Lydieth A's Open Salon Blog

Farewell, Thomas Kinkade.

Sat, 7 Apr 2012 22:04:43 -0400

This is a reposting, intended with respect for Kinkade's memory even though his persona was ripe for satire.

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You've probably seen the magazine ads. There’s a village with all the houses facing a winding canal instead of a street — sort of a miniature Venice, without the pigeons.

It is dusk. Old-fashioned gas streetlamps line the canal and golden lights glow in the windows of the stone houses.

The ad is for plates or framed prints or coffee mugs with these romantic images, available for five installments. The picture was created by Thomas Kinkade, Painter of Light.(TM)

I’ve never met anyone with a trademarked name, and I’ve certainly never met anyone with a descriptive title as a surname. It harkens back to an earlier day, doesn’t it? Sir Lancelot, Defender of Damsels or Slayer of Dragons.

Maybe it’s just as well that we all don’t have titles like that. It might reveal more about what others think of us than we’re prepared to know. I might be Lydieth, Bringer of Peace, to my face, but then again, I might be Lydieth, Cause of Nausea, behind my back. Your boss might be Carrier of Ulcers or Ignorer of Deadlines. Your spouse might be Burner of Burgers or Loser of Keys. It’s a little reductive.

Recently I heard in a news story that Kinkade has extended the reach of his painted beam of light to the planned community business. There’s now a Thomas Kinkade, Painter of Light, housing development, where you can live in one of those stone cottages along the winding canal with the gas streetlamps. Is it always dusk there?

How old do you suppose a person might be before a title like Painter of Light is conferred? There might be several titles over the course of a lifetime, making it tough to keep up with old friends.

Hey, did you hear about Jane, Carrier of Extra Pounds? Didn’t she used to be Jane, Wearer of Size 2? What happened to her?

You didn’t know? She married John, Fryer of Lard, and they had four kids. She hangs out on weekends with her friend Marge, Wearer of Tarps, and they bake brownies all day. But her sister Renee, Stapler of Stomach — now, she kept her figure and married that lawyer Bruce, Chaser of Ambulances. They bought a house in that Thomas Kinkade, Painter of Light, village that went up. Lost their dog in that canal when it rained in the spring, and can’t use the front yard at all — you wouldn’t believe the things that wash up on the doorstep. And when the tide’s low, the smell isn’t so romantic, trust me. But otherwise, they love it there.

What do you suppose were the titles Kinkade nixed? Merchandiser Without Restraint? Robber of Readers of Parade Magazine? Competitor for the Franklin Mint?

I shall remain, Lydieth, Keeper of Cash, and avoid the temptation to begin an installment plan for one of those commemorative plates. But if someone wanted to start calling me Lydieth, Bringer of True Wisdom, I wouldn’t object.

Trying to Stay OUT of the Loop

Fri, 9 Mar 2012 09:03:10 -0500

Being female is a load of hurt.

    That’s all I could think as I listened to my sister rant, looping through her repeating list of complaints she had about her ex-husband, our parents, her sons, and her neighbors. I tried not to seem alarmed as she recycled the exact language and inflection, the rationalizations, the affronts in the way Alzheimer’s or whatever has taken over her personality makes her do. Our father did this, too, in the last few years of his life. But he was in his eighties. Linda is in her early sixties.

    She wears her hair very short because a long time ago, before he left her for another woman, that ex-husband wanted her to cut it that way. Her hair was beautiful, dark and wavy with glints of our mother’s red. So many years later, Linda still wears her hair cut short and close, even though it doesn’t flatter her as well as a little longer style might. I wish she would let it grow to her shoulders again.

    I try to distract her from the stories that reopen so many old wounds and still have the power to make her cry. I try to get her talking about stores she likes. She was a world-champion shopper, with more tricks for bargain hunting than anyone I knew. She had the stamina to march through stores all day and night, long beyond what I was inclined to do.

    The day after our mother had the heart attack that would eventually lead to her death, Linda and I went shopping for nightgowns and robes for Mom to wear in the hospital. Our father had sent us on this errand to save our mother from wearing the undignified hospital gowns. Linda kept us on the move through three malls and every department store and outlet in Virginia Beach until after five that evening. She was driving and in charge. I was getting the migraine that always hit me when I wasn’t in control of my own schedule. I didn’t realize until late in the day that Linda was delaying our arrival at the hospital because she was afraid to see how sick Mom might be. The lingerie we bought stayed in the boxes we delivered them in, wrapped in tissue and never worn because our mother took a bad turn soon after that. I was frustrated that we missed most of one her last days on earth, but I knew that Linda was coping with complicated feelings toward our mother.

