It All Goes So Fast
It's a cold damp day in the Pacific Northwest. Denise is in a training here in Olympia, Washington, and Alexander is having his first nap of the day in this little cozy room at the lovely Fertile Ground bed and breakfast.)
We drove in to Olympia Tuesday night after several days in Portland with friends and family, and before that we'd been with other friends and family in Seattle (too briefly) and Spokane.
Some of the Portland highlights were with Alexander's next youngest cousin on my side, James Langford, almost five, and his dad, my oldest brother William. William works one of those odd nursing schedules, leaving him off a few days and home with James. Monday we met at a beautiful city recreation center, where we swam in the coolest kid pool ever. Wheels to turn and pipes here and there spouting different shoots and sprays; lots of really shallow area for Sender to get comfy in before he really got bold. That afternoon we took a bus into the downtown area, rode a streetcar, and discovered the library's wonderful children's reading room. We then took the bus back to Multnomah Village to meet our hosts Kara and Alex, William and his entire family (Cheryl, Elizabeth – 13, John – 9 , and James, and Casey Parks(!!) and Kate for pizza, noise and chaos at the Lucky Labrador brewery down the street from Kara and Alex. Very fun. Alexander slept great that night! Another highlight involving cousin James was the Portland Zoo on Tuesday! It was way too cold and Alexander refused to wear his hood and mittens so it eventually all went south, but for a while we were so delighted to be so close to big fruit bats, giraffes, chimpanzees, elephants! Wow. Alexander was running around freezing but so excited he didn't seen to mind at all. He's such a big boy now, almost two!
It all goes so fast. Yesterday we had a tiny little baby in our arms. Today he's exploding with language, covering his mouth when he makes fake coughs, climbing up every possible obstacle. We've moved on from the days when he called everyone "Mama," including the dogs and my brother Robert, to calling only Denise "Mama", me "Imah" and Uncle Robert something like "Rah Rah." Vivaldi sounds something like "Baldy." I wonder if he was.
It's been quite a long time since my last update of this site. Life has certainly been rich.
At the end of June I went back to work with our local ambulance service. I never updated my bio on this site but nearly three years ago I had a little head injury from a bicycle accident and was unable to work as a paramedic due to about six months of vertigo (yuck – don't recommend that). The painting business had been going well and I let my certification lapse. I found, however, that I really missed EMS (emergency medical services). This year I jumped through multiple hoops and went back, first as just an ambulance driver, and then, after passing the practical and written national registry exams, as a paramedic again. I love being back. It means even more late nights at the studio and even less sleep but I feel like the work informs my painting in a crucial way.
Each call introduces me to an encapsulated story, a peak into a vulnerable time in each patient's life, during which I learn as much as I possibly can about this child of god, what their life is like and what has led them to this moment, so that I can care for them as well as possible and then convey their story to the hospital staff for their definitive care. In addition to each intriguing call, the folks I work with in EMS are the salt of the earth. They all work ridiculous hours at not very much pay and often in dangerous and physically demanding conditions. Many of my coworkers also work on volunteer fire departments in their communities.
Before I took the paramedic recertification tests I worked as a driver with a paramedic named Billy Pickle. Besides having a great name, Mr. Pickle was a delight to work with. A compassionate care-giver, he's also funny and smart. He's a volunteer firefighter up near Carthage, Mississippi and grew up farming. I especially delighted in his stories of a pig and a cow he had at different times in his childhood. The pig he had first. When he'd get home from school he's whistle and his pig would come. Billy Pickle would then get his fishing gear, hop on the pig's back and ride down to the pond to fish. At some point his father told him it was time to eat his pig and that was that. Well, there were the stories of building the smoke house, the slaughter, etc, but that was that for the pig. Later, he had a 4-H cow with whom he had the same home from school, ride to the pond, fishing arrangement. Apparently in 4-H one is supposed to auction off one's animal at the end of some length of time. Each Year? I don't know. At any rate, during three of these consecutive auctions, Billy Pickle's father bid hard and bought Billy's solid black cow back for him to care for another year. The last time, however, if I have the story straight, the bidding was getting too high, Billy knew his dad couldn't afford the price she was going for, and he told his father to stop bidding. Billy Pickle's cow, weighing two thousand pounds?, was sold but the breeder who bought him invited Billy to visit her any time, and kept in touch about the beautiful offspring she produced.
Now that I'm working as a paramedic, I've mostly been working with Bernard, who's been a basic EMT with AMR quite a while, and with whom I feel quite safe. He and I have a few differences of opinion about gun control, public schools, the Democratic Party, etc, but we agree on a surprising number of issues, like the dominance of the Kansas Jayhawks.
This summer Alexander turned one and a half and I turned forty. Swimming, cooking, sitting on the porch with friends from all over in Virginia at my mother's house on the Ware River was a great way to celebrate the occasion.
A month or so ago we loaded up Alexander and the dogs and headed through Arkansas and Missouri on little back roads to find ourselves in Lawrence, Kansas where we stayed with my dear college friend Dan and his wife Angie. Denise hooked up with her classmates from college. She hadn't seen them in twenty years and they all had a great deal of fun watching that historical/hysterical football game between Kansas and Nebraska. Alexander and I were overwhelmed by the enormous crowd and so watched the game with Dan and Angie on their fancy new HDTV, waving the wheat and hollering Dan's personal Jayhawk cheer, "Kaw Kaw!"
We drove from there to Denise's parents' home in Peabody, KS where Sender added the words "cold" and "windy" to his vocabulary. He also added "Llama" when we went out to the Jones' sheep farm and saw the chickens, sheep, goats and dogs I've painted so much over the years. It's a little trickier to paint with Sender in arms on these trips so for a little while these trips are mostly research. Lots of photography and diaper changing!
Well it's the second week of Advent, Chanukah's just ended, and here we are on the opposite corner of the country. This bed and breakfast is a favorite of my favorite Pac Northwest artist: Nikki McClure and Denise and I were delighted to see her work hanging on the walls on our arrival last night. Jenny Levison has given us her calendar each year for the last several years. I highly recommend it.
The near future brings Sender's second Christmas, a painting in the Huntsville Museum of Art, and some decisions about my long-delayed graduate education. I'm really hoping to find a suitable MFA program but if we stay in Mississippi, it looks like it's going to be one of those super-expensive low-residency programs. I'll take any suggestions!
Happy Solstice!
Ellen
