We didn’t really do Christmas this year. We didn’t have money for presents. A tree seemed like far too much work, given that walking from the chair to the kitchen is a five minute trial. Dear friends will need to understand some packages will arrive possibly later than Epiphany. They know about that.

Don is fixing my old computer to be my new computer with some new parts and that frees up a new computer for him. It sounds much worse than it is. Both of us lack nothing for stuff. Merry Christmas!

Sarah and Donna Hinman sent me calamity ware mugs and a teapot that have me over the moon. They have dinosaurs, monsters, Sasquash, and zombie poodles! Merry Christmas indeed!

All of the really big gifts in our lives, a love, a job, a passion, a pet, a child, a studio, are invitations to be something different ourselves. A love teaches you how to be a lover. A pet or a child teaches you how to love someone or something past it’s problems and messes. A studio, well a studio teaches you how to dance with your creation.

For those of you who don’t know, Don gave me his house as my studio last year. I have never had a gift like a studio. The space to do what we do without interruption or criticism is a place to practice art. And with art, we never really do anything but practice, one phase into another. Art is a byproduct. What we create in a studio is skill and vision. Thank you, Don! Merry Christmas!

Real gifts change us. And I have been give some of the best. Here is a bit of what I did this year, in my studio.

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I hope Christmas brought you gifts that change you, help you grow, help you see your world differently. And make us all so much richer in ability, in who we are and what we have to give.

I’ve been recovering from a number of changes these last couple of years. Change is neither good nor bad, I suspect, except how it works out in the end. I suspect also that the definition of that is where you put the end.

This last month, for perhaps the first time in my life, I’ve been over political. I’ve had strong opinions and I’ve posted them broadly and widely. In truth, I’ve felt like I was fighting for our lives. As it works out, I think we all lost a lot in this election but time will tell.

Be that as it may, I am sure you’re opinion probably hasn’t changed. Neither has mine. I think I still will point out happenings that make me nervous and convince me something bad is happening. I’ll do my best to run them through snopes so it’s not nonsense. I hope you can do something similar.

But I’m tired of asking folk why they’ve made the choices they have and I don’t want to debate candidates anymore. Mostly I’m exhaustably tired of nasty angry men heads on my Facebook page. Yuck.

I wrote earlier about the flip and my high school reunion. It turned out to be pretty prophetic. I did have a pleasant time. Part of that was due to a choice on my part to offer an unspoken amnesty to people who hurt me in high school. If I can’t get over it in 45 years, I’m doing something wrong.

The election did stimulate that for me. The idea of ANYONE in a corner berated, battered, hounded, hated brought me right back home. But this time my fear was that I too would be standing in the crowd whistling dixey and be afraid to stop it. I’m afraid of becoming one of the people who permitted the abuses I’ve lived through.

What stops this kind of abuse? I’m not sure, but we’re going to have to figure it out or live with it. I think it may simply be the witness of people who actively don’t approve or permit it.

Years ago, when the Bosnian community moved into Chicago, I worked with a family there. One of the boys ran off to play ball with his friends. That, in that part of Chicago wasn’t great, but the park had a reputation for drug dealers and junkies. I went rushing off looking for him. I found him in the park, with a number of Bosnian children and adults ( by the way, these people are Muslim. And lovey, I might add). watching to keep everyone safe. Not a drug dealer in sight. Honest people who disapproved of them had moved in and taken the space.

So that being said, My studio is up. My web page is back up. I am back doing art. I forgive you if you said some smug, crude thing to me for not thinking the way you do. I hope you can forgive me for whatever I might have said that hurt you.

I would rather, in the end, be able to say you were right than I am. I’m not sure we’re going to survive this political clime as a democracy. I don’t know what will be left after the rapine that seems promised by our president’s elects’ choices.

So what else is left? Do art. Take care of the people in front of you. Write the best truth you can.

My apologies all around.

 

Within  a week or two I’ll be going to my 45th high school reunion.

I’m told I don’t have the right attitude about  my high school memories. I’m sure there are people for whom high school was a happy magical place of growth and possibilities. I don’t know any of them, but I think I know people who would say that anyway. I often wonder what they do remember. And what they need to forget to make themselves whole.

Do they remember the day someone threw me into the bleachers during a dance class? Or the day I was beaten with books by 5 classmates in a hall room? Or the young Christian girl who observed that even people like me were of some value? Or being celebrated as the queen of Saturnalia (fools) for a Latin club event? As you can imagine, I have some mixed feelings about the memories.

Bless us, I suppose there’s a part of that these people who probably define all this as high spirits and a lack of humor on my part.

Did I have friends? I did. They were dear and they were rare. I hope I recognize them.

I believe that what forms who we are most is the stories we tell about ourselves. We define ourselves as legends in our own minds. Perhaps that’s normal. Who else can best tell your story but you?

Had I been braver, tougher, tighter, smarter, and prettier, I might have had a different experience. There was a lord of the flies quality to high school that I’m still trying to get over. How did they define me?  Was I a victim? A snot assed scholar? A mental bully?  An antisocial art princess? A writer with several books under her belt? There’s  no going back, to change what was. I’m waiting for the stories to flip.

I’m waiting on my perception to change. Perhaps I can see how afraid they were they might have been lumped in with me as a person to focus on. Perhaps they were afraid all the time too. Perhaps I made them feel less able or valuable. Perhaps there’s a space where we can see each other differently. Perhaps the stories can flip.

So I am going hoping to see these folk in a different light. I’m hoping to see me in a different light. I’m hoping for our stories to flip.

I’ll be in a wheel chair for some of this. I’m not exactly crippled, but I don’t do distance standing and walking. Try not to add it to my story. It’s not how I define myself. It’s just the mileage.