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 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).
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.
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.
It was great. The art reception was great. Thank you, everyone who came and took it in! I hadn’t known what to expect, and I was pleasantly surprised. There was a warm sense of community and welcome amongst the artists who’d gathered to show their work. I liked that. The atmosphere and visitors (many of whom were family and friends, including a couple of babies) were casual and friendly and appreciative (barring a tiny gaggle of teenagers who came just for the food). And Maurya did come and play the baby grand with her lovely gentle fingers for awhile, after her dad had sufficiently nagged her (she was on a date). It was all delightful: the guests, the other artists (whose art I gratefully mingled mine with), the atmosphere. Having no real previous experience of my own, I had been vaguely worried that guests (if any came at all) would expect the event to go off like something I’d seen in a movie, where the artists were cerebral and mysterious and devastatingly neurotic and everyone dressed in chic, snug, expensive, unapproachable black and ate tiny fancy appetizers with names ordinary people couldn’t pronounce. 