love and luck

About a year ago I walked down the basement stairs in my parents' house and watched my mom have a stroke, and everything I understood about the world, and my place in it, changed.

Memory, for me, is completist. This is why I make a poor storyteller: I can't leave things out. I tell lists (long ones), not stories. So I could tell you about the seventeen minutes we waited for the ambulance, name the nurses in the ER, trace the shape of the monitors listing emergency surgery patients in the air. And that would be the beginning, in facts, of the change.

I have always felt lucky. Even in France, where everything that could go wrong did, I was surprised to hear my colleagues describe me as 'unlucky.' I had a beautiful childhood, full of books, stories, music, possibility, adventure, imagination, and love. High school and college taught me so much about what education meant to me. And the thought of how much I learned in my Master's and in the year I spent in France is humbling--the luck, there is no other word, of it.

Actually, if I'm being truthful, things began to change for me when I was in France, an outsider. Foreign, alone. There is nothing like it for developing a sense of compassion, empathy, and humility.

And then to come home--and when my family most needed it there were meals left on the porch (months' worth), and cards, and letters, and the support of people we didn't even know (bloggy people who contributed to the auction, generous strangers who made bids). I didn't know how much we were loved.

Sometimes the only response was to cry, but I'm not so good at that. I'm better at working, going out and fixing something or getting the laundry in, or heating something up. Making cake as declaration of love. I learned this from watching all these strangers love my family.

I arrived in England on a clear day in September with three suitcases and a memorized recipe for plain cake. And within two weeks I was making cake almost every day. Oh, girls from Flat 6, oh, economists, oh Matt and fellow theorists: I was so lucky to be found by you.

Every day since June 4th of last year I have been aware that I can choose to be open and to love (or to be closed and bitter). And more and more I find I'm able to choose to love and to be kind, be really with the people I love. I have made this luck and they have made it for me, with me.

This feeling of being beloved. This luck.

imaginaries

Thursdays in the printshop, I'm working on a series of imaginaries. A friend of mine here noted that I am often as attached to the imagination of a place as to the place itself, which I think is a fair analysis. It's a deeply personal and private way of relating to space. The prints I'm making are etchings with chine collée.

This is the Beeston imaginary: foxes, daffodils, beehives, cranes, and girls in toggle coats.

psychogeography (1)

St Pancras International, London.

mancunian daffodils

The sun is coming through the clouds in a particularly English way, the sky is blue above the edge of the building across the courtyard, my work's been very good lately, and I'm leaving for France on Wednesday. My insides feel like Spring.

lucky

How could I have ever anticipated the presence of a ragtag bunch of economists in my life, their dry humor, their awkward care, their surprising tenderness? I found them--or they found me--in early days, and now it's like having cousins around who offer hugs, advice, a gruff shoulder, jokes, nights out. They are wonderful. (Missing from the drawing is Robert, who wasn't in the pub then.)

on rain in the afternoon

It makes me turn off the sound on my computer during "Fight Test," which is my favorite song by the Flaming Lips (although I do also love "Suddenly Everything Has Changed") so that I can hear it, by this point almost horizontal, hitting the parking lot, cars, tin roofs, my window.

I think that's the Postal Service covering "Suddenly..." there.

The best thing about England is the light: light while it rains, the changing light before storms, light in the morning when the sky is clear. Sometimes you can lie on the bed and watch out the window and in the course of a single day things will change so much.

on collection (1)

A collection is defined by its lack of something, says Baudrillard.