Lonely Paintings

I can't mention the names of the people in these kinds of stories.  They deserve their privacy.  Besides, the point is not who they are but what they are and how they lived, at least in my stories.

She'd grown accustomed to living in the room beside her husband in the skilled nursing facility.  Both struggled with daily tasks in their ninetieth decade but wanted little more than to be together.  They'd visit each other's room, watch television, read what's left of our newspaper, and talk with the sitter.  After seventy-five years together, few words had to pass between them to communicate a lifetime of experience.

He died quietly while I was visiting my family.  When I got back in the building, I could tell something was wrong,  Days later, he was gone, but his room was the same.  The bed was made, and everything was in order, but he wasn't there.  With the lights out, you'd think he was napping.  

In his room, there were three or four large paintings and three or four more in his wife's room.  I knew something about him that nobody else in the building knew.  In his younger days, he was a member of the Jackson Watercolor Society, now the Mississippi Water Society.  I thought I recognized the paintings as his own, but they might also be by his master, John Gaddis.  I asked his nurse to quietly check the signatures for me.  They were his.

Watercolorists always seemed a bit of magic to me.  I knew several great ones, including Jackie Meena, who lived across the street.  I was allowed to take drawing from the daughter of Mildred and Carl Wolfe because they taught at Millsaps.  I was allowed to take oil from the daughter of Carter O'Ferrall, who was Grandaddy's best friend, and one of the kindest men I had ever met.  

Make no mistake about it, though; Art was for housewives and weirdos.  As much as I admired the work of Walter Anderson, it's no mystery which camp he fell into.  I was meant for greater things.  I had no other choice.  

"You could be anything you want, Buddy.  If only you'd settle down and study."
"I'm trying.  I promise."
"You could be a doctor if you wanted to.  You're really smart.  Wouldn't you want to do that?"
"I guess."
"How about you spend less time with those comic books and monster movies and try harder at math?"
"Ok, I'll try."

Oil paint, and acrylic, and pencil drawings, you could kind of control those.  They would do what you told them for the most part.  Watercolor was different.  You laid out an opportunity for it and did your best to guide the shapes on your page.  I would watch Mrs. Meena work a few times.  She'd move her brush across the paper like she was planting seeds that grew in the fibers of the expensive art paper she got downtown.  There was no way I could do that.  Not ever.  I stuck with oil and drawing for a while but gave them up because everybody knew life called me for other things.  At least, that's what I was told.

For me, landing in a skilled nursing facility was almost like I died and was born again.  All the shackles that held me down wore away, and I could remake myself according to what I really was.  A bulletin outside the community room said, "Water Color Class-Hope Carr."  I thought, "what's the worst that can happen?  If it's horrible, I don't really know the other people in the class, so it won't be too embarrassing."  Now, I'm making five or six new paintings a week.  I'm not good at watercolor yet, but I'm not afraid of it anymore, and my lifelong admiration of those who were good at it helps guide and inspire me.

I go by the room of my neighbor who lost her husband, pretending to be on an errand but really just checking on her.  After so many years together, being apart must feel like a great empty spot for her.  Her husband was in high school with my mother and father.  When I would see his father, he'd ask Daddy, "have you seen my boy?"  Daddy would say he had.  They were on boards together and had many common friends.  

I was kind of like his wife; he'd always been there--now he's gone.  Sometimes she'd go into his room and turn the light on to see if he was napping, then remember, after more than seventy years, he's not there anymore.  She'd pause and let the thought sink in, then turn the light off and go back to her room alone.  The unfairness of her moment strikes me like a cold wind.  You spend decades building a life with someone, then one day, there's a hole in your life where they used to be, and nothing will fill it.  

I suppose it won't be long before they pack up the things in his room and take them away, leaving her even more alone.  I hope his paintings go to someone special.  They weren't easily made, and there won't be any more of them.  I'm glad I got to be near him in the last days.  It's good to have somebody who knows what you were but still appreciates what you are now.  I don't know that I'll ever be as good a painter as he was.  I've had some great teachers but never much confidence.  I'm free now, though.  Anything can happen.  His paintings transcend him.  Art is like that.

 

My Imperfect Arm

Circled here is a lump on my arm.  Evidence of a bone broken when I was just twelve years old.  It's a lump now because Jim Campbell and Mike Barkett thought they were doctors.

