I AM WHAT I AM, AND THAT IS RESTLESS

I simply cannot stay still.  There is nothing in me that is willing to remain in one place for any stretch of time, my feet and legs, my mind, my attention span, everything wants to get up and go.  Go where?  It doesn’t matter, anywhere but here.

If I’m sitting if front of the TV, my fingers are constantly strumming on the arm of the chair; at our kitchen counter my feet and legs are bouncing on the footrest. In addition to creating enough noise to drive my dear wife crazy, I have managed to wear the finish off several armrests with my constant strumming.  I’m at my very best when on the cell phone.  In the kitchen I walk around the center island, continuously, without stopping for the entire call.  In the studio I will walk the length of the studio-gallery, back and forth, sometimes actually interfering with the call’s signal.  I don’t know why I do this; it is entirely unconscious.  I’m inclined to believe it is related to some prenatal event in my mother’s life.

I like to read.  There are piles of books all around our home, in my study, the studio, my beside table, and surrounding my favorite chair in the living room.  There has to be, because I rarely read one book or magazine for more than 15 or 20 minutes at any one time.  If I’m reading a mystery/thriller as soon as something critical or dangerous is about to happen I close the book and pick up another one.  Later I will return to the first book and continue reading, only to repeat the cycle again and again. 

It’s the same with my painting, regardless of the medium. I work on a painting one small stage at a time, taking frequent, totally unnecessary breaks, usually to spend another brief period of time on a book or two that I’m reading.  After painting one element or portion of the work I quickly step away, whether it took 3 minutes or 30 minutes. For this reason, I like to have more than one piece of work in progress at the same time, frequently in different mediums.  Then when I move from one to another I can feel productive and ambitious and not neurotic and spastic.  I very rarely complete a painting from start to finish in one sitting.  Small watercolors or drawings are the exception. My helter-skelter habits make for a rather schizophrenic studio, with workstations continually evolving and moving; to counter this I’ve turned to rolling carts.  I now have four of them, each holding a different medium, and easily moves about to accommodate my own moving about.

I would love to finish this piece now but I gotta go…really.

I’M WHAT I WAS BORN TO BE

 I’M WHAT I WAS BORN TO BE

How fortunate and grateful I am to be able to say that about myself.  It has been a privilege to live a life of my own design, to choose the work I felt called to do, and pursue it, unfettered by outside demands.  Well, that is not quite true.  The outside demands were minimized, not abolished.  Many of my friends and colleagues considered the choices I made courageous, and others thought them foolish; I see them as neither.  I can take no credit for being brave or wise; I simply did what I was meant to do.  The seeds that grew the temperament required to make these decisions were sown at my conception and lovingly nurtured by my parents.  All that remained for me to do was take advantage of what had been given to me.

One of my greatest wishes is that my children can say the same of themselves.

THE FRUIT OF THE VINE

I grew up with wine.  It has stained my DNA.  From the half a dozen wooden barrels of wine in our cellar to the plain gallon jug in the kitchen, wine was a constant presence in our home.   The small vineyard that once provided the grapes for my grand father’s winery could easily be seen from our kitchen window. I’ve been told he had the first commercial winery in southern New Jersey, producing a Claret that was sold behind a label reading – Father & Son  brand Claret.  Apparently it was a commercial success, until Prohibition shut is down in the 1920s.

It wasn’t a vast vineyard, but to a young boy the canopied rows of grapes seemed endless.  By the time I arrived on the scene it occupied about two acres of the twenty plus acre farm, perhaps a bit more.  It is possible it was larger during the commercial wine making days. There are many things I remember fondly from my early childhood, the persimmon, apple, and pear trees, my pony, the family cow… but more than anything else, I remember, and miss, the grapes.  I loved to walk between the rows in the late summer when the grapes were ready for picking.  The broad leaves reached above my head keeping out the sun, creating the perfect summer hide away.  But the real treasure was the delectable fruit, just hanging there waiting for me.  My favorite grapes were in the first 3 rows, large yellow and light red grapes (Niagara?) that I could squeeze and pop the pulp out of the skin into my mouth.  Oh they were good! The rest of the vineyard was given to the deep blue concord variety, also quite tasty, but smaller and less juicy.

I have the faintest memory of harvesting the grapes…I was probably 5-6 years old and I remember a lot of people walking through the rows filling their baskets with lush bunches of grapes.  To pick them my father put a funny ring on his middle finger; it had a curved blade on the top that was used to cut the stem with a simple swift flick of the wrist.  The grapes were carried to the yard between our house and one of the barns where a press had been set up.  Much to my dismay I cannot remember the actual pressing and the steps that obviously followed.  I can say with authority that I never saw anyone stomping on the grapes.  Another distressing gap in my memory is when the vineyard was removed, but maybe that’s good.

