Nude vs. Naked

For some reason this morning, I woke up thinking about my old seventh-grade art teacher, Mr. Greer at Farrer Jr. High, who was famous for his "Nude vs. Naked" lecture.

Mr. Greer looked like he could be a stunt double for Jacob Marley.  Or even for Scrooge himself, not counting the George C. Scott version of "A Christmas Carol."  He was thin and hunched with a skull sparsely populated by random hairs.  He wore a painter's coat over his clothes with paintbrushes sticking out of his pockets, and it was apparent that by that time in his career he genuinely disliked kids.

Still, we'd all heard about his "Nude vs. Naked" lecture and were eager to hear it for ourselves.  Also, I should point out here that when he said "Naked," it sounded like "Neked."   So yeah.  Bring on the "Nude vs. Neked" lecture, we all said.

Because this was titillating stuff in the late sixties before stuff like the Victoria's Secret Fashion Show hit network TV for all of us to see.  And see and see and see.

Good stuff, right?

And here is the difference, in case you want to know.  Nude is art.  Naked is pornography.  Or regular unglamorous people just crawling into the shower each morning.

(I made up that last distinction, actually.  Because I just got out of the shower myself.)

Gratified. But mystified.

So suddenly I realized I had a deadline and NO IDEAS for a column.  Somehow I ground out this one.  And I did think unto myself, "Yeah.  This probably really sucks."

But it's gotten more hits online than usual, which is a good thing in NewspaperWorld these days.  It's just . . . surprising to me.  I wonder why some things seem to work and other things don't.

I felt that way at the TKE today as I pulled for returns.  Why do some novels take off?  And other equally worthy novels never do?

It's a mystery for sure.

Trigger

My neighbor Johanna--a tall and beautiful Dutch woman in her sixties--told me that when she heard about my dad's death, she remembered how she used to pick berries with her own father when she was a little girl.

"I haven't thought about that in years," she said.  "It's like the floodgates have been opened.

It's strange how triggers work.  In the past few weeks I've been thinking as much about my grandparents as I have about my dad, hearing their stories and feeling thin Wyoming sunlight on my bare brown arms.

TRQ and I today at the Nordstrom Bistro

So TRQ and I met for lunch today at the Nordstrom Bistro.  I ordered the special--a kale salad with roasted Brussels Sprouts and cauliflower.  TRQ had a margarita pizza.  You know.  Ladies-Who-Lunch food.

She looked at my salad.

"Kale is going out of style," TRQ said.

"It's about time," I said.  "Who needs a high-maintenance vegetable that requires you to massage it before you can eat it?"

We both took bites of our food, thinking about how the three of us--TRQ, the Coach, and I--often met for lunch at the Bistro.

"Dad hated this place," I said.

"Yes," TRQ said.  "Yes, he did."

And we both burst out laughing.

How to be non-compliant

I was once whining to the Coach about how hard some of my kids seemed compared to other kids in our extended family.  He looked at me and said, "Their kids?  Compliant.  Your kids? Non-compliant."

This was not said critically at all.  In fact, there was more than a little non-compliance in that man's soul, as I remembered today when talking to one of my boys.

Shortly after the Coach had a major skin graft on the bottom of his foot (Melanoma!  Weird!) TRQ was eager for him to a) heal by b) not doing anything stupid.  So when the Coach wanted to plant flowers that spring, she called up my son, who was living in Provo at the time, to assist.

Mostly my son remembers his grandfather getting annoyed with him for not digging the holes in the right places.  Meanwhile, TRQ took off with these instructions, "DON'T LET YOUR GRANDFATHER PLANT THE FLOWERS!"

As soon as she backed out of the driveway, the Coach grabbed the shovel away from my son and started digging.

With his bad foot.

Non-compliance at its finest.

De-cluttering

Well, I love Christmas and I love Christmas crap.  BRING ON THE CHRISTMAS CRAP is my life motto, which means I have Santas and snowmen and candles and elves and fake reindeer tucked into every corner of my house during the holidays.  And I always hate to put the Christmas crap away.  Good-bye, Christmas Crap, I always say wistfully as I stuff another Santa into a box.

But this year it feels good to clean, to leave surfaces bare, to enjoy the clean lines of winter.

This won't last, of course.  I'll be putting out other crap soon enough.  But right now?  Peaceful.  That's how bareness feels.

I love you, my friends.

Attending to the living

As you all know, death is disruptive.

Even when you know it's coming, there's really no way to prepare for how it upends everything for awhile.  I realized this morning when I awoke that I haven't opened my mail, folded laundry, made my bed, or combed my hair (except for that once when KUTV asked me to do an interview) for almost a week now.

Here's what else I haven't done.  Watered plants or fed my animals.  Fortunately there have been people here who've taken take of the dogs and cats, although the parrot was overlooked some.  The plants, however, are suffering.

And so today my goal is to stay in my pajamas and tend to the living.  Not a bad way to begin a new year.