Escaping Artist

It was a busy weekend in California, spent driving back and forth between Pasadena and Palm Springs. Five days should be enough time to see everyone and do everything planned, but the visit felt rushed and incomplete as visits always do. It’s hard to land in a place and pick up where you left off, so much has changed and happened since I was last there. It’s the seemingly small task of “catching up” that takes too much time and is so important, and the bigger tasks of seeing and doing that get put off. Arriving, a childhood friend retrieved me at LAX. Last time I saw her I was a bridesmaid in her wedding, this time she brought her two-year-old and the baby girl on the way. As much as I wish I lived near my oldest and best friends, I can’t imagine going home and having them be elsewhere. It is odd enough that my brother is no longer there. I think of certain people as belonging to certain places as strongly as I know those places themselves. It always surprises me that while I have lived most of my adult life away from the people I know best, they still understand me the most. Sharing a past seems to a lay the groundwork of trust that carries us through the unexpected twists and turns of our more adult lives.

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Generally speaking I admittedly don’t know very much about religion. I have not been inside very many American churches and have sat through even fewer services, but I do know something about European cathedrals. What religion I have studied came through art history where not only did we briefly study the most famous European basilicas, cathedrals, and churches, but by now I have also been inside most of them. While looking at biblical paintings can sometimes turn into a passive activity of visual monotony, something about the physical experience of being within a Gothic cathedral leaves a deeply unforgettable impression. Notre Dame, the Pantheon, St. Peter’s, San Marco, all have that same transcendent feeling you get from natural wonders, but impressively these are places we built. It is the overwhelming sense of human touch that the great cathedrals have that give them their feeling if divinity, or at least a sense of eternity.

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I am looking out the window of the plane en route to new york. The sun is setting over clouds that have finally stopped shaking the beer can we are flying in, and the view is breathtaking. It is awkward to be so high, but it’s a view I can never resist, and since it will be dark when I fly over the east, I am enjoying the window seat while it still matters.

At the risk of sounding cliché, I can’t help but state that the wedding was truly beautiful. It was everything I think the bride wanted it to be; simple, nontraditional, sentimental, and meaningful. Despite the rebellion my generation instinctively feels toward the traditions of feminine ownership, I understand why we love weddings. Property matters aside, it is a lovely way to come together as a group and celebrate something good. Love, even when it does not last, in the moment that it is true, is a glorious thing to toast—birth, death, and love. The details of weddings only matter because they too are icons of a kind of shared beauty. Flowers, friends, silks and satins are simply the manner in which we reflect a feeling, and our sentiment.

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In Costa Rica we took the family portrait with the camera balanced on a wine bottle, and in New York, near St. Mark’s and 1st, we set it on top of a phone booth, aiming toward what turned out to be a closed shop and a grate covered in graffiti. Our midnight image looks ironically like the perfect Gotham City portrait; we are happy, soused, and smoking. Having left Inwood a little later than we planned, this picture came after the 11:58 run out of the subway station in a ridiculous (but successful) effort to be above ground at midnight. Far away from the madness of Times Square, we imagined we could hear reverberating echoes rebounding off near by buildings. More immediately we were surrounded by the sounds of honking taxicabs, random pedestrian shouts, Shem’s vocalized yells, and muffled happy new year’s! coming from crowded bars.

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