A Backward Glance

Pheasant Dreams, KSully

Pheasant Dreams

I turned 73 a few weeks ago. I began to write these posts when I realized it was time to look back, to gather my past into myself and maybe most importantly, to clean up my studio - which I call my Playroom. Studio is just too serious. I am a musician, a painter and a writer and I often feel like an imposter in each realm - not for any logical reason other than I know how much I don’t know.

I pictured my kids coming in here and being overwhelmed. What to keep? What to throw out? I remember standing in my mother’s kitchen with my sister Geddy, holding up beautiful little embroidered napkins which my mother must have put out lovingly when she hosted the bridge ladies. My mother had worked very hard to clear out her house, to deal with all the things she had accumulated over a lifetime of six kids. The attic was empty. And yet, there was plenty left. A dumpster sat in the driveway as we all shuffled around, trying to figure out what to do with each drawerful.

Want this knife-sharpener? We could all picture mother using it. How about this little glass mustard dish with the glass spoon? I ended up with that. I loved it, and was so upset when I broke the glass spoon. Oh, the things we collect along the way!

And so, I look back at my own trail of treasures. Treasures to me. Puzzles to solve for my kids.

I have drawers and drawers of artwork, paintings which I haven’t sold, or didn’t have the heart to part with. I have newspaper articles about various pursuits, videos of performances, recordings and now published written work.

I am not a spreadsheet kind of kid. I decided long ago that energy spent on sales was energy lost on creation. Perhaps I was wrong, although for me, I think not. But the time has come to take stock. I thought it was a bit early to begin this process, but now that I’m deep in it and totally overwhelmed, I know that it was time.

I am up to my eyeballs in the slow process of taking photographs of artwork, measuring, cataloguing. I signed up with a fancy-dancy outfit that markets artwork- Art Storefronts. For a sneak peek of what I’m working on, go to shop.sullyarts.com. It’s definitely a work in progress!

I am trying to organize (and remember!) all the music I’ve written. Everything is deep in the bowels of my computer. I used to know where it all was, but then the computer bit the dust. Supposedly it’s all in the new computer, or has the computer guy told me, “It’s all in The Time Machine.” I’ve tried going into The Time Machine a few times. It felt more like The Twilight Zone.

And of course, the thought creeps in…who cares? My mother had an Edith Wharton quote on her refrigerator for many years. I have always loved it.

We now have more funerals in our family than weddings. No doubt, old age has its share of sadness, but the sadness is offset by a rich storehouse of memory and love. And hopefully, we have the grace to embrace the wisdom we have acquired over long lives. We appreciate things we rushed past in earlier days - a beautiful tree, a happy child, the sound of a bird. We are surrounded by miracles.

And so, I collect the past and look forward to future miracles!

I wrote this imaginary letter to my sister Geddy several years ago. She is now one of the angels who watches over us all.

THERE BUT FOR THE GRACE OF GOD, reprinted from Writers.com

The phone rings and you don’t know if it’s the phone or the new, beeping pill dispenser your husband bought so he could leave you alone in the house for longer stretches of time.  Before that, you were in charge of knowing which gaily colored pill was which and when to take the Rasagiline, or the Levodopa, the Azilect, the Sinemet or the anti-depressant, hoping the color-coded remedies might stop the slow and steady march of Parkinson’s Disease.

From the outside, I am helpless. I don’t know how you keep it all straight.  If only yours was the variation of Parkinson’s that only affects coordination and calms the tremors. That would have been a gift compared with what you got — a version that causes a relentless creep of dementia, like the hot lava flow that devours entire villages in the horror movies. You are slowly losing your mind, clinging to your grip on the day-to-day, but mostly reverting to what has come before in your life, grasping at memories of our growing-up years like they were yesterday, imagining that the eight of us are all crowded into the old Pontiac ‘woody’ station wagon to go to the drive-in, or that our youngest brother Michael is still alive, or that we still live in the old house on Thackeray Road, or that Mother and Dad are in the next room. They are not. But there are others too, you tell me. There’s a baby sleeping in a crib, who needs its diapers changed. There’s a little boy standing in your driveway, or a bunch of teenagers goofing off in the backyard.  You are constantly seeing the babies and children you were never able to have — the only one of the six of us who was unable to conceive – a particularly tough dose in a baby-centric family.  But the truth is, because of that, you were able to dote on all the children precisely because you were not preoccupied with your own.  You so enjoyed the role of the favorite auntie. Everyone looked forward to your Christmas brunch.  The invitation was for kids only.  None of us parents were allowed. Every year you would pick a theme and buy a special party favor for each child.  It was the event of the year.  The oldest of ‘the kids’ are now in their mid-fifties, but they’ve never forgotten The Brunch.

More and more, our phone calls have become strange and confusing.  You were a Latin teacher, a grammarian, a meticulous explainer of the ablative absolute or the anomalies of fifth declension or the use of the vocative case.  After many years of teaching, you went into real estate sales, where you were consumed by a business of money and appearances, growing a customer base, showing houses at a moment’s notice, even if it meant getting up from the middle of a dinner party.  And you were good at it!  You dressed as though your life depended on it, which it did.

So now, your telephone chat has become a strange invention of half-sentences and invented words — all with the correct, assured tone of voice of the salesman and the etymological know-how of the Latin teacher. It would be….grubble stang and so forth…so interesting, for instance…if the house weren’t…sub rosa…it’s only two doors down, but it’s the same…conglomeration…

And why should we be surprised when, before you can go out for a little walk, you decide to line up all your jewelry on your bed, to take inventory, to consider which pair of large sterling silver earrings you might choose to match the wilted black fleece sweatsuit you now wear every day, while the bright quilted jackets, elegant slips of silk blouses and tasteful black slacks lie fallow in your closet.

And the pills keep changing, this one combatting the decline of motor function, that one batting back dementia, a Hobson’s choice between two distasteful outcomes, as you sail haltingly between the Scylla and Charybdis of a turbulent disease.  Funny, that on any given day, you still might remember those two treacherous cliffs described in Virgil’s Aeneid, a treasure shared by several of us in our classics-crazy household!

You were always the fancy one in the family.  I envied your pink flowery canopy bed and the delicate white secretary desk in the corner, where you wrote neatly in little notebooks, in a handwriting that was so elegant people would ask you to do their wedding invitations.  I was only four years younger than you and was probably in line for the canopy and the desk, but the world seemed to shift in those four years — from stockings, silk dresses and patent leather pocketbooks to torn jeans and bandanas.

Your stories and concerns are often filled now with paranoia and apprehensions, suspicions or fears of criticism. I try to untangle what is disease and what is part of your DNA, from our family that seemed full of laughter, happiness and success, but which also hid a raw underbelly of competition, fear of failure and thin skin.

You are the canary-in-the-coal mine of the family now, laying bare all of our inner faults — the limitations and neuroses that the rest of us are still capable of disguising with the quick two-step of Irish wit.

And so, my friends, all of us, whatever age, let’s live this beautiful life to its richest and fullest possibilities! Let’s make all kinds of wonderful hay while the sun shines and when it doesn’t shine, let’s also remember to muck out the barn.