Hi all,
Thank you all who reached out in support of my YESvember!
I have one more piece of news to add to YESvember that I wasn’t allowed to announce until late November.
My painting ‘We’ve been taught to listen’ was accepted to a show in Baton Rouge called Surreal Salon!
When I saw the call for the show I had a good feeling about it. I let the deadline creep up, classic procrastinator, and I knew I would regret it if I didn’t just apply. I apply to other things here and there and am rarely prone to feeling like I will get it. It’s more just a “I guess I will pay $35 for this and hope for the best.”
This show spoke to me because it was a blind juried show and the juror was the editor-in-chief of Juxtapoz magazine. Back when I was a more frequent visitor of bookstores (including in art school when I worked at the largest Borders Books and Music in the WORLD) Juxtapoz was one of the magazines I gravitated towards. It featured people with distinct styles who were just a side step from “fine art”. Artists who seemed to have found their own voices and weirdnesses.
Back then I was striving so hard to…well, just to be right. I don’t know how else to put it. I just wanted to be right. The artists in Juxtapoz were right in their own way because to me it seemed like they belonged to a club, a club of confidence in their vision and voice. It was very far away from my skill level and how I viewed myself.
Sometime within the last year, before I saw the call for this show, I was painting in my studio, deep in a pondering zone. At some point in my life I got it in my head that being an artist meant making art that could be featured in Art in America magazine. (Probably something I picked up at art school.) It was a magazine I used to peruse as well, but mostly it featured art that I felt outside of; beautiful landscapes, expertly rendered portraits, well crafted fiber arts and ceramics. It felt like something I was supposed to aspire to but would never be. Thus I decided I was a failure. I’m not so sure what I was thinking about that day in my studio, but I finally realized, “Oh, I don’t want to be in Art in America, I want to be in Juxtapoz!” That realization made me feel less like I was creating in a vacuum and that there might actually be a place for me and my art.
I am known to live my life as though it is narrative fiction, so it only made sense that I would be accepted into this show. The feeling that I was going to be accepted was so strong that I actually had to give myself the opposite of a pep talk and allow for the possibility that I could be rejected, it was an international call for goodness sake. I’m not one to usually have to talk myself out of positive thinking!
I was sitting in my craft/Pilates room when I opened the acceptance email. I had the thought, ‘You are allowed to be excited’ and then I let myself scream for joy. I don’t think I had ever done that before. Just an unabashed joyful scream for myself.
I went out to the living room where my cat, Goma, was snoozing on the back of the chair. “Goma! That was a good scream I promise! Can you believe it!? I got into the show!”
I sat down and lay my head on her, really trying to convey that it hadn’t been an angry scream, as she is one of the only beings to witness me doing that. Honestly, I am not sure she noticed either way.
As I pet her 17 year old body, I imagined that she was proud of me, of who she watched me become over her lifetime. And I tried not to think what I knew was true, that these 17 years were for me, just me growing into myself, but for her, it was her whole life. I knew that she didn’t have much time left and that perhaps she wouldn’t even make it long enough to see me frolic off to Baton Rouge to see the show.
This is all to say that behind all of the YES in YESvember was a sad and scared Sara who was silently pleading, “NOOOOOO, not yet, please, don’t go Goma.” I felt guilty leaving her and was sure to tell her of my successes when I returned home. I really didn’t think she was going to make it through the weekend of the studio tour, and she held on until the next morning when her body gave us it’s first definitive sign that we really, really, really had to admit that we were at the end. She came back from the vet that morning with more pep in her step than she’d had for a month, but also with a diagnosis of “it’s probably cancer that we see in the x-ray.” She also had Stage 3 kidney disease, inflamed bowel disease, and never ending congestion. We enjoyed some days with her and her pepped up step. I kept joking, “Did you just use one of your nine lives to come back stronger!?”
The morning of my birthday, when perhaps you were reading my last newsletter, I was sitting with Goma just sobbing my eyes out as I knew it was the last birthday I would spend with her. She came into my life right before I turned 29, we were both little babies in our own ways.
The day before Thanksgiving, I left the house and noticed a grackle in the pecan tree branch over our driveway. If you live in Austin you know that a grackle sighting is nothing rare, but I allowed myself a second to fantasize. I thought about how in storytelling a black bird is often the harbinger of death. Usually, it’s spooky or ominous, but what if, in fact, it is something of beauty. What if there is an energy field that we know nothing of that is operating for a purpose we cannot imagine. I took solace in the idea that this wild bird might be there because it had an understanding of Goma that I did not.
The next afternoon, Thanksgiving, Kris called out from another room, “There are like 40 grackles in the front yard!”
I ran to the window and sure enough, a grackle storm. In our 14 years in this house we had never seen this before. Our front yard is quite small, but the grackles were swooping in, picking at the dirt, swooping out, making a ruckus. I opened the curtain so Goma could look out from her perch on the back of the chair. “I think they are here for you.” I told her, tears in my eyes. “Your welcoming committee.”
We said goodbye to her two days later, Sunday, Dec. 1. A vet came to our house and reassured us in all ways we needed reassuring. 17 years, she said, is older than she usually sees.
This is my first experience with grief like this. Yesterday I was dizzy, with a headache and nausea, and woke up feeling similar today. I am not one who gets sick often and although I have shed daily doses of tears, I couldn’t help but point my finger at unexpressed grief for my maladies. So here I am writing, hoping to type my way out of it.
Goma’s name came from the Haruki Murakami novel, Kafka on the Shore. I was reading it at the time my roommate Becca and I got her and another cat from the shelter. The other cat I named Pierre because he just looked like a Pierre, like he should be wearing a bowtie. Goma we were struggling to name. In Kafka on the Shore there is a man who can psychically communicate with cats. He is on the search for a missing tortoise shell cat named Goma, which means ‘sesame seed’ in Japanese. Ultimately, Goma is found and no harm has been done to her, as was feared. With the happy conclusion to the tale, I decided to call our new kitten that.
As is the case with animals, that was not her only moniker. Becca called her Goma Sophia, which we agreed on but it never stuck for me. Kris pretty much called her Goma or Gomi, but not me! I called her Gomatron, Tron, Tronny, Tron Tron, Tronalonaldingdong, Tronnals, Dings, Dingaling, Funny Feet.
I had a song, “Tron, Tron, You’ve got some funny feet.” (They were very small.)
I liked to say “Ciao, Tron!” when I was leaving the house.
She used to go on the kitchen cabinet and I would declare, “Tron on high!”
Yeah, it kinda seems like I called her Tron a lot but ultimately she was Goma/Gomi.
She was as soft as a rabbit and an absolute sweetheart.
She was the perfect temperament for my anxious self.
In her absence I can feel all of the love I felt for her, and it feels a lot like the place where imagine the grackles took her.
Ciao, Tron. Thank you.
Awwww, Goma. 💜 Such a beautiful remembrance.
meowvember