lightheartedness
Excerpts
The Alfresco Papers
I'll call this Plein Air Writing. I could call it Writing on the Spot, or the Alfresco Papers. Any of these will do. The concept's the same: I take a notebook to the beach, or the Bay, or the B&A Trail, and write there. This is what Monet and the Impressionists did to capture light. They got out of the studio. This is what I will do to capture immediacy. No computer, no thesaurus or dictionary. No glasses of ice water or M&Ms. No CDs, and no staring out of the window from the desk. Just the light, the air, the pen and paper. And what's underfoot.
Outside, other ideas I've considered evaporate. I can't write about aging or fishing because these seashells nag for attention. They repeat a theme I want to understand, and have tried before to write about but never can, even after years of studying the sand here in Naples.
Here in Naples, Florida, where my husband's parents live, the sand gets to me. For 20 years - half of which I've been a writer - I've thought about this beach. It's unavoidable, with each footstep I smash shells. They're piled three inches deep some places along the shore. Pounds of pastel seashells, the size of toenails. Coquina. Fighting Conch. Jewel Box. Nutmeg. Alphabet Cone. Sunrise Shell. Rose Cockle. Olive. Old Maid's Curl. Cat's Paw. Barbados Chink.
They come in the hundreds of thousands, so you could ignore them. Many people do. I wage an internal war with those people because I'm barefooted; the exercisers wear sneakers. I'm barefooted to protect the shells. I try to soften my footfall and think everyone else should, too. I glower behind my sunglasses as these exercisers charge past me all gung-ho crunching, crunching.
Green Lights
"'I
work at true vision."When I was twenty, I could tell people this quite honestly because I worked in a store called True Vision for an optician named Ray who had a glass eye. I've always felt there was a message, a reason for having that job. After all, there I was - a twenty-year-old who couldn't see where her life was supposed to go - assisting an optician who couldn't see out of one eye as he helped customers whose vision was blurry. And where did we all find ourselves?
When I was a newlywed, I took a painting class from an artist who had us paint objects outdoors, in the early light. One morning I was trying to paint a green wine bottle when my teacher came up behind me and said, "Why are you using green?" I thought that was confusing, but then he said, "See the red? Don't you see all the red in there? And the purple and orange? And what color do you see in the shadow?" I nearly cried from my cluelessness, but I've seen color differently ever since.
In grad school I took a class called, "American Architecture." We sat in the dark, examining slides of buildings and taking notes on the categories they fell into according to design traits. From design alone, a building tells its age. Before I took that class, my eyes were on the cars and streets. I rarely looked higher than front doors or store windows. "American Architecture" changed that and made commuting to school through Washington, D.C.'s neighborhoods - all neighborhoods and cities - fascinating. Now I automatically date the architecture around me.
Three pleasant enough experiences from a pleasant enough life. A life that usually seems disjointed or just plain tangled up. There are times I wish a journalist would develop my biography - not because I think I'm so important - but that way, maybe I could get a better perspective of what I've gone through.
Then - just like that! waiting at a red light - I
thought: True Vision, painting class and "American Architecture" taught me
to see better. How nice. See what? The light turned green. And I got it.
It's that other kind of seeing."