Keep Breathing

I have not blogged since my husband, the Artist, died, but have been writing and just can’t seem to stop most days. As I look through old digital photo files on my laptop, memories have washed over me in waves, and sometimes I posted only images on Facebook, but other times I put together a themed group and a paragraph of the thoughts that group of images gave me. “Keep writing,” a few friends said in their comments. Saying that to me is kind of like saying “Keep breathing” or “Keep remembering.” One dear friend of mine said in an e-mail that I may be a graphomaiac. Can’t help writing. But blogging? That’s been tough even to think about. 

 

So while I’m not ready to come up with a new blog post, here are some memories and a few, though not all, of the photos that have turned up along the way and found their way to my friends on Facebook, with a few small changes here and there and once in a while an amplification. It’s the best I can do right now.

Above: Grand Marais, Michigan, in the Upper Peninsula, was to us what Leelanau County is to annual visitors from, say, Grand Rapids. It was our home away from home, a place where we didn't work but went every year to catch our breaths again after a fast-paced summer of work, to breathe deeply, and to revisit old haunts and friends, not needing anything fancy, only to immerse ourselves in the dear and familiar: the Superior Hotel (Room 11), the West Bay Diner, the agate beach, Coast Guard Point, the Sucker River flowing cold into even colder Lake Superior, the serenity of the harbor, and boats, boats, boats. We walked the shore and the alleys and were always happy there, doing almost nothing after a busy tourist summer in Northport.

Above: In Northport, at any season of the year, David was always rearranging his gallery space. It was one of the constant joys of his life. The big red rug, lights over the paintings, the guest book presided over by a rubber rat bought at David Chrobak's shop, and other treasures on display were all David Grath. 

Below: Over the years, many friends visited and spent hours talking and laughing, and often if I wandered in David would say, "Take a picture of us." His friends were his treasures, also.

 

Another Northport artist, Bonnie Marris, sent me a couple of old digital photos from her archives. I know they were taken in the yard at our farmhouse because I recognize the blue and yellow tablecloth bought at an outdoor market in France when David and I were there in September of 2000. We had started out in Paris, of course, where we stayed at the Hotel Recamier, and then after a week or so we took the TGV (le Train de Grande Vitesse) south to Avignon, from which point we drove back north in a tiny rental car, traveling without reservations, as the spirit moved us. After a flat tire in the rain, we ditched the car in Fontainebleau and caught a train back to Paris, happy to be in familiar surroundings with great public transportation. But except for that flat tire day, the drive north from Avignon was heavenly, most especially the evening, night and morning we spent in Blesle, one of the (officially) prettiest villages in France and, to me, the French version of Glocca Morra, an almost unreal place of beautiful dreams.

To many friends and even oftener to people who didn't know all the aspects of his personality, David was known as a "car guy," and he certainly loved these big showboats -- besides the Lincolns, a beautiful yellow Cadillac that had belonged to another dear late friend. In 1986 David wrote an article called "86 Cars" for Automobile magazine and was a featured guest on the television "Today" show. When a crew came to Leelanau County to interview him and film the show, his houseboat on the Leland River made that show, as did the view looking north on Setterbo Road towards St. Wenceslaus church.

Back when Sarah was a young dog and Donny's dogs Weiser and Ida often came to spend the night (Donny, brother of David’s dear friend Michael, had lived in the house until his death, when Michael made it available to us for a few winter months), David loved his roomy studio space in Aripeka, Florida. From Aripeka we also enjoyed water adventures with with other members of the Seuss family, and David treasured his morning coffee times at Carl Norfleet’s store by the island’s north bridge.

Always messing about in boats (his own or other people's) or designing them or dreaming of them (because David always was a dreamer, as one of his grade-school teachers wrote to his parents on a long-ago report card), the Artist was very much the Rat of Wind in the Willows legend. Not surprisingly, that classic was one of our household’s all-time favorites.

Beginning in 1993, we were always a pack of three except for short stretches between dogs. On one trip to Florida, we were exploring Plains, Georgia, and, feeling as if our poor old Nikki might not make it any farther down the road, we asked a pleasant young policewoman to take a family picture of us. Nikki rallied, and we had her for much longer, in Florida and back in Michigan. Sarah was the dog of our life, the practically perfect puppy we adopted at four months and the charming hostess at Dog Ears Books for years. She was as happy with us on the road and in Florida and in the Arizona desert as she was in Michigan, summer and winter. Queen of the Snow! David and I loved our nightly pack times with her -- and also with Peasy, the dog we had for only 13 months.

