Helena Clare Pittman, one of the Center’s most dedicated teachers, has written, painted, and taught her entire life. In her monthly Helena Writes series, she shares a lifetime of wisdom, one pearl at a time.
In her 57th post, Helena grapples first with this column’s deadline, then with a transformative experience of both grief and love. Enjoy!
Deadlines and baby blue
The column is due. I dig in my heels. I’m watching the news, or a movie. Really—no—I’m not writing it. Then I remember, no one is forcing me to do this. I ponder my gratitude for this commitment I’ve made, to myself, and to the Center. I’ve been writing it for something like five years. Through this column, I have plumbed the depths of aspects of my experience that I wouldn’t otherwise. I am so grateful.
But I can’t move. I’m tired, lazy, inert. I want to sit here and watch the TV, sew the little summer shrug I’m making from an old pullover light blue long sleeve shirt that doesn’t fit me. In all fairness to myself, it never fit me the way I like a shirt to fit, big and baggy. It was the color that got me, stopped me at the Tractor Supply store, on my way to the cashier to pay for Oliver’s cat food. The weave was strange and a little slippery for cotton. It was a blend of something else, I learned from the tag sewn two-thirds of the way down one inner seam when I got home. Being so near fifteen colors of long-sleeved pullover shirts, seeing the colors of the rainbow shimmering together, already too loose with money I am in the process of spending this summer, on the garden, on clothes, on books, on Amazon, even though I went into Tractor Supply to save money on Oliver’s food, I couldn’t, apparently, just leave the store.
So I browsed. Nothing was compelling enough to tempt me to buy it, a feeling I love and hate, until I saw that shirt, shining at the cool end of that Tractor Supply display shelf, brilliantly arranged for sales, shirt-rainbow. It was baby blue. Baby Ultramarine Blue, if you are a painter or a craftsperson who buys colors in any medium at all. Ultramarine blue puts me into a trance. And a baby-ultramarine blue pullover polo shirt—well, I lingered.
I thumbed through the pile of shirts. There wasn’t a large. I’ve never seen that color in a shirt, or in any piece of clothing, really. I’ve only seen that blue when I mix my paints for sky, or for a blue glass vase I want to cause to shimmer, like the beautiful transparent glass it is. One simply can’t paint the ultramarine blue you see in the sky, or, say, my blue glass vase, from the tube. It takes purple blues, Alizarin Crimson blues, green blues, blues mixed with white, blues mixed with Naples Yellow, blues mixed with any color at all, juxtaposed on that vase. Then the blues move so beautifully, it takes my breath away. Sometimes other people might say, “Oh, that is a beautiful painting, I love the blues!”
Size small was out of the question. But there was one last “Medium”. I grabbed it and paid for it along with the cat food.
Once home, I tried it on. It was snug. Didn’t give me the room I like in a shirt—I don’t want to be reminded of weight I’d prefer to take off. I don’t want to remember that size small once fit very well. This baby-blue shirt didn’t give me the look I like: Artist, thrown-together, casual, I-don’t-care-what-I-look-like-as-long-as-I’m-wearing-lipstick—anything in the mauve family.
But I wore it with a sweater. The blue was the important thing.
I’ve added ice cream back onto my menu this year. Not everyday, but once a week, or so. Hagan Daas Pistachio. The shirt went from snug to, well, I couldn’t wear it. I gave it to my son. He liked it, didn’t mind it wasn’t a man’s design. Thought he could use it. It didn’t work for him. He throws himself together too; is it an artists’ trait? My son attaches to certain shirts that he wears until they are threadbare. He calls them his “current favorite shirts.” The blue shirt wasn’t a candidate. He brought it back to me.
I don’t take defeat easily, especially when it comes to having spent money. “I’ll make it a shrug,” I told my son. I like to sew when I watch the news. It’s a way to justify sitting there participating in the thing we now call by that name, creating something new, listening, occasionally raising my head to see who’s speaking, to the mad spectacle delivered to keep those of us who have any luxury of time to watch it, addicted. That’s one way to look at it. Breaking! Breaking! Breaking! The Boy Who Cried Wolf. There are certain themes in the current news that do draw me, particular commentators I like to watch, people who have a sense of humor, and are as sophomoric as Walter Cronkite was grave and avuncular—someone we looked up to for 15 minutes a day. (And, face it, Helena, people as sophomoric as I can be.)
Breaking through
But tonight is column night, and no matter what is breaking on that ever-present news cycle, news and not-news, I resist getting up and going to the computer to type the blog. I dread digging back into my journal notes and chits of paper that have things I’ve jotted down, for the August writing. I am sewing this slightly skewed, cut-down-the-middle, baby blue shrug, hiding badly crafted sewing and fabric hills with tiny quilt-like stitches, trying to make it work for the evenings I wear summer dresses. And that eye-rolling color will work with a few of my blue print dresses, in the most heavenly way—for someone who throws themselves together. Shabby chic. I suppose I am not really alone anymore in the way I wear clothes.
