Day 415: Arts and crafts day.

I pop downstairs to warm up coffee. Exuberance bursts from the kitchen table.

“Mom, look over there! Look what I drew for {the toddler}! It’s a freight truck!” the preschooler says.

I admire the truck. Actually, I would love to see this truck on the road in real life.

“Mail truck!” the toddler says. He points to his paper with many intersecting colorful lines and dots.

I admire his truck abstraction piece. Throughout the morning, the drawings multiply.

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  “Freight truck” (Preschooler)

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  “Mail truck” (Toddler)

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  “Stegosaurus” (Preschooler)

And more art to come! I leave my homequarters a little early for a special activity at the boys’ preschool – Mom and Me craft time.

The preschooler and I join a smattering of other masked parents and kids at the school. The teachers set up stations a social distance apart in the classrooms. The tiny tables are set with paper plates ringed with pools of paint, paintbrushes, water cups, and blank aprons.

I squeeze into a tiny chair next to the preschooler and we get to work painting. Our apron theme is “treasure chest at the end of the rainbow.” It’s fun to work on collaborative fabric art with a five year old. He mixes intriguing varieties of green and brown, and some color between purple, black, and green that I can’t name. He smears this Mystery Color in an arc above the rainbow. We paint each other’s names on the apron and the teacher hangs it up on a clothesline to dry.

After craft time, the kids AND moms get popsicles! The kid eats his in the school while I clean up our station. I open mine outside and eat while we walk back to the car.

“Mom, you’re not sharing any of your ice cream,” the preschooler says.

“You didn’t offer me any of yours,” I reply. “And you didn’t ask nicely. If you ask nicely, that increases your chances exponentially.”

He says “please” with a smile. I give him a bite or two. Or three. Our faces are covered in orange goo.

So in other words, it’s been a great day.

What am I grateful for today?

A fun time with my kid. And Sal surprised me with an early Mother’s Day present: a Shiatsu neck massager!

Day 410: A quasi-ferret.

My friends are developing a game on Godot and opened a Google Hangouts for camaraderie and artistic contributions. One of the characters is a ferret, so I attempt a few sketches. It’s difficult to capture the “ferretness” of a ferret. If you make it too tubular, it looks like a snake with ears. Not tubular enough, it resembles a puppy. In fact, it slips from puppy to fox quickly, depending on how you shape the ears and nose area. After a few iterations and some feedback, I get it close:

Ferret?

As we’re wrapping up, Sal returns from a park outing with the kids. He brings home Wendy’s and we have a cheerful lunchtime.

What am I grateful for today?

Sal and I started watching Shadow and Bone on Netflix. It’s pretty good so far.

Day 389: Periwinkle beach night.

As the days grow warmer, parks and beaches draw more people on the weekends. Sal and I are always scheming on new lonely spots, off-peak times, and odd days out to get the kids outside while avoiding crowds.

This morning, I craft a scheme to get us to Seacliff Beach State Park in the late afternoon. If we time it right, we can get there when the day is at peak temperature (68 degrees) and people are starting to pack up and leave. We bring the preschooler in on the plan.

“When we go outside,” I tell him, “we have to run around a lot so your brother gets tired and takes a nap. Then right after his nap, we’ll drive to the beach!”

“Yeah! And can I watch a movie on the red iPad?”

“Good idea,” I say, “We should load some new movies on it.”

The preschooler takes his role in our scheme very seriously. He is committed to success. When we go out for a walk, he tries all sorts of ways to get the toddler to run around. We bring balls out and bounce them off the garage door, to practice throwing and catching. When the toddler throws his at the garage door, the preschooler runs over and kicks it just before it reaches him, so the toddler has to run and chase it. It’s a pretty clever trick, but only works a few times before the toddler starts to protest.

“Mom,” the preschooler says, “he’s not running! He’s just sitting there.”

I look over at the toddler, who is talking to himself on the sidewalk. “It’s ok, honey,” I say. “I think he’s had enough exercise.”

Sure enough, the toddler takes a good two hour nap. Just before he wakes up, I make a bunch of heavy snacks and pack a picnic bag. We head for Seacliff Beach at around 5 p.m. There’s no traffic at all. I feed the kids squares of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches as we get closer. We pull in to the parking lot just before 6 p.m. It’s a little later than I wanted, but it’s an experiment, so we roll with it.