Every year my father and grandfather would make 4 or 5 barrels of wine that were kept in a small alcove in our cellar. I would occasionally help myself to a taste using a Mason jar lid.  I thought it was cool, but the truth is, I didn’t like it. .  A gallon of red wine was a fixture in our kitchen, often on the floor by my father or grandfather at dinnertime. They drank from small juice glasses, never the stemmed wine glasses we see today.   One year tragedy struck, and all the wine ended up as vinegar.  In a fit of anger my father opened the taps in all the barrels and let the wine drain onto the dirt floor.  You can only use so much red wine vinegar.  The basement never smelled the same after that.

Like so many first generation Italian-Americans, my father made wine every year, even long after the grapes were gone.  He did this his entire life excluding the few years his health prevented him from doing so. The wooden barrels where eventually replaced by five gallon glass and plastic containers, and he had to purchase the grapes from commercial suppliers.  But the wine was distinctly his own.  My mother would join in making dandelion and peach wine.

When friends and relatives came to visit they never left without first having coffee, wine, and more often than not, food.  Until he died, all of my visits to my uncle Ferrar, dad’s older brother, began with a glass of wine along with some bread, cheese, and perhaps peppers and/or salami.  Of course he made his own wine, as did my uncle Ren, another older brother, who left the farm and moved to Long Island. (His name was Communardo, but everyone called him Ren...quite understandable.)  He had his own grape arbor in the back yard.

I enjoy a small juice glass of red wine every day at lunch.  It is my way of celebrating my father and grandfather.  And I enjoy wine with my dinner, but I enjoy it more when I am sitting with one or more friends and neighbors in our kitchen or on our porch. It is a quiet way of saying, “I am glad your here with me”.  It is a gesture of friendship and hospitality.

Family, friendship, and hospitality – that sounds a lot like love to me.

About a year ago someone brought us a bottle of wine, a label I did not recognize, and as soon as I opened it the aroma of the Niagara grapes immediately brought me back to our farm, the grapes, and the wine.  If I closed my eyes I could have been standing between the rows of grapes in our modest vineyard.  It was the first time since my childhood that I experienced that fragrance.

THE HEAVINESS OF AGE

  

Last night listening to folk music from the early 60s on You Tube, I was immediately transported back to my college years (1957-1961).  Thinking about  how the years have transformed my psyche, the phrase, the heaviness of years, came immediately to mind, and as I am inclined to do, I began exploring this idea in my journal.  I thought about how age tends to diminish our ambitions, aspirations, and willingness to take risks, as well as encouraging distrust and suspicion of anything new, a growing reliance on daily routine, confusion over an evolving youth culture, and uncertainty over the extent of our personal future.  How depressing!

But even as I was writing this bleak scenario of aging, which carries a modicum of truth, I realized it was only one side of the coin; there is an equally compelling argument to make for the benefit of age.  The weight of the years is well balanced.

The uncertainty of the future   I have difficulty dealing with the loss of the “some days” of my youth.   As a younger man I could cling to the notion that someday my dreams would come true, and my aspirations achieved.  The future was limitless.  At some point in my mid 60s that began to change, the future was narrowing and the “some days” began to diminish.  Disastrous?  Perhaps, but there is another way to look at this.  With a diminishing and uncertain future, one is forced to focus on the present.  For someone who tends to spend too much time thinking about the tomorrows, this is a positive step, with each birthday I move one year closer to learning to live in and appreciate my “todays.  In the end, it is the journey, and not the destination that matters.

Following the dream and taking risks I know something about this.  At age 39 I decided to leave my private medical practice and work part time in an emergency room so I could pursue a career in art (I had no formal training).  At age 53 I opened a medical practice in a converted barn on our farm, and at age 62 moved 950 miles away from family and friends to Paducah Kentucky to be one of the first artists to sign up for their artist relocation program.  I made each of these decisions, and many others, without fear or trepidation because I was confident that they were the steps intended for me...I knew that as much as one can know something.

But now, six years later, when I think about these moves I wonder, could I do that today?  Does our spirit respond to age the way our bones and joints do?  Does it tend to get a little slow and more inclined to remain comfortable and secure rather than jump ahead into the unknown?  Those decisions were made with the security of the “some days” to fall back on if needed, “some days” that become more elusive with the passing years.

Although taking risks to pursue dreams become more difficult and perhaps more stressful, the years provide us with a new resource…experience.  And if we pay attention to our past, experience brings us another resource...wisdom.  Together they can help guide us through the transitions and changes faced in these later years.  We are better equipped to assess risks and have a more realistic notion of the consequences of our actions.  Perhaps my spirit and my personal aspirations have been buffered a bit by the years, but they remain intact, and I pursue them a bit slower, with deliberation and determination that these same years have provided.