A Live Van Gogh

I'm at an age where I have more aches and pains than ever. I've also noticed I feel them less when I'm happy.
And the pain isn't all age-related. I was diagnosed with juvenile arthritis at age 10, and my rheumatologist told my parents that while my prognosis might be good, I also might wind up using a wheelchair more than my legs. 

Flash forward a few decades, and I'm in good shape considering. Still, my knees tend to ache and my back can get testy, so I'm focused on losing weight to take unnecessary strain off them. 

One weekend, I took my kids to Northern Michigan and we spent a day on Mackinac Island. I'm a native Michigander, and Mackinac Island is my restoration place. Cars are not allowed there unless you're a police officer or emergency responder, and horses, carriages, bikes and feet are the only means of transportation for regular folk. I was struck by how joyful I felt and by how gratifying it was to reintroduce my kids to a place they hadn't been since they were barely more than toddlers. 

We walked everywhere that weekend - up and down streets, up and down hills, and up and down long stretches of beach. That's when it dawned on me: I wasn't in much pain. 

Could it be that my mood was overriding my pain? The only place I drew the line was in climbing Castle Rock in St. Ignace, Michigan. I don't know that it was as much a pain issue as it was stamina, since Castle Rock is almost 200 feet high. My son did it though, and I vowed to him that in 2021, we'll climb it together. 

But I'm meandering, as one does in Northern Michigan. 

I was thinking that if I were awarded an all expense paid trip to Paris, and it rained for most of the trip, I'd probably still be thrilled just to be there. I'd be thinking how picturesque Paris is with its streets all shiny and wet and how fascinating Parisians are to watch, darting in and out of shops and clutching their umbrellas. Of course the Parisians, there all the time, would be all down in the mouth because it's raining. Maybe they'd be wishing they were in Miami Beach. 

So if Parisians can get bummed when they live someplace fabulous, maybe the rest of us can
be expected to when we live someplace mundane - mundane to us anyway. Could it be as simple as choosing to find what we need from our surroundings, and, by extension, our lives? 

Van Gogh painted pastures and stars and flowers and life until the day he suddenly didn’t. While he lived, he breathed color into his lungs and exhaled it onto canvass. He gazed at starry skies and walked through fields as yellow as the sun.

I choose to be a live Van Gogh every day I possibly can. 

Stand Still, Bright Eyes - Preserving Memories in Victorian Times

On a crisp October Saturday in Michigan, the kind where thousands of Michiganders wash down hundreds of donuts with gallons upon gallons of apple cider, I stood with my daughter Sydney and my longtime friend Tina on the porch of a Victorian mansion. 

The home had been meticulously restored and opened to the public. Tina suggested we go there after reading that it had been decorated for Halloween. We rang the doorbell and were greeted by a gracious docent who began showing us through the home as she recounted its history. 

The photo shown us by the docent.

The decorations were modest, but charming, giving them an appeal anything more opulent might have lacked. Tiny orange lights wound around the banister in the main hall, and mannequins, wearing harlequin masks and vintage formalwear, appeared to be the ghostly guests at a soiree.  

The docent pointed out a framed photo of three people. I surmised it to be a daughter flanked by her parents. Her posture and facial expression struck me as a little apathetic until the docent said the girl may well have been dead. There were other similar photos around the room of what the docent explained were deceased Victorians, many propped up and seated with loved ones. I struggled to grasp why the Victorians would do this, then heard myself blurting out the words, "Why would the Victorians do this?" Shockingly, it was my daughter who replied.

"It's called Victorian-era postmortem photography," she explained. "Back then, photography was new, and people couldn't always afford to have pictures taken unless there was a good reason. Because the exposure time needed to take a photograph was so long, people looked blurry if someone took their picture walking in the park or something. Even if they moved just a little, they could look blurry. That's why so many of the photos from that period were portraits. And if someone died, a postmortem photo might be a family's only picture of them."

I peered into my daughter's serious brown eyes, searching for something that until that moment I never dreamed might be in there - the possessing spirit of a long-dead Victorian historian. 

“What she said,” grinned the docent. I nodded, dumbfounded, to the woman before returning my attention to Sydney and noticed for the first time, her striking resemblance to Wednesday Addams. 

"You're 19 - how did you know all that?" I asked.

She shrugged, and the braids I was suddenly imagining bounced a bit. 

"I read."  

I needed to get my mind off this new view of my daughter and onto something less unnerving - like propped-up dead Victorians. It wasn't photographing deceased family members - a common practice that continues to this day - that threw me. It was that I couldn't stop thinking about Weekend at Bernie's. But Syd's explanation made perfect sense. Victorians held a unique position in time, when photography was emerging and slowly becoming accessible to everyday people. Suddenly, I saw my reaction for what it was: flippant, judgmental, and based on ignorance.   

Later, I did some googling and found more photos said to be of deceased Victorians. These I found disturbing because the subjects were standing. Then I found a Wikipedia entry that read ". . . it is untrue that metal stands and other devices were used to pose the dead as though they were living." It said that photographers used armrests and devices sometimes called "Brady stands" to steady their living subjects, thus preventing the blurring Sydney had explained. According to Wikipedia, evidence of such a stand meant the subject was a living person. I was so happy to read that Wikipedia entry after seeing ...

