Diversions, National Blog Posting Month

Gaining momentum

I was early to pick Poppy up from her classes last week, so I took the opportunity to visit a new art gallery that a friend’s family recently opened. I don’t go to art galleries all that often, but I think maybe I should. It was a lovely space, and being there was pretty soothing.

A lot of the artists at Momentum Gallery are local or have some kind of local connection, and I recognized a few of the artists who had work on display there. Hoss Haley, for example, makes large metal sculptures that I’ve seen around town before. They kind of looked like balled-up pieces of paper, and if I had a lot more money than I have I’d buy one for my yard. I’d also buy his “Blocks No. 2,” but that would require a lot of money and some larger walls.

The more I looked at it, the more off-kilter it made me feel, like I was Alice about to tumble into another wackadoodle adventure.

"Blocks No. 2" by Hoss Haley
“Blocks No. 2” by Hoss Haley

My favorite piece at Momentum was Mariella Bisson’s “Waterfall in Three Parts,” which would also require a lot of money — $24,000, to be exact — and a ginormous wall were I to make it mine.

Her paintings are really textural, and from a distance they look like you could step straight into them.

"Waterfall in Three Parts" by Mariella Bisson
“Waterfall in Three Parts” by Mariella Bisson

They also had a good number of Andy Farkas Prints. He does a lot of paintings that feature woodland creatures in anthropomorphized situations, which you may not be shocked to learn is right up my alley. Happily, his work is much more affordable than Bisson’s, and I am going to have some of his trash pandas on my wall in the near future.

If you’re in or around Asheville NC and you’re looking for something unique to grace your walls, you should stop by Momentum (24 N. Lexington). They have some really interesting work, and the people who run the place are both nice and local.

Family matters, National Blog Posting Month

The Green Bean Incident

My grandparents got divorced when my dad was really young, and Dad never had much of a relationship with his father. When I was born, though, my mom thought my grandfather and his wife deserved the pleasure of my company. So until I was about 7, my mom tried her best to make sure my brother and I had a relationship with our paternal grandfather.

But here’s the thing: I don’t remember spending much time with him at all.

I do remember spending time with his wife, Betty. I remember lying in the living room floor in front of her recliner, watching “Savannah Smiles” on their giant square television. I remember being fascinated by the gold lamp in the corner with its cage of lugubrious bars encasing a glamorous lady. I remember the drawers upon drawers filled with colored pencils and crayons in her craft room.

But most of all, I remember the Green Bean Incident.

Why is it that we remember our lowest, most embarrassing moments so clearly?

My other grandparents were either working or hundreds of miles away, I guess, so Grandma Betty was my designated grandparent that day for Grandparents Day at school. I proudly showed her around my first-grade classroom, and I introduced her to Ms. Opal, whose eyes behind her thick glasses were alarmingly large.

The Grandparents joined us in the cafeteria that afternoon, and I helped Grandma Betty find our trays and get in line. The food line at my elementary school stretched into the horizon for miles, and Grandma Betty and I slide along it obediently, saying “Yes Please” to the baked chicken and rice and “No Thank You” to the Salisbury steak. Or maybe it was the other way around. It’s tough to reach three decades back in search of my chosen cuisine of the day.

I do, however, remember that I did not eat the green beans.

After sliding our trays down the line for what seemed like hours, we reached the Sides.

“Green beans?” The lunch lady asked.

“Yes,” Grandma Betty said, and the next 30 seconds unfolded in excruciating slow motion.

The lunch lady scooped up a spoonful of those hateful grayish-green tubes and started them on a certain trajectory with my plate.

“Noooooooo,” I whined. “I don’t want greeeeeeen beeeeeaaaaaaans.”

And I pulled my tray away just in the knick of time.

The green beans hit the floor with a squelch, and my tray flew across the room, the chicken and rice or Salisbury steak and potatoes spraying the floor and the first-grade and the grandparents in a typhoon of school nutrition before the tray, the plate and all the silverware crashed to the floor.

Grandma Betty shrieked, and then a terrible silence fell over the cafeteria.

“Clean it up,” Grandma Betty broke the silence. “Pick up those beans!”

She was clearly furious. And I, being a very spoiled kid, had never been told quite so brusquely to address any sort of mess.

So naturally I wailed.

“You. Are. Embarrassing. Me,” Grandma Betty growled. “Pick. Up. The. Beans.”

