I have decided however that I am less comfortable sharing enormous amount of detail here. I have received a lot of encouragement, wisdom and support from visitors to the site,  but I feel that these enormous passages in our lives should be expressed somehow differently, with more care and perspective. So, while I continue to write and draw about these days in my journal, I will be much more selective in how I share them, here and elsewhere. Instead, I shall use dannygregory.com as a place to express myself as I always have, about matters creative and artistic, rather than as deeply personal as the posts I put up in the early summer. I promise to share a lot of this material with you in the future — just in a different shape and form.

I don’t regret that public airing of my private feelings, but I no longer have the same need to do so. I’m sure you understand.

Also, after being plagued by malware and paying a consultant to repeatedly exterminate the vermin in my site, I have decided to radically redesign dannygregory,com. I will launch the new site soon and on it I will share a lot of material from my sketchbooks which I  hope you will find useful.

If you have visited this page over the years, you are probably quite used to my occasional bouts of ambivalence about leading a public life and know that inevitably I shall prance back onto center stage, neuroses in full display and reveal more than a sane person probably should about my experience of the world.

Until then, I remain small and timidly yours,

Danny

—–

Oh, one more thing  —  Seth Apter has just published an interview with me in which I explain, for the first time, the real origins of Everyday Matters. You might find it interesting.

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My sketchbooks have been becoming simpler and more austere over the years. I started just drawing in ink, then added color, then watercolors and then slowly turned back until all I have been using is a dip pen and black india ink.

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Occasionally I’d get wild and add a little watered down sum-i ink. But mainly I relied on cross hatching and the varying line widths of my flexible steel nib.

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On the rarest of occasions, I would add a color,  a single solid  wash over my line, an earth tone or maybe two for the sake of variety. My work was increasingly about limitations and technique, playing with the simplest of notes and digging deep into  lots of combinations.

But in the past few months since Patti’s accident, I have gone hog-wild in an explosion of the brightest colors I could find. I cover each page with magentas and fuschias and sap green and cadmium yellow.

I even treated myself to the complete collection of Dr. PH Martin’s liquid watercolors, 56 explosive tones that even my camera cannot do justice to. These are fragile colors, they can’t be exposed to sunlight, but perfect to lurk within the pages of a sketchbook and then leap out at the reader when the page is turned.

It’s funny, this penchant I now have for the rainbow. Mourning is supposed to be conducted in shades of black and gray. But one of my love’s many nicknames was ‘Patti Pink‘ and she adored bright colors. Her memory has infected me and I want to commemorate it in the brightest colors I can find. My book is a feast of sizzling hues and she would have liked it that way.

I didn’t even know I had a great aunt Greta (twice removed). But I was happy to take the call from her lawyer, the executor of her estate. Now I am the lucky owner of a 5,000 square foot studio loft not far from our home.
It is a quiet space but when I open the floor to ceiling French doors, the birds’ twittering can be heard from Central Park below. The ceilings are high, about 18 feet and, but for a few graceful, sculpted columns, the space is open and expansive with freshly painted white walls and well varnished, wide plank floors. The most notable feature is the enormous skylight overhead that floods the room with sunshine on even the gloomiest days.
Greta, who apparently enjoyed my drawings when I was six, also left me an open ended, unrestricted trust fund for art supplies and furniture, so I have been busily organizing and shopping for the past few days.
First, I had my friend Dean help me plan out the space. We covered the eastern wall with cork for pinning up drawings and things torn out of books and magazines. Next to it, we erected twelve foot high bookshelves with one of those sliding ladders. In the corner by the door, I have a seating area with a Mies leather couch (for afternoon naps) and three Eames chairs and walnut stools. There’s a large kitchen and we just had to have some of the counters redone (I love to draw at the kitchen table) and a new fridge with an ice maker installed.
There’s another wall for storage with oak flat files and cabinets for storing supplies. I have two different drawing tables, one of which is a BF23 from Italy and can be angled, and raised with a foot pedal. I have a wooden print rack and several taborets that roll around on the floor and hold pens and stuff. They’re delivering the G5 Mac tomorrow afternoon and the server, which will hold my MP3 collection. Then the guys from Harvey Electronics just need to hook the system up to the Niles Audio AT8700 speakers they installed in all the walls and we’ll have Miles playing in ever corner.

