d take a short walk around the block.

He pouted for the first few houses and then remembered that there was a rosebush on the corner. He ran ahead because he loves the smell of roses. The bush was empty. I thought he might get upset and lose all desire to live (or continue walking), so I quickly suggested that there were probably other rosebushes around the next corner. It became a quest from then on. He raced from one house to the next, scanning for roses and sniffing any within his reach—all the while maintaining a running commentary on their particular fragrances (some were “out of nectar” already and thus scored low on the olfactory report).

He insisted we take the long, windy route through several neighborhoods in search of more roses. He announced that today was Rose Day, that we lived in Rose Country, and that one particular street (where there appeared to be a green thumb living in every house) was Rose Heaven. He even told me a great joke: “Why did the Gabie cross the road? To get to the rosebush on the other side.” (He told several others but this was the only one I understood. Five year-old humor is way over my head.)

Nora, by the way, sniffed a few flowers as well. Or I should say she projected baby snot on them since she has not yet mastered the distinction between inhaling and exhaling.

So Gabie reminded me today how important it is to stop and smell the roses, which is just about the oldest cliché in the book. But just because something is a cliché doesn’t mean it can’t still be true.

proxy blogger

Since I'm not going to get around to posting something of my own today, I'll give you a link to a very inspiring post by my 12-year old son Ethan the Environmentalist. He doesn't post often on his blog but he loves to get comments when he does. I promised I'd send a few readers his way if he promised to put his cereal bowl away tomorrow. So please take a look if you feel so inclined.

What I’ve learned from Cezanne and other people smarter than me

Cezanne, Vessels Basket and Fruit, 1888-90

If you look at the left front edge of Cezanne’s table in this painting and then look at the right edge, you notice that there’s something strange happening. Either Cezanne was drunk or he deliberately painted the table from two different angles. He was not drunk. Cezanne knew that all objects exist in time and space and just because our human vision only experiences one angle at once doesn’t mean our human minds aren’t simultaneously aware of all the other options. Cezanne—the most cerebral and philosophical of painters—is asking us to set aside our ingrained assumption that a painting should frame a single point of view. He wants us to admit that art and life are complex and multidimensional things.

I bring this up because I have been lamenting a post I wrote last week about an act of conspicuous Jell-O production. I am not happy with how mean-spirited I came across in that post and I wanted to delete it several times. But I also wanted to apologize first, which I’m doing here. If ever it was possible to hold two completely contrary viewpoints in one’s head at the same time, such was the case with the Jell-O. I was both offended by the salad (offense combined with equal parts jealousy, self-loathing, and general grumpiness) and impressed with the care that went into it. After all, my neighbor chose to share her talents and time. And who did she share them with? ME! (oh, and a bunch of other women, but we're talking about me here). It was an act of thoughtfulness and generosity on her part and even if there was the tiniest hope that she would get a bit of praise and a few compliments (one being from me) out of it then who am I to begrudge her that?

So I could have gone either way in my verbal painting of the evening and I chose to go with the single-minded, negative slant. Frankly, I went for the humor. I laughed as I typed the blog post (I’m still amused that I finally got a chance to tell the “Diane’s house is too clean to clean” story) and in my new spirit of posting more and editing less, I posted it without thinking it through.

I should have thought it through.

Because I know better. I have written two other snarky posts that I regretted later and deleted (one about my husband going deer hunting and another about poorly-written student papers). Whenever I try to put my tongue in my cheek I somehow manage to stick it out very rudely.

What really got me regretting the post was the thought that many of my family members and good friends share their “virtuosity” in generous ways as well. Once when she came to visit, my friend Tara (chef, artist, all-around classy person) showed us how to make dipped and ornamented Oreos. We had a blast making them and when we gave a few to our friend Gayle, she loved that we were giving her these little masterpieces.

My sister-in-law Echo makes birthday cards so intricate and personalized that we all can’t wait to see what ours will look like. Last Thanksgiving, my sister Teri spent about 2 hours helping me skewer vegetables and assemble them like a flower arrangement so that I would have something fun to contribute to my in-laws’ dinner. My mother has decorated wedding cakes Martha Stewart would drool over (does Martha drool? Does it come out in French twists? Am I getting rude again?).

I think we all have things we do well and love to share with others. I once had time to quilt (alas, in another life) and I made this I-Spy quilt for my friend Kathy’s baby. It took me so many hours to make that the baby was nearly 18 months old before I finally finished it. Did I do this to impress her and make everyone who saw it envious? No. I made it because I love my friend and I like to make quilts and I wanted to try something really challenging for a change.



Anyway, it has all been yet another learning experience. Here’s what I’ve come up with thus far:

1. Don’t write when I’m grumpy
2. Don’t write mean stuff.
3. Not even when it’s supposed to be funny.
4. Because it might be funny but it’s still mean.
5. When I’m offended, look at all the angles.
6. Look again.
7. Then look at myself in the mirror.
8. Wipe off the mirror because it’s covered in toothpaste.
9. Jello is spelled Jell-O
10. Go ask my neighbor for her Jell-O recipe because I should really make it someday for my family.
11. They’ll LOVE it.

get a grip, the sequel

I just had to add a funny post script to this post about pencil grips. I had assumed all this time that Gabie's kindergarten teacher must have joined the losing battle to correct his improper hold of the pencil. We had a parent teacher conference tonight and guess what? It turns out that she doesn't care. She's not worried at all. In fact, she normally holds her pencil in a totally bizarre way (although she makes it a point to hold it "the school way" when she's in the classroom to set a good example). She doesn't think her odd grip has stunted her ability to write in any way. I love her and plan to adopt her soon.

So I'm following my mommy intuition here and I'm just going to let Gabie do his own thing. Hopefully his 1st through 6th grade teachers will also be as cool about it. I figure by the time he hits High School, he'll be typing everything or using sophisticated voice-recognition software anyway, so why stress? Besides, if his penmanship is a mess, he'll be one step ahead of all those other medical students who will have to work hard to master their sloppy doctor scrawls.

Anyway, I just thought you'd like to know.

The art of Jello consumption

My neighbor brought a fifteen-layer Jello salad to the Women’s Conference dinner at the church on Saturday. Now why did she have to go and do that? I love this neighbor. She is a kind, generous person. When I broke my foot last year, she brought my family a home cooked seven-course meal in disposable containers, bless her incredibly thoughtful little heart. But seriously, fifteen layers?

I sliced a serving and set it respectfully on my plate where it shimmied in all its rainbowed glory—seven different flavors of Jello, alternating translucent and cloudy stripes, with a creamy white topping. It tasted delicious, of course, but every bite was—for me at least—a spoonful of guilt because I knew exactly how much work went into making that salad. It represented a giant undertaking of foresight and effort: a shopping trip involving an actual planned-in-advance list, fifteen washings of the mixing bowl, organization and memory skills that I could never hope to possess (just think about the math: a new layer every hour on the hour for an entire day!), and above all a clean fridge with room enough for not one but two large dishes because I can guarantee she made a double batch and left one salad home with her husband and six (6) children along with a chicken casserole and homemade rolls.

I, on the other hand, decided to attend the function only at the last minute, mostly because I needed an escape from my chaotic house, and so I deserted my family without a single thought for what they might scrounge up to eat (Ken ended up ordering pizza). I would also have arrived completely empty handed at the church except for the lucky encounter I had in the foyer with a man carrying a plate of brownies. His told me his wife had made them but she didn’t feel well, so would I be so kind as to carry them in with me because he felt uncomfortable intruding on all those women. “I’d be happy to,” I replied magnanimously. Yeah (I thought as I waltzed into the room and asked sweetly, “so where would you like these?”) I’d be happy to usurp your wife’s brownies to hide my own negligence. I felt like the scroungy dude in a t-shirt who arrives at a fancy restaurant and is rescued from the humiliation of failing the dress code by a polite manager waiting at the door with a loaner jacket.