Nikki

Sarah on the road

Peasy, always ready for a ride

Sunny Juliet

I'm so sorry David never had a chance to meet Sunny, the puppy he had me purchase with cash he’d set aside for an Italian motorcycle (before coming to his senses), but when my sister and I went to the coffee house in Willcox -- a place David loved! -- the owner recalled the day I went to see Sunny, up north of Tucson, for the first time and put down a deposit on her. David drove into Willcox that day and visited the coffee house and told everyone at Source of Coffee about the puppy we were getting! He looked forward to us being a pack of three again (and she already has the makings of a good traveler). David was looking forward to so much -- making sculpture again, seeing friends in Michigan, making another trip to Minnesota to see children and grandchildren there. He lived right up to the end, and what more can we ask? Just more time, I guess, but sooner or later time runs out….

 

David Grath loved music, listening to it and making it. Playing bongos with Newt and the Salamanders was a favorite in his memory chest, and in his last weeks of life (though we didn’t know they were the last) he couldn’t resist a cello found at a thrift shop. He loved books, an incurable addiction we shared, and so he loved my bookstore, too, opened when our combined collections threatened to crowd us out of house and home, the bookstore that became, like his gallery and studio, a place for us to welcome friends old and new over the years. He loved beautiful things. Objets de virtue. And old soulful things of all kinds. He loved handsome shoes (especially Italian), beautiful hats, Harris tweed sport coats, leather bags, and cowboy boots (all things leather). He liked looking good. Especially, above all else, he loved painting. He looked at the world as a painter, always. And — my great good fortune — he loved me, and our life was rich and full.

One dear friend (who perhaps has not known me long enough to identify me as a graphomaniac) asked how I can write about losing this dear man when my grief is so new, but it's how I live -- by writing. It's how I think and sort myself out. And looking through my old photos reinforces my deep, strong gratitude for the life we shared for so many years. It's when I'm not writing or talking about David or looking at his paintings or my photographs of him and his paintings that the loss is unbearable. 

But here is a lovely story from a friend back in Leelanau County. He said that one recent cold day in Michigan, cold but very bright and sunny, he was sitting in his living room, sunlight pouring in through the windows, looking at Grath paintings on the wall (he owns several), and "Umbrous Pond" was glowing in the light. "It just glowed." That was in the afternoon, and only later, in the evening, did Tom learn that his artist friend David had died. But what would have given David more joy than to know that someone was looking at and loving one of his paintings? It was the best thing I heard all day.

Poetry, Music, Visual Art in My Personal Distant Past

Saved by my mother

The much-folded sheet of lined, looseleaf paper holds faint lines written in pencil. In what year? Sometime in the early 1960s, but there is no date. Here is a poem I’d forgotten I wrote:

“Bravado”

Behold the tragic hero.

I have wronged him, so he thinks.

And yet his head is held up high

While troubled spirit sinks.

He wants no pity, no not ye,

Nor any sympathy.

It is a point of honor

That he act courageously.

His tears are locked within his heart.

He mustn’t let them show.

That I should great him thusly!

Oh, such a cruel blow!

I too have known this feeling

Of despair my little man,

And others have been knowing it

Since first the world began.

Sitting in the corner,

His back is ramrod-stiff.

Come here, my silly little lad,

And give your mom a kiss!

—

The twist at the end was undoubtedly influenced by short stories of the mid-twentieth century.

And then there is this --

When the sheet of paper is folded up again or turned over, a division problem appears: 675 divided by 12, yielding a solution of 56.25. I think I know the reference to the problem, and that would date to 1963 or 1964, the year my violin teacher persuaded my mother that I needed a better instrument if I were to continue to make progress. Payments of $56.25 a month for a year purchased a very nice old French violin, made by Claudot in 1899. I had the violin until the late 1980s, when I sold it to finance my first trip to Paris.

—

Visual art was not my strong suit. We non-artistic types had a few art classes in junior high school, but I certainly never signed up for drawing or painting or anything like that in high school, so this piece my mother held onto must have been something I did in junior high. I seem to remember that we chose pieces of colored construction paper from a box and arranged them, then painted the resulting arrangement. 

Such were my limited girlhood talents, precious in the eyes of my mother, I guess.

The Dawns, the Cities, the Lives: Written Words and Visual Images

My only "leisurely" day in Mexico

Latent in me, I suppose, there was always the belief that writing was greater than other things, or at least would prove to be greater in the end. Call it a delusion if you like, but within me was an insistence that whatever we did, the things that were said, the dawns, the cities, the lives, all of it had to be drawn together, made into pages, or it was in danger of not existing, of never having been. There comes a time when you realize that everything is a dream, and only those things preserved in writing have any possibility of being real.

 - James Salter, Don't Save Anything: Uncollected Essays, Articles, and Profiles, Reviews

These lines clearly spoke to me, because I copied them down almost the moment I read them, quickly shared them on Facebook, and sent them in an enthusiastic e-mail to a friend. But is this my belief, that writing is "realer than other things"? 