So, off to the store.
Let’s start with watercolors. I want all the colors that Daniel Smith makes, every series, big fat 15 ml. tubes. Then I’m also going to try out a few other brands, so I’ll get all three of the Maimeri sets that Catherine Anderson advertises. I’ve had fun with the Dr Ph Martin’s transparent liquid watercolors I own but I want to move up a notch to their Hydrus colors so I’ll pick up all24 colors they make. I see Schmicke makes powdered metallic watercolors – they could be fun to use in my journal so I’ll take those: rich gold, pale gold, copper, silver and aluminum. Here’s something called Ox gall Liquid; no idea what its for but I like the sound of it. In the basket.
Next, I want the best brushes money can buy. Really great watercolor brushes always spring back to a natural, razor sharp point and I think male Kolinsky red sable is considered the best (they’re made from the tips of animal tails which is mildly disturbing but maybe they just trim off the tip and it grows back like a lizard’s. In any case, I’ll ask the lawyer if the trust fund can make a contribution to PETA or something). Here’s a #14 brush for $311.95. I’ll take three. It’s by Isabey and they’re nickel plated. But the #14 is pretty chunky; for safety’s sake, I should get the whole line, 00 though 12. And, for fooling around with, maybe those Squirrel quills. And a 2″ squirrel wash or two. Oh and some fun brushes: a few of those filberts and fans, a set of lettering brushes and those weird angled tear drop brushes.
I’ll need some good new palettes, the big English glazed porcelain ones. Grab half a dozen. That watercolor bucket looks interesting – it has water basins and palettes inside it and there are holes in the hadles to keep brushes upright. Oh, and this Rinse-Well thing is cool. You fill the big bottle with water, it fills a basin with clean water and when it’s dirty, you press a button and it flushes it into a hidden reservoir. Cute and just $30. I need three. Might as well get this Sta-Wet palette with the lid that seals the paint like Tupperware. It seems a bit fiddly and I can always just get fresh paint but, oh, what the hell… in the basket.
Watercolor canvas? Apparently it has a special coating that takes the watercolor, you can lift off mistakes or even wash the whole image off the surface and start again. It doesn’t rip or shred and comes in huge rolls so you could do paintings that are 4 and half feet by 18 feet! Wow.
I also need loads of Fabriano Artistico watercolor paper. I want to try the hot press too and both 140 and 300 lbs. I love the Canon Montval Field books for journaling but also want to try out these Michael Rogers books with 140 lb. cold press acid free paper. Take a half dozen of each. This Nujabi journal looks good too: 25 130 lb. deckled pages in a Royal blue cover. In the basket. Lots of empty pans and half pans and an enameled steel box to hold them. Some nickeled brass palette cups. Check. One of these steel tube wringers that squeeze out paint. Check. A few dozen empty jars and squeeze bottles. Check.
I’ve never used a Mahl stick to rest my hand on while painting. It’s very Rembrandt looking. In the basket. And a thing called an Artist Leaning bridge, a transparent shelf that sits right on top of your page so your grubby paws don’t get on the work.
Here’s a very cute and must have item, the art traveler, a combination back pack and stool, with aluminum legs and lots of pockets and padded straps.
I like these huge art bins with the casters on them, full of individual boxes that neatly stack. Even a pocket for my wireless phone. Do they have to be such an ugly shade of purple?
I’m getting a huge paper cutter for bookbinding. I am used to the arm cutters (which could live up to their name an sever a limb) but am intrigued by the Rotatrim that rolls the blade along a bar. They have a massive 54″ one here that’s a bargain at just a little over a grand.