    Linda’s relationship with our mother was always charged. Linda can still quote things my mother said to her so many years ago that hurt. Linda says Mom told her outright that she wasn’t her favorite child. Linda is still angry that Mom would wake her up to cook breakfast for our older brother and his friends when they came home late at night. She tells me that she stayed up on Christmas Eve to put my toys together because our parents went to bed without doing it. She says that Mom took me to bed to nurse me and left her to do all of the housework.

    Of course these events were unfair and still bother her. I feel guilt even though these actions of others aren’t my fault. I still wish I could make up for them for Linda. And I don’t really know what is true or unfair or wrong on either side. Was Linda a teenager feeling put out that she was expected to do anything at all? Did my parents really make as much of a difference between my brother and Linda as it seemed to her? I wasn’t born yet for most of the episodes Linda tells me about. Linda was 16 when I was born and got married when I was five. All I know is that fifty years later, these stories still make Linda cry. If they had happened to me, would I have let go or would I be hanging on to old hurts this way, too?

    Linda has cast herself as the victim in every part of her life. She sees herself as the mistreated party, with no recourse, no power to change anything.

    She has recited this litany of hurts every day of her life.

    And I am terrified because I see a little of that tendency in myself and my daughter. All the way home from Charlottesville and my last visit with Linda, I tried to persuade myself that I am different. I’ve been the one in charge in my life; I was the one who made decisions and changes and had power to do what I wanted to do. I tried to fill my head with new ideas, tried to stay creative and open to trying new things. I never forget the stories of those who treated me poorly or hurt my feelings, but I don’t think about them every day. Maybe that is insurance against being robbed of joy and happy memories the way Linda has been.

    But what if I’m NOT different? What if my own litany of complaints takes over my brain and leaves me in an endless loop of sad, angry thoughts? What mantra can I repeat to myself to ward off what might be inevitable?

The Walls Have Eyes. And Ears. And Hearts.

Wed, 14 Dec 2011 23:12:19 -0500

"Women have sat indoors all these millions of years, so that by this time, the very walls are permeated by their creative force, which has, indeed so overcharged the capacity of bricks and mortar that it must needs harness itself to pens and brushes and business and politics."

--Virginia Woolf

Dr. Christiane Northrup has said (or perhaps quoted a colleague as saying) that fibroid tumors, a common enough malady among women, are the result of their collected anger and frustration. She tells of patients who wanted to avoid surgery for fibroids coming to her for advice. She told them to go do what they had really wanted to but had been afraid or reluctant to do. If they wanted to paint or travel or study or extricate themselves from bad relationships, she gave them permission and a directive to do it. When these patients returned, she reports that many of their tumors had shrunk or disappeared. Women's bodies were vessels corroded by their own disappointment and sadness.

Kitchens have always seemed to me to be the hearts of homes. But those hearts often signal, in ways that may not be perceptible to many, that they are broken. The frustration and sorrow of the women who have spent hours in those kitchens pervades the air like a spicy aroma that won't dissipate. When I stand at the sink and wash dishes, I look out of a kitchen window that may not have been in this same spot when the house was built in 1829, but I feel a kinship, nonetheless, with Permelia and later Hazel and most recently Kay, some of the women who lived in this house before I did. I wonder about their disappointments because sometimes I can feel the old house sigh under the weight of them.

On the porch, I like to shell butterbeans or peel peaches and think of all the women before me who sat here and did these ordinary things. I wonder if they longed to travel elsewhere, or if they had ambitions beyond the road that curves in front of the old house. If they were dissatisfied, even that yearning is a gut-level connection to all the women before me.

I have ambitions, although my dreams have become smaller than when I was five and stood on my mother's bed, looking at myself in the dresser mirror with my arms stretched wide and saying, "I'm the smartest girl in the world!" Later at 10, I remember my brother looking up from the old car he was under, and saying he understood and felt the same way when I said it seemed like a waste of a life not to be famous, that being ordinary and forgotten after death was the worst thing I could think of.

Later I dreamed of being a famous singer or musician. Then I dreamed of just being romantically allied with one. When that shift came—when the desire to be the star changed to a desire just to be close to the star—I and the world lost something.

