our two worlds

Good­ness, I real­ly MUST got to sleep. But I’m think­ing, late this Sat­ur­day night, of the dar­ling dress­es made by the fash­ion kit giv­en to Avery by her dot­ing grand­moth­er, and how many hours of the Olympic cov­er­age it took up for Avery, to design these beau­ti­ful and touch­ing out­fits! I will nev­er for­get those evenings with Non­na in the minia­ture rock­ing chair that nor­mal­ly lives under the eaves of my bed­room (no one seems able to remem­ber where that chair ever came from!), all of us cheer­ing on some ath­lete or oth­er (gen­er­al­ly with John it was a beach vol­ley­ball maid­en, I’m sor­ry to say), while Avery con­coct­ed dress after pantsuit after skirt and jumpers. That child has the longest atten­tion span of any­one I know. What pleas­ant evenings, and how I wish I’d brought these lit­tle out­fits home.

We are all miss­ing the sim­plic­i­ty of the Red Gate Farm World where we weren’t think­ing about the elec­tion (how we are now!), nor were we wor­ry­ing about Avery’s readi­ness for the back­pack require­ments for the first day of school. In that world, we were pos­ing pho­tographs with dar­ling Farmer Rol­lie and wife Judy, Anne, David and Baby Katie, and dear baby Hast­ings, now liv­ing in his new family.

May I take just a moment to tell Shel­ley, my friend, how much it means to us that she has giv­en our dar­ling Hast­ings a lov­ing fam­i­ly? Today we hear he has tri­umphed over his dis­tem­per shot, and Shel­ley is spoil­ing him suit­ably with “fre­quent lit­tle meals” in addi­tion to his ever-avail­able bowl of kit­ty chow. He has tru­ly fall­en into the pot of jam. Avery and I agreed tonight, who would have guessed all these weeks for­ward that a sim­ple lun­cheon for a cou­ple of girl­friends would result in a per­fect home for our Lit­tle Mis­ter, and a life­long friend­ship for us as well? That’s how life works.

How­ev­er, there are charms to our Lon­don world as well! Among them chiefly is… the PIANO! When we bought it, all in a rush from Becky as she and her fam­i­ly decamped to Green­wich, I did­n’t give it much thought. Lord knows my fam­i­ly paid for enough piano lessons for me, and sat through enough recitals, that you’d think my skills would still be buried under there some­where. And as Avery picked her way through a cou­ple of pieces of sheet music we found among her dread­ed vio­lin home­work (!), my ears pricked up, and so did my fin­ger­tips. I was good moth­er enough to apply tape to the keys between the Cs below and above mid­dle C, and to offer some help with tim­ing and sharps and flats. Avery was in com­plete heav­en, trans­fer­ring her intense atten­tion from fash­ion design to “Fly­ing Free,” the incom­pa­ra­bly tear-jerk­ing song she and her Senior Choir com­pa­tri­ots sang to their retir­ing head­mistress in July (I don’t even remem­ber their per­for­mance, so busy was I bit­ing my tongue to keep from crying).

And then when she bored of it, I sat down to play, and would you believe it? As the hours and days go by, I get bet­ter and bet­ter! I can play “Dan­ny Boy from her “Favourites from Ire­land” book, and “True Love” from the “Easy Hits From ‘High Soci­ety’ ” book we ordered from a music shop. And it’s so thrilling to get a skill back. Fun­ny to reach back into a part of my brain that has­n’t func­tioned in 30 years! But I think it’s all still there. To think my moth­er and I used to be able to com­pete on how fast we could play Chopin’s Minute… Minute… heav­en’s to bet­sy, what was it called? You were meant to play it in a minute, and we could.

So our slow and lazy days recov­er­ing from jet lag, get­ting used to John’s being away all day, fac­ing the grey skies day after day, were punc­tu­at­ed yes­ter­day by a wel­come sum­mons from… also a mil­lion years away! My dear friend Bea and her part­ner Edith, vis­it­ing from New York, where they live the true life of the bohemi­ans, in a West Vil­lage loft filled with Edith’s paint­ings and Bea’s son’s graph­ic design work. “He says he’s mid­dle-aged,” Bea reports with rel­ish, “and I keep ask­ing if he’s ever met any­one who’s 108 years old.” She and Edith and their host in Sus­sex invit­ed us to meet them at the Tate Mod­ern for the Cy Twomb­ley show, and we were quick to head off on the tube and for a nice walk across the Mil­le­ni­um Bridge to be there.