I need pencils: These Faber-Castell Polychromos come in a box of 120 colors and , for some reason, a CD-ROM. I like the idea of pencils so sophisticated you need to use a computer to work them. I’ll take the matching Albrecht Durer Watercolor Pencils too. In a wooden box, just $300 a piece. I’ll also need an electric eraser, just in case I ever make a mistake. These triangular TrioColor pencils looks interesting. Oooh, and these color pencil easels that organize everything in rows behind elastic straps and Velcro closures. Very nice.
I want to try some new media too: Encaustic crayons that you apply with a special electric iron. British scraper board for beautiful cross hatched drawings tat look like engravings. I’ll take some in black and some in white. And foil too. Oh and a set of cutters and scrapers you need to work on them.
No pastels. I never like drawing with them and I never like the look of pastel drawings. Except for Degas. And Lautrec.
Some gold leafing. I’ve used cheap stuff and it’s very dramatic but I’m going for the real stuff this time, 22k Double Gold and Pure Palladium too. The perfect way to class up a humble line drawing.
I’m going to have to order some clay for sculpting but I might as well pick up the armature set, the metal mesh and the riffler tools for shaping. This rotating sculpture stand is cool. It goes up and down and has a little adjustable shelf for tools. And this clay gun extrudes different shapes of clay, like a grown up play do maker, only in steel. Ultimately I want to get a welding setup and a kiln but this’ll do for now.
I love pure pigments, no idea what to do with them, but I want a few jars of them sitting around: Sennelier sells a nice starter set for just $1250 in a handsome wooden box.
I want some gouache to try out for the first time. This Lukas brand looks sort of interesting but I think Roz urged me to get Schminke. Better ingredients, less chalky and dull.
Now that I have all this space, I’m going to do some oil painting. I have painted on canvas before but always hastily, using a dining room chair as an easel and acrylics because they dry fast. I’m intrigued by Williamsburg paints. They’re made here in New York by an artist who based his recipes on research into the paint houses that supplied Monet and Cezanne. I’ll need 150 ml. tubes and the colors go from $25-145 so I should probably get the whole range, looks like about 150 colors. I can’t stand the smell of turpentine and how it gets into everything so I better get some Turpenoid and a citrus based thinner.
Brushes: If in doubt, buy the most expensive. In this case, more Kolinsky Sable. I’m getting a set of flats, of rounds, of filberts and of liners: grand total, a mere $1802.15. Hang on, these color shapers look like fun. They’re silicone brushes which I can use for applying and scraping paint, sort of like more elegant paint knives. But I should get paint knives too. Here’s a set of 60 different ones for $450. Done. Oh and a smock. Here’s a nice black one, cotton, lots of pockets. And though I won’t be getting a beret to go with it, I like this life sized human skeleton made of wood. Beautiful, and look, life sized posable manikins. They have men, women, boys and girls. A lovely family for just about two grand. And a posable giraffe too. Other miscellanea: a reducing glass les for looking at my canvas without having to step back and … duh, an easel, I’ll get two: one for plein air, a french easel that folds up into a little box to strap on my back like Van Gogh did. And then a big one made of oiled oak wood with cranks and shelves and casters. Here’s a nice one, called appropriately, the Manhatttan and it’s just $1707. Greta would approve.
Finally, canvas, double primed cotton duck to start with, and then a roll or two of Belgian linen and loads of stretcher strips and canvas pliers and a really good staple gun. And a few maple panels for painting on too, the really thin kind, satin smooth. Oh, and a Bob Ross video, maybe “More Joy of Painting”.

