Always a new day. Thank God.
Weather: fairly warm, near 30 ish if not above, balmy but snowy. It was snowier this morning when I took the dog out. Kind of nice just at dawn when its still sort of dark and the snow makes everything glow a bit: the stuff on the ground and the stuff falling. Roads a little slick today, but not as bad as December’s snow storms. One of them both Esther and I were snowed in; Emily at an overnight. I thought we’d both lose our minds. She bitched and whined about not getting to see her boyfriend, mouthed off at me, told me I drove her crazy, cried. I snapped and told her she could move the hell out if I was making her that miserable and that I was still waiting for her to outgrow her mouthy stage. It just keeps getting worse. She was quiet and sniffling for a while, all the while the snow piled up outside and no one was on the road. Finally we got past it and she’s been quite nice to me since. She got me a Hot Wheels remote control car and I raced it around the hallways of the nursing home, hoping like hell I wouldn’t break someones hip. Most of them are in wheel chairs. The staff enjoyed the car I’d say more than the residents. What a bunch of grumps.
A day or so later, my mother’s 92 year old roommate did break her hip, falling out of her chair in her room. She will come back, but she may not survive the injury. I guess hip injuries in the elderly are killers.
Second day of classes and I’ve sure learned how to babble on. Things going well so far. 3 good groups, my 8am class has only 22 students. Yes!
Memories: I was looking on Dad’s website (see link in entry below) at all the hard edge 60’s pop art stuff, if that’s what you call it. There’s a few of them on pages 13, 14 and 15, maybe 16 starting here: http://burtondickerson.com/Gallery/Paintings?page=14 The numbers, the swirly shapes, the hour glass things, all those weird hard-edge designs. I remember those on the walls when I was very little. Some of these on Dad’s site I’ve seen for the first time since I was a kid. I imagine over the years, these old paintings came down and went into the basement or attic, and Travis when through everything and photographed them. Later the big oily abstracts went up. I remember as a kid, thinking those were messy and gross and that I wanted the nice neat designs back. In fact, I may have kept some of the nice neat designs in my bedroom, instead of the big oily abstracts. Now, those hard edged paintings remind me of when I was little.
Still, there is a big, long, tall one: no photograph and its not around the house anymore. It hung in the stairwell on a tallish wall running from the second level of the stairwell to the ceiling of the second floor, probably the only place it could hang. Lots of pink, I think. That’s all I can remember. I wonder what happened to it. I know my dad joked about cutting up some of the pantings he dind’t like into little pieces and throwing them into the trash. A neighbor pulled them out and made lovely place mats out of them. There are some older paintings still hanging at the cottage, but most of them have been fetched out of there. I think Lindy rescued them. The mold and mildew up there must be murder on them. There is also one, or maybe two, built into the new ceiling (which was put in probably more than twenty years ago). No way to get them out unless you tore the ceiling out. Whoever buys the place and tears it down, will likely discover a couple of old oil paintings.
Another painting I saw recently and have not seen since is one done by my mom. About 3 feet tall by a foot wide of a big pot of tall weeds and cat tails. I remember the painting well. I saw it in the old home movies that Travis just put on DVD for us. I had forgotten all about it and there it was. Dad said he thought it was at the cottage. We wondered if Lindy rescued that one for his house up north.
Old home movies are great: but the later ones are missing, the ones with Bethy and I. There were only 2 or 3, but they seem to be lost for good. Not in the house in Mt. Pleasant and Lindy said they were not in the box of films. It’s kind of disappointing. Still, looking at the old 50s home films are cool: the toys my brothers got for Christmas, the over-alls and beanies they wore outside when they played. the cars in the roads, the sleds, the style of clothing, everyone smoking. A few early shots of the cottage just after it was first built: Brandy must have been a year old, or maybe two. Weird how the place looks exactly the same, the landscape, 50 years ago, where the rest of us, and the cottage itself has aged. A few trees on the cliff I remember in the film, now gone. Long before they hung the tire swing from them. The lake, the sunset, the shape of the beach is the same: at one time, when I was around 20, the beach disappeared, but its back and now looks the same as it did in the fifties. It may have been much sandier back then. I don’t see so many rocks on the old sandy beach in the film as I do now. Rocks everywhere.
I learned a whole bunch of stuff reading Jerry Dennis’ book on the Great Lakes and I want to share some of it. But I need the book for reference. I’ll do it later. I may use some of it.
Done.
