My cousin, Patsy

The other night, I found a message from my cousin Patsy on the phone. And I called her back. Unfortunately, we talk only about once a year, close to the holidays. 

My cousin Jacqueline and I were the youngest of the family. Pat and my brother were thirteen and sixteen years older. She would have been my role model, had my mother lived, since she'd so successfully moved into an important and interesting professional life in New York. Whenever I could, I looked at the fashion section that she edited in the New York Times Magazine Section, even though I rarely read the Times, never having enough money to buy the Sunday edition.

Often I'm sure that I've aged  into looking just like her mother, Marion, since I don't remember my mother, and my aunt is my model for family resemblance. I look at my blue eyes and see hers, my wrinkles and see hers.

After I'd done a lot of self-portraits, 1972-73, I went on to take more out in Port Washington where we grew up. I love this image of Marion, my daughter, me and the vacuum. I hear Marion, "Lissie, don't show my hands. Please, don't show my hands." She worried that they weren't the hands of her youth, but I find them comforting since they so much resemble the way my hands have become. I remember Krissy asking, "What happened to your beautiful hands? Where are your thin fingers?" That was twenty years ago, when we were eating dinner with Nance in Tucson.

Recently I had a dream in which I was nude, wearing only high heels, standing on Mackey Avenue outside of Marion and Roi's house. Workmen were sanding the floors and one told me that I could stand on the bed in the guest room and vacuum away all the dust I could reach from there. In the hallway, a tattoo artist was creating the most gorgeous shawl, robins egg blue and silver lettering, perhaps in Japanese, across the shoulders and down the back of a man who did martial arts. After he got up to shake out the pain, and sat down again, I felt his foot against mine.

Eight months of daily self-portraits

Each month I sort of decide how I might take photographs. The aim is to to be casual, intuitive and not match my first series of self-portraits taken in 1972-1973. Though I'd like to combine photographs from the two series, it's important not to think about what makes the most relevant combinations. What would 'look best' together.

     In May Krissy allowed to me take self-portraits with her as my birthday present. I'd actually finished my first series by taking photographs with her when she was a small girl and then by handing it over to her so that she was posing alone. That was a conscious decision, like passing a baton. I'd planned to take photographs for a year, but some of those photographs were being published with the "Krissy Photographs" in a portfolio in Camera 35 Annual. That fact made me very self-conscious. And I stopped the series.

     This June I thought that I would take close-ups and had taken the first day of images of my skin. I'm very curious about being inside a body that seemed like mine for all these years only to find that it's become quite different. The changes in skin are fascinating, if a bit frightening. Whose exterior do I inhabit? Though I find these images a bit repellant, they are interesting and very different from a group of body images that I took five years ago. Those were black-and-white and more refined. 

     However, Krissy said, "Why don't the three of us take pictures this month?" Her ex had arrived that afternoon. They are really close friends who laugh a lot and talk on the phone all the time. I find him very endearing. Why not jump for her idea? 

     But she is leaving, moving to New York on the 15th. Now I am in the middle of this unexpected direction (why not, since I didn't want to be burdened by conscious choice?) that is far more fun than the skin meditations would be. Will I use my beloved dog for the second half of the month?

     

Shelia's place

     I was supposed to stay with Susan during my 70th birthday trip to New York. Well, I'd planned to stay in a hotel, but Susan wanted me to stay with her. That was really much better, a good idea even though my plan had been to see how tough I was and whether I could do it all myself. The last time I'd been to NY was with my big guy, three or four summers ago, before that relationship ended.

     New York was my city, for eighteen years. I still consider myself a New Yorker, not having ever forgiven Boston for the disgusting display of racism during bussing when I first moved here in 1974. But New York has changed and so have I. And it was a bit daunting to make this trip. 