(This grotesque fantasy of excess was inspired by the arrival of Jerry’s Artarama catalog in our mailbox. In the real world, I ended up buying a bamboo sketch pen, for $1.79).

[Originally published on: Apr 21, 2004 @ 5:59]

Creative people care so very much what others think of them. They ask, “Is it any good?” and then wait not just for what you say but for how you say it. It’s not enough to be effusive in your praise. Were you sincere? Really? And does the fact that you say you like it mean your opinion isn’t worth listening to? Are you Paula Abdul? Or Simon Cowell? Is there a ‘But…” lurking in your praise? If you give constructive advice. is it personal? Are you saying I, as well as my work, suck?
(Sure, there are the rare, apparent exceptions who don’t give a good god-damn what anyone else says, but I suspect that they too are motivated by the perceptions of others — they just hide it better.)
Sometimes, others’ verdicts are integral to what you’re making.
In my business, the success of an idea is entirely decided by what someone else decides it’s worth. Does the client think it’s good? Does the consumer think it’s good? Does my boss like it? Do my peers? Award show judges? Et cetera.
If I was showing my work in a gallery, the dealers’, critics’ and patrons’ opinions would make or break me. If I act in a show, a review could take bread off my table. Some person I’ve never met at the New York Times could devastate my next book.
When I draw in public, a passerby might possibly be sneering, even if just to himself, at my presumption at being ‘an artist’ while scrawling in my sketchbook. If I yank the page out of my book, I must be careful to tear it up so no one piece sit back together and scoffs. I shred the pieces small so no one thinks that I myself don’t know how much it sucks: Sure , I can’t draw, but at least I have the taste and judgment to know it. Or, maybe I’ll leave it in my book but write a long essay next to it about how bad it is, like a reminder and a slap in the head not to do such crap again. If anyone sees it, well, they’ll read my notation and know I know better.
Do you go through this? So did I, until I discovered a little fact, that boils down to this: by and large, no one cares about anyone else but themselves. I don’t mean that we’re all hateful and selfish, just that we’re almost always wrapped up in our own issues and can’t much be bothered with anyone elses’s actions, except as to how they pertain to us.
Doubt me? Prove it to yourself. Start a conversation with anyone and see how long it takes them to steer the conversation back to themselves:

“I love your shirt.
“Thanks. It’s new.
“Really? I can never wear pink.
“I didn’t think I could either…
“But you look great in it. Where’d you get it? Loehman’s?
“No, I …
“I love Loehman’s. When I can find stuff that fits me.
“Huh.
“Yeah, I must have gained ten pounds since Christmas…

Try listening instead of talking and see how long the other person will talk about themselves. Be prepared to wait because virtually anyone, if given the stage, will hold on to it eternally.

“What are you doing?”
“Drawing”
“I can’t draw a straight line. Even as a kid, I never could. You’re great. You must have taken a lot of lesssons.
“No, not really.
“Well, I just have no talent. I used to play the guitar but you know, who has the time. I’m so busy at work since I got that promotion…

Sound familiar? A couple of years ago, I gave a colleague, a ‘creative’ person, a copy of Everyday Matters. A month later, he hadn’t said anything about it so I asked him what he’d thought of it. He said,

“Yeah, it was great. You have that stuff in there about Wales and my father’s from Wales so I thought it was interesting.”
“Wales, really?”
Yeah.”

I waited for more but that was it.Wales. Sigh.

I’m not talking about hard-core self-involved people, mega-bores. I mean everyone, including me (goes without saying, I hope) spends most of their time thinking about themselves or how what others are doing affects them.
Put simply: no one is nearly as interested in what you do as you are. No one is judging it as hard as you, or analysing it, or wondering about it. The only time they really get involved is when your success or failure could effect them. Will looking at your work entertain or divert them for a moment (oh, your drawing sucks, never mind then) If you draw and they don’t are they less than you? WiIl your work make theirs look worse? Will it make them money? Can they use your technique to improve their work? WiIl praising you oblige you to them?
Seriously, what other motives do they have? And are those sufficient reasons for your to be concerned? Are these sorts of opinions what drive your work? Are you making art so others can make money or feel better about their own abilities (or worse)?
Think about it: we all, even Brad Pitt or George Bush, occupy a tiny percentage of any other given person’s interest, That’s why some of us are interested in achieving fame: because it takes all those tiny percentages and multiplies them across millions of people. Eventually that adds up to something.
And because we are all, at best, living in our own self-reflecting bubbles, you should relax and do what you want. Stop caring so much about externals. Make what you like in the way that you do. Sure, maybe you’ll manage to be a blip on someone else’s radar, but that’s not why you bother. Live and make art for the only person that matters or truly cares.