Did I pick up the beans? Did scary, skinny Ms. Opal come to my rescue? Did I ever apologize?

I have no idea.

But I can still go right back to that vast cafeteria and feel Grandma Betty’s fury about those beans.

Obviously Grandma Betty and I were not at our best on that particular Grandparents Day. I don’t remember her raising her voice at me any other time, and that’s probably why that one stuck. I’ve never seen anyone get so angry about green beans before, either.

So the lessons I took from the Green Bean Incident are as follows:

  • Let the lunch lady put the green beans on your tray. Just because they’re there doesn’t mean you have to eat them.
  • Sometimes kids do dopey, embarrassing things. Try not to overreact, though, because if you yell at them in the school cafeteria you just might scar them for life.

    • blessings, Family matters, National Blog Posting Month

    Growth

    2 Comments

    Poppy looked different yesterday when she hopped out of the car after soccer practice.

    She was glowing a little more than usual, but that was probably just from spending an hour and a half running around the soccer field. She’s been growing her pixie cut out, so she’s currently a bit shaggy around the edges. But that wasn’t it either. I shrugged it off and gave her a hug and we went inside to finish our day with a late dinner and an episode of “Blackish.”

    Poppy is 79 days into being 12. Twelve hasn’t been the easiest age for her. She had her first breakup this year, and a lot of her homeschooled friends joined the public school ranks. She was cut from her soccer team, and two-thirds of her three-person tae kwon do crew advanced to the next belt level without her.

    She’s weathered it all with aplomb, but I know it’s been difficult for her.

    Poppy’s always been slow to wake up in the mornings, much like her mother. It was lovely letting our mornings unfold slowly when she was 6. It’s more stressful now that she’s 12 and has a 12-year-old’s schedule and responsibilities. This morning, as I have most every morning for the last 12 years, I rubbed her head and told her it was time to get up.

    “I’m heading to the shower,” I said. “You need to be up and getting ready when I get out.”

    She stretched and grunted and I headed to the shower, full in the knowledge that I’d be waking her up again in a few minutes.

    There was a Boy for a brief moment. They texted a lot and went to a dance together, and then the fascination just kind of faded away. It stung, but I think most of that sting came from not knowing how to be friends again. They’re working on it.

    Those former homeschooled friends, we don’t see much of them any more. That stung, too, at first, but Poppy has found that there are more friendly kids out there and, as a pretty friendly kid herself, she hasn’t had much trouble befriending them.

    Sometimes she surprises me. I came out of the bathroom this morning and there she was in my bedroom, her hair going every which way and her arms stretched to the sky.

    I think the sports setbacks stung the most of all. I’m not sure what happened with soccer tryouts. She was on the team last year, and I suspect she figured that was 90 percent of the battle. Getting cut from the team was a bitter and tearful way to learn that she actually did need to bring 100 percent of her effort to tryouts.

    Poppy is a red-black belt in tae kwon do, as were two of her friends. They’ve talked a lot about testing for black belt together. But when the other girls were ready to test for recommended black belt, Poppy just wasn’t quite there.

    We’ve talked a lot about Kyle Schwarber this year. Schwarber won the World Series and then got sent back to the minors. Which was almost certainly mortifying for him, but he didn’t quit. He set a goal and worked hard and made it back onto the Cubs.

    So Poppy, she’s taken a cue from Schwarber. She’s spent this season playing soccer at a less prestigious level, and she committed to going to two additional practices every week to help build her skills for next year’s tryouts. She’s going to as many tae kwon do classes as she can fit into a week, and she’s meeting outside of class with her instructors to ask for constructive criticism and to hone her skills.

    She still looked different this morning, and I still couldn’t put my finger on exactly what it was. I shrugged it off and gave her a hug and then I saw it.

    Poppy’s sweet sleepy gaze was in the wrong place. Her eyes were in the wrong place, and her nose was in the wrong place, and her pillow-wild mop was in the wrong place.

    Until very recently I’ve always seen her face from above. She’s been exactly the same height as me for long enough to get used to seeing eye-to-eye with her, literally if not always figuratively. And now, suddenly, I’m looking up at her.

    This kid. She grew a quarter of an inch in 18 days. She’s grown leaps and bounds more than that emotionally since her birthday 79 days ago.

    And all I can do is give her the tools she needs and then sit over here on the sidelines cheering her on. The growing pains are so tough, but watching her grow is such a beautiful thing.