365 Memories

I am not a makeup maven. I've never worn foundation, except the professional "pancake" kind for those handful of times I have performed on stage (a lifetime ago!). For everyday, it just feels like a slow toxic suffocation of crud in my pores. Ditto the blush. No fuss, no muss. Definitely no mascara; the wand is a serious hazard. The most I could cope with: eyeliner, some shimmery nude color on lids, and lipstick. The lipstick used to be bright red. At some point, I realized that my olive skin tone is hard to match to the right shade, though—all the reds I like when I see them in stick form end up making my skin or my teeth look yellow. Now, I opt for more tawny and brown shades, when I bother. I remember, though, a time when I loved to browse the cosmetics aisles and look at lipsticks and read the exotic, trumped up names of the colors. I would laugh at the outrageousness . Of all the hundreds of names I've read, and the dozens of tubes I've owned, I remember the ...

The honeymoon starts unfairly, with my love divided. Moving along the curving Provençal roads, shaded by plane trees, we leave the festivities of the (beautiful but exhausting) wedding behind us—hightail it out of the Southwest region, trading Dumas for Van Gogh , for Cézanne . We arrive on the outskirts of Aix , and there she is: Mont Sainte Victoire in all her rocky glory. I have never been here, but I feel a sense of homecoming and desire, like returning to a lover after a long absence, seeing again the delicate way she peels an orange in a single spiral for your pleasure. I spent years looking at this mountain, through the eyes of the painter Paul Cézanne ; semesters analyzing his obsessive analysis of its geometry: the critical thesis for my MFA compared Cézanne and his modernist literary relation, Lawrence Durrell . But what can you really capture of a lifelong love? Which face presents itself to you, at what moment? A mountain, an Alexandrian woman, two people beginning thei...

We stopped at the side of the road, shocked by yellow. A full field of sunflowers, turning their large, open faces to the sun. Tournesols in French. My friend, D., and I jumped out of the car, went to stand at the edge of the field, and had our pictures taken. Saturated color: gold and cyan behind and above us. Kodachrome tribute. But even in black and white the shots are impressive, the flowers big as our own heads, a field of dark eyes glistening. Before France, I had never seen a vibrant field of growing sunflowers, only their kin, turning up sometimes in a florist's shop or else in the farmer's market. Bringing them home, there was never a vase large enough or heavy enough to hold them; their long, thick stalks had to be cut with knives. The flower heads would bow toward the table, stooped under the weight of their cheerful petal halos and spiky, mane-like leaves. Across the street from the house purchased jointly in name ( post about that here ), there are also fields li...

Today I was honored with a gift: a gorgeous orchid plant in luscious, fertile bloom. The colors are instantly uplifting, especially on as drab a day as today is in New York City, the sky going from black to gray to white and back to gray. In front of me, however, a complex cluster of waxy yellow petals that look as though they've been flecked first with an intense shade of purplish-pink (really, the color you first think of if I say "orchid"), and next with a touch of orange-red, right in the center of each flower. The picture to the left does not do justice to the color saturation; the blossoms are much brighter than they appear here. The orchid is an interesting plant. Its flowers seem fragile; you'd expect them to be like tissue paper. And yet not only are the leaves hearty and thick, the petals (at least on this variety) are sturdy as well. Another seeming contradiction: the blooms are, on the one hand, the epitome of refinement, of elegance . . . and yet, if you ...

Thinking about high school friends. Friends from my second high school, that is. A place I entered under cover of deep Michigan snow, in the middle of my sophomore year. Spring semester, summer vacation, then back for one more term before having to take a medical leave. These events are all detailed in other posts. But what I remember today is this: an unexpected gesture from a friend I didn't even know I had. A handcrafted gift I have kept and cherished since the age of sixteen. With all the moves I've made, it's perhaps a miracle that this gift has not been broken—it is fragile, fired clay—and yet it makes sense: I have taken more than the usual care with it. The object in question is a plate, glazed in dove gray with an abstract crosshatch of lavender, peat, and twilight sky. It was made expertly by a boy in my school, in the ceramics studio, and given to my mother to pass along to me once she'd made the trip up north, alone, to clean out my room toward the end of th...