[Originally published  on: Apr 21, 2006 @ 19:17]

[Seth Apter of The Altered Page is conducting a Buried Treasure hunt and encouraged bloggers to resurrect one of their favorite long ago posts. I like this one. I may put up a couple more golden oldies to follow. Then back to the normal sturm and drang of the present.]

Dear H______:
Think less. Draw more.
When you draw a thing, see it just as that. Not a head, not perspective, not crosshatching, just pure observation as if you’ve never seen it before. The more preconceptions you bring to the drawing, the shittier it will be.
Clear your mind, and start drawing what you see. Start anywhere. I tend to start in the upper left hand corner because I am right handed. I move across observing, recording, until I get to the lower left hand corner. Then I am done.
If my subject is sufficiently complex, this will take me a half hour or more. I go as slowly as I can stand to go. But I don’t know how long it is usually; my left-brain has no sense of time.
As I draw, I avoid evaluation. I avoid thinking of the purpose of the drawing. I avoid commenting on what I am drawing, even in the quality of the line. I am empty and the drawing fills me up. Drawing is meditation, not production. Drawing is entirely in the present with no attempt to create context.
Do not think about style. Add shadows as you see them. But better to avoid shadows all together and stay engaged with the contours of things. When you have done that for months, even years, then add shadows and crosshatching (My pal, d.price has been drawing for a dozen years. Only on his trip to New York last week did he decide to start concentrating on the effects of light. He still almost never uses color). For now, none of that is important. What matters is to see deeply and let your hand respond.
And if you start at huge length before you draw, you risk becoming bored, or forming mental notes, theories, ideas about what you are seeing. The reason to let your hand and pen take over is to shut the hell up, silence the internal voice, the endless chattering of the mind, the distractions, the pointless pontificating that insists on meaning for the meaningless. The moment does not need meaning or context. It just is.
Drawing is about reaching for pure being. Not making pretty pictures to put in frames and on websites. The world doesn’t need more pictures. It needs peace and connection. It needs people who can accept reality and don’t feel compelled to control their environments. If you can look at a boot, at a rotting apple, at car’s worn tire, at an old man’s foot, and see it for what it is, without value or judgement, can see the beauty and particularity of the thing, you will find peace. You will avoid being covetous. You will be happy with what you have. You will accept others more readily, will see the sunshine on a cloudy day.
Life is a wonderful business, though fools blow up London tube stations and sell each other crap and waste time with gossip about movie stars. If you can draw, you will always have a place to go that is beautiful and honest and true. As you sit in an airport you will find pleasure in the folds of a crumpled lunch bag. As you bide your time in a doctor’s waiting room, you will find peace in the arrangement of the shadows on the wall. Even without putting ink on paper, you will be able to slip in to Drawing Mind.
The point is not what your lines look like or how accurate your crosshatching might be.
The point is not the drawings on the page or the pages in the book.
The point is not the opinions of others who love/hate/ignore those lines you made on the page.
The point is not the money you make selling your work to galleries or publishers.
The point of practicing your craft is not to rise in the rankings of those who draw. It’s not to have your style dominate (sorry, Dan!).
The point is to more easily gain access to the moment, to the deeper more peaceful recesses of your Self.
The point is to live as well and as fully as you can today, right now, whether your pen is in your hand or not.
The point is to See and to Be.
Your pal,
Danny

[Originally published on: Jul 7, 2005 @ 8:58]

This is a photocopy of a watercolor I just made for our friend, Cynthia. It commemorates the night I introduced her to Patti, four years ago. We went to the Pierre, had too many martinis and, upon leaving, Patti shot out of the bar and spilled (out of her chair) and onto Fifth Avenue! Cynthia was so cool about this debacle that we knew she would be our friend.
I am fairly happy with the uptown, 1950s feeling of the drawing and I hope it’ll look good in her pad.

[Originally published on: Feb 1, 2004 @ 8:56]

Click here to view the embedded video.

It’s the 13th anniversary of Patti’s accident. Jack wrote a lovely essay about how that event has effected him since he was just a baby. Here’s a video of him reading it at his school’s literary festival.

