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She and I talked while my friend had her arm in the cuff, and as I listened to this lady's story, I could hear my inner voice trembling, “She’s some form of a future me. She is every woman of a certain age with support-hose straining to hold in her varicose veins, sitting on a chair in the back of a drugstore waiting for them to fill four prescriptions she cannot afford.” Suddenly the twinges of discomfort I get in my lower back became a crippling form of arthritis and I was wheelchair bound. I am her a few years or a stroke away. I say, “I know what you are feeling. They always make you wait—they try to run you down with bureaucracy so you will wither up and blow away and forget your brain is about to burst.”
As this lady tells me her story, I want to scream. I imagine thousands of older women with aneurisms who can no longer stand for their eight hour shifts at Wal-Mart because their backs are breaking and the veins in their legs are popping. I imagine a sea of them sitting at kitchen tables long into the night, filling out forms for disability, knowing their efforts are futile, and certain they will be denied assistance because they can still manage to stand. I imagine them giving up, too tired to try, as they finish Diet Cokes head toward sofas where they curl up in fetal positions with TVs on until the pictures turns to fuzz. I imagine they refuse to get up for any reason other than to use the bathroom for the most basic of necessities, or to quickly grab some Fritos from a peeling kitchen cupboard before resuming fetal positions on warn and stained sofas. They lay with cats whose litter boxes are full, but who devotedly curl next to them as they refuse to open mail or answer the occasional ring of their phones.
And, I wonder, is it the pop tarts, the insidious infiltration on a massive scale of sugar and salt laden foods that causes popping veins and aneurisms? If they had only juiced and eaten organic, like good people should, and jogged and enrolled in Pilates classes, would they now be curled up on sofas watching television screens turn fuzzy? Will I, who do not practice Pilates, be punished, forced to join this mass movement of sofa-ridden aged women? Will I, with a rarely used juicer sitting on my counter and several pounds of organic apples sitting uneaten in my refrigerator, succumb to popping veins? Is being too lazy to cut up a few apples and carrots and put them in a juicer on a regular basis (especially when I possess these resources), grounds for that prison sentence called aging?
When my friend checks the results of her blood pressure, she looks relieved. Her pressure is lower than it was a few days ago when it was so alarmingly high it threatened to burst the vessels in her eyes causing an inconvenient state of blindness. We had been to the University of Iowa Hospitals earlier in the week, and the specialist told her that her vision was not permanently impaired and would improve if she increased the dosage of the dugs she was taking. She had waited to see the doctor because she was in-between insurance having just left a job and started as an independent contractor. Thank god, I said, now you won’t go blind. My friend walked to the counter and picked up her new prescription. I noticed her new JJill tee shirt looked tight around her midriff and tummy. I remembered when we were both more slender.
“Do we need anything while we are here?” I ask. After all, they do have a small health food section. “How about some Ben and Jerry’s fhish?” she answers. “Yeah,” I say, “We deserve it.”
I’m exhausted from trying to be artistic – in my art studio past the comfort zone of bedtime – an already challenged time when reading or television always compete to keep me from much needed rest, but my art teacher, guru of sorts – a creative director and wizard of artistic transcendence – directed me to set up a designated space in my house allocated to art only, where paints, paper, brushes, glitter, glue, markers, magazines, gesso, and all manner of artsy material are arranged in baskets on the table, strewn across the guest bed, poke from under the guest bed in plastic containers. I am now officially obligated to create that illusive product – art. Art – that category of mystic and mythic proportions that cannot be defined, and continues to be the subject of argument, awe, fear, and reverence. I am now on permanent assignment to be creative, in tune with the right hemisphere of my brain, and on alert to notice all opportunities to move spirit into matter. I, who cannot draw a straight line or anything that remotely resembles subject matter, am suddenly required to produce the true and the beautiful. I am overwhelmed by the magnitude of this spiritual assignment springing from the depths of my being and progressing under the guidance of my mentor.
It started out simply, when one day, two years ago, while I walked by the art gallery, a friend pulled me in to the art studio, and asked me to sit down and start decorating paper mask molds to be auctioned as an art gallery fund-raiser. I had not glued much since kindergarten, when I typically threw my own attempts at making flowers look like flowers across rooms. Yet while mask-making, it seemed the gluing and painting process became instantly addictive, and the right brainwave activity leading to suspension of time and space, had the profound effect of creating a yearning for a repeat experience of the out-of-the-box mode of operating, leading to a discussion with fully-credentialed- art-gallery-owner-and-art-instructor-par-excellence who recommended continuing art education at his gallery/studio on a regular basis to enliven that field where the creative so easily go, and, in some cases, never return. And now, just a few weeks into the exploration of this new terrain, with a few collages under my belt, and lots of time spent with Dick Blick, and a designated art studio on my premises, I am exhausted by the demands of the creative life and the expectations I have put upon myself to be “an artist.” There – I have finally uttered the A-word and now must suffer under the mantle of expectation and the realization I know nothing about art, and do not know anything about making it other than cutting out magazine pictures and pasting them on masonite. I am a fraud in a field where absolute truth and honesty are required for any modicum of success. And so, I often stay up past ten or eleven, and sitting on a chair in front of the easel purchased on e-bay even before my decision to embark on formal but actually informal training, I stare at my board, gesso-ed and painted, with scraps of cut paper, renderings of skulls, pictures of lipstick tubes, and words lightly glued (still in process). I stare, worrying that I suck and that I am a wanna-be, and fuck the "process only" preachers who are adamant that product is not where it is at, while they stick cool looking product on the pages of their books that claim process is the only thing that matters. And sometimes when in process, I feel that flow, that sugary rush of time suspended, and that light headed no-fly zone when I know that picture of the Goth girl is perfect for that spot directly underneath the orange torn paper in the right corner. I just know it, and all is well.
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