biker gear and an existential crisis

I think I love painting leather jackets. I'm going to make my mother wear her vest and patch for her portrait, sitting on her big red Shadow.

 

The hands look like hands this time! I can put away the gloves and mittens I was going to make everyone wear.

I've come to think of this thing as "paint for your life". If a person had only two years to paint, what record would they want to leave behind? Prioritize. Two years can become five. And ten. And thirty. Best to start at a run, though, just in case.

Queue:

The family. A portrait of each child. Of the man. My mother. Myself. The cats. Maybe the chicken, if she stops biting me. My aunt, the two cousins.


When that is finished, there are the places where I would want to hide a horcrux.

On Black Mesa, there is a little cliff you can sit on and watch the horses in the valley, and a hidden cave down the hill to climb into and pretend you're surviving a harsh winter.

At Lake George, there is a long dark rock to swim out to at night and watch the stars for UFOs while you sit shivering next to someone you love so much you'll vibrate into little pieces.

Near St. John's, there is a beach with grains of sand the size of Le Cars where my grandmother stood and painted the shoreline before she died, and blueberry fields with steaming flat patches of grass where moose have been napping.

In Bloomington, there is a well house with a hot metal drinking fountain in the middle, and at sunset the bats fill the sky. There are statues in the woods, if you can find them.

On Molokai, there is a deer path that leads down through the trees to a waterfall with a pool at the bottom, where you can jump and swim and then lay on the warm rocks while a friend confesses that their dad died that morning.


And in between, there is a life's worth of well-loved objects; worn leather gloves, old silver necklaces, tokens hidden in boxes, sheafs of old paper and notebooks and scribbles that tell stories that will never get typed up.


There is still time to make the things we want to make, and visit the places we want to see - GO GO GO.

painting with moleskine

I needed my painting to be more portable and less expensive while I work on skill-building, so I took a page from Nicolas Uribe and bought a moleskine to paint straight into.

This has been pretty great, because I can tote the sketchbook around while I work on the underdrawings, then spray-fix and gesso them, and sit at the dining room table to paint in the evenings instead of waiting for my Mondays - which I can devote to working on longer paintings.

I'm having strong feelings about the clear gesso. Feelings that may be hate. Regular gesso is slightly glossy and smooth and water-proof, this stuff is matte and gritty and SUPER absorbent. This might a good quality, if you know what you're doing. Which I do not.

First try:

I didn't have the scary gesso, so I painted over the drawing with watered-down white gesso.

Second try:

I had to sand down the gritty clear gesso, which might be why it bled so badly, but it made the painting really soft, which I kind of like.

Next up:
The man painted the celtic dragons on his helmet himself, so I think it merits recording for posterity.

Meanwhile: REJOICE - Zenny has survived 5 years.

My last baby is officially half a decade old. She hasn't smacked her head and had a seizure in a whole year, and kindergarten registration has started. The ever-present knot in my chest is relaxing. I still make her wear her crash helmet when she sits in the truck's jump seat, though.

My mother pulled off another weird and amazing cake, made to the child's specifications.

 YES

There was Japanese bbq, and cuddles with the new 5-toed chicken, and a fight over how many teenagers could fit in the new 3-foot-high pop-up play castle (none, incidentally - and now I have some castle-repair sewing to do).

 aunt with beer, mother with giant invisible hamburger

ready to extinguish fires at the burn-your-own-children bbq restaurant

 those feet

Happy birthday, kiddo.

a small feathery loss

My best girl, Sirius, died suddenly yesterday. She wasn't egg-bound, she hadn't been sick long enough for sour crop - she just felt poorly in the morning and died while we were rushing her to the emergency vet. Am having dark thoughts about the neighbors and rat poison.

Sirius was 3 years old, a good chicken who gave hugs and rested her head on your shoulder while you carried her around like a loaf of bread. She survived the pox, and had a close call while egg bound as a youth, which was a bonding experience for the two of us. Her eggs were the daintiest and most adorable, barely bigger than a quail's. She loved cookies and grapes, and had a chance to know love when the handsome gulch rooster showed up and romanced her for a few weeks.

I am so, so sorry, Sirius.

babby Sirius

teenage Sirius and Plucky

My girl, annoyed that my necklace was not made of grapes

Summon the bloodletters

A few weeks ago, there was a thing that made me mad. And then tired. And then resigned. Unfortunately, while I was in the mad bit, the man helpfully made an appointment for me to meet with his therapist so that we could talk it out together as responsible adults.* 

I decided that I didn't want to go. 