The video is above and here’s the text:

A Challenge for the Whole Family by Jack Tea Gregory
It was June 8th of 1995 when the incident happened. It felt like a normal day, nobody expected anything out of the ordinary. My mother was waiting for the 9 train and she was in a hurry. She was rushing to a demanding photo shoot that was very important to her career. While she was standing near the tracks, peering down the tunnel, her stress and the intense heat caused her to faint. She started to fall just as the train pulled up to the platform and the wind caused from the train whizzing past pulled her into the middle of the track, allowing her to avoid any electrocution. However, she wasn’t safe, the way she fell caused her spinal cord to bend and her back twisted, just before a dangling piece of metal hanging from the train hit her. She was immediately taken to the hospital where they placed an iron rod into her back because her spinal cord had been broken. My mother had been paralyzed from the waist down. She could no longer walk and was forced to sit in a wheelchair. Ever since that day, her life and those surrounding her was instantly affected greatly. Luckily, she was able to get through the therapy and with the support of her family, a new child, and a great sense of humor she was able to push past the injury and escape the pit of despair that many fall into. Many people who are hit by trains come out the tracks in different ways; some are bruised and some are killed. Luckily she didn’t experience the latter, but still life has been a challenge. Our family has also recovered from it and is able to say that they have grown used to it.
Living in New York hasn’t been the easiest, there are a lot of places that don’t have ramps or aren’t accessible. Whenever we find a problem we try and make the best of it. For example, when Mom got her first wheelchair, instead of grimacing about not being able to walk, she would place me on her lap and we’d ride down huge ramps and hills together. The rush between fear of falling and the fun of the wind speeding past our faces created a sense that nothing else in the world existed. My old school had stairs everywhere and she often couldn’t come to school performances or celebrations. I would usually try to take pictures of what was going on so that I could bring her a substitute for not having been there. I would bring her my work if we were celebrating a finished work party.
When my mother would pick me up from school, I would look up from the monkey bars and see all the kids starting to crowd around her. They would ask her questions like, “Do you sleep in a wheelchair?” or “How do you go to the bathroom?” Being the kind woman she is, she’d simply answer them as if nothing was wrong. But I couldn’t help but feel separate from the rest of the children. They found it cool and interesting that my mom was in a wheelchair. They didn’t know how it really was though, all the things we couldn’t do anymore because of this problem. We sometimes can’t go on vacation to certain places because the hotel has a flight of stairs or its elevator has broken down. There are a lot of cars that she can’t get into because they are too high for her to transfer into. However, we find ways around this. My father or I lift her up the stairs and we use a small piece of wood that we call “the Transfer Board,” which she uses to slide across onto the car’s seating.
Taxi drivers are our next issue. Since we didn’t own a car, taxis or the bus are our main form of transportation. Unfortunately, only a small fraction of the drivers actually know how to load up a wheelchair. We have to help them to understand how the wheels come off and how to fold up the seat. This can take about 15 minutes and it becomes very annoying after the 20th time.
This incident has changed our life completely and entirely. I can’t imagine or picture how different I’d be if my mother wasn’t in a wheelchair. Most people would think that this is a near to impossible lifestyle but it’s not. We get through each challenge and we do it as family, together. We have as much fun as any other family would; we just do it in a different way.

[Originally posted June 7, 2008]

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In the emergency room, after Miranda and I had looked at Patti’s body, a policeman handed me P’s watch in a Ziploc bag. Without thinking, I put it on. It fit perfectly. The next day I took off my watch and never wore it again. But Patti’s watch has stayed on my wrist ever since.

The watch stopped at the moment of her death, 11:20. But over the next week or so, it slowly crawled forward. Each day I would notice it was a minute or two ahead. Finally, it stopped completely, at 11:40.

Sometimes people who don’t really know me comment on it, sometimes snearingly, ‘Nice watch’.This delicate silver watch on my meaty, hairy wrist. I explain it’s my wife’s. I don’t say much more than that. I don’t really care what they think.

As far back as I can remember, I have always worn a watch, usually a waterproof one that I never need to take off, through showers and sleep. Now I ask people what time it is. Or I look around for a clock. Or I just shrug. I’m okay with being late, selfish as that can be.

