It was the best of times, it was the worst of times...

It feels just a bit like I've actually lived a Dickens novel in the last 10 days or so.

Triumph, tragedy, happiness and heartbreak, it was all here.

Joy, pain, accomplishment, failure, stress and peace were all in the sentences and paragraphs I've just lived through. I've been criticized, caused offense, been shown deep love and tenderness, mourned with those who lost a loved one, then rejoiced with friends about just being together. I've worked harder than I have in a long time, yet felt satisfied rather than depleted.

It was a week of contrasts to go along with my current art project about using just values of one color to tell the story.

Life is like that. We only have one life but by mixing in light or dark, whether by choice or circumstance, we end up with a million different tints and shades.

I learned this week that dark is stronger than light in terms of paint. It only takes the tiniest amount of black paint to make red change through the values from pure to brick to the strangest of almost-blacks.

Going the other way is a different story. You must start with a great deal of white, but only need to add the tiniest amount of red to make a hundred tints of pink. Light is easily colored by dark. I have to watch out for that.

So, when things seem Dickensian, keep lots of light on hand and dole out the dark sparingly. Just enough to give the light places the contrast they need to really bloom.

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Book Review: The Help

The Help by Kathryn Stockett
Adult Fiction
You might like this book if you like to read current bestsellers, you are interested in an interesting perspective on every-day racial tensions and relationships in the dawning of the civil rights movement, or you like good stories with women as the main characters.

I feel complete now. I've finally read The Help. I know, it took me long enough!  I started hearing about this book in the spring sometime and casually went searching for it at my library, completely unaware of its popularity. On June 3, I became number 218 in the reserve queue for this Book Club Juggernaut. Last week, my number came up! Fortunately I was too busy during the summer to be tempted to buy it, so I got myself over to the library and picked it up before the deadline.

I know why it is making the rounds. It has a lot to inspire thinking, talking and sharing among readers. It raises hard questions, forces the reader to come to terms with things not often talked about, and in spite of its very specific subject matter, has a universal quality. The characters are interesting, the writing is good, and the story feels authentic.  In short, I thought it was a wonderful read and worth the wait.

It is primarily the story of three women: Skeeter, Aibileen and Minny. They live in Jackson, MS in the early 1960's. One is a young, white, wealthy college graduate, the trust-fund endowed daughter of a cotton plantation. The other two are black maids employed by white families in the town. The first is trying to figure out who she is and what she values, and the other two become her unexpected mentors in that task. The story begins in 1962 or so, with the heady effects of  Rosa Parks keeping her place in the front of the bus still heavy in the southern air. It keeps time with mentions of the murder of Medger Evers, the loss of JFK and Martin Luther King's  "I Have a Dream" speech. Along the way, the main characters become activists in their own, very personal, civil rights movement, and the issues they tackle really bring to life the realities of the damage that generations of slavery did to the fabric of American society.

I think it had a certain deeper meaning for me because I employ "help." Someone with a true talent for it cleans my house every week.  She has become a friend, as have her children, and we have had interaction outside the parameters of her employment, but because she is a Hispanic immigrant, there are things to think about. I like to think that I value her for herself and that her expertise and skill at cleaning my house are no different than my other friend's expertise and skill at teaching me piano, but I don't know. Is it that simple?  It's a little different when someone is washing your toilets and admittedly, sometimes I feel strange letting her do those kinds of tasks. 

She needs the money and chooses to do this kind of work to earn it. I function much better with that weekly deadline to remind me to de-clutter and organize so she can clean the surfaces. So, is it symbiotic or exploitative? I hope it's not the latter, because, in addition to paying her well, I do love and respect her and value the time we've spent together. Like in the book though, she thinks it is funny and odd and sometimes is even uncomfortable when I work alongside her doing other tasks like changing the sheets, cleaning carpets and doing the laundry or when I won't let her clean my kids' rooms if they haven't excavated the mess on the floor that week. She fully expects to come in and do it all and still will not call me by only my first name.  That really hit home while I was reading this. My housecleaner calls me Miss Kellie, just like the maids call "their white ladies" in the book.

I'm not sure how I feel about that now.

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This Week's Assignments

This week was a busy one for my class. Two assignments, plus lots of preparation for upcoming work.  I struggled this week, but I did my best. I did like the white chalk pencil on black paper. The idea of adding light instead of shadow as one does on white paper was kind of cool.  Because this is a design class, we didn't focus on the how of using the media, so I don't feel like my strokes and shading are the best in this piece, but it captures the feel of the photo I was using, which you can actually see here. Considering it's my first time trying the method with really no instruction, I'm okay with it.  The other one was half easy, half hard.  It is about lines. The first one with the repeating lines was easy. I liked that one a lot. The other one, to use 5-7 lines of varying width to create a mood, was stinking hard. It's not the greatest thing in the world, but again, I did my best and had that feeling of, "Okay, just be done now."  After all, it's a class, and part of the learning is from the doing and the other part is finding out what I should have done differently.  And sorry about the color cast. My monitor is not calibrated right now and I played and played and still couldn't get it right. They are all just plain old black and white.

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Out of the Frying Pan

Yesterday ended my first week of being Concessions Manager for our high school Booster Club, and in practical terms it went okay, meaning we didn't run out of anything, nothing caught fire, and the answers that I'm making up when people ask me questions appear to be working out. It will be a major undertaking, but thankfully, I have many amazing people on the job with me, and so far, it has been really good to have something biggish to focus on.

I haven't stepped up to volunteer at school in a major way in a long time for several reasons, chief among them the fact that I was doing well just to keep my my kids alive and get them TO school because both I and my husband have been majorly involved in volunteer positions at church.

I had to choose sanity.