I don't dream of fame anymore. But I dream of being no one's fool, of creating the worlds I can imagine when I drive past houses and fields and bodies of water that feel so real and detailed that I would swear they're memories of a past life. If I were able to put these worlds on paper or on film or into song, would I be able to convey those details so clearly that they would come alive for others as well? Could I create models for us to follow in reality—models of communities that function on love rather than fear? Could I nudge the world toward a more compassionate reality through a fictitious world I create?

I knew I wanted an old house. I needed to feel that there was a history and presence in my home that new construction, beautiful but charmless, lacked. Yet there was one lovely old house we looked at with a real estate agents in tow that had so much of the previous owner's presence in it—murals on the walls and permanent changes that so reflected her personality—that I knew the house would never truly be mine. It was as though her spirit had not released the house for anyone else to truly occupy it.

The house we bought didn't give me that feeling. It is grandmotherly, old enough to have seen it all, unflappable, accustomed to weathering storms and children, and able to transcend the moods of the temporary residents, whomever they might be. This house welcomes us, loves us, and keeps us safe from harm.

This house doesn't fight me.

I have often wondered if I still haunt the other houses I've lived in. There were some unhappy spells where I cried too often and too much, so much that I'm sure my tears soaked into the floorboards and the plaster on the walls. I hope that sadness doesn't affect the women and children in those houses today. I hope that my ghost only sprinkles fairy dust on the children while they're sleeping and helps the women find what they think they've misplaced. I hope that my spirit hovering there has found the peace it couldn't find when I lived there.

Riding by some of the places where I used to live is a strange, unsettling experience. If the house looks better than I left it, it feels like a judgment against me. And if the house is in worse shape, the feeling of vindication lasts only a few seconds before it's replaced with a nostalgic sadness for the time spent there and all that wasn't as it should have been at the time.

Is it our creativity, squelched for the sake of family and obligation and duty, that holds these houses together? Can that frustration be transformed into joy without destroying the mortar that holds our homes and families together?

In a world where even Diane Chambers on "Cheers" was left to decide if she could write a book OR marry Sam, as though marriage precluded any possible success as a writer, we still have a belief that a wife and mother somehow will and ought to channel all of her creative energy into home and family and that to pursue her own dreams and develop her own intellectual capacity is somehow boorishly selfish, it's no surprise that a woman who wants to pursue her art must still fight for the money and a room of her own necessary to create.

The walls around me resonate with the dreams and desires of women who repressed their own needs for nearly 200 years. Is it any wonder that I cry and wish I could break free? Could I honor their memories and pursue my own selfish creative impulses? I'm ready to try, with the ghosts of those women, of my own mother and grandmothers, hovering around me, saying "Atta girl!"

Confession of a Child Animal Activist

Fri, 3 Dec 2010 10:12:21 -0500

I have a confession to make. When I was nine, I misrepresented myself
to a United States congressman and profited from it.

I should preface this by explaining that in those days I was the odd
kid talking to the trees at the edge of the playground. I was what polite adults would call "bookish" and what not so polite classmates would call "weird."

I was so weird, in fact, that I conducted extended club meetings with fictional characters in the cabin of my father's boat drydocked in the driveway.

So weird, in fact, that these meetings were conducted in strict accordance with Robert's Rules of Order, with me serving not only as parliamentarian but also keeping elaborate minutes as recording secretary.

So weird that these minutes sometimes had to be amended when a fictional member of the group refused to approve them as read.

The mission of the club was hardly an original one. I co-opted a few
tenets from the SPCA, the Humane Society, and the Animal Assistance
League. (PETA was founded a few years later.) The name of the club
was pinched from the efforts at the time to bring home prisoners of
the conflict in Viet Nam. In this case, however, POW stood for
"protect our wildlife." Members of the club were characters from
books I'd read including a pair of children who had formed an "SPCR"
to protect a stray dog named Rachel. We were a like-minded group.

Aside from the occasional squabble over accuracy of the minutes, POW
meetings were uneventful until the club voted to announce our
existence in a letter to Congress demanding that Something Be Done to
further our mission. As president of the club, I wrote a heartfelt
letter about the plight of endangered animals, the horror of wearing
fur, and the need for more space in local pounds and animal shelters
on orange stationery with paisley Sock It To Me stickers. When my
brother saw the sealed envelope addressed to US CONGRESS, he
suggested that I add “ATTENTION: G. William Whitehurst” because he
thought our local representative might be sympathetic to my cause. My family knew the basic content of the letter, but not that I had
described the efforts of a group of imaginary children in an
imaginary club.