But I want to talk about that salad. Because I really need to know if I’m crazy to think that there’s just no call for that kind of public demonstration of talent. Did anyone really enjoy eating it? Was I the only one who would have been fine with four layers, or even one of those Cool Whip and pudding jobbies thrown together at the last second—the ones that say, “Hey, I was made by a woman who walks on earth, not water. You too could have done this, if only you had thought of it.”

Fifteen layers just screams, “Yowza, look at me, I’m a fifteen-layer salad that also tastes fantastic. You wish your household ran this smoothly.”

I have another neighbor named Diane whose house is always immaculate. I don’t mean tidy and presentable. I mean white-glove-inspection-ready clean 24/7. She has seven children and is a fabulous mother to boot. I have dropped in at random times just to catch her off guard and once I found a single cup in her sink and a music stand in the middle of the living room. That was it. A few months ago, when Diane’s mother passed away and she was out of town attending to the funeral, six women from the church planned to spend the morning “cleaning her house” for her while she was gone. They had a hard time finding anything to do and left after an hour. To this day, Diane still doesn’t know that they were ever there.

Might I suggest they could have taken a different approach. You know how sometimes instead of sending yet another batch of flowers to a funeral, you might donate the money, in the name of the departed, to a charity? Perhaps those women could have gone to a house that really needed 6 woman-hours of work done on it and left Diane a note saying, “On your behalf, we cleaned so-and-so’s house today.” I’m not saying they necessarily would have had to come to my house, but I’ll tell you I would definitely have known they had been here.

My point is that I feel a bit uncomfortable in Diane’s house. Not that it’s one of those places where you’re afraid to wrinkle the furniture or spoil the white carpet, but I just can’t help but be fully aware, the whole time I am there, of how clean everything is (and by implication, how far short my home falls from her level). This is also why I can never truly enjoy listening to piano concertos. The more insanely well they are performed, the more agony they cause me. I can’t relax and enjoy the beauty of the music because I’m sitting there thinking: man, this guy is good! . . . he must practice six hours a day. . . wow that was a tricky spot. . . (and inevitably) You knew you’d regret quitting piano lessons when you were 15, you big slacker.

The word that comes to mind is virtuosity, which Websters defines simply as great technical skill. But I think the word implies more than just talent; a virtuoso draws attention to their talent by showing it off. A virtuoso pianist does not play chopsticks; he plays Liszt. A virtuoso artist pushes the envelope of his medium and lets you know, in unveiled irony, how much work was involved to make the feat seem effortless. In this 17th century still life for example, the artist (Adrien van der Spelt) used incredible skill at painting light and detail to fool the viewer into assuming that a curtain has been drawn part way across the canvas.

On closer inspection, you can see that the curtain is only painted on. The curtain serves as a fitting metaphor; that which usually parts to unveil the real view now becomes the main attraction. I imagine most viewers of this work do not leave with a strong opinion of how beautiful the flowers were but with appreciation of van der Spelt’s mastery of trompe l’oeil. So let’s just be honest about what the painting is really about. Instead of calling it Still life with flowers and curtain, they should call it Self-portrait of the artist’s talent.

Maybe I’m the one with the problem. I mean, who else gets offended by gelatin? But I think the world needs more people like me—the underachievers without whom those who aspire for excellence would have no cause to feel superior. I’m here to make everyone else feel better about themselves in comparison. I’m here to leave the door to my cluttered garage open wide for everyone driving past to see and disparage. I am here to go to my 20-year reunion looking 20-years frumpier so that the ladies who have worked their tails off to stay slim and glamorous can make a good impression. I am here to send out my Christmas letters in March (every other year) to ease the holiday burden on the postal service.

I am not, as I had imagined, merely a slacker. I am truly hard at work, making the world safe for virtuosity. I fail to accomplish even a fraction of what I hope to accomplish so that the success of others means something. I do everyone a great service and I’m happy to oblige. I have to admit that the world is a more beautiful place because my neighbor took the time to share her talents and build an elaborate Jello salad. But the world is also a more symmetrical place because there are people like me, ready to show up with a plate.