He decided that I really should. 

I said, fine. 

My internal organs said, ABANDON SHIP, and tried to violently claw their way out of my rib cage.

So I spent the evening in the emergency room, instead. The doctors determined that I did, in fact, have organs, but couldn't figure out what they were doing, so they shrugged, filled me up with morphine, gave me a prescription for narcotics, and waved me off into the night without making sure I had a ride home. Why do we have an opioid epidemic? It is a mystery. 

I tore up the prescription. Where the IV was, my arm has blossomed into an amazing palette of electric green and deep purple and lurid pink. I feel like someone kicked me down some stairs, but do not appear to be actually dead. So that worked out. And the man gave me a gyro, which pretty much counts as marriage counseling.

*My last meeting with her was not actually so helpful. Or it was, but not in the way it was supposed to be, because I ended up buying plane tickets to Seattle. 


Librarian super sleuth knuckle-cracking action

I have a few pet research questions that I work on when things are slow at the reference desk. Among these is, Who was the serial killer who picked up my mother while she was hitchhiking as a teenager in the 1970s?

The story goes like this: my mother, a teenager, is walking home from school and hitching a ride. A man picks her up in a sedan - he's old, to her, so maybe in his 30s. She tells him where she's going, they chat a bit, and she notices that he's taking the wrong turn, heading out of town. She tells him he's going the wrong way. He doesn't stop. She tells him to let her out. He doesn't stop. She tells him to pull over NOW or she's jumping out of the vehicle. He doesn't stop. She opens the door and starts to jump out. He hits the brakes. She runs out, gets away from him, and walks all the way home. Some time after this, a girl goes missing. A body is found in the wooded area where they had been driving. Then others go missing, but they are never found. She realizes she probably met the killer, and she bets the bodies are still in those woods.

I knew my mother had been a teenager in Bloomington, Indiana, before the family moved to Newfoundland, so I started looking for murders along the main highway in the mid-1970s. I found a lot of serial killers. A LOT. There have been waaaay more serial killers in Indiana than you'd find comfortable, which is probably attributable to corn madness (says me, arbitrarily, after reading one article about cannibal hamsters). I never figured out exactly which one it was. And that is because it wasn't any of them. This weekend, my mother casually mentioned that she met the man again, years later, while walking home from the Memorial University. In Newfoundland.

All this time, the thing I had not known was that while my grandfather had been working on his PhD in Indiana, he had been working part of the year in Newfoundland, doing a professorship at the Memorial University. During those months, my mother went to a jr. high school near the university, and it was while she was walking home through St. John's that she was picked up by this man.

Years later, in about 1985, she was walking home from the university with her dog when she passed him on the sidewalk. He remembered her name, and called to her. She stopped, recognizing him. He had a cane. "Does your dog bite?" he asked. "Yes, but only if I tell her to," she said. He tried to be conversational, and explained that things weren't so great for him; he'd been in a diving accident. He'd been swimming pretty deep, thought he saw a shark, and panicked. Whether he had the bends or an injury, it wasn't clear, but she sized him up and decided that he probably wouldn't be murdering anyone else in that condition. She felt uneasy about meeting him so close to her home.


This is the timeline I've put together:

1972 or 1973 - my mother is picked up while walking home from jr. high school, and escapes after threatening to jump from the car.

1978 - Sharon Drover, 17, disappears while hitchhiking in St. John's. Her body is never found.

1981 - Dana Bradley, 14, disappears while hitchhiking in St. John's. Her body is found in the wooded area South of St. John's.

1982 - Henrietta Millek, 25, disappears at night. She is a student at Memorial University. A friend says she got into a car with someone in St. John's. Her body is never found.

1984 - Pamela Asprey, 20, disappears while walking home or hitchhiking in St. John's. Her body is never found.

1985 - my mother meets the man again, and he is walking with a cane.

No further disappearances.


The fact that he remembered her name, and that she got away, leads me to suspect that she was one of his first attempts. She encountered him twice in roughly the same area of the city, so he probably lived somewhere around the university. If he's still alive, he may be in his 70s now. And he was injured while diving (or so he said), so OFF TO THE NEWSPAPER ARCHIVES I go. Maybe there is some mention of an accident in a small local article.

I'm coming to get you, old man. Very slowly. If you die before I figure it out, please mention the diving injury in your obituary so I can solve the mystery in a tidy manner.