20 June 2011

 Art Card #70

Wow!  Nothing like the first heat waves of summer in the Carolinas to make you forget every good thought you ever had - every good intention - every high and lofty ideal!  When suddenly it is a 100 degrees, nothing matters much but survival.

I think this was the first real insight I had about life in the South. In the first couple of years that I lived here, friends would come to visit from New England and wonder aloud and with fairly palpable disdain why everyone in the South is so slow! Slow moving, slow talking, and slow. In the same time period, when I went back up north to visit, I watched everyone and wondered why they were all moving so fast!  And that's when it hit me.  In the North, in the frozen cold, you will die if you don't scurry and hurry and bustle through the cold. In the South, in the blazing heat, you will die if you don't slow down!  And sure enough, when this heat hit, I slowed down, way down.  It probably doesn't help that the AC in my car is out, and I cannot bring myself to pay more than $1000 dollars to have it fixed.  On the 12 mile drive home from work, I say things like:  this heat is good for you, Amanda.  Just drink a little more water.  All this while the temperature gauge tells me it is 98 at 5:50 p.m. I tell myself these things, but I am not convinced.  By the time I get home, I am totally, as they say, fried!

I generally write to you in the evenings or on soft Sundays.  But for the past six weeks, I have been so busy at work and at home (ridiculously busy) and knowing that if I don't slow down, I will die in the heat, I made the decision to do less...more a consequence of my heat fatigue than a true decision.  But still, worth noting. So the evenings have included a lot more television than normal:  you would be amazed at what I know about America's next Top Chef, America's next Top Model, and the inner life of the characters on Glee.  Oh, and of course, I balance all this out with a little Masterpiece Theater once a week and a few movies....

Did you see The King's Speech!?! Loved it. 

This heat, this fatigue, and this stimulating array of TV shows have combined with the end of the fiscal year demands at work, impending budget woes for the coming year, and a million other slow motion things to leave me stymied, or sullen, or something. If nothing else...embarrassingly silent, I am barely keeping my journal...or rather, my journal has turned into a long list of what I will do when fall comes! But today, I am turning over a new leaf.  A summer leaf on the eve of summer....

According to Examiner.com:  "This year the summer solstice occurs on June 21 at 17 hours 16 minutes coordinated universal time (1:16 PM EDT)." 

Only 20 hours of spring left and it will be official - Summer. And yes, I promise, I will continue to write to you during the hot three months ahead.

All is well here. The grand-babies are amazing, children seem to be thriving - although I imagine Emily and Will without air conditioning during heat waves in NYC and I nearly swoon (Do I sound as much like an old southern matriarch as I think I do?) - Kirsten is hanging in there, managing her pain as best she can.  We celebrated our fifteenth anniversary a few days ago.  Time flies.  Maybe the summer will fly by too.

You know, its funny, but among all my memories of childhood summers, I hold the ones in Michigan most dear.  The lakes and the river, the air, how late the sun sets, and even the crazy May Flies (or were they June bugs? swirling around the street lights). In all these memories, Belle Isle is there...the Greenhouse, the horses, my father in his MG.  The day my mom, my sister, and I rode our bikes over the long hot bridge. This was when I was very small - I hadn't even learned how to coast! We moved so much that there are other summer places to recall, but I remember Detroit.  I remember the long steps up to the front door of the Detroit Institute of Art.  I remember the color of the sky before it rained.  That strange blush of green across the clouds.  Here, when it is really hot in June, July, and August, the blue sky turns white with nary a cloud in sight. But I remember the clouds, high and bright white.

Hope you are well, and bright, and fair.. I will write more very soon (this silence has been too long - and too deep). And I will do my best (dammit) to enjoy the summer.  

I love you, Miss Kelly - so much.
Amanda

7 May 2011

Art Card 110

First, I posted this little art card on my tumblr.  

That prompted a fairly amazing post by our Emily on her tumblr site in which she said:

So funny to see my mother’s latest entry in her #artcards series, when just this week I’ve had the strange, sudden and poignantly real urge to uproot my life in Brooklyn and move to Detroit. Bloomberg cheapened the feeling with his unthinking comments earlier this week, but it did make me think about what could happen if white folks like me with financial means and a well-intentioned analysis (and commitment to do the work of transformative justice) did move to Detroit. Would it just be gentrification all over again, despite all our best efforts? Does that risk mean I shouldn’t do it — or does the very real economic and governmental value of my white face and money sufficiently mitigate that risk? How do you make that choice?

I admit, there is something touching for me lately in thinking of living in the place where my parents and grandparents lived… that is, at least lived for a while. I’d wager we also have always been a bit nomadic at heart, these bloodlines of mine. But place, this romantic question of place, it comes back to me. What would it feel like to live in the place where my (recent) ancestors lived and struggled and grew up and loved — to not live in diaspora, as I often feel like I do now? It’s been an interesting urge to chew on, new and unexpected. It’ll be 10 years in Brooklyn for me come this Fall. Maybe this urge for Detroit is just another manifestation of my restless heart, draped in longings for a stability I’ve already worked hard to make happen? And if I was going to move away from Brooklyn to, ostensibly, have this feeling of connection with the other generations of my family, why wouldn’t I move back to North Carolina where my living family currently is? But there, that option feels completely different — the romance of the notion is more clearly delimited by the familiar, unromantic work I know would await me there.

Funny that. Maybe that’s what romance is about — the mystery of a compelling other, and all the things you don’t know (yet). It’s a dangerous, if occasionally useful, sentiment. I’m not packing my bags for my mother’s Michigan tonight… but, yes, I still might dream about it.

With some surprise, I read Mayor Bloomberg's statement about Immigration Law and the future of Detroit.  He said, and I quote directly from http://www.nbcnewyork.com:  

"If I were the federal government ... assuming you could wave a magic wand and pull everybody together," Bloomberg said, "you pass a law letting immigrants come in as long as they agree to go to Detroit 

and live there for five or 10 years."

Detroit has lost 25 percent of its citizens since the last census and 

Bloomberg said his immigration idea can revive the city 

where they would "start businesses, take jobs, whatever."

"You would populate Detroit overnight because half the world wants to come here ... 

You can use something like immigration policy

-- at no cost to the federal government -- 

to fix a lot of the problems that we have." 

Wow! 

What makes all of this interesting is that I looked at job postings the other day - no intention at all of moving, but more to see what the market for museum professionals looks like around the country - and one of the interesting positions was at the Detroit Contemporary Art Museum.  I was, to say the least, smitten.  A part of me wanted to apply, to get the job, to pack my bags and my little (actually not so little) family and move back to Michigan.  Or rather, to move back to Detroit, which, at least in my memory, is its own country.  

I started thinking - remembering - our home on Parker Street in Indian Village, walking to the A & P, playing down by the Detroit River.  A frenzied flight of ideas took me round Woodward and down Jefferson and over the Belle Isle Bridge, into the greenhouse, up the steps of the Detroit Institute of Art, back down to the Ambassador Bridge...all over and around the seat of my childhood.   I know that I will never come back to Detroit to live.  But, I do swirl around her in my dreams.  There is something about that childhood vista: the land of my opportunity and my loss that still calls to me.  

This morning, I looked online at properties for sale in that old neighborhood, and it made my heart ache a bit.  One crazy fantasy was a vacation home back in the middle of it all...but my life is not arranged for such things. 

I think what touched me, or astounded and surprised me, about Bloomberg's comment is only this:  Detroit will rise again, one way or the other, I am certain.  And in my heart, I suspect it may well be what he blithely calls immigrants - speaking of these "others" from around the world and around the nation. That makes sense for Detroit and for America for that matter. That is how we started, that is how we will continue. Immigration and migration have shaped our national history from the beginning, bringing ideas and innovation, arts and industry, small businesses and backyard gardens. The ebb and flow of people is precisely what made Detroit such a fabulous city for so long.  Love and hope rooted in the possibility of economic opportunity, affordable housing, outstanding public schools, and shared values, dreams of realizing the American dream of life, liberty, and that elusive pursuit of happiness.  

If I were a younger woman, if I were not so tied to this place now, if I were able to move my whole family, if, if, if only...then maybe I would declare myself an immigrant and move back to my homeland. For now, I will stay here and invest in this foreign Southern landscape...be the immigrant from the North, from Michigan, from Detroit.  

And as I told Emily - maybe it is time for a road trip this summer....

Always loving you (and always loving Detroit)

Amanda 

 

17 April 2011

It's Palm Sunday.

This morning, I found myself thinking about all those Hosannas at the entrance to Jerusalem.  Once you let these gospel stories into your heart, they have a tendency to stay for a long time. They shift in meaning; they sharpen and fade. But the basic image remains: Jesus and his disciples, donkey and palm fronds, singing and shouting praise at the "triumphal entry."  I remember too, in at least one of the gospel accounts, there is a strange little text in which Jesus says that even if the crowds were silent, the rocks and stones would begin to shout.

But today, I find myself wondering what would the stones say? What are the stones saying if I stop to listen? 

The crowds were shouting out their expectation of victory -  Jesus as legal King of Jerusalem, Jesus as a just ruler in a time of corruption...shouting their affirmation of hope. But every hope would be dashed.  Jesus would not overthrow the government; he would not assume political leadership. In fact, after the triumphal entry, more than at any other moment in the gospels, he just seems annoyed. He overturns the money-changers tables in the temple.  He curses a fig tree for not having a ripe fig for him as he passes by. He all but  picks a fight with the chief priest and the elders when they question his authority. And he preaches these strange metaphors - trying, I suspect, one more time to tell people what he knew...and, knowing that they wold misunderstand him no matter what. He speaks in riddles about vineyard owners, tax collectors, wedding servants, and coins.  He seems bored by questions of whether people will marry in heaven and in something that must have sounded like a rant, he lists off the seven woes - woe to the blind guides, woe to the teachers of the law, woe to hypocrites.  He rattles off the signs of the end of the age, and before you know it, he appears to have offended everyone around him so completely - except perhaps the woman with the expensive oil that she poured on his head - so completely alienated everyone that the betrayal of Judas  comes as no surprise, Peter's denial seems predictable, and sure enough it all goes downhill so fast - in a few short days.

So why were they shouting Hosanna? These are the same ones, we are taught, who seven days later shout "Crucify him."  This morning, it seemed to me that maybe this propensity we have to shout is part of the problem.  Maybe we should be a little less willing to jump on in there and say Yea or Nay...Maybe we should just shut up and move on.  But, then, as the day wore on, and I finished my taxes (rendering unto Caesar...), I started to think about how tenderly God must love us - if God is love after all.  We are so easily charmed, so quick to speak up, so wrong, so in need of a little divine intervention. How could you not love us, even if we are annoying and blind?

I found this little triptych in an old pile of postcards - the title: The Annunciation with Saint Joseph and kneeling donors.  It is in the collection of the Metropolitan.  I looked at it for a long time before I thought to post it here. (I don't think I am violating any 15th century copyrights; if I am, I will pull the image down.) The longer I looked, the more fond I became of the two donors in the left panel - look at those faces - kneeling and hoping to see in through the open door, across the frames of time, to see Mary and the angel, Joseph and his tools.  I like them...these two. I like they way they hope.

Another Palm Sunday, another year of anticipation, another shout of hopeful longing for the coming of whatever comes.  Maybe that is what the stones would cry out...bring it on - more time, more life, more death, more of all of it - and save us, help us...one and all, in our ignorance, in our hopeful longing....

Hosanna means:  "strictly, a cry expressing an appeal for divine help "save! Help, we pray!"  According to Wikipedia (the non-definitive source!). I ought to say it every day. And, if I tell the truth, I do. No matter what I hope for, or long for, or think I know or understand - at center...Hosanna.  

Love you - and miss you. 
Amanda

4 April 2010

Journal Doodle

colored pencil on graph paper 

Because it is suddenly spring, I am cleaning the house, or at least trying to.  It seems like a funny thing to do in the midst of the pine dusting that accompanies the blossoming of daffodils, but it is essential!  Sudden sunny days make the windows look especially dreary and in need of Windex. And the closets are stuffed with sweaters and long-sleeved tee shirts...I missed the memo about the heat today - all the way up to 86 degrees!  So my all black outfit, pants and turtleneck made me feel ridiculous on the drive home.  Windows down, sun on my skin, oh how I love this time of year.  But tomorrow will be much the same if I don't do something about these closets!

It is time for light colors and haircuts and "happy clothes."  Enough of the black on black with a jewel tone scarf! Time for patterns and prints, for linens instead of wools.  But none of that is possible if I don't clear and clean out my closet! So here are my closet insights for Spring 2011:


1. Black is not the only serious color!  
I have this funny feeling that informs a lot of my wardrobe: if I wear serious clothes, people will take me seriously.  More and more I know this is delusional or at least dubious - mostly because I am a serious person and everyone knows it.  But old habits, and especially old mental habits, die hard. It will take an act of extraordinary will to shed some of the black for more color.

Note to self:  Black in North Carolina in the summer months is not a wise choice...it communicates a lack of awareness of the world around you. In other words, I may hope to be taken seriously, but I do not want to look seriously hot!


2. Happy clothes are best purchased when you are happy!
I tend to shop in a kind of quiet desperation - some event to attend, some last minute need, always bargain hunting.  This is not how you build a wardrobe!  It is how you jam your closet full of impulse purchases!  I think happy shopping could change my life. No emergency, no sad mood I am trying to fend off.  Just joy shopping.  Life is good...clothes should reflect that.

Another note to self:  This all sounds so good in theory, but in practice it is more difficult.  Most of my happy time is spent in what I lovingly call "yoga wear" (also mostly black), super-soft and baggy with bare feet and no interest whatsoever in going clothes shopping!  


3. Pay attention to the young and learn from the old! 
I watch with some interest what my younger colleagues wear - how easily their clothes fit, how light and comfortable they appear.  But, this is balanced by watching those marvelous older women with their serious jewelry and so little makeup.  Being as I am - so fully ensconced in midlife - I hope to take something from both of them: ease and style; comfort and panache.  

And yes, yet another note to self:  This is precisely the issue!  Style is such a marvelous thing...but not if it is singular and written in concrete!  I find as a face down my closet that I see so many "selves" in there.  The serious minded young writer, the ambitious artist, the administrator, and the Oma (Grandbabies do give you a completely new identity!).  The funny part about midlife is that you are all these things at once and need a wardrobe that supports a profound "mutliple personality disorder"!   

4. Less is more - but only if the less is better!
I suspect this is a fundamental truth and one that I should take to my closet and to my beloved Ross. Yes, I admit that most of what I wear comes from one of three places:  "hand me overs" from Kirsten's sister - she has a natural eye for happy clothes and loves to shop!; the GoodWill - I just love the feeling that I am benefiting from the closets of the wealthy; and, my beloved Ross!  This chain of stores (do they have these in Michigan?) has supported my need for the perfect suit, sweaters, etc...all at discount prices for years.  But sometimes, I think it would be smart to set a budget and actually buy "better" clothes!  You know, the ones with the french seams and the perfect topstitching....

Final note to self:  Its spring - and what I really want to do is hang out in my "yoga wear" and watch the sky....doodle in my sketchbook...imagine a complete and perfect wardrobe from my perch on the porch swing...

This is no way to clean a closet!  
Love you,
Amanda  

PS  Check out deadfleurette. A fashion blog written by a 20 year old in Oslo Norway!  Hop around her site.  She is amazing...and writes like a dream.  Plus, if you join me in this folly, we can skew her reader statistics in our favor...very few over the age of 50 are reading this wise young woman.

21 March 2011

when I cannot...

colored pencil, ink, paint on wrapping paper

Amanda Millay Hughes

Spring fever has set in with a vengence!  Sorry for the long silence, and thank you for the email and comment...it helps to know you are there, listening.  

The last few weeks have been a whirlwind of work and life activity - every day, evening, and weekend...and all pressed forward by the real wind of the seasons changing.  The daffodils are up, the pollen count is up, the temperature is up, and on Saturday night, the full moon looked larger in the sky than it has in 18 years...no wonder I am longing for a trip to anywhere, a month of Sundays, a little time to look at the sky, to stand, to lie down with nothing to do but be there. . . wherever there is. 

My antidote for this fever (since a month of Sundays is simply not possible and ibuprofen doesn't touch it): a little reading.  I have gone back to some of the books that I have loved in the past - learned from - listened to and heeded.  A little bit of Edna St. Vincent Millay (particularly Poems for Children); a little bit of Gift from the Sea (Anne Morrow Lindberg), and finally, last night, I pulled down one of the collections of writings by MFK Fisher, The Art of Eating.  My God, the woman could write! I found myself reading though some of her essays in An Alphabet for Gourmets - in particular the section on spaghetti.  She says: 

Have a bowl of grated Parmesan, genuine and sandy, and unadulterated by domestic packaged stuff; a large pat of sweet butter; a good salt shaker and a freshly filled pepper-mill; as many hot plates as there are people, and a big, hot casserole with a lump of butter in the bottom.  

Just reading it makes me hungry - and in fact, it is precisely what I intend to cook as soon as I finish this post.  I was reading well after 10 pm last night, so I had already eaten and couldn't imagine it wise to start a second dinner at 10:45! There is something extraordinary about the way she co-mingles her personal experience of herself and the landscape of her life with the universal touch of a great big dish of pasta.  The writing inspires me and despite my genuine effort to find someone who speaks this way today, despite all the cookbooks in my personal collection, and my love for Judith Jones, my respect (albeit with a bit of suspect questioning) for Mark Bittman and How to Cook Everything - MFK Fisher was, as a friend of mine says, "A One-er."  There is no one quite like her when it comes to the art of eating, loving food, and offering inspiration to get you organized and started cooking! 

I find it interesting that both she and Judith Jones describe in some detail their decisions to cook for themselves (a table for one), and in both cases organization of time (and shopping) are key.  Organization - when applied to anything other than my silverware drawer - is not a natural tendency.  And organized shopping seems like an oxymoron!  But Fisher says: 

I rearranged my schedule, so that I could market on my way to the studio each morning....I grew deliberately fastidious about eggs and butter; the biggest, brownest, eggs were none too good, nor could any butter be too clover-fresh and sweet.  I laid in a case or two of "unpretentious but delightful" little wines.

She is a miracle.  

So, perhaps, with the itchiness of my spring fever, the wanderlust, and the ache, I will find a new motivation to these organized intentions.  

Dinner at the table 

A little glass of wine 

A pat of butter 

an end of day ritual that might make everything more sensible.  

I don't know...

For now, I will just go ahead and put the water on - and hope for a long Spring...

Thinking of you, more often than you know...

All love

Amanda

27 February 2011

 Untitled, watercolor and pencil 

Amanda Millay Hughes

I am worried about Judith Jones. 

Starting with The Tenth Muse and arriving home from Borders today - my Border's is closing and all books were on sale 20 - 40 % off - with The Pleasures of Cooking for One, I have become a fan.  How can you resist a woman writer and editor and a home chef extraordinaire even on the first beautiful Sunday of the year?  I know that I could be, perhaps should be out in the sun, sweeping the front porch or walking the dog.  Instead, I am inside reading.  

Judith Jones was born in 1924 and started working at Knopf in 1957 - yes, the year I was born.  She has been the editor of so many I admire, annotating their manuscripts and sending thoughtful commentary. From John Updike to Julia Child, Anne Tyler to William Maxwell (although I know Maxwell only from his fame as fiction editor at The New Yorker during the golden years) - she has been the last reader before all the others line up to purchase a book. And yes, she saved The Diary of Anne Frank from the reject pile and she is singlehandedly responsible for the publication of Mastering the Art of French Cooking.   It must be a grace and a charm to have this intimate role with great manuscripts and their authors. When I imagine her, I place her in a tiny apartment in New York City or in an old house in Vermont and I see a life that makes so much imaginary sense to me that I could simply cry with delight: oh, to be a reader and writer, an editor and a serious-minded home cook.

But, I am worried about her. 

Her last blog post on judithjonescooks.com is dated months ago.  There are no touring dates on her Random House/Knopf page (publisher of The Pleasures of...). At 87, perhaps she has finally, truly retired. 

I hope not. 

The world needs good, strong women making their mark in publishing and in the kitchen, living well and living long enough to have time to tell us about it. I think Jones is right when she says that "the food industry has for more than a century been selling the idea that it is demeaning for women to cook and a waste of time when they can buy ready made products instead" (Introduction, The Pleasures of Cooking for One). I never really gave this much thought until I found myself buying the steam-in-bag pre-seasoned microwavable vegetables (you know the kind, the butter and salt are added because, why?  Because that would be hard and a waste of my time?).  They are tasty and convenient, but they are also a bit of an insult to the part of me that knows - or at least knew, once upon a time - how to cook peas on the stove top. Knowing how to cook is not a waste of time.  Knowing how to cook is an investment in life. And living is the thing that matters.  Living well and openly, with curiosity, intellectual rigor, and commitment.  This is what I see in Judith Jones.  It is what I want to see in myself. 

I suspect that my old friend and teacher, Andre Dubus was right when he told me not to worry too much about writing for a while - he said, "You write well, Amanda, and you always will.  For now, you must live. Your best work will come a little later in the day." 

Andre is gone, and Dad, and so many others that I have admired and learned from - both close and far away, in person and through books.  So many who offered such unbridled enthusiasm for their craft and their creed, such generosity to me - student, daughter, reader.  In Judith Jones, I thought perhaps I had found a new teacher, but just when I recognize her, I fear she has stopped writing.  And with that fear, another feeling...or at least another kind of knowing emerges.

It is a little later in the day.  It is time to think about dinner, a Sunday supper of chicken salad and warm slices of pumpernickel bread, a little glass of wine and an evening watching the Oscars and snippets of Carolina Basketball.  But, it is also "a little later in the day."  Just as Andre said it would be. 

I wonder.  If Andre were here, would he tell me that now is the time?  Would he caution me that yes, sure enough, it is later in the day and time to write?

Wish you were here. 
All love,
Amanda

PS  It is well over 70 degrees outside today - spring is entirely here. 

4 February 2011

Image Courtesy of Will Hughes Haddad Photography

I am watching the news reports of this endless winter.  The constant swirling of white and pink on enhanced Dopplar Radar maps.  Pictures on William's Facebook page and postings of waiting in airports and delayed flights.  It is cold here today - but not the bitter cold of New England or Michigan, New York or Ohio. 

I am thinking of you in the bitter cold.

Every year in the South we hope and pray for a few snow days - knowing full well that it will take next to nothing to make everything stop.  I was in the grocery store a few weeks ago and said something to the checkout girl about snow coming over the next week.  She frowned, pursed her lips, pointed her finger at me and said with a sneer, "Don't use that word in a grocery store."  "Snow," I asked.  "You did it again," she said.  "Don't do that." And she meant it with a little grin.  I know what she means.  I have been at my Kroger on the evening before a storm.  It is like watching preparation for Armageddon!   People have more bread than they could eat in a month and strange non-perishables (Beenie-Weenies????) that no one really wants when heated on the electric stove, let alone ice cold from the can! What are they thinking? 

They are thinking ICE.  Because here, it is rarely snow that causes real problems or damange.  It is ice.  There is something about our geography - where we are in the middle of the Piedmont wedged between the Sandhills and Foothills of North Carolina - that makes us particularly susceptible to ice. Ice on powerlines never intended to support ice.  Ice on roadways. Ice on bridges and sidewalks.  Ice is the real concern. 

But for us, this concern is almost over for another year.  In a few weeks the first crocuses and daffodils will appear.  The warmer, longer days will begin and before you know it we will be in the first heat wave and worrying about a long hot summer.  Complaining about the weather may be pointless - complaining about the obvious is never a good idea - but it is a healthy pastime.  I spoke with three people in New York City today - and every one of them talked about the weather!  Who can blame them? 

I will let you know on the first day we hit 70 degrees.  You should keep me posted on when you hit 50! I remember those magical first "warm" days in New England, opening every window in the house on one such day...after all, it was 52! 

Thinking of you - with only warm thoughts. 
Amanda