We interrupt the blogging here at Pugs and Pics to let you know that we are are taking the evening off for the Oscars! Please tune back in tomorrow when we will resume our regularly scheduled posts.
Catherine and Waffles
My niece Catherine and Waffles. Catherine loves dogs. She has a boxer named Sophie at home, but would like a little dog as well. She is saving her money for a Maltese.
Scrabble
Scrabble with the family tonight. The team of my nephew Christian and my niece Catherine won.
Self-Portrait #12: Memoir
I spent today writing. It is a piece for The Hubbard Hall Writers’ Project, a piece of memoir that I may never share with anyone because it is not polished, it is not linear. It may not make sense to anyone but me. It is intensely personal and probably necessary. It is stuff that needs to be put down and sorted through to move on. In many ways it is background material for all that comes next.
It reminds me of my self-portrait projects. For each of us there is a past and a present. The people we were and the people we have become. In my writing, there is the story I have been telling myself and the story I want to tell now. Like these pictures in many ways they are the same and in many ways they are different.
The pictures can’t tell the whole story, there is a wealth of life between the childhood photo and the adult photo and any written account still has such gaps. There are things I want to share and things I don’t, things that are mine to tell and things that belong to others. I would not be who I am today if it were not for all these things, and so I write down what I can and I stare at the words like I stare at my photos and try to understand who I am and how I got here.
That’s what memoir is I guess, whether it manifests itself in words or in pictures. I begin each semester of my Memoir class asking my student “What memoir is and why would anyone like to write one?” But, I’m not sure I have ever tried to answer that question for myself. I have one student who has taken my class eight times and each time she answers this question it evolves. If I were to answer it today I would say a memoir is our search for meaning, the best possible explanation we can give at the moment. It tries to connect the dots and create a story. It tries to understand how the bald headed toddler smelling the roses became the woman doing the same.
Writing Prompt: 1. What is a memoir and why would anyone want to write one? 2. Write about a time you got from here to there. What happened?
Elden Murray Competition
Headed off to Howe Library in Hanover, NH tomorrow to deliver three of my photographs to the Elden Murray Competition. I was fortunate last year to win a couple of ribbons for the entries below. Always enjoy participating and seeing all the great photographs the Upper Valley has to offer.
Filling the holes
Tonight we celebrated Christmas at my house. I finally gave my friend, Joan, my pugs Vader and Waffles’ breeder, the two scrapbooks of photographs and blog entries that I had compiled for her.
She greeted them with the glee of a child. Her face lit up and her blue eyes twinkled in the same way that my five-year-old niece Tori’s does when presented with a surprise. I love this about Joan, a childlike glee, that despite her age, lights up her face and the world around her when she is excited by an animal, a gift, a delightful piece of news. She squeals and blushes and those around her find themselves swept up in her exuberance.
Yet, as excited as she was, she approached each volume with reverence. The cover of the first featured a picture of Vader and her, one of the first I had ever taken; the second, one of the last. She turned the pages of each as if they were the Old and New Testaments. She could only glance through their pages – each binder is four-inches thick, comprised of all the blog entries I had written last year pertaining to Joan and the pugs as well as all the photographs I had taken of Pugdom and the events we had attended together. She scanned the quotations I included, noted a few pics of the dogs, complained about a few of her and expressed her pleasure at the hours of viewing ahead.
Earlier, when we were out to dinner, Joan confessed how difficult life still is now 15 years after her husband Charlie’s death. “Sometimes I have to force myself to get out and do things,” she said.
Life creates its share of wounds, leaves holes in all of us. Joan, I think, fills hers, in part, with her pugs, filling her life, literally, with fulfilling their needs. Sharing this with her, I fill some of my own holes. I look at her childlike wonder and her joy and I see the love I poured into those scrapbooks. The feelings reflect back to me. The loneliness each of us feels, she for the husband she lost, me for the family I have yet to establish, dissipates. We find in our friendship with each other and the animals that we love, a salve.
Gary's Barn
When I was a little girl, my Uncle would bring his friends home from the Coast Guard Academy to my grandparents’ schoolhouse. One such friend was Gary. Gary adopted my grandparents’ as his own parents and they accepted him as a son. He eventually purchased a farm above the schoolhouse. He has rented it out over the years and while there were chickens, sheep, and goats there for a while, in recent years the barn has stood empty and is in a state of decay.
As a child, the barn was filled with my grandfather’s antiques. I would love to go there and look around. My grandfather used to collect glass telephone insulators – a beautiful teal green in color. We would often go antiquing on the weekends and he would bring objects back to the barn. He also stored a number of cardboard cones there and he would help me fashion dolls out of them. I haven’t been inside the barn in years, but it no longer looks safe. The roof is caving in, but it still projects a certain beauty, like an aging model whose skin may sag, but who never loses that great bone structure. Only, that’s not quite true, the structure of this building is giving in, giving up, and eventually it will probably have to come down. I already know some people who were checking it out for the wood, although as far as I know Gary has made no such deal. I will be sad the day it finally happens. We already lost a couple of barns at the farm where my Dad grew up, taken down because they too were falling in and were no longer safe. The hole where they were offers a great view, but it is still a hole, a part of what once was a leaving, breathing entity, now amputated.
Not only are old barns a thing of beauty, but old memories are, too.
Self-Portrait # 11: Uncle Bobby
I am five-years-old. The darkness enfolds me like a warm, comfy blanket. A soft light shines from the other room. I am tucked in my cot next to my parents’ double bed in the barn wood room of my grandparent’s schoolhouse.
