Thursday, October 19, 2006

wisdom teeth


Paula went for her extraction today. Mine is on Monday. Our dentist's dad has an art supply store downtown. I started going there 36 years ago. Before art college. Dr. Gwarztman looks and acts like his dad. Sardonic but humourous. Theye both have the same lean body. Paula's molar x-ray reveals that her roots are too long for the doctor to make the extractio. They are really long. We took the x-ray home. She has a new appointment with an oral surgeon tomorrow. I can't be there with her because I'm teaching in the morning. I wish I could take her. To comfort her. She might be woozy after the procedure. Her tooth is still paining her. Our decayed wisdom teeth are both severely fragmented. Mine is almost gone. Hers is smarting. Well, it's a wisdom tooth right? Mine is torpid. Defunct really. Paula is on the verge of tears all the time. It's really hurting her. Mine is just plain dead.

Wednesday, October 18, 2006

love of my life


I met Paula at a hockey party. I played for a few years with this particular gang of guys. We partied together a couple of times a year. Ours was a game of pickup. In Canada we call it shinny. It's played without referees or visiting opponents. We choose sides and just go at it. The group was full of highly educated men who fancied themselves the perfect blend of intellect and machismo (that would be the Greath White North kind of manliness). Many in the group were actors, writers and artists. Conceits were rampant.

Having women at one of our hockey parties was unusual. The guys called a girl who called some girls. Paula tagged along with her mates. I fell in love with her there. She and I sat in the living room sipped drinks and chatted about art and astrology. She was from London Ontario. New to Toronto and alone. Totally single. No boyfriend baggage. I was in the middle of a plot to leave my wife and abscond with my son. I kept that story and its sordid details to myself. We parted with a slow kiss and a tight warm hug. I liked the feel of her in my arms. An athelete, 5' 10". I didn't speak to her for another 7 months. I waited till I was separated, situated and sane again. It was an honorable courtship. That was almost 20 years ago. We started well and now we're beautiful.


I took my son that summer. I consulted a medium after the marriage meltdown. He explained to me that Paula had been my brother during Biblical times. Interesting endorsement. I was hoping for something more like my Queen, from our days of Atlantean rule. But we do fracas like siblings.

Tuesday, October 17, 2006

the forensic artist


Friday, the subway driver tells me a story about a family member who is a forensic artist. This when I ask to sketch him as we drive north to Downsview Station. Our last stop. His door is open. I'm out of models. The train emptied at Wilson Station. I'm sitting at the front of the car and we're heading home. The person he talks about, the family member, drew his children. She aged them. It was many years ago. She ages photos of abducted children for police departments across North America, in pencil. So we can spot them years after they've dissappeared. Today the drawings look exactly like his grown up children. I'm sure it must have been fun for the family, this exercise in time travel. The thought of my children disappearing is numbing.

Have you ever wondered if someone you saw had once been abducted at an early age, had their identity obliterated through attrition and terror. Their lives destroyed, their personhood violated and shattered forever. Some pedestrians and transit riders have that look. Like they've been crushed. My father was such a ghost. Concentration camp vaporized his will. I wish that when I drew people that I could see something about them they've lost, something still hovering nearby, and by drawing it, it returned..

Monday, October 16, 2006

the moore sculptures


We have a room full of Henry Moore sculptures on permanent display at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto. I tried to seduce a girl in this room when I was 18. It was my first year at the Ontario College of Art, just next door. She was more experienced than me. At love. She lived with 2 guys. I wanted her. She enjoyed teasing me. We went to her place after making out behind a giant Moore. Her boyfriends were there. It was uncomfortable for me. She enjoyed my squirming and confusion. I left.


The sculptures are magnificent. I can't imagine that they had cared about my frustrated adolescent lust. But they watched. I wonder if they remember. I visited the room again this summer with my son Jacob and one of my students. Jacob was sitting in on my teaching that day. The rest of the class remained at school completing a project. We drew for 2 hours. Jacob turned 10 this summer. I loved the enjoyment he took in the sketching. The pleasure. His focus. His pride the work he had done. We sketched people all the way home on the subway. I never pushed this on him. Art. It just captured his imagination. Now he's an artist. He carries a sketchbook to events and family functions. To draw.