I think about the column for days before I write it, have written pieces in my journal and on scraps of paper, hard things at times, like this month, memories and realizations about my mother, the relationship I have been preoccupied with all my life. And I have broken through with a twilight dream, a gorgeous moment with my mother, in the kitchen of our Queens apartment. A moment of feeling overcome with unconditional love and contrition, absent all blame, no self-justification, but perfect adoration, love I’ve longed to feel, I now realize, for her. Love unbound from the tensions, angers, resentments, the cause-and-effect dysfunction of our family life. Love that I now feel I know we human beings long with all our being to feel, even when it implicates our own actions. Love unbound. Love from the bottom of heart and soul.
Love I felt for my mother in that twilight state in the midst of a 15-minute nap two days ago. “Mommy, I am sorry, I am so sorry, so sorry,” I said to her in that twilight state. The thing I was experiencing, I think, above all, was that I couldn’t be with my mother in her grieving for my father, her husband of 32 years. The love of her life. The stabilizer, the glue of our immediate family, and of the larger family, too. The Inlaw, Uncle Jack, universally loved by everyone. My father succumbed to heart disease that now would have been treatable. I was 24. Full of myself and myself alone. Out of touch, therefore, with anyone else’s suffering but my own grieving. The greatest tragedy of my youth. I know I must not be cruel to myself here. It was not in a vacuum. I hadn’t learned how to open that way, yet, to the people around me. I had no teacher for that. Life taught me, finally, at last, and at last, I could love my mother with a love unimpeded. It didn’t end my grieving, I still feel the sadness of that experience, two or three days later. But I know it must serve some deeply important understanding of myself and life, and of my mother’s loneliness after my father left behind the terrible absence, silence, where his great being had been within our reach.
I have many people I grieve for now. My husband, Jim, my son’s father, is principal in that group. Sebastian, my cat-person, has left me in disbelief, losing my breath when I think of him, gazing into my eyes. I can’t imagine what his brother, Oliver, is experiencing. I stay closer to Oliver now. I don’t like to go out for too long. I comb him every morning. But there are moments he looks around, seeming to be listening, or looking for something. Or suddenly he looks upstairs, where Sebastian would sometimes lay.
I can’t imagine my mother’s grieving. Her last sister had died. Her mother had died. My sister was in denial. And I was oblivious. We were all lonely in our grieving, unable to perceive the other to draw near, to comfort each other. That’s what changed with the twilight experience of my nap.
Magical grace, graceful magic
There is magic in life. Once, when I was still commuting to Long Island to teach painting, a Sunday, when I’d brought my traveling bags out to my car, I saw with shock that the nest the phoebes had built, phoebes, the brown fly catches that cry out fee-bee! Fee-bee! and return every year, generation after generation, to build or to refurbish their perfect nest under the eave of my roof, I saw that the nest had fallen. It lay on the ground in pieces. I crossed to the patio, where they build and picked it up, looked at the pieces in my hands. No eggs, no babies. No parents in sight. I placed the constructed thing, intricately woven grasses, twigs and blue plastic streamers, bits they’d pulled from the tarpaulins that cover my wood piles, cemented with mud. I placed it carefully, with great reverence, for their work, on my picnic table, just below that eave. I felt a terrible sadness. I forgot about it for the two days I taught, but remembered the nest when I turned into the driveway, Tuesday afternoon. Before I reached the patio I saw, again, with shock, that the nest was back up under the eave, safe from the rain, hidden from predators. I was so frozen with awe, I imagined the hand of God having reached down to that nest, to restore it, the way scripture tells us, “His eye is on the sparrow.”
How could those birds have done it? Those tiny parent phoebes?
Magic? I can’t think about the great unknown forces in this cosmos as magic. Grace is a better word, a word I can feel the holiness of.
Taking my mother in my arms, telling her, “I’m sorry, Mommy,” feeling such love as I may never have felt before, such truth of contrition, such empathy for her, such a cherishing of her, was certainly grace. And it must somehow find its place in my being, sorrow, with the joy of truth of having experienced my human, destined capacity to love my mother unimpeded, a love I now think we are all destined to love each other with. This mystery of grace isn’t lighthearted. But no one could persuade me that it isn’t real.
I can see from here, from having written this, without referring to any of my journal writings, why I struggle the way I do to write these columns. The blue shrug sits, still incomplete, in a basket next to my rocking chair. And I forced myself to this computer to enter a world that is so different from inertia, from anything lazy. A world so alive with revelation I understand what it costs to walk through that invisible wall to this place where I write from.
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Related reading: Helena Writes
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