This friend and I correspond in the form of written letters and are almost compulsive about not e-mailing each other, except on rare occasions, and as briefly as possible, to arrange a meeting or send each other photographs or quick, pithy notes. For us, writing, on paper, is very important. Escribir nos importe. But she also is a visual artist, a painter, as is my husband, and would I want to say their work, their painting, is less than writing? That feels all wrong. 

And so, in a letter to my friend (which I hope she will forgive my raiding for pieces to use here), I began to think through the question -- thinking, as I so often do, by exploring my thoughts in writing to see where they would lead.

I asked my friend (in writing, in a letter she will not yet have received) if she felt with her drawing and painting what Salter felt about writing, that her art preserves what otherwise would, in the end, lack reality, that her paintings of (for instance) Scotland draw together for her what otherwise would be in danger of not existing. In posing the question on paper, I realized that I feel that way with even the most pathetic of sketches I make on paper with pen or pencil, such as the one at the top of this page of the beach at Cancun. I also feel it to a lesser degree with photography. But I feel it most of all with writing. I am not claiming that writing is objectively "best" at drawing together and preserving reality -- only that it is the first toolkit I reach for.

"Most of all," I wrote above, using those words to emphasize that I feel I am preserving the world of my own experience (though not some objective, God's-eye world), when I write about it. Next question: Why, for me, this "most of all"?

The contrast with photography is striking, as I see it. Look at any snapshot or photograph, and how often can you tell who was holding the camera? Occasionally it's clear from the location, the time period, the subject, and the chosen framing that the photographer was, say, Eugene Atget, but in most photographs, even the best (and all the more so for amateur results such as my own), whoever clicked the shutter is absent from the image. In a family snapshot, a missing family member is obviously the photographer, but the image below of dawn over the city of Mérida could have been made by anyone.

When I compose a written "picture," on the other hand, I put myself into it. The place I write about, when I write about a place, isn't just the place by itself but a place I inhabited for some period of time, however brief. Like Kilroy, "I was here."

Where does that leave drawing and painting? I will not be so bold as to speak for painting or for painters. The Artist with whom I share a life paints from memory and imagination, not to preserve details of a particular scene, and there are as many styles and subjects of painting as there are painters. What I will say is that -- again, for me -- I find sketching intermediate between photography and writing and feel it closer to writing, for me, than it is to my photography. 

(For a couple years, I took drawing classes and tried to spend part of every day quietly looking and drawing my world. More recently I have hardly touched a sketch pad, so what you saw at the top of this post is very much what I would call a sketch rather than what I would call a drawing, but the distinction does not matter for my purposes in today's musings.) 

In writing and thinking about this subject, then, I discovered my feeling about sketching/drawing, that I feel it closer to writing than to photography is to writing, but then I had to ask again, Why? Is it because a hand guiding a pen or pencil cannot help being more personal than the instantaneous click of a camera shutter? Because the lines on the paper cannot be other than a personal, individual expression? Maybe in part, but that can't be the whole story. Or -- and this feels right to me -- is it because of the time spent making those marks on paper that I feel I have preserved a bit of the world? That feels closer to my intuition.

Living is always a journey through time. When I write about anything in my life -- or even, as today, writing about a developing train of thought -- the writing takes time, and anyone reading it must also take time. When I write about dogs in the Yucatan, during the time I spend writing I re-live my time there, and when you read, you are journeying through time with me. 

"I should tell you that there were stray dogs all over the Yucatan, and they all look pretty much alike, differing only in color — about 20-25 pounds, short-haired, with skinny tails and sticking-up or -out ears. Some were black, some tan, some bicolor, but it was almost as if we saw the same dog everywhere in a different costume. Mutts, like my dear old Nikki. Leonore couldn’t help worrying about them: were they sick? did they have worms? did they get enough to eat? As for me, I really, really liked the fact that they were tolerated everywhere and could go about their lives unmolested (I never saw a dog on a leash), as if they were people. They are very traffic-savvy, naturally, as they have to be to survive and never seemed to beg from tables, even when people dining outdoors had very good food."

My photographs of one of those same dogs tells no story at all and serves only (and not very well at that, since this was not a city dog) to illustrate my words. 

Because we had so few days and a very full schedule, there was no time for me to sketch any of the dogs I saw in Mexico, but that would have meant more to me than a camera image, because when I look at an old drawing that took me a long time to produce I feel again the whole being-there of that time. I do not appear in the drawing, any more than I appear in any of my own drawings or sketches, but I can feel myself there in a way I don't with a photograph. A drawing for me is a diary entry without words. Those below were made around my Michigan home and down in Florida years ago.

Be that as it may, though, for better or for worse, words have always been and will no doubt remain my first toolbox.