The air is light and just a bit warm, like an oven that’s been turned off for a while. The boys squeal and run around in the surf and dig holes with their plastic shovels. Sal makes castles with the bucket for them to jump over and stomp.

When the sun sets, it casts a strange light on the waves.

“What color is that?” I ask Sal. “Would you say periwinkle?”

“It’s blue.”

“Oh, come on,” I laugh. “You’re an artist. Don’t you have like a million names for colors?”

“It’s blue. The water is a reflection of the sky.”

“But look over there,” I insist. “It’s got some purple in it, right?”

“Are you talking about the foam? Yeah, that’s got purple in it.”

“So it’s periwinkle!” I say.

“Sure, periwinkle.”

Never ask an artist about colors!

What am I grateful for today?

We got home super late, and I’m very tired, but what a great day! I declare beach night experiment a success.

Day 120: Quarantine Birthday.

It’s July, so Quarantine Birthdays are no longer novel, but it’s our little household’s first one. It snuck up on me, and I was not well prepared.

“What do you want for your Quarantine Birthday?” I asked Sal a few days ago while we were driving to the beach.

“You know, I was going to buy these Crocs for work, but then I thought, it’s my birthday, I should let someone else buy them.”

“So you want Crocs?”

“Yeah, that would be nice.”

“What kind of blue do you want? Like, a blue blue, a bright blue?”

I should pause here and mention that Sal only wears blue. It’s been this way for more years than I can recall. One day, he just announced it: “I’m only wearing blue now.” And that was that.

“Whatever is fine. A regular blue would be good.”

I’m not fooled by this. I’ve lived with an artist long enough to know that there are right and wrong blues, and “regular blue” is relatively meaningless. I search for “mens blue Crocs” and start scrolling through images.

“Like, this one…it’s a periwinkle…or cornflower kind of blue…something like that?”

“Is it purple?”

“Um…kind of. There are two here. One is more green-y and one’s more purple-y.”

“Like a pink tone?”

“No, like one is teal-ish and the other one is a periwinkle…”

There are a shockingly small selection of “mens blue Crocs” in size 10 on the internet right now. I am not winning here.

“How about rainbow Crocs?”

I should pause here and mention that Sal recently modified his Blue Only rule out of professional necessity. He was teaching for a community center that did not allow blue due to gang related issues; so now he wears rainbows occasionally.

“Sure, that would be fun,” he says.

“Ooo, this one is tie dye. Looks like paint got splashed on it! And it will arrive on your birthday.”

“Get it!”

The day of his party, the Rainbow Crocs had not arrived. I woke up early, made a pot of coffee, warmed up some pancakes, and prepped the preschooler.

“When your daddy comes downstairs, say ‘happy birthday’!”

Sal came down with the baby and the kid gave him a hug and said: “Happy birthday, Daddy! Remember that when you have birthday cake you don’t eat all of it, we all get some.”

Happy Quarantine Birthday, Sal!

What am I grateful for today?

Sal is very easy going. I was going to make him tacos for dinner, but had to work a bit late. He convinced me that all he really wants is chicken nuggets. “Throw some sauce on them, with a tortilla and cheese,” he said. “That would be really good!”

Damien Hirst

‘A whole week where I don’t have to think about death!’  I say to Sal at the start of my staycation (holistay?).  ‘So, want to go to that Damien Hirst exhibit at the Tate?’

I don’t know what possessed me.  I just wanted to see what the fuss was about.  After some begging, Sal finally caves.  He doesn’t like Damien Hirst.

‘He doesn’t do his own work, you know,’ Sal begins as we enter the first room. ‘He has these ideas and then gets interns to make the installations for like minimum wage, and they don’t get any acknowledgement, and blah blah blah…’

There’s a photo of a young Damien grinning next to a big dead guy head.  I can’t take my eyes off of it.  It’s horrible.  Should I turn back now?  Dare I venture further into the darkness of my morbid curiosity?