I am still aware of the passage of time, but seem to be measuring it by a different rhythm. It’s less of a tick-tick-tick, time is passing relentless tattoo and more of an organic drift through the day. I look back each evening and think about what I”ve done, assess its value, wonder if this is really how I should spend what time I have left. I havent made any big decisions about that yet, but I do feel more that time is precious, that it must be savored, and that only I should decide how to mete it out.  Not even a wristwatch has that right.

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It is so nice that more of my friends have discovered drawing in the past three months, many of them people I would never have imagined would have the time and interest to pick up a pen. It may be coincidental or it may be a newly discovered awareness that life is short and one ought to try all the things one dreamt of while one has the chance.

I also like to think that Patti’s example inspired my friends to explore their creativity. She was an endlessly creative person, always making something out of something else. She made creativity seem fun and a natural part of life, not scary or intimidating or prey to judgment. I think our friends are reminded of that when they think of her as intensely as we have this past season. They remembered how she was always a flurry of creative energy and were somehow moved to keep that spirit alive.

She would be happy that this is her legacy — inspiring people to come into their own creatively and to take risks in order to discover what they can do. It’s a wonderful gift to pass on and it is infectious, spreading to more and more people as they see what their friends can do.

We work hard to give our lives some meaning, to do well by others, to have values and standards that can endure. We teach our children things that can survive beyond our lifetimes, we set examples that make a mark. That’s true immortality.

I come from a fairly small family, generations with just a child or three in each family, many of them grown estranged. As we’ve lost touch, we’ve lost meaning too and the lessons and examples of our lives have dissipated in the fog. I know my great-grandmother became senile, stripped off her nightgown and danced on the dining table. I don’t know much more about her than that. But her daughter, my grandmother Ninny, inculcated my sister and me with a certain set of higher standards — that one sets the table with cloth napkins, that one makes one’s bed each morning, that one should strive to have a nice garden and to listen to Mozart and Bach. It’s funny that she lived for some eight decades and that her legacy is this small list of small things. I think that would surprise and maybe disappoint her. My grandfather taught me some things by his example but more things to avoid. He was fastidious and controlling and grew older without growing wiser. I think in the end one can learn as much from bad examples than good; the things to avoid have lots of resonance.

I have no idea what impression I shall make on the the world. Or how long it will last. It doesn’t really matter, I suppose, as I’ll be dust and gone. Encouraging others to make things seems like a nice testament to one’s life and I am proud to have been married to a woman who inspired it. Her love of beauty and self-expression will continue to ring out like ripples in the ocean for quite some time. And perhaps by reading these words about her, you too will be moved to make a drawing or a cake or a dress and share it with others who will be inspired to do something nice and creative of their own. Please think of Patti when you do.

Click to enlarge image

Our hounds were Patti’s babies. They traveled all over town with her, Tim riding in the baskey of her scooter, Joe on the platform by her feet. She would hug them close, dress them in raincoats and a little duck suit, bring them to bed, and spoil them with treats. They licked her, hugged her back and guarded her, barking whenever a stranger got too close.

People asked me if they noticed her absence.

I didnt know how to tell. It’s not like they were hanging around the door waiting for her to come home,  or howling with grief. They seemed more or less the same. Except for the total breakdown in housebreaking. Horrible, squirty diarrhea. Puddles of pee all over. They were eating the same food as ever, getting lots of walks, but it was a nightmare.

I spent a few hundred dollars at the vet and put them on antibiotics. It went away, sort of but not entirely.  A dog walker suggested I try organic food. At the hippy pet store, they prescribed pumpkin and squash, cans of duck and venison. I tried it all and after four weeks or so, things calmed down. When I ran out of cans of expensive handmade food, I switched them back to dry food and they have been fine ever since. Except for when we went away overnight to my mum’s house and they stayed with strangers. Again, diahrrea.

Duh, they were stressed out and this is how it manifested. No support groups or condolence cards. They just want normalcy.

Grief is a messy business. This kind can be taken care of with a mop, hot water and Mr. Clean.