Moore's sculptures, all boney, washed in acid, holding time, tears and loss, fix me in space with their textured fleshy architecture. His drawings are marvelous too. I wish he had been my teacher. Someone like him. With his passion for work. I wish I could believe in making art. I just don't.

jacobs moore's




Sunday, October 15, 2006

mom's car


My mother was attacked. By her car. She's in the hospital lying on a gurney in the hall when I draw this. Just after her x-rays were taken. She needs to pee. I ask an intern to help her. Mom's too proud to ask for assistance. She's been holding it in for 5 hours. The pee. She deceides to hold it in a little longer because they won't allow her go alone. She's too proud to be undressed by a stranger. To use a bedpan.

She parked her car on an incline. She left the car in drive, parking brake disengaged. The car begin to roll when she reached in for the keys she had forgotten in the ignition. She tried to hold the Honda Accord back so it wouldn't roll into the cars parked behind her. But it kept rolling. The open door probably knocked her down when she lost the strength to continue the fight with gravity. Instead of rolling into cars it rolled over her leg. Her knee is swollen like a ruby red grapefruit turned inside out. It's covered in dark bruises. Her calf has crimson tread marks.

When I arrived at the hospital she was lying on a wooden board in her own room in the emergency ward. In agony. Alone. Her only arm holding a lukewarm ice pack to her contused scalp. The arm with the concentration camp tatoo. Her eyes were closed and her breathing was short and frustrated. I paused and created a good face before disturbing her. She didn't want to call me when the accident occurred. Nor anyone else. She had tried to limp to her car and drive home. But passersby stopped her and called for the ambulance. The hospital staff had forced her call me. She didn't want to bother us. I laugh. She calls us incessantly about nothing. Cajoling us, guilting us, charming us into myriad acts of self-betrayal. To live the life of good Jews. That's her dream. To show up to all the funerals, the ceremonies, the religious services, to buy the right kind of home improvements, to embrace the extended family, to raise our children right. It never stops. It's an endless assault. She wants us to better. We're no good.

Mom begged me to stop drawing her, she was ashamed of her appearance. Fatigue relieved her of self-consciousness. The Paramedic who had attended Mom came by. She admired my drawing. She talked about art as she watched me sketch Mom. Mom's doctor came by. She is going to be OK. I can take her home. She smiles. She clasps the doctors hand and with tears in her eye she shares her gratitude and relief. She limps to the car on my arm. But first we stop at the bathroom. Another victory. She is tougher than tough. She is Auschwitz tough. Indefatigable is the word I'm looking for. You've never seen anything like it. She's almost 80. People think she's in her mid-60's. She sings Yiddish and Hebrew folk songs. Her voice is silken schmaltz. She's sung in many countries. She's a passionate performer. Her charm is hypnotic. Her heart is an iron anvil of bitter hardness. You come out as dust.

I picked up her car. It was raining out. Some of Mom's papers lay out on the hood of the car, rainsoaked, the ink running. I don't know why but I lectured the car. "Bad car. Don't ever do anything like that again." I got in and took it home. I parked it in front of our house. Locked it. Beep.

Friday, October 13, 2006

visiting dave and lisa


We don't have many friends. Real friends, the not online kind. Touch them, hug them friends. We have many virtual friends. People we've never met. Some are archived in our Microsoft Outlook backup files. Conversation fossilized in binary code. Posts, chats, transcripts, flirtations crys for help. Most long ago deleted forever. Gone and never were. I always wanted a pen pal when I was a boy. Someone from Africa. Someone who could help relieve my perpetual loneliness. Today I have too many writing mates. They are from everywhere. The responsibilities that go with this kind of connectivity piles up fast. Mountain of posts unreplied to. For me, an aspiring children’s book writer/illustrator, it's wonderful having communities of peers to consult and commiserate with. My kidlit critique group plus my other mailing lists and message boards, for illustrators, writers, designers, and on, they're a help. I' share personal things with online friends, characters, tippy-tapped out on keyboard. But Dave and Lisa are real. We hung out with them last week during Nuit Blanche, the all night art festival, imported from a Paris event, held for the first time in Toronto. Which was spectacular.


We've known the Dave and Lisa since Paula and Lisa met at YTV's daycare where Liam and Jacob were stored during the day. We all worked. It was a good daycare. The boys love each other, they're sympathetic soul brothers. Rarely argue. We visit Dave and Lisa often. Often for us. We visit only my mother more. They don't realize how much they mean to us. They have many visitors. They're life is full of transiting friends and family. Their home is homey. They make friends everywhere. Their tenants are their friends. They realize how much they mean to us. Sometimes it hurts, but we also know it can be tough to be around us. We're tough in our heads on them. Not in words, but in our thoughts we're hard on the way they relate to each other and to their child. We talk about them on our way home after visiting them. The whole way home. We're critical. As much as we love them. We're not liking some of their interpersonal stuff. We invite them to our place regularly but they don't come. They always throw out the red carpet for us when we visit their beautiful downtown home . They cook for us and treat us with welcoming kindness and respect. I spend lots of my time drawing when I'm there. They don't mind. They love art.