The next rooms have big paintings of coloured dots on them.  Sal is muttering, ‘probably stole that idea from the Kusama exhibit…’

Eventually we get to the room with the cow head with live flies.  Honestly, this isn’t that disturbing – growing up in the country, you see a fair amount of animal parts lying around with flies.  But there’s something unsettling about it rotting there behind glass, in the Tate Modern, with no pretty meadow to avert your eyes towards.

The embalmed animals begin around this point.  I think.  It’s all kind of a blur.  There are some brightly coloured paintings with dead butterflies embedded into them.  Beautiful and sad.

Then Mr Hirst provides us a meadow, of sorts.  A room buzzing with butterflies!  Living ones!  Also some weird brown streaks on the wall.  But also butterflies!!

Then a room set up like a medicine cabinet or pharmacy, coloured pills lined up in a glass cabinet.  Then more stuff in formaldehyde, like lambs and sharks.  None of this matches up.  What is the theme here?  Was this a Best Hits Album?

A little girl tugs at her mum’s sleeve.  What?  They let kids in here?!

‘Look, Mummy, a lamby!  Baaa!  So soft!’

‘No, not a lamb.  That’s the deception of living without acknowledging death and one’s own mortality, sweetie.’

Somehow I end up trapped inside a sagittal-ly sliced cow.  These ladies talking excitedly in Portuguese, pointing at grey cow parts ahead of me, some guys behind me.  I start to panic.  I didn’t know I had a phobia of being trapped inside a dissected cow.  I whisper to Sal, ‘I HAVE TO GET OUT OF THIS COW.’  Someone hears me and moves aside.

The next room is better.  Swirling colours and a suspended beach ball.  My emotions are getting seasick.  Am I disturbed?  Happy?  Grossed out?  Confused?  It gets choppy after this:

Horrible, horrible dead flies matted into a dark vortex of doom.

A diamond room!  Shiny, shiny diamonds!

More dead butterflies, arranged like stained glass.  So pretty!…?

An angel carved in marble…with dissected parts (‘Probably had his interns carve that, they did a good job, too…’ Sal grumbles).

The end comes (finally) with a dove suspended in flight in formaldehyde.  It’s beautiful and sad.  Hope and death.

I don’t get Damien Hirst.  That’s ok, I tell myself.  You don’t have to get everything.

‘Right,’ I turn to Sal as we run for the exit. ‘Who’s hungry?’

This is awesome. Underground Camden Market, near the loos

Blinged out phone booths

juxtaposition

You know where the cool kids hang out on Friday night?  Galleries.

If you haven’t been to the National Portrait Gallery‘s Thurs/Fri night Late Shift, freaking go already.  I mean, Trafalfar Square is like, right there, all lit up with Olympic fervour, and the Gallery’s open late with drinks and live music.  Plus there’s that special Diamond Jubilee exhibition of portraits of the royal family.  So I invited a friend to join me Friday night, thinking how very posh we would be, sipping wine as the gallery fills with Mozart under the approving gaze of Her Magesty.

Um.  This is not what happened.  I don’t even know how to describe this music the band (called Circle of Sound) played.  Someone said ‘jazz’, but it ain’t no jazz I ever heard.  Fusion?  Maybe if I could sort out what was fused with what.  One of the songs was oddly reminiscent of ‘Dead or Alive’ by Bon Jovi.  Do you know what a Sarod is?  According to the Circle of Sound’s flyer, it’s a ‘rare Indian fretless instrument’.  There was a British Bengali guy playing that, which was super cool, and this British Austrian dude on the drums.  Then the Austrian dude started beatboxing.

!!!

I want you to picture this.  Looking straight at the audience, he just breaks out in weird sounds – bleeps and ‘pacchews’ and ‘pshp-pshp-pshps’.  An audience with an average age of 45, perched politely on their stools, clearly trying to sort out when and whether to applaud.  The mouth sounds start out randomly, accompanied by some casual drumming, then increase in frequency and intensity, until the fretless strumming and mouth percussion burn a sonic hole in the universe.  And all of us – the Sarod, the beatboxing Austrian, the polite and confused Brits on stools – surrounded by dead MPs glaring at us from wall-to-wall oil paintings in the National Freaking Portrait Gallery.

Awesome.  And how was your weekend?