Now… Cy Tomb­ley. Cy Twomb­ley and a near­ly 12-year-old girl, admit­ted­ly well schooled from birth in con­tem­po­rary art, sur­round­ed all her life by abstract art, in fact, brought up after school for sev­er­al years in her moth­er’s art gallery where rep­re­sen­ta­tion (let along fig­u­ra­tion) was a sub­ject only for debate, but not for pur­chase or home­ly famil­iar­i­ty. Cy Twomb­ley is a chal­lenge even for such a girl, even for an adult on some lev­els. Nev­er hav­ing heard, I hope, the clas­sic anti-mod­ern-art phrase, “I could do that,” or “my child could do that,” her own com­plete­ly spon­ta­neous but real­ly charm­ing ver­sion was, “I think I real­ly pre­fer art where it’s hard­er for me to imag­ine mak­ing it myself, like Hol­bein.” And of course on a cer­tain lev­el I feel her point. It’s just ges­tur­al, just almost-hand­writ­ing, almost-text, and I did think, we both thought, that the pieces that depend­ed more on col­or were the more suc­cess­ful. There was one room of all-green ges­tur­al works that com­plete­ly evoked Mon­et and were in that way real­ly won­der­ful and yet also… real­ly depen­dent on Mon­et. Best to our minds was the room of three huge red spi­ral works, although nei­ther of us could imag­ine the three liv­ing sep­a­rate­ly as they do, in all cor­ners of the world, when they’re not in the show.

It’s frankly the sort of paint­ing that for me requires some his­tor­i­cal ground­ing: what was this fel­low admir­ing? What was he reject­ing? It’s much more inter­est­ing to look at such supreme­ly abstract art in the light of the fight between min­i­mal­ists and abstract expres­sion­ists, than to stand alone there in the muse­um, try­ing to under­stand it on appear­ances alone. I know that’s not always a defen­si­ble posi­tion for a true paint­ing fanat­ic, but for a fair­ly his­tor­i­cal­ly based per­son, or indeed a per­son who might find her­self resist­ing the inter­est of those paint­ings, putting them in their con­text can help. I don’t know about Avery! She sailed along on her own, notic­ing that a bit had been erased and what would it have been like if the per­son eras­ing had just… kept going? Which led us to see lay­ers where exact­ly that had been done. Good show.

Any­way, we were head­ed down to the cafe to meet Bea when I heard a voice ask, “Are you Kris­ten?” and I turned in total aston­ish­ment (who on earth!) to find a stranger look­ing at us in a friend­ly way. “And you must be Avery, I rec­og­nized you from the pho­to­graph your moth­er sent Bea. She’s up in the post­card shop, did­n’t want you to wait, so come with me.”

Such fun to catch up with old, old friends, who have known me since before there was an Avery! I met them all on a fan­tas­ti­cal­ly ener­getic Com­mit­tee on Women in the Arts for the Col­lege Art Asso­ci­a­tion, which I went on to chair years lat­er… some of the hap­pi­est and most pro­fes­sion­al moments of my life! A love­ly time to catch up, and let Avery have her say, watch­ing her speak to them about art, Lon­don, her edu­ca­tion. We talked about the show: how Twomb­ley admired Jasper Johns, Don­ald Judd as well as the great AbEx fel­lows he was com­pared to… I had to sing my prais­es of Carl Andre, which led my intre­pid fem­i­nist friends to object to his life sto­ry. Avery was puz­zled. “Well, there was the small mat­ter of his… push­ing his artist wife to her death from an apart­ment win­dow… was he ever pros­e­cut­ed for that?” we won­dered. We talked about Edith’s upcom­ing 80th birth­day show in New York, and whether or not I missed my gallery. Not until I talk to these peo­ple, not real­ly, but then… I do.

Oth­er than that, noth­ing of note has been hap­pen­ing. We are real­ly try­ing to enjoy the near-bore­dom of the last days before sched­ules begin to crowd in, in the way they do in this Lon­don life. In fact, yes­ter­day I spent some time fill­ing in dates in my cal­en­dar from things that have been planned this sum­mer, and I got a bit of ner­vous stom­ach to see how much of the next three months is already spo­ken for.

But I bet there’s still time to learn the entire­ty of the key of F sharp…