Christmas Real Estate
Walter Tan. Nat King Cole - “The Christmas Song” (1961). YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hwacxSnc4tI.
Memories are like the future, distant and uncertain, save for the near ones and the indelible far ones. Some of them, like movie scripts, linger for the company they keep. In my grandfather's house there is the famous oval window, a magical one nestled from beside the hearth and overlooking the forest and valley below. Small birds peeping on the branches outside that window are as cute as a cat worth sculpting and in some way more precious because of the picture window's quality to our relationships. Inside, the grace of details our late grandparents had provided, bound us to the place and still do.
In grade school, the beloved Miss Raisonbrand, our art and music teacher, announced one day she would be leaving to take a new job, selling real estate. She wouldn't be back. This was in northern New Jersey in the 1980's. I remember it so vividly because I loved that teacher and because I had no clue what 'real estate' meant. I still don't know what it means (to some extent as long as extended adolescence will last). I recall her playing guitar and singing, which I loved, even if most of those hootenanny songs sounded silly and un-relatable compared to the AC/DC and hair band metal I heard from my sister's collection. I liked it anyway because I liked the person playing it. Ms. Raisonbrand also liked my art and let my mom know it often. One year (maybe in fourth grade) I won an award for a cat sculpture i made out of gypsum and parts of an old gray rug. The thing was thick and ugly to me compared to the real cat I loved so much. So when I won the award I felt like it wasn't justified. The thing had to totally embody the beauty of its muse or nothing. There were a lot of cats and dogs from that time onward that played muse and could never be matched in form while the best, most inspiring humans went off to sell real estate which, all things counter, is probably a good move given the circumstances (real choices, not just inspired ones), just not for me at the time - i preferred silly hootenanny's and encouragement for my imperfect creations.
In grade school, the beloved Miss Raisonbrand, our art and music teacher, announced one day she would be leaving to take a new job, selling real estate. She wouldn't be back. This was in northern New Jersey in the 1980's. I remember it so vividly because I loved that teacher and because I had no clue what 'real estate' meant. I still don't know what it means (to some extent as long as extended adolescence will last). I recall her playing guitar and singing, which I loved, even if most of those hootenanny songs sounded silly and un-relatable compared to the AC/DC and hair band metal I heard from my sister's collection. I liked it anyway because I liked the person playing it. Ms. Raisonbrand also liked my art and let my mom know it often. One year (maybe in fourth grade) I won an award for a cat sculpture i made out of gypsum and parts of an old gray rug. The thing was thick and ugly to me compared to the real cat I loved so much. So when I won the award I felt like it wasn't justified. The thing had to totally embody the beauty of its muse or nothing. There were a lot of cats and dogs from that time onward that played muse and could never be matched in form while the best, most inspiring humans went off to sell real estate which, all things counter, is probably a good move given the circumstances (real choices, not just inspired ones), just not for me at the time - i preferred silly hootenanny's and encouragement for my imperfect creations.
On a day near Christmas, suffering the death of a pet, I lay near that oval window with cups of hot tea and honey and a fake fever. Or maybe I managed the fever from grief. In either case, there in the years before Ms. Raisonbrand left to sell Real Estate, I was stricken and when so stricken taken to focus on the micro-movements inside the body and about the spirit from beneath that oval window. With each pump of the heart, in these times of grief, I could feel the blood flow up, down and back again, at first constricted in the arterial pathways and then washed out over the working organs, inside the brain, and around the heart, feeding itself. Feeling each pump, flow and wash, pump, flow and wash, (repeat) in heightened awareness, an empathic grief. That experience, more or less, has carried on through life, surrounded by that hearth and beautiful illusions, visible and present, as a grand artwork in our home. In less than a month my daughter will sit on the same spot and mourn the passing of the late, great, Ruby. Ruby, a beloved rescue dog from the Katrina flooding who made her way from certain death on the drenched flats of Louisiana to a loving warm home a stone's throw from New York City and there built the stature of royalty until the cancer took her shortly after a joyous Christmas season. To this day "celebrating Christmas" may refer to Ruby humping pillows near the hearth, under the oval window. Actually anytime an animal mounts an inanimate object or a human leg, this may be referred to as "celebrating Christmas", as in Grandma's coined phrase "it's her way of celebrating Christmas", followed by a good long belly laugh. In less than two weeks we make the journey home.
Goes, Hugo van der. English: Portinari Triptych (Detail). Mary and Joseph on the Way to Bethlehem Français 1475. English: Galleria degli Uffizi, Wikimedia Commons.
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