Senses swimming in a deep, blue hue. An unexpected bath of color, and the feeling of being washed clean. In the intimate, empty auditorium of the Musée Chagall, in Nice, France, I sat in shafts of light made dazzling by the stained-glass windows of the artist's spiritual genius. Outside, at the base of the hill on which the museum perched, the January air did little to keep beach goers off the Promenade, but my mom and I preferred being inside, in this museum. I am surprised we did not go back daily while in Nice. It was 1990. I was living my twenty-first year, and in that moment, in front of that three-panel installation of Chagall's windows, I could allow myself to feel that I was just then, only then, beginning to live. In fact, the windows are called La création du monde , or "The Creation of the World," dating from 1971–1972. I was two to three years old when they were made, so we were very nearly born at the same time, the windows and I. The auditorium was u...

Do you remember your first big box of Crayola crayons? While I may not remember the exact one, or how old I was when I received it, I do remember the excitement of the perfect, unused tips (it always felt like a shame to spoil them); I recall the built-in sharpener, which in my childhood world was at least as good as sliced bread (with PB & J, of course) and which made some amends for the unavoidable wear-and-tear. No more 8-, 16-, 24-, or 48-count boxes for me; those did not come with the sharpener. I always lusted after the 64-crayon box, with its brown cardboard tiers displaying the colors to their best advantage. The year I was born, this was the biggest size box you could purchase. Now there's the whopping 120-color box, which came into existence in 1998, according to the Crayola Web site  color chronology. Still, I like the 64-count assortment, and it's the first one I bought for my son once he could hold the slimmer crayons. Now, about the colors themselves. Followin...

Blue, blue, Brazilian blue. My one, my only love is you . . . I may not recall with total accuracy this, or indeed any, specific passage, but to this day I bear the imprint of the text and vivid artwork bound together in the book  Lion and Blue . My father gave this book to me for a birthday in the 1970s (maybe '75 or '76); he inscribed it with words I also can no longer quote verbatim though the emotion behind them still resonates. I was between the ages of six and eight, no more. The book, a fable of love written by Robert Vavra and illustrated with reproduced oil paintings by Fleur Cowles, was published in 1974 by William Morrow & Co, and was marketed as children's literature. It's appeal, however, crossed over to all ages. What I remember most is the deeply saturated hue of the blue Brazilian butterfly with black-veined wings, who was the object of the lion's love. I remember being mesmerized by its intensity, and the color has in fact become a motif in my l...

I should have been in lightweight, fine-mesh tulle, pink or white; costumed to evoke a Degas dancer (I did have a black ribbon around my neck), posing among the polished wood furniture featured in the print ad for a fine antique store. If my costume had been white or pale pink, I felt sure, I would have been placed up front in the photograph. (Though maybe it was my olive complexion, too, that was too dark; I loved the sun and did not yet cultivate paleness as a mark of beauty, though at the time, there were still many assumptions about what a ballerina's skin ought to look like: anemic, as if to belie any suggestion of her true athleticism.) As it happened, though, I was in a costume of coarser blue material, and when the ad appeared in Architectural Digest in the mid-1980s, I was in the background, next to a seated violinist, pretending to be more interested in following along with his sheet music than in performing any dance steps. Front and center was another girl, a girl with...

White expanse of linen; bleached perfect square in front of me on a polished walnut bar. Folding, without too much thought required. Repetitive action draining away the minutes before the doors to the restaurant would open for business. Making my way through graduate school, I covered some measure of expenses by returning to the standby job of many artists: waiting tables. Growing up, it seemed you quickly fell into one camp or the other when it came to the (not necessarily) simple job for money—you were either "restaurant" or "retail." I dislike shopping, dislike salespeople trying to help me shop . . . I'm hardly right for retail. For me, it's always been restaurants, either front or back of house. I have worked at restaurants of varying degrees of size and finesse, from small hash-slinging diner to raw bar (shucking oysters is no mean task!), from bookstore café and espresso bar to the most recent, a more upscale American establishment. The shifts would ...

January 1985. At fifteen years old, I was an angry ex-dancer; passion crushed, career shunted. It seemed so true, that statement about not going home again. After being on my own at fourteen, across the country from my parents in order to pursue a dream that didn't work out, there was no question of going back to a "normal" high school, no desire to live at home, despite my parents' support (or maybe because of it—I didn't want sympathy or for anyone to say they'd been afraid this kind of thing would happen). So, I was once again the "new girl" at another boarding school for artists, and that was fine; I could remake myself into anything at all: drama major, costume designer, metalsmith , photographer. Assuming, of course, that my parents and I made it through the whiteout. We had just arrived in Traverse City, Michigan, had found the school some 14 miles away, situated between two frozen lakes, abutting State Park land, and we were heading out to fi...