Cobwebs in likely places

Life is truly a constant source of amazement to me. When I used to live in San Francisco, how could I ever have gone out in my yard in the middle of the day, laid out a blanket with a bunch of toys on it, and passed the time lounging around with the baby staring at clouds and listening to the nonstop chirping of birds? Well, I couldn't have, which is why I guess I live in Mexico now. So that I could lay out under my tree, sunlight seeping down between its leaves, with my boob hanging out and a baby sucking away at it when he's not being distracted by the birds.

We don't make much money, but in exchange we have a cush life of liberty and relaxation. My husband went to a job interview the other day in Pachuca, a big city about 45 minutes to an hour away from here. They offered him the job - it would have been perfect, doing what he does, what he studied for, training kids in soccer, and it would have been at the fancy Soccer University associated with the best pro team in Mexico, gorgeous modern facilities, you name it. Too bad they're cheap though. The hours were 8 am to 7 pm, Monday thru Friday, all out under the hot high altitude sun, plus games on the weekends, plus the drive back and forth, and the salary was $600 dollars a month. Do the math. And the biggest growth opportunity would have eventually given him max $800 a month. So it just seemed so much more worth it to keep kicking it here at home, piecing jobs together between the two of us, where he can actually hope to see his kid for more than an hour everyday.

While Nikis works, I lounge with the baby - he's learning how to crawl, a development that is both frightening and exciting. On the one hand he's able to entertain himself more self-sufficiently, but he's also more apt to get into trouble. I just read in that book Eat Pray Love where the author's sister said that having a baby is like getting a tattoo on your face - you have to be really sure before you do it because its a commitment for life. Ain't that the truth. Baby plucks up big handfuls of grass and tries to stick them in his mouth, and I wish I could write without stopping every two seconds to scoop him up as he's pushed himself in reverse up against a tree truck or he's about to swallow a big black bug or he's accidentally banged his head too hard with a wooden block. I wish I could paint more, too - I did finally make a deal with Nikis. If he was going to go out and play soccer with all the other "veterans" (read men who are really too old to be running around a dusty dirt field under the blazing noontime sun) every Sunday for hours, then I too deserved some time to myself to do my thing. So now he takes care of the baby for a whole two hours straight once a week to give me uninterupted time to go into my studio and paint.

So last night I sat in my studio and let me just paint you a picture if you will: its hot and dim in a long narrow room painted bright lemon yellow. There is a laundry line strung through the middle of it, currently adorned with the "whites" and dangling right over my easel. It's lit by a couple of bulbs dangling from their sockets over which I have tried to hang Chinese paper lanterns in a useless effort to spruce up the lighting effect. (Can I just interject that my baby is at this moment sucking on the tile floor). The walls have gaping cracks in them and disintegrating plaster falls from the ceiling like snow after every major storm. Outside my little window to the street, I alternately hear the megaphone of the fruit truck as it roams the neighborhood advertising bargains on peanuts, and the megaphone of the tamale guy crowing "Ricos, sabrosos, calientitos, tamales ..." sounding like eery metallic voices from incoming UFOs that learned about humans from watching old telenovelas. Of course I hear the maa-ing of the ever present sheep. I hear the low muttering of village ladies passing on the sidewalk, surely gossiping about some scandal or other, as there is always a scandal to be talked about in this town - another pregnant 14 year old, another mother left stranded with 4 kids as her no-good husband took off with the neighbor lady, another drunk done in by liver failure, another innocent scared out of money by an unscrupulous witch (yeah, that really happens here - I love witches but the kind most frequently encountered around here are those who are into scaring people by telling them they're cursed and the curse can only be removed for a cool $1000 dollars). Inside my long yellow room, I have my trusty old radio tuned into a staticky pop station. Other than that the only voices are those in my own head, and my wondering what on earth I'm going to paint. I haven't really painted in, gosh, like a YEAR, not since I was bulbously pregnant and Nikis got a whiff of my supposedly nontoxic paints and forbade me to go near them lest the child be born with 2 heads or no hands or some other unthinkable paint-caused defect.

So after a year of not really being creative (besides the obvious creativity involved in the production of babies), I wander around my studio like a prodigal daughter returned home after 20 years away. Everything is at once familiar and foreign. Its familiar because its where I hang my laundry ever day, and foreign because there beneath stacks of baby clothes and sheets and towels I discover long forgotten implements like paintbrushes, half-dried tubes of red oxide, an eraser. A wildly tinkling ice cream van zooms past outside, too quickly for kids to grab change and run for a cone, and I just sit on my plastic chair and think how quickly time passes, the years, the months, even these 2 hours allotted by my husband. And as the minutes tick by, I can't even think of what to paint! I doodle around some, but my mind comes up blank, or comes up with copies of things I've already done, or worse, copies of things others have already done. There is zero fresh insight, zero download from the cosmos - I used to be able to channel symbols and messages from the universe onto a canvas, bright colors and bold shapes, a vibration from my paintbrush opening a doorway to a mystery. But now, its like dead silence. There is no doorway. There is just a blank wall. And a pressure to channel something quick before my two hours is up. I rummaged around and found some old canvases, which of course they're all old, right?! But I mean some unfinished work from long ago. So I figured that would be a good place to start - finish some old work. It was strange to open up crusty old tubes of paint and try to remember how to mix certain colors. It was like watching someone else's hand move, except that the hand was attached to my body. The brushes certainly looked like someone else's - who else would let their brushes get so dusty and grungy. As I began to paint, I noticed some sticky fibery stuff getting on the brush and getting all stuck to the paint - horror of horrors and shame of artists, they were cobwebs! My old paintings are all goopy with cobwebs!!!

What can I say? The lesson is pretty obvious here - paint more often. Make the most out of 2 hours a week. Don't waste a second. And the rest of the time, when you're on baby duty, appreciate every second of kickin it under the tree because time ticks away way too fast if you're clock watching.