Return of the Light

Two-oh-oh-seven. My god, what a year it's been. It could possibly be the most stressful year of my life, although there have been a few close competitors for that title.

There's good stress and bad stress and this year started out with good stress. I was getting ready for a solo show, the "Red Sparrow" at the Newmark Gallery. It's the first time, and I hope the last time, that I didn't have all the paintings finished before the show was in the publicity cycle. Solo shows are stressful anyway, but that just adds a ridiculous mountain of anxiety on top of everything else. But I was dealing with it - just kept telling myself that as soon as the opening was over, I could relax.

At noon, on the day of the opening, I got a phone call from the sheriff of Saratoga County, in upstate New York, telling me that my father was in jail. He had been arrested for disturbing the peace and threatening employees at the local hospital when they blocked his attempts to take his wife out of the hospital. Her with bare feet, a hospital gown, IV dangling, into a snowy February night. She has Alzheimer's, he has dementia. Yes we knew they needed help, yes we'd been trying to do something about it for months/years, but believe me - you don't know the meaning of Kafkaesque until you've dealt with government bureaucracies when trying to help a family member who refuses (make that vehemently rejects) your help.

It takes a crisis to make things happen in these situations, and we finally had our crisis. Over the next two months, I came to be on a first name basis with a dozen Saratoga County law enforcement, social services, legal, medical, and nursing people. At one point he came to live with me. It didn't last long, but finally getting him set up in his house with daily in-home attendants (and with his wife in a nursing home) was only slightly less time-consuming and stressful than having him here.

Around May, things were calming down with Dad and I was looking forward to that rest I'd been promising myself since Fall '06. But first, an old friend was coming in from out of town for a 2 week visit. She wanted to do all those tourist things, lots of shopping, and go-go-go activities from morning to midnight every day. It was exhausting, but I hadn't seen her in years, and it was only two weeks . . . I kept telling myself that in just a few days, I could sleep for a week.

The very day I waved goodbye to my friend, as she left for the airport, I got a call from a doctor at Kaiser, telling me I had to come down there right away, because my husband was in shock. Why I asked? Because he was just diagnosed with Acute Leukemia, she said (which turned out to be the wrong diagnosis, but we didn't find that out for a few more days, and the right diagnosis was not exactly comforting.) It turns out he has Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia and he's been getting chemotherapy and other treatments ever since.

It was a serious adjustment. One of the first orders of business was to move our bedroom closer to the bathroom, which meant rearranging other parts of the house, including moving my painting studio into the basement/garage. That turned out to be a good move, and I love my new studio, but I had been in the old studio for many years. It took me months to find everything and get my painting tools arranged in a comfortable way again.

So here it is, the winter solstice already, and I only got ten paintings done this year - an appallingly low number for me, less than a quarter of my normal output. But I did complete one of my personal winter solstice traditions, which is to start the narrative series for the following year. This time I had 15 of my friends and family members to pose for me as I dragged then all over town for a 15 hour shoot. I'm still awed and grateful that so many people are willing to help me out with these wacky projects I keep asking them to be part of. Now I have to make the paintings. During the shoot, I fell down in the parking lot of the U.S.S. San Francisco Memorial and now I feel like someone hit me all over with big sticks. The worst of it, is my right hand, which is too swollen and painful to use. But I'm sure it'll be ready for painting any day now.

The night before the shoot, our washing machine broke down, so we're getting reacquainted with the local laundromat, and hoping we get enough of a tax return to buy a new machine.

Just to reinforce the idea that the light IS returning, Dave and I went out very early this morning, took a friend's truck to the Marin Headlands, and watched the sun come up over San Francisco. We packed a thermos of hot tea, some muffins and tangerines, and after the sun was truly up, we sat and ate our breakfast and thought about how lucky we are: