I do not immediately call my primary. After staying up half the night fretting, I come to a decision. Maybe if I ride my knee scooter to and from work, and stay off my feet as much as possible, and then only walk on my heel, maybe then I can get the blisters to improve a little, so that when I see Dr. Rochelle next week, she’ll dial back the rhetoric a bit and we can figure out some other solution. Maybe I can get the cooler-headed Dr. Ronda to take a look as well. It’s not a great plan, but I don’t know what else to do, and it’ll buy me a week before I have to face the fact that the rest of my life will probably be spent as an invalid.
So the next morning I get out my scooter and reassemble it. I haven’t used it since December, and I haven’t wheeled to work on it since before the pandemic. As I follow the path where the Great Plank Road once stretched, I find I still remember where all the most dangerous cracks and bumps are. I speed recklessly, even though a single grain of gravel, if hit at the wrong angle, might send me sprawling. What the fuck do I care.
It’s strange seeing the sights that were once so familiar through my fucked-up lenses. The coffee shop and Amazon store are now closed, and in front of them a small caravan of tents has been erected. I weave around the bodies strewn across the sidewalk. The birds I used to hear twittering every morning are silent –it’s an hour later than I used to arrive. Also gone is the lone woman I used to see sweeping the sidewalk in front of the Mexican consulate, replaced by a long line of blurry people waiting for them to open. The Plaid Pantry is, of course, unchanged.
When I arrive at work, a giant truck is backing out of the space between the museum buildings, where the majority of the construction is now focused. Huge steel girders are now being erected. A fence runs along much of the property, covered with black banners that read “(ART) WORK IN PROGRESS.” I cross further up to avoid getting creamed by the truck and head down to the locker room in the basement, where I stow my scooter for the day.
As good as it is to see everyone, it's even better to be around art again. There are two shows up at the museum. One is a show about sneakers, and it’s as uninspiring as I had expected. The other has the uninspired name Monet to Matisse: French Moderns, and while the show is really nice, it includes a bunch of artists who, while incontestably French, do not strike me as being particularly modern. For instance, Corot. Corot is one of my favorite artists, his genius pointed out to me by my old friend Irv, who studied at the Barnes Foundation. I miss Irv terribly, and someday will write about him, but he lives on in my mind every time I see a painting by Corot, or by Renoir. Like many people, I loathed Renoir, but Irv taught me how to look at him differently, and now I adore his work.
As is common in shows like this, there are only a few examples of the artists mentioned in the title –I’m reminded of the “Rembrandt” show we had, which, though lovely, only featured a handful of Rembrandts, surrounded by a ruffed gaggle of lesser Dutchmen. The work is good though, and there are some names I've never heard of scattered amongst the Cezannes and Soutines. Monet’s fuzzy blobs of color are not unlike the way I see the world these days. Of course, he too had cataracts. If I tilt my glasses, I can sharpen the outlines a bit, but otherwise it’s all blobs of blue, blobs of green, blobs of purple. I learn to recognize people by the way they walk, can differentiate their faces from just a few bits of shaded pigment. I use the magnifier on my phone to help me read the computer. Like everything else in my life, it's frustrating and exhausting.
By the end of my second week it feels routine, like I never left. The past six months were a dream.
Saturday I sleep in, then sit out on the balcony with a book and coffee. Olivia lies across my lap for a while then dashes off. I can hear her thumping around as she jumps and twists trying to catch flies.
I’m surprised and delighted to see that the juncos are still living in the nest –a pair of them. One perches on the roof with a gigantic grasshopper in its mouth.
My mind keeps going blank and I just let it. This is not a bad way to live. Lonesome, but not terrible. Anyways, isn’t the artist’s job to be lonely? Most of the artists I know have given up art for human companionship. And who can blame them?
But I have the cat, the birds, the bugs. I have enough paintings and sketchbooks to fill a good-sized dumpster. If this was all I wanted out of life, I could be content. It’s a gorgeous day. A smear of hills stretches out before me, covered with trees and houses, with clouds above and the busy knot of roads below. I wonder what it would feel like to fly over the railing.
No comments:
Post a Comment