David is a great sculptor but he has a troubled artistic persona. I believe it's basically a self-worth issue. He suffered deep and damaging emotional wounds as a child. It's sad seeing him struggle year after year to surface creatively. It's painful. He's working hard to unravel the mess in is psyche. We all love him. He's a kind and gentle man. He's lost career momentum, it frustrates and upsets him profoundly, and he's trying to reinvent his purpose along personally meaningful and sustainable lines. I'd love to see his plethora of wax models cast in metal. But he's down on the return on invest aspect of the process, and faithless about his prospects for critical acceptance. Lisa is not in his corner in this area. Not at all. We wish she was. I also wish we were closer friends. Paula and I wish we had more friends. But we don't . We have each other in it's working really good.

Thursday, October 12, 2006

catching up


I don't know what I felt when I did a lot of these drawings. Not until I've looked at them for a while, later. They take me right back, and I can feel myself, who I was, then, and being able to do this allows me to experience the rush of emotions and thoughts that flowed through me in those moments, that are gone now, as I sat there, maybe worrying about arriving on time to teach, or what to do about my teeth, or feeling warm in side from making love, or coming home excited to get back to work on one of my projects, or maybe numb from anxiety about resolving a fight with my son, or depressed about my age, stuff like that.



In this way I get to catch up to myself, and deal with things that came up then that maybe I didn't deal with yet. Things that are over but not really part of me yet. They happened but in many ways I wasn't there. There's always stuff to catch up to. To ground.


Paula had to go pay off a traffic ticket the 31st of August, the night I did the drawing above . It was a hundred bucks or something. We hung out together with Jacob, waiting for Paula's number to be called. I drew people. It was kind of a festive scene, with a holiday weekend hours away from kicking off and lots of jokes about driving under the influence being kicked around. It was that kind of crowd. Her license had been suspended for not paying the ticket off within a few months. Just slipped our minds and boom. No driving allowed. People are so beautiful when you draw them. You can love their appearance, their body language, their sadness, their life force. You can just love them quietly from within yourself. It's easy this way. To know them is to find their needs and your needs poking, crying and colliding and making a mess of everything. Then it's hard to love.

Wednesday, October 11, 2006

the subway


I take the subway to work. And then home. 1/2 hour down, 1/2 hour up. I used to read. Now I sketch. I pull out a sketch book and just go at it. I have different sizes of sketch books. The size I pick for the trip depends on how brave I feel about being seen drawing. Drawing them. It makes a lot of people nervous. When you keep staring at them. I have some nice little sketch books. They have black hardcovers on them.


I'm thinking of pasting fake book covers on them so they look more like novels. People barely notice I'm working in one of these little books. But still many commuters can tell somethings up. There's a lot of skritching and scratching going on. Plus I keep looking up and down and around like a worm hunting robin. There could be a cat around or something. That kind of nervous busy.


But I prefer bigger books so I can stretch out the lines and get into some nice scale. There's so little room for error. The little books offer very little space. You have to be spot on considering the people are always moving, getting off and being obscured by new riders.


But the little drawing part is like being in early grade school again, drawing tiny pictures in the margins, so tiny that when my teachers walked by they couldn't tell I was in the middle of these huge, epic battle scenes with tons of killing and bloody carnage. I'm really really good at small, but I have lots of big in me too. so I need the space on the paper. Anyways, I'm the teacher now, so, go Larry go.


Lately though I'm using a big pad. And everyone is noticing me and I'm just loving all the smiles. People wanting to look at what I'm doing and talk to me. I look in their eyes and see curousity and respect. I didn't see that before. Maybe It was always there before. Probably. but I couldn't see it. I could only see how bad my drawings were. I was ashamed of my work. I believed I was terrible at it. But they weren't and I'm not. Now it's fun again. Like it's supposed to be. Because drawing really is. Fun. That's why kids do it. They enjoy it. I lost that. Sleeping people are the best models.

the coffee table conundrum

We haven't been able to find the right coffee table. In almost 2 decades together Paula and I have yet to spend a cent on a coffee table. But we always put our feet up on one. Or the facsimile of one. We find them in the garbage, we inherit crappy old ones, we snap up something at a garage sale or substitute chairs with cushions on them or just plain make them out of box crates. Paula has this thing about the perfect affordable coffee table but we've never encountered it yet. One day we'll find it and then we can luxuriantly rest our long legs on something nice. I'm 6' 2" and Paula is 5' 10". We plop in front of the couch a lot. To eat, to talk, to watch DVD's, to fight, and to watch stuff on TV. We like sports and 24 and I like the news. And we get tired legs alot because we've always played a lot of sports. And played hard too. Like all weekend at tournaments.