A package from Rep. Whitehurst arrived a few weeks later. In addition
to a letter praising the initiative and dedication of POW members,
Whitehurst included a book from the U. S. Department of the Interior
about endangered species in America.

By this time, I had joined a real junior garden club with nonfictional members. The package came on the day members of the junior garden club were turning in scrapbooks to be judged in a statewide competition.

Terrified that my family would discover that the letter praised my make-believe group, I hid it in my scrapbook, "Endangered Species in Virginia," and took it with me to the meeting.

You can guess the rest. I forgot to take the letter out of the
scrapbook when I turned it in. The letter praised the club without
naming it, and judges assumed I had scored a congressional
endorsement for the junior garden club. I won big-- a state award and a scholarship to nature camp in Lynchburg that my mom didn't let me go to. I was so horrified that I wanted to hide in the cabin of the boat.

The shame of what I did has stayed with me ever since. Following a
nearly vegetarian diet (shrimp don’t have eyelashes) and taking in
stray cats doesn’t seem to ease my guilt.

A few years ago, I had the chance to confess to Dr. Whitehurst in our local newspaper. Rather than taking offense, Whitehurst gamely issued a pardon on some Congressional stationery he still had lying around.

In a letter attached, he said he understood my chagrin and that whenever he received undeserved credit for an accomplishment, he followed what he called "Whitehurst's Eleventh Amendment," which states, "When There Is Good News, Stand Close To It."

Staff Meeting Notes

Wed, 3 Dec 2008 13:12:23 -0500

Notes from staff meeting in November, after calculating the estimated hourly salary of all present and concluding that the money could be better spent on an AIG-style retreat:

There is no excuse on earth for devouring anyone’s time this way. For the love of Pete, set us free.

Time to break with reality.

If it’s all an illusion, play with it. Don’t be so damn timid and obeisant and compliant. Talk back.

Refuse.

Say no.

The world won’t stop. And don’t be afraid to walk away. Two years of wasted hours is more than enough.

(Doodle of palm tree and sunrays through clouds over rippling water.) (Flower and vine border)

If I were free and could be at home, how would I spend my time?

Mountain Week.
Beach Week.
Move ‘em Out Week.
Dance in Underwear Week.
Wear Pajamas All Week Week.
Eat Only Ice Cream Week.
Sleep Late Week.
Walk at Dawn Week.
Sunbathe Naked on the Roof Week.
Sew Two New Outfits Week.
Crank Calls Week (with Caller ID disabled)
Use “Basically” and “Utilize” in Every Sentence Week.
Opposite Week.
British Accent Week.
Drunk By Noon Week.
Curse Like a Sailor Week.
Be Ten Minutes Late Week.
Show Up a Day Early Week.
Don’t Answer the Phone Week.
Sing Instead of Talk Week.
Embarrass Teenagers Week.
Disrupt Dull Meetings Week.

That’s almost six months of wacky self-indulgence. My creative juices would certainly be flowing enough at that point to think up another six months’ worth.

God is pitying us. We’ve made up silly outfits and gathered in rooms where no woman present has hair in her natural color, all so we can feel obliged to suffer through these interminable and ultimately meaningless meetings.

Our lives include hours, even YEARS, of doing things we don’t want to do and think we have no choice but to endure.

And all of that (except the hair—this mousy, gray streaked, once-blonde is my own, thank you) is absolutely true about me, even when I think I know better, because I’m as cowed by others’ expectations as anyone else.

Why do I think that I have to keep doing these things I hate doing?
Why do I still make my decisions based on fear?

Nine years is the limit for my last two addresses. January 2009 will be 9 years at the current address. What is about to happen to help me move on?

Meetings like the ones in the last few weeks—and all through the last few years—are huge flashing signs from the Universe that are telling me that I am not aligned with my purpose and that I’m not where I belong.

Being categorized as an INFP could become my explanation and excuse for all sorts of rebellious behavior. I could stand up in this meeting right now and say, “GOT IT! THE POINT WAS MADE 45 MINUTES AGO. THE HORSE COULD NOT BE MORE DEAD.”

(Doodle of ragdoll splayed on floor with x’s for eyes and a swirl of stars and asterisks and “at” signs over her head. Other rag dolls in suits are standing over her with hands on hips trying to figure out what’s wrong. Star border.)