     I travel very little since my body is so cranky from fibromyalgia. If I sit too long, it gets angry. And if I carry heavy things, it gets angry. If I work at the computer, it gets angry. It absolutely hates the bus and loathed PeterPan all the way down, no leg room and uncomfortable seats. And I'd had a hard week, helping out a friend whose mother is very ill, going back and forth to deal with the cyst and taking antibiotics that produced stomach angst. So, I wasn't in the best of shape. 

     Because Susan wasn't able to have me at her condo, she asked her friend, Shelia, if I could stay there. Shelia (how do you spell her name?) makes friends just walking up the block, gives away many keys to her apartment and was willing to try me out. Susan bought a blow-up mattress and took me there on Friday night after I got off of the bus. 

     Shelia is easy. And nothing could have been better, barring the fact that I couldn't stay with Susan. 

     Lady, Shelia's golden retriever who seems more like a large refrigerator that moves from place to place, placidly, quietly, was rescued from a friend whose mother, in Mexico, died. Lady understood only Spanish, had never been on a leash, and lived in extreme luxury. Shelia's friend had found good homes for the servants, but couldn't find anyone to take the dog. When Shelia said that she was finished mourning for Chico, their former beloved dog, part Chow, part Pit Bull and something else that seems equally fierce, her friend flew to Mexico and brought an extremely frightened Lady back to New York. 

     Lucky Lady. Adored Lady. After having tried giving her the food that she was used to, and trying many other brands, Shelia now boils chicken for her, adds green beans to a bit of kibble and stirs it all up. 

      I don't know how Sly got adopted, but he follows her around as if he's a dog. It took him a couple of days before he'd allow me to photograph him, but on the last day, after I'd moved to a hotel, he allowed me to capture a few images. I'd stopped by her house on the way to the bus station, dragging my suitcase. I'd forgotten the bones that I wanted to take back to Boston so that I could make pinhole images of them. Why I got this hair brain idea is beyond me. But the bones, that Shelia had put on the shelf when Lady finished with them, were fascinating. Perhaps they remind me of "50 lbs. of clay," an installation piece. I'd never been at all interested in making anything that's beautiful, but for the last four years, I've been working with clay, amassing these impractical installations that I won't ever find a place to show. Anyway, I saw the bones. Photographing them with the digital point-and-shoot wasn't enough. They have to be pinhole images, I thought. Insanity.

     Shelia said, "Don't take them all. Your suitcase will be too heavy to pull." I obeyed, though I wanted them all. The suitcase was very heavy to pull. But now I want her to send me a monthly supply of bones by mail. I'll send her postage money. I hope I make the pinhole photos. 

     And Shelia allowed herself to be part of my 2008-2009 self-portrait series. That was terrific, more terrific because Lady wanted to join us.

Self-portraits, 1972, 73 and 2008, 09

     My daughter, Krissy, is allowing me to take a self-portrait with her everyday. That's her present for my seventieth birthday. And it's a good one. She was my first photo subject and that project lasted eighteen years until she stood on the stoop, her last day of high school, and said, "No more photographs." She'd been enormously patient until then.

     I never imagined reaching seventy. I've thought of death everyday for as long as I can remember. I imagine that is common for anyone whose mother died when she was a child. The possibility of death becomes too present. I think about death almost every time I get into the car. When I go away on a trip, I can't imagine returning from it. A trip to the doctor opens the potential for getting the news about what's in store for me.

     Krissy says I never smile. I'm sure that's hard on her. In fact, I'm much less dour than my father was, though I never even thought about his rarely smiling. He had a marvelous, quiet sense of humor and would make almost unnoticeable word plays. When he did laugh, his eyes would tear, his body would shake, is face would turn red. He liked Bob and Ray and the Sid Caesar Show, Thurber's writing. But smiling wasn't essential. By the time he got very old, he looked like a jack-o-lantern when he did smile, his front teeth blackened by his determination to never darken the door of a dentist.

     When Krissy was first brought into me after she was born, she was already alert. Even though I know that newborns don't actually see details, I could have sworn that she did, that she was saying, "Okay, I'm here, I want to get going." It was immediately obvious that she was an extrovert.