Flopping somewhere comfortably is a big deal here. Sometimes Paula will see a beautiful dais and drool over it's loveliness. Something really expensive. But she doesn't like to spend lots of money on us in that way. So I'm starting to realize that I'll just have to take charge here and solve this one. You know sometimes a guy has just got to step up to the plate and take a viscious pitch off his ass. He has to be willing to eat some risky tartar sauce and run through a bricked wall on gut instinct. Even though sneers and farts greet your wanting to take the initiative, finally. And battle those little inner voices calling you a pussy for looking at something called a dais, or a chaise lounge. Ok well, none of that really happens to me, I just didn't get that I could get involved in the making it happen part. Just because I can sleep on gravel doesn't mean I can't try to make nice things a little nicer. For us. I guess. So I'm going to hunt down the perfect object to put our feet up on. To rest and relax on. This is my quest. To follow her dream. To wrong the ugliness of endless hours of torture on our makeshift furniture. Then I'll be a hero. And we'll be at peace

Tuesday, October 10, 2006

she's the one

Paula is my wife. She's mine. Paula writes. She's an astrologer too. She has so much talent. Eveyone has talent, but Paula is one of those people born with speical talent. My life is very different since I met Paula. I'm much more me. She's my best friend. We're very happy together. We like to be together. I'm inspired by her work. She wrote a novel and it's fantastic. Just so wonderful and poignant. The way she writes is wonderous to me. Her writing voice is so unique and startling in its brilliance.


I discovered something about Paula this weekend that I didn't see that clearly before. About her intelligence and sensitivity. How sensitive she is about what people think about how smart she is. what I think about that. She feels bad sometimes about her thinking. I feel the same way about myself alot. But we're all kind of dumb. So what's the big deal. I think she's very smart. But I don't always act like I do. While I read her book the lyracism of her prose got me crying many times. That and how the story is so sad in many places. We're really excited about her quest to land an agent or find an editor who wants to work with her to sell this book. She's my hero. I love her madly, though sometimes I'm just really mad at her. It's always interesting with Paula.

roshashona at my mom's

This is the cup I got on my Bar Mitzvah from Rabbi Kellman at the Beth Emeth Bais Yehuda Synagogue. My mom has it in her china cabinet. She pulls all our little ceremonial cups out on holidays. She distributes them randomly to the guests. They're like party favorites at a birthday. "Hey look what I got, Michael's cup!" (my brother Michael) "This ones filled with his pink ulcerated Crones diseased intestines." Michael internalized our Holocaust Survivor parents miserable grief and guilt to the point of almost killing himself. He still doesn't know how to get angry without wanting to destroy people. So he stays emotionally dead. The wine in my cup looks like the bloody scabbed diarreah of all my rottenest childhood memories, not the sweet concord wine from Israel that I poured in the cup. The liquid hisses as it glistens with pain.


Mom is the best jew. Jenny wins hands down. She has an excellent jew rating. She balances her cheating on all major orthodox values and practices with her wildly extensive jew charilty and jew cultural contributions to the jew community locally and internationally. She's a player. And a keeper of the gate. The one I'm always pissing on. Well that's how she sees it. What with my convert wife. And by default half jew son. My rejection of her extended jew family, her jew community of friends and her racist jew synagogue. And disrespect for her rank. She has a 5 star general ranking tatooed by the Nazi's on her forearm. She has the Auschwitz card, I've got the Joker. My kind of jew life works for me. My new jew wife has a sweet abiding love for jew life and culture. And jews like me. We do lots of jew stuff in our quiet undisciplined way. It's our business how we jew. My mom's judgement is a dark arbiter. We stay away.

Monday, October 09, 2006

on our new couch


She doesn't ask me to touch her feet. She doesn't ask for massages. She just knows that if she lays her legs across my thighs with her beautful soft skin near my talkative hands I'll touch them. I'll caress her beautiful feet all night. They are beautiful. They're perfect really. And I love to touch them. She's mine. There are many places on her feet that make nice sounds. If I touch them right. I talk to her through those feet. I say, I love you, I love you, I love you and your feet are cute.