My brother Joe played football for Andy Mullins at St. Andrews.  My sister and I were in the lower school.  During one of Joe's games, I joined a pickup game of nerf touch in the area in front of the Upper School Library.  As sometimes happens in a game of touch, I was tackled and held out my arm to break my fall onto the worn, compacted spot of dirt where the older kids walked to class every day.  It hurt.  It hurt a lot.  I sought out my mother.

When I was little, Daddy's career caught fire.  It required him to miss many things in our childhood, most things, really,  but he never missed a football game.  Not one.  

"Let me see, buddy,"  Daddy said.  "Make a fist.  Try to squeeze my finger.  Try harder."  

"I AM trying.  It really hurts!"

Mike Barkett, baseball coach, and lower school administrator, saw the commotion and came over.  

"It looks like a sprain.  I know what to do."  With that, Mike fetched a bag of ice and an ace bandage.  After wrapping my wrist in the ace bandage, they then wrapped the ice bag onto it with another ace bandage.

"Keep that on there for a while, Buddy.  It'll feel better."  So I sat on the bleachers the rest of the game, trying not to cry, with an ice bag wrapped onto my hurting arm.

At home, mother refreshed the ice bag during supper and sent me to bed with the entire contraption wrapped to my now useless left arm.

In those days, St. Andrews hired a Greyhound bus to take us kids, to and from school.  Some kids still had their moms take them to school, but I was under orders not to be spoiled and ride the bus like a man.  Not a problem.  Normally I could draw on the bus all the way home, and my second favorite girl rode it too, dropping off just before I did.  Riding the bus with my left arm immobilized in the ace bandage, which had by then increased to three bandages meant that I had nothing to hold the sketchbook with, and every bump was causing considerable pain.  The girl I liked talked her mom into taking her home for a while.  The bus driver always did his best to look out for me.  "I'll avoid the bumps, pal.  You sit quiet."

After the second week of this, I was still complaining of pain in my arm.  Some kids thought it was funny to jostle me on the bus, causing even more pain.  "I'm calling J.O. in the morning." Mother said at supper.  J.O.  was James Oliver Manning.  One of dad's oldest friends.  They had both been number one at the Alpha Upsilon chapter of KA at Ole Miss.  There was a time when every third house on Honeysuckle lane had the name of a KA on the title.  Dr. Manning and Dr. Turner were Jackson's busiest orthopedists.  In the days to come, J.O. Manning would found Mississippi Sports Medicine, where I would also become a patient. His wife was a brilliant painter.  One of my favorites.

Once again, I was checked out of school by my mother, who sat in the waiting room in J.O.'s office near the stadium on Woodrow Wilson.  Mother was obsessed with paperback novels, all mysteries, and she would consume about one a week, fifty-two paperback mystery novels a year.  She kept them in paper grocery bags when finished to trade at a paperback book store near Parham Bridges' Park.  The person who taught me to read, read herself. A lot.

"Let's get you x-rayed," a pretty nurse said.  She maneuvered a gigantic machine, the kind that I'd seen turn tarantulas into monsters on Horrible Movie the weekend before, over my poor arm, naked of its ace bandages for the first time in twelve days.  "Hold still," she said as she moved behind a heavy screen.  "Why does she need to be behind a heavy screen when I'm here practically naked!" I thought.  This wasn't going to end well.

Once the ordeal with the X-Ray machine was over, the nurse returned me to the waiting room where my mother sat, one leg crossed over the other, reading her mystery novel, her basket purse with houses painted on it that she made herself with Jane Lewis and Onie Flood sitting beside her.  With some help from the nurse, I sank onto the examination table and sulked.  This won't go well, I thought.  

"How'd it go, buddy?"  "

"Fine."

 "Do you want a sucker?"

"No."

"Does it hurt?"

"no," I lied.

After a while, Dr. Manning came in.  He had a voice that sounded like he was speaking to you through an oak barrel.  He flicked on a light table and jabbed two x-ray sheets into the holding clip.  It was my arm.

"Tell Jim Campbell I'll make a deal with him.  I won't sell pencils if he won't practice medicine.  Your son has a broken arm."  

In the x-ray you could see pretty clearly where the break was.  It was also pretty clear that the bones didn't line up exactly right at the break.

"I want to put him in a cast.  It'll heal and be strong, but it might not be perfectly straight."

Forty-eight years later, it's still not perfectly straight.  

Momma and daddy and Dr. Manning would have many more opportunities to take care of me, but Daddy and Mike Barkett never tried to practice medicine on me again.  That's too bad.  It produced some great stories.