*. *. *

It was at this point in my musings that I was joined over morning coffee by the Artist, who asked what I was working on. I gave him a quick synopsis of the thoughts expressed above. Surprisingly, perhaps, he gave the written word highest priority. 

"A photograph becomes another object in the world," he began. "It shows objects but is also itself an object. A written description, on the other hand, has no representative existence except in the mind of the writer and readers."

"So what about a drawing?" I asked. "Isn't it an object, too? The way I was looking at it, a drawing is closer to writing, but the way you're looking at it, it's closer to photography."

"Yes, a drawing is also an object and exists as an object. What is written exists only in imagination."

Well, that was interesting! We would have continued our conversation, except that Sarah, the dog, had gotten tired of waiting for her morning sortie, and I had to get dressed to get her outdoors. 

Walking can be an aid to thinking, however, and so my thoughts continued, and I realized that my seeing a drawing as preserving and recreating time rested on the assumption of a first-person experience -- me, looking at one of my own drawings -- whereas another person looking at one of my drawings might as well be looking at one of my photographs. The time I spent drawing, the time that comes back to me when I look at an old drawing, is not present for another viewer. A written description -- or any kind of writing, for that matter -- is different not only because it can only be "seen" in a reader's imagination but also because the reader must take time to read the words that compose the piece. David's point about imagination is important, then, but so is my emphasis on time.

How about you? Did you follow my thoughts along this meandering path? Did you stop and argue with me or bring in examples of your own, either to confirm or refute any points made along the way? Were you walking in my shoes, or were we walking side by side, in dialogue?

Words. I cannot stop generating them. Will my written work be fiction this winter? (Michigan dreaming from the far Southwest?) Or drawing dear, scruffy Cochise County with words? The dawns, ... the lives....  

However the winter experience develops, along with studying Mexican history and the Spanish language and doing a good winter's worth of writing, as well, I want to use some of my Arizona time wordlessly, too, being-there in unhurried fashion with paper and pencil. 

When Does Summer End?

The official first day of autumn this year is September 22, making the 21^st the last official day of summer, but for many families of schoolchildren and for those whose traditional minds can’t help seeing Memorial Day and Labor Day as summer’s bookends, the season ended last weekend For some others (I heard them muttering!) the end came earlier, with a couple of summer vacationers in late August shivering in their jackets and sweatshirts, feeling that fall had arrived in northern Michigan before they got here. Isn’t that always the way, though? Beginnings and endings of seasons are not like doors opening and closing all at once. Any two adjacent seasons interpenetrate and play tug-o’-war for a while before settling down to the new one.

For many years, David and I used to take off for the U.P. the Tuesday after Labor Day. (Once we fled north on Labor Day itself but only had to learn that lesson once, sitting for hours in a long line of unmoving traffic during the annual Mackinac Bridge walk.) Northport, however, is livelier these days than it was a dozen years ago: no one is rolling up the sidewalks yet, a week into September, though there are more strolling older couples now than young families in town. Two years ago we didn’t make our getaway until October, and it was short then. So yes, there have been changes over the years, some more gradual than others.

But this year has been entirely different in one very important way, and that has been David’s one-man exhibition at the Dennos Museum Center in Traverse City. A career milestone for him, it has been the focus of the season for both of us, and that’s why my bookstore, open on Labor Day itself until 3:30, was closed the Wednesday following Labor Day when old friends from Kalamazoo came up to see the show.

Since David and I were at the museum before our friends, I took the opportunity to photograph the artist with several of his paintings (below), photographing individual paintings, also, and several more inclusive groupings (above). 

When they arrived, of course my camera and I were eager to capture David and our friends surrounded by his work.

I guess it rained a bit while we were in the museum. I didn’t notice. We toured the sculpture of Sally Rogers and the Inuit gallery, as well as David’s painting exhibit, explained the new additions underway, and our friends were quite impressed by the museum in general.

Tearing ourselves away at last, we adjourned to downtown and, creatures of habit, suggested to our friends Cafe Amical, an iconic Traverse City restaurant for (I’m going to say) 23 years. Our table was back by the fireplace, and so, again, I didn’t notice any rain until we left the restaurant to stroll up and down a couple blocks of Front Street and saw that the pavement was gleaming wet. Anyway, the rain had let up, and we had dry walking, and coming back east on the other side of the street, we stopped in at the old U&I (an even older landmark than Amical) for one last round of drinks and then strolled together to the big new parking structure down by the Park Place.

(It occurs to me that I’ll probably be saying “the new parking structure” as long as I live, just as the Civic Center, or whatever it’s called, will always be, to me, “the old fairgrounds.”)

Old friends! Time together! David’s beautiful show! One more Kalamazoo friend comes up on Friday, and then Saturday will be the last day of the exhibit, and we will go in Sunday to pack up the paintings, and that will be the close of summer for us. But oh, what a summer it has been! One for the memory book!