“Put the kids to bed and we’ll bring out the ice cream,” my Uncle Bobby jokes, but he comes in to rub my feet before I fall asleep. It is something I remember in the years to come, first, when he is my boss at his granite company and later, when our families go through a falling out. Things are better now, but in the dark times, I remembered moments like this, when he was just my uncle and I was a little kid. The thing about special memories like this is that they can be a glue and a bridge to hold relationships together and to help cross a gulf until things are okay again.
I love my uncle.
I’m not sure where this picture of us was taken, but we spent a lot of time together when I was little. He was in the Coast Guard Academy and he would bring home friends to my grandparents’ schoolhouse. My parents and my brother and I would travel down to camp out with them for the weekend.
When I was older and my uncle married, his wife Lynn pierced my ears with a needle and some ice. She taught me how to make Christmas ornaments out of walnuts and cotton balls so they looked like little mice. She taught me the words and hand signals to a song we’d sign around the campfire “His Banner over Me is Love.”
When Bobby and Lynn had children, they would come down to our house and swim in the pool and we would eat big family meals around my grandmother’s large dining room table at the schoolhouse.
I don’t remember this photo, but it is a rare shot of us together, but I have memories to fill the gap.
I didn’t have time to take a new photo with my uncle for this project, although he only lives 30 miles away. I see him often when I visit my 92-year-old grandmother, who now lives with him, and when they travel down this way to visit us. We even go out to eat together at Cockadoodle Pizza Café, our local haunt. Instead, I chose to recreate the setting and the substance of the photo, but this time with my constant companion Alfie. I love how she studies me in this photo. This is her natural stance.
Growing up, neither side of our family was particularly a dog lover. My uncle got his first dog, a black lab named Daisy about the same time I got my first pug Vader. They both died within weeks of each other. When my Uncle Bobby interacted with Daisy, I saw a side of him that was more playful, less serious. He would get down on the floor and rub her belly. My grandmother said he cried when Daisy died.
Dogs bring out the best in people. They are a catalyst for creating warm memories. In the summer, I now often bring my pugs to my uncle’s pool. He always surprises me with his warmth towards them. They seem to make him smile. His genuine affection towards these creatures and our mutual appreciation of them are another bridge and a glue that binds us. I cross it and know love.
Problems
I'm not sure if this post will do any good as many of you are reporting having difficulty viewing my last couple of blog entries while others of you are having no difficulty at all. If this message does manage to make it out into the world, I wanted to let you know that I have made my web people aware of the issue and we hope to rectify it soon. I will continue to post and hope that they will be accessible to all of you shortly. Thank you for following and checking back in.
Writing Prompt & Self-Portrait #10: Laid Bare
My self-portrait project raised some issues for me when it comes to body image, but being judgmental of my body is not the only way to be hard on myself. I was reminded of that today.
It was one of those cliché-ridden days. The kind where I woke up on the wrong side of the bed and never should have gotten out of it. But I did and by afternoon had already missed an important interview for work because I had the wrong day. Tonight I had another appointment and was then supposed to head off to my photography class, but when my appointment ran long I realized I would be getting to class very late. I could choose to still go and miss a substantial amount of class, which could be disruptive, or call up and cancel. I chose the latter, but felt guilty about it. First, of all I really respect the teacher, who has become a friend, and second, I had actually worked hard on the assignment this week – taking the photos on color and light that I posted yesterday. I worried that I made the wrong choice and then I worried some more.
How could I have missed the appointment earlier in the day? Was I forgetting things because I was overworked, overbooked? Was I wrong to have taken the photography class in the first place? Was there any way I could have left the appointment earlier and not have been late for class? Should I still have shown up?
Everyone, I’m sure, beats themselves up once in awhile, but I don’t seem to know when to call it a day. By the time I was done questioning myself I couldn’t tell what I really wanted in the first place – to be at class or to go home guilt free? What’s wrong with me? I asked again and suddenly mid-thought, I realized: No one’s upset here except you; no one else is holding you accountable. This is Kim on Kim and you are a hard taskmaster. Your appointment ran overtime, you chose not to show up late, you let the instructor know. It’s over, move on. Let yourself off the hook.
I was scared. When things were laid bare and I could see the monster, I discovered it was me. A sobering thought with a happy flip side: just like I learned that I can be more forgiving of my body, I can also be more forgiving of other aspects of myself. I have been judge, juror and jailor to a woman trying very hard just to be free. Perhaps now I can be liberator instead.
About the photos: I wasn't sure how to handle these photos. The child photo shows me in the tub and as I have already mentioned, I've never been too happy about sharing that type of photo. It also was pretty revealing, so I didn't feel comfortable showing it in its original form. It seemed like such a childhood shot required something similar as an adult, but I wasn't comfortable with a real nude. Instead I set up the camera and took this adult shot, which shows a little skin, but nothing too risque. I'm still uncomfortable, however, with seeing myself in such a sensual way, and chose once again not to share it on Facebook. I used some filters to change the photos to black-and-white and mask some of the more delicate elements. I was going to use these two shots to write more about sensuality and the body, but after today I realized there is more than one way to be laid bare, more than one truth to be discovered in these photos.
The adult shot not only suggests sensuality, but vulnerability. I think many of us consider vulnerability to be a weakness and try to avoid feeling this way. It's dictionary definition means being open to harm. But, vulnerability is also a pure and honest emotion and there is a beauty in it. To look at my reflection in my photos and my actions is to be laid bare and to be made vulnerable. I am trying to find the beauty in what I see and to be kinder to this child and this woman in every way.
Writing Prompt: In what ways are you hard on yourself? How can you be more forgiving?