November 2, 2007

• Pentimento

  I have returned from vacation.  It was beautiful and restful and wonderful and difficult and perfect.  Let me start with the easy stuff….

              I went to Shartlesville, Pennsylvania to visit two friends from college with whom I had lost contact for too many years.  We reconnected a couple of years ago at a reunion and this visit was the first time we would have a face-to-face with wine and conversation and no one else around.  We visited Hawk Mountain, one of the most spiritual places I have been in a very long time.  I often sit on the beach and hear the tones and voices of the ages but there is so much human intrusion this close to population that those moments are rare and hard to come by.  Hawk Mountain was a gift.  It is a true cathedral, calling for hushed tones and serious contemplation.  One of these days I will return and just sit.  There are answers there if one listens.

              The bonfire in the rain on Friday was delightful.  Not as large as the community had hoped but perfectly respectable for a first time event.  The rain was torrential so the fire was small but no one seemed to mind and there was music, laughter, food and friendship.  What else matters?

              Monday and Tuesday were spent at the Delaware shore, another place of spirit.  We walked and talked and gathered shells for the grandchildren. 

  Libraries were visited to satisfy my longing and homesickness.  I talked about my children far too much, nauseating even myself.  No one seemed to mind though so that was all right.  Wine and good food were consumed throughout the week.  It was good.

  As far as the difficult….we did not spend time catching up per se.  There was no chronology of “I did this on this date blah blah blah.”  It was rather a matter of wrapping our heads around who we were some thirty odd years ago and who we are now and how our lives have changed and grown and matured into this person in this time and this space.  For me, it was a Pentimento moment.  In the preface to that memoir, Lillian Hellman writes,  “Old paint on canvas, as it ages, sometimes becomes transparent. When that happens, it is possible, in some pictures, to see the original lines: a tree will show through a woman’s dress, a child makes way for a dog, a large boat is no longer on an open sea. That is called pentimento because the painter ‘repented,’ changed his mind. Perhaps it would be as well to say that the old conception, replaced by a later choice, is a way of seeing and then seeing again.  That is all I mean about the people in this book. The paint has aged now and I wanted to see what was there for me once, what is there for me now.”  In some ways I am still looking at the painting, still there in that place with those people.  I suppose I will be for a time.  It is hard to be here when part of me is still there.  I do not have my Fairport legs yet.

  The kids, biological and not, make it easier with their hugs and their strength.  Right now, I want to wrap the people I love around me like a quilt and just sit with all of them in front of the fire and breath.

  And so it goes.

   

             

  • 10:54 am
  • 10 Comments