Life. Unable to Write at This Time

A Man Refusing to Paint, Brian Kershisnik

When I began this blog I thought I knew me pretty well. Nothing could have prepared me for fairly steady diligence on my part. I could have told you I'd write once, fully intending to be back faithfully the next week but flaking out and only showing up every once in a while, for a month or so, then erratically once a month for about four months and then in a panic of self-loathing and good intentions twice a year, then chuck the blarmed thing on the hoarded heap of failures I aggressively avoid examining. Or even knowing about anymore.
Here are a few things I've learned.

*As my preferred food presentation is saladesque or stir fried and so is my preferred writing style.

*I really like poetry even when that poetry is actually a song lyric. Verse, I suppose I should call that.

*I really really really love to tell stories in which I figure prominently. I really do. A lot.

*I am going to try to be precise, to nail it, even if I need 20,000 words to get there.

*I will edit for a long, long time. I will not get it right.

*Even when I'm talking about my own self in a near-compulsive fashion and spending 20,000 words to get me from A to B, it's surprising how people reading will just go ahead and draw a line sending me on from B on to C (and then phone to tell me so), even if all along I had supposed it perfectly plain if not embarrassingly obvious that I myself would have headed off toward another letter altogether. Or stopped at B.

*Kanosh is not like the rest of the world.

*The rest of the world can be understood by staring at it through memories of my long-gone Kanosh, if I stare long enough. Sometimes people think I'm sleeping during these important times, but I'm really pondering in a staring sort of way.

*If someone tries to interact with me while I'm writing I have to eat them. Regardless of how weak, needy or defenseless they may be. Most especially if they're the painter.

*I misspell the same words over and again and there are more of those than I can rest easy about in my mind.

*Spell check is sort of provincial and needs to get out more into some tougher books.

*And, (brace yourself), life can interfere with writing. Never saw that one coming, did you? I know I didn't. Of course this isn't a surprise, shouldn't be a surprise, but I am SO surprised because I've never regularly, faithfully pursued anything (religion aside) over such a sustained period other than breathing, eating and reading so I sit and gaze in wonder at all the ways I can be prevented and the reasons therefore like I've got a crush on them. I would have bet ready money I'd be prevented simply by the drag of my own laziness and general disinclination to work or to do anything at all hard.
But it turns out that's not what keeps me away. Other stuff, not personal failings, do; and their number is three.
Naturally, I assumed you'd be fascinated, too.

#1 Thing that Makes Me Not Able to Write.
Christmas.
I wrote a Christmas letter, posted it on my blog and envisioned myself taking important me-time thereafter throughout the holidays to post cheery ongoing season's greetings with cute or thoughtful pictures (psyche! early days) and tangy, trenchant but appropriately spiritual observations. I think I do remember excusing myself at the end of the Christmas letter for the rest of December, just to be safe (though I'd have to do dreaded research in order to make sure--so we'll just be content with my guesses) even though I was hyped to tell all ten of you out there what I really think about the tide of Yule and fairly sure you'd want to know. And guess what? Christmas plowed under and chewed up everything that lay before it, leaving plundered chaos sparkling gently under a thin dusting of vintage glitter and tinsel, just as it has every year since I can remember years. That isn't a mixed metaphor, it's what Christmas accomplishes with its varied orifices and appendages, plows, chews and softly dusts with glister.