But then everything changed. For the last year, I have experienced my first ever fallow period of church service, having previously been in a leadership or other major calling since 1991. I guess fallow is not the best word because it's not that what I'm currently doing for my congregation is not valuable or productive, it is, and I love what I'm doing. It's just really different in that I've gone from spending hours a day on focused volunteer assignments to hours a week, and even that amounts to less time in a whole week than I used to spend in one day. Some would say that's a good thing and that I should hush and be grateful, but for me, it has actually been really, really hard. Combined with my children leaving the house in droves over the last few years, having less work to do in my church community has left a void in my life and has made it a challenge for me to focus my energy and overcome all my normal tendencies toward hermit-like behavior. I've found myself struggling with periods of depression, identity crises, loss of feelings of self-worth all sorts of other irrational stuff. I'm not beating myself up, because it has been a major lifestyle change and stress and adjustment are normal when that happens. But I have felt like something was needed. Last spring at a school-wide meeting, there was an announcement that a volunteer was needed to help with concessions for Boosters. I had the feeling then that I should step up, but I think I was hoping the feeling would pass. Then at the end of the summer at Freshman Orientation, they made the same announcement, and I made the commitment. It has been scary and energizing at the same time. I'm starting to get a feel for how much time it will take and also some ideas for how I can organize and shape things, and it feels good to be using my skills in this way again.

And oh yeah, Go Bears!

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First Assignment

I've decided I'm going to record my assignments for my art class, so here is the first one, the quintessential first art project, "Self-Portrait of Eye" drawn from life. I think anyone who has ever taken a beginning art class has done this or something similar. It was fun to do, holding my little mirror and looking back and forth to try and get the details right. I've always sketched bits of things from life and been able to get a result that looks passably like the model, so this was a good introductory project for me. It will be the next few, when I have to come up with an image from my imagination, that will be challenging.

Anyway, It is done in pencil on illustration board, framed in to be 11x14 in. I think it looks sad, but people have often told me I have "sad" eyes. They definitely are expressive, so there you go. My daughter says I made my lid too heavy and old-looking but pronounced it "good anyway." I'll hold onto that because tomorrow I get to put it on the board with all my classmates' work for "Crits." That will be fun. I don't know yet if we critique each other's work or just listen to the instructor. The instructor seems pretty invested in helping us to actually succeed, so I think it will be good either way.

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An Enhanced Book Review: The Year of Magical Thinking

The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
Adult, non-fiction, memoir
You might like this book if you like excellent writing, portraits of intimate emotions and relationships, or are interested in learning more about grief.

I bought this at a sale some years ago. I decided to read it now because in the last few months, I've thought more about death and what happens to the living when people die than I have in many years. This book is a memoir of the year after the author's husband dies and I found it beautiful. It was honest, had a sense of immediacy and, I thought, felt very real. It has beautiful writing, well-chosen quotes from poetry and literature, reflections on a good marriage and offers a somehow restrained yet at times frighteningly raw glimpse into what those who are grieving are actually experiencing.

All of the deaths that I've been thinking about have been people near my age who have died suddenly and tragically (one was taken by disease, the other two by murder in separate circumstances), and have left behind children near the ages of my children, so even though I'm not grieving in the way their families are, I'm certainly thinking through a lot of things and working to use my faith and knowledge to make sense of these passages. This book helped some. Even though it is not written from the perspective of faith, it is written from the perspective of someone who loved the one she lost very, very much. Theirs was a rich and strong marriage and I loved the way she shared memories of family life that were so happy, I mean framed with a golden glow kind of happy, but to her were the jagged edges of her grief revealed. It was an amazing dichotomy. I would be completely caught up in the joy of the moment she was describing, then we would come back to the present to find her completely debilitated by the force of the memory.

The writing is superb, and as it is the first piece I've read by this author, I will certainly be looking for more. I have not done a search of her work, but it sounds like she and her husband worked extensively as writers in the film industry, so I'm curious if she is the writer of anything I'm familiar with.

This book was tender, but never sentimental. It was beautiful, but did not leave out the ugliness of grief. It was like a photograph that perfectly blended light and shadow to give the act of mourning a form and substance that even those of us on the outside of real pain can understand. In the end, though, it is a love story-a tribute to her husband John that never falters. You can even tell from the cover that he is the book's true subject. Look closely.

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How Does That Work Again?

This weekend was one of those in which I had arranged, by my own choice, to be of help to several different people in a very few days. I have no desire to share details or aggrandize my efforts, because I'm not any different than any other person I know and because that's not the point. The point is how important it is to be willing to serve, to help, and to get outside one's own needs as often as one possibly can.

As the school year gets underway, things start to get busy, and the digital calendar I currently use becomes a veritable mosaic of pastel-colored rectangles. As the time fills up, I start to operate in a near-constant state of heightened awareness that easily tips over into stress. Some days it gets to actual anxiety as I breathe a little faster and my heart rate goes up as I wonder how I'll get it all done.

So, it would follow that during a weekend when I spent 6 hours away from the house volunteering for the high school and then on Sunday, and when opportunities to settle back and just listen and worship and absorb spiritual strength were few and my church experience was mostly just busy; my stress level would go up and not down and even send the needle way over into the anxiety zone.

But there's the rub. It just doesn't work that way. Not for me anyway. As I arrived back home from church on Sunday to my first opportunity of the weekend to have free time, I felt wonderful. Calm. Happy. Renewed. Ready for the week ahead. I was even energized enough to make a real dinner, which hasn't happened much this summer. It just never fails that when I am all sucked into the vortex of worry that I'll fail at what I'm trying to do and I reach out to God for relief, the answer almost always comes in the form of helping someone else. Perspective, endorphins, being with other people, all of it. It just works as serious therapy for me.

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