Again! Another year. My Great Artistic Venture continues, however sporadic and interrupted, with my second showing of art on canvas at the annual North Ogden Art Festival. Saturday, August 13th. At the North Ogden Park (2650 N. 500 E., North Ogden). Last year was the best turnout so far. Small, but delightful. Intimate, fun.
I’m excited. Which excitement is belated, but. Excited!
This week has been a frenzy of last minute parenting amidst artwork. Or it feels frenzied to me, because I’m also still doing laundry, chauffeuring children, fixing cheese bubblies for my kids and company, cleaning cheese bubblies up after kids and company are finished, and buggling Nora when the day is done. “Buggle” is a word Nora invented. It is when I snuggle her to sleep in her bed, or in my bed when Frank is out of town. I suppose any place with a pillow would work for buggling.
Aloha, Y’all. Yes, Hawaii. Waikiki Beach, Honolulu, Oahu, Hawaii. I wrote a blog last summer about how I was not in Hawaii, and now, this summer, amazingly, I am. Almost ten days in paradise.
I am here with Frank, courtesy of his vocation. Once again, I am the stowaway, the familiar girl in the faraway port. But I’m not minding; the hotel is nice, the breezes are heavenly (Heavenly!), and I am well stocked with apple bananas (a world apart and above regular bananas), mangos, pineapple, macadamia chocolates, and diet shakes (to offset the chocolate). Hawaii! Surreal. My first….maybe my only visit.
I wonder if they only exist in Northern Utah, those nondescript white vans with the simple lettering “Incident Management” painted down their sides. I don’t recall seeing them anywhere else, though maybe they escaped my notice during my preoccupied thirties in Washington. I can’t remember now if they have flashing lights (I think they do). But I’ve seen them everywhere here—there must be a fleet of them— and I always wonder, when I see one, just what incident they’ve been summoned to manage. Domestic disasters? The vans look a little underdressed for such major disturbances as earthquakes, tornados, terrorists, or flooding (and too local for other aquatic catastrophes such as Watergate and Whitewater).
And so I am left perplexed. What DO they mean by incident? How do they intend to manage it? Who are “they”? And how are they summoned? Could I call them, if I had an incident? Or do they just suddenly show up in my moment of need.
My sister Andrea pleaded. She pleaded a month ago in a post on my Facebook wall (which otherwise is a minimalist space–spare, sparse, and neglected by its owner) for me to write more blogs. Which plea smote my heart and tickled my vanity and led me, eventually—in spurts and lapses— to this very moment, in which my fingers find their cautious way once more across my laptop keyboard. Writing who knows what; after the longest quiet interval yet, I battle not just writer’s block, but trepidation. Which trepidation means (some friends complain that my word choice is foreign to them) that there is at least some fear—let’s call it agitation— about writing (I know, it’s lame); it is possible, even, that at some point trembling could occur (that would be from the Latin “trepidare”: to “be agitated, tremble”).
I have discovered that I can run in the cold. In well below freezing temps. I thought something bad would happen, like (for instance) I would get really, really, really cold. Miserably cold. I hate being cold. And my toes, nose, and fingers (and the pink lining of my lungs) would be frostbitten, which frostbite might lead eventually to death or dismemberment. But no. No, I can run in the cold without permanently damaging my pieces and parts.
My sabbatical has ended; I’d like to talk about banana bread now.
I make the best whole wheat chocolate banana bread in the world–no no–in the History of the world. If I do say so myself. It might not rate beyond divine in an everyday street/post-football game taste test; I suspect that only extraordinary persons would truly appreciate the supreme nuances of my banana bread. But you can see that Nora loves it. Stray friends and relatives with an affinity for chocolate, browsing through my kitchen, cannot leave it alone. It is, frankly, to die for.
I am not going to simply share my recipe. No, that would be too easy, and way too brief. I’ve been away for awhile; I’m back, and I have things to say. Prepare yourselves for my banana bread ramble. While the story is not as spectacular as the bread itself, it does stray into far flung tangents, culminating in irrelevant–perhaps even exotic– regions. How fun is that.
Crisis. Everyone faces them; most of us make it through them. Usually they alter our perspective. Hopefully we learn good things by crisis. Hopefully we see better on the other side. Perhaps we are even more gracious and graceful in the end.
In the midst, though. Grace under fire is…well, just this side of impossible. Not impossible, but. Sometimes our knuckles are too white above clenched fingers to allow them to play our music. Our teeth set too tight to smile for our friends or for strangers..
And that is where I have been lately, where I am now. In crisis. White knuckled. Huddled over wounds, looking for ways to heal. Not to be melodramatic or mysterious or anything… Like I said, we’ve all been there at one time or another; what I suffer is common to us all. But if I opened my soul enough to write for real about it, I am afraid ugly, distorted things…things I’m trying to unravel and understand and get past would come spilling out. I won’t write here about my crisis. Not yet. Someday, after this tight sabbatical, I may allude to it. Or not. Someday I may have a glorious, lightning-streaked epiphany about how to see the story, so that I can phrase it in truthful and real and hopeful ways. Share-able ways. And then… it would look ordinary, possibly even boring. Nothing to wonder and exclaim about. And I would think, well my goodness. After all that, this only?