#2 Thing of Prevention
Vacation
I know, right? Who didn't see that one coming? Me. Duh. Now, you know as well as I do that Manhattan has Internet access. Yeah, we'd be busy all day doing vacation stuff, but we don't do night life so I knew we'd also hang out all evening in our friend Judy's unbelievable apartment and I confidently prognosticated that, as important as I had (recently) decided this blog was to me, I'd for sure be writing about the glories of it all, us all. The City. Us in The City. Or, failing that, the Town. That other one, where I grew up.
But no. I did a little highlights-of-the-day thingy on Facebook and fell over exhausted. From that simple statement we see what actually prevented me from writing. Fatigue. Severe. Also, having to fight for computer time with my middle child who was the only Kershisnik to schlep her laptop to the City. And then acted like she owned it, when in fact I use the word "her," as in "her laptop," in a very broad and inaccurate sense where "her" indicates something that lives in her room but which her parents, in fact, purchased. "Her" room belongs to us, too. Just sayin'. And I'm still thinking about "her" parents.
I will take a tiny moment here (tiny because I'm trying to keep this post short. It's a goal. I make it over and over every time) to share what was for me the highlight of that trip. Whenever we come back from anyplace people say, "What did you like best?" or "What was the highlight?" and we never have an answer. I do think I could tell you if you asked me about every four hours. "So, what stands out since breakfast?" but if the span stretches over two meals that's too much. Overload. However. This time I accidentally spent an afternoon and evening in the Metropolitan Museum of Art alone. It was a high light.
Alone.
I never intended to be alone. I'm not wired that way. I had picked Friday to go to the Met because that night it stays open late and I assumed everyone would be stoked about the extra time (I plan our trips. I don't think this is at all good for anyone but everyone else just lays there and doesn't do it. Also they get lost. Walking across the park. Seriously. Ask the painter about it sometime). We had already had a little private tour in the Met while they were closed on Monday (this is why people are married to the painter) but I assumed no one had had their fill. Also, although the painter had gone on his own two other times while the girls and I went to H&M and Bloomingdale's etc., I knew he'd be up for another visit. Painters are insatiable. But come Friday afternoon, our last hours and, no, the girls were finished, used up, wanted to walk Judy's dogs in Central Park, take pictures of themselves in their new Manhattan clothes and pretend to be somebody. The painter and I went off happy but a little guilty ("You're sure you don't want to spend seven hours looking at (more) art? Really? Do you have a fever? You're OK? Well, alright, then, if you're sure."). Once inside we immediately ran into trouble. I wanted to look worshipfully at the dreamy American Woman clothing exhibit and he felt he had seen it since we had, after all, strolled (rapidly) through on our first trip. He commenced waiting while I looked. Politely. Everyone was being polite.
I (politely) told him he should go ahead and I'd find him later. Convinced him. He went.
And I was alone.
Alone you can spend an hour on Belle Epoque dresses. Alone you can look at Asian sculpture for a super, super long time. You never have to look at armored knights unless you feel driven to it. Alone you can sit for a long time listening to running water in the Moon Garden and you needn't ever listen to the sound of talking people drowning out the sound of running water at the Temple of Dendur. Alone you can look for many minutes at paintings of cherry blossoms and cry over Korean pottery. You can find period rooms in the American Wing you've never seen before and that gorgeous painting of Alexander Hamilton. Alone you can wander in visible storage till they threaten you with closing and turn off lights and then you have to tell the painter, truthfully, that your cell phone doesn't work this deep in visible storage.

#3 Thing
Sickness
Gottcha you again, didn't I? We're all so taken aback we hardly know where to have ourselves.
Here we are at the end of a lovely week in which the Familia Kershisnik has undergone vital and thorough immune system retrofitting. New diseases are available to upgrade your system! Don't show me this again. I thought, oh, good, I'm legitimately lying around, I'll write a hundred essays. Yay! No! I couldn't think. Didn't want to read, couldn't sleep. Did a lot of mending, which, in all honesty, felt sort of good. I believe we are now over most things that people have been telling us, sympathetically, are going around. I see a school year looming off the port bow. All I have to say is, bring it on. Actually, don't. I loathe, I abhor, I abominate school. Not schooling, school.

But that's another story.

While Walking, Brian Kershisnik

Life. Perform Ramdom Acts of Hamlet

Summer is spinning itself away and I am sad. The downward slide toward school has for me always been paved with tragedy. Can you pave with tragedy? Even in print? Tragedy pavers are slick with regrets and slimy with second guessing. No way even to slow a descent. How could all those days my child self piled up at summer's beginning, heaping them high with careless, spendthrift gluttony, slipping them through my fingers like marbles in a bowl, like polished stones, have gone? Just gone, gone all away? Did I do the things I planned? Heck, I forgot to plan. Again. Second half of summer dread, heavy now every day in my stomach. Was there time now to frantically plan, make a list, check it twice, ensure a harvest by summer's end so I could store up something, anything, tangible to carry about and tell over through the dark days of schooling, this, this I had in summer, events and activities to remember, to remind me of the untellable worth of an unscheduled day? Or should I take arms, empty myself of things and people, dig in my nails and drag my feet for all my worth against the sun's shortening hours, refuse to observe, build a wall of books so high that from behind it I couldn't even tell that each successive bedtime was darker, quieter, seducing me into winter sleep, less and less like a strange summer afternoon nap. Riding my bike in the cool blue twilight swallowing hard at rising panic. One more day gone. One more day gone.
I still feel it.


Not too long ago, I rode a school bus, as I did every day from third grade through graduation. I might reasonably have expected never to do it again, but I have these children. The youngest needed an adult presence on bus rides from time to time. I am that sort of parent who becomes an adult presence if anyone asks it of me.