If you're thinking about doing your own research on Victorian-era postmortem photography, be warned - it can be unsettling. It can also haunt you in more ways than one when cheerful teasers from Instagram pop up saying it's found more postmortem photography you might like. 

One of my eagle-eyed readers, Mari Collier, commented that the photo of the couple and baby is not of the Victorian era, noting the woman's dress and what appears to be a flash of knee. I'm leaving it here to prove some points. In addition to labeling the photo as Victorian, the caption beneath it said the baby's open eyes were painted on. Postmortem Victorian photography did sometimes have eyes drawn or painted onto prints or negatives. For argument's sake, let's say the photo was Victorian. Isn't it more likely that this was a living baby who had never seen a camera before and that the flash surprised him? 

For generations, parents have secretly harbored feelings of disappointment caused by pictures of their kids - case in point: the school photos my parents paid for year after year.

Victorian parents were simply the first to have that problem. 

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Michigan's Really Cold

I don't know where you are right now, but I'm in Michigan. And I don't know when you're reading this, but I'm writing this in January on yet another day when the temperature failed to reach 20 degrees. 

It's been this way for days. One day last week was so bitterly cold that as I was crossing a parking lot on foot, I couldn't stop sputtering the F-word over and over into my winter scarf followed by the word me.   

It was the kind of day where even snowmen throw their branch arms into the sky and scream, but we can't hear them under our ear-muffs. 

The parking lot was large and there was no one around and it hit me that if I fell, I could be one stiff mitten before anyone found me - a sorry metaphor for the state in which I lived and now had died.  

As to me swearing my way across that parking lot, I'm not proud of that; I like to think I can "use my words" better than that. However, on that particular day there didn't seem to be any way around it. Spewing "F me" all the way across that empty lot felt like the only way to propel myself fast enough to out-shuffle Death should he happen to be after me, which it seemed he was. But here's the good thing: it was so cold that if Death was stupid enough to get out on a day like that, he would be shuffling too, so I felt relatively safe provided I didn't fall. 

This morning I woke up and checked my Facebook feed. In it was a post from my friend Pat, who lives in Australia. It read: "Today it reached a high of 95. We have a beautiful breeze that comes in through our front windows. No need for the air conditioner."

I wished for a plague of kangaroos to stomp all over her Bloomin' Onions or whatever it is that grows in Australian gardens in the summertime. 

I grew up in Michigan; I knew what I was in for when I moved back here from Maryland a few years ago. Still, shortly before my return, I had a nightmare about Michigan in the winter, one where I was trapped outside surrounded by nothing but frozen tundra - assuming there's any other kind - and asking myself over and over, 'Why am I here?' It was a rhetorical question obviously but it does have three good answers: Michigan in the spring, Michigan in the summer and Michigan in the fall. To get to them, you've got to get through Michigan in the winter. 

So, despite all my cursing, I am at peace knowing that spring will arrive in roughly 70 days, four hours and 27 minutes. And that it will take at least half that amount of time to thaw me out again. 

Sweet Nothings

Sometimes in marriage it’s all about timing. Take for instance, Melrose and Ed. 

This was the early sixties and Ed worked for one of Southern Michigan’s General Motors assembly plants. He was that era's quintessential “regular Joe." He went to work in clean but faded coveralls and carried a big, black, barn-shaped lunchbox. 

And like a lot of men back then, Ed just might have been a wee bit chauvinistic.

But whatever Ed’s attitudes towards women, they did not include the conviction that after work his place was with his wife. His place, Ed felt, was with his fellow assembly workers at a neighborhood drinking establishment; the cinder-block construction, neon light illumination kind of drinking establishment.

Meanwhile, Ed’s wife, Melrose was the regular wife of the regular Joe. She stayed at home even though the kids were well out of the nest, claiming she was focused on homemaking. And she maybe wasn’t quite as on top of her appearance as when she and Ed first met. 

Melrose might also have had a tendency to meet her husband at the door (on the rare occasions he came straight home) in curlers and a house dress, the bunions on her feet peeking at Ed through threadbare slippers.

So there's a chance that each of them had reason to feel a bit resentful of the other.

One night, Ed was out at the bar knocking back a few while Melrose lay in bed dreaming of Ed’s early demise, so bitter was she over his nocturnal fellowship habits. When Ed came stumbling through the back door, Melrose didn’t hear him. 

This, of course, was before the days of cell phones when a third party could pick up the phone and either join the other two parties or just listen in, provided said person's phone was in the same residence as at least one of the others. 

When the phone rang, it startled them both, Ed in the kitchen and Melrose in the bedroom. They picked up within milliseconds of one another, Melrose assuming it was Ed and Ed with no clue who it was.

They said hello in unison before Melrose yelled: “Where the hell have you been? Do you know what time it is?”

“Hell, yes, I know what time it is!” Ed yelled back. He consulted his watch but it kept swimming around in front of his face. “By the way, what time is it?”

“It’s time your drunken carcass was here where it belongs! Why the hell aren’t you home?”

“What the hell do you mean, why the hell aren’t I home? I am home and damned if it isn’t hell!”

“Well, if you’re home, get your ass in bed!”

“My ass is in bed! It’s name is Melrose!”

“Aw, go to hell!”

“No! You go to hell!”

Ed and Melrose slammed down their receivers.

A few seconds later, Ed’s boss hung up, too.