It makes me kind of sick to ride school buses. There's the general, slight carsickness to which I am prone if I sit toward the back or in direct sun (I sound like a houseplant), but then there's a specific bus sickness, more of the soul than of the stomach or the head. I can't tune out now that I am an a grown up, I can't help watching the children around me; they intrude insistently, they sling words callously into my ears. I begin to brood. I know a bus brings out the best in nobody, but I find myself wondering, could this perhaps the worst? And I know it's not, not the worst, this is a group of lucky, achieving children who are on their way to a privilege, something they and their dedicated parents have earned. Which funnels me straight into musing on what sort of careful, thoughtful upbringing could result in the greedy, stentorian, attention-devouring, criminally silly behavior manifesting the instant a little person's bottom touches that terrible vinyl. Is it the shape of the seat? Is it that bus smell of old lunches, dirty grade schoolers, desperately ignored and stomped-down homework with a throw-up chaser? Is this how my own children act on a bus, or would act, were I not eternally manifesting as Adult Presence? Is it even possible to raise a well mannered child who will not simply lose all sense of dignity, of propriety and decorum, all sense, the moment they feel the throbbing of the great diesel engines thrumming up through the floor, making conversation carried on at any level below a shriek ridiculous and impossible? And so on and on, swirling thoughts in ever tightening circles of hysterical supposing and hopeless concluding. Before I can stop myself I'm thinking despairingly about the relative insignificance of all lives and efforts and my life and efforts in particular. The longer the ride, the grimmer my musings and bleaker my conclusions.


I try to avoid it, bus riding. But so do all the other parents on the planet and some of us have to form a presence, so I find I go every time I'm asked. And I ponder.


All the kids in Kanosh rode the bus to school in Fillmore. The bus, beginning its run heading north, stopping for kids about every third corner, made a circle through the town, which is four blocks wide running east to west and five blocks long running north to south. Eight blocks to the mile. My stop was about halfway along the circle and something like a third of a block from my front door. That door faced the wrong direction for bus watching, opening as it did to a lovely view of the east mountains, while the bus turned the corner down by my Grandma Christensen's house and came at us from the west (the direction of the desert and the nastiest winds), up the block, across main street and then another block to the corner where it turned by my Harris grandmother's house, where we got on. If someone, maybe a little sister, was actually stationed in the front yard watching, she could see the bus two blocks away and scream to the house that it was coming, giving the older and slower people inside plenty of time to grab their stuff and get to the corner. In the spring and fall sisters sometimes did that. My mother sometimes made them. In the winter they were not inclined to be helpful in that way. My mother still sometimes made them because she didn't want to drive us the 15 or so miles from Kanosh to Fillmore, which is what might happen if we missed the bus.


But not often. Usually if we failed to make the stop before the bus pulled away (one of the drivers got a real kick out of watching kids run all the way to their stop and then pulling away at the last second. I almost ran into the bus during one of these little pranks. My dad would watch these goings on and, I swear, flames would come out of the top of his head. Equally mad at us and the driver) our dad or mom would throw us into the car and go screaming along the county road to pull off and sit waiting at either the turnoff to the Indian Reservation or the road out to Hatton, catching the bus as it came back from round trips harvesting children at these locales, and make us get on there. You could see the bright yellow, capsule-shaped bus very clearly as it hurtled along the flat, empty, open road in the early, raking light from the rising sun, going east out to the reservation or west to Hatton, (or coming back, depending on how late we were) so it was easy to know where to wait. We didn't like this option, though it saved time for our parents. You had the annoyed, put-out parent thrusting you none too gently from the family car (which had been parked in a geographically aggressive position across the highway access to prevent the bus from just speeding around you--this generally worked) into the care of the frankly pissed-off driver, now doubly inconvenienced and making an "unscheduled" stop. And then, of course, there were the other kids. Stepping onto the bus, into a solid wave of aggressive clamor, now all turned to ridicule, now all focused on the bus-missers, was a hideous form of social destruction. Better from a child's viewpoint to just idle and dither till you forced a ride all the way to Fillmore and could slide silently and anonymously into the crowds pouring into school. Only your parent was mad at you, had been before, would be again anyway. At least your parents mostly loved you.


And going with Mom or Dad was quicker. By about forty minutes. It takes fifteen to twenty minutes to drive from Kanosh to Fillmore, depending on speed and road conditions. Weather, for example, is often a factor; delineator poles keep you on the asphalt if you are making the drive after a big snow fall but ahead of the plows. Cowboys moving a herd of cattle along the road between Meadow and Kanosh can also really slow you down. Our regular bus ride, with fair weather and no livestock but with our trips out to the reservation and Hatton, was an hour. Each way.

I remember the bus rides almost as solid things, a dense cylindrical tube packed with pounding, unending, stupid noise and bad air, stretching from my stop to the schoolyard , and me, suspended in it, the proverbial fly in amber, entering at one end and exiting at the other without a sense of intermediate movement, of travel. I read, mostly, unless I was too cold or in the direct sun (houseplant). I liked to sit in the seat over the heater, even though you boiled and lots of the kids avoided those seats. I hated getting to school with numb feet. I hated my hands shaking and not being able to hold my book still enough to focus on it. Better to burn.


I remember riding for the whole way, sometimes, leaning my head against the window, bumping and slamming against the glass for an hour. Getting a headache from it, a bruise, not knowing why I had done it the whole way. Not seeming to feel like it made any difference.


I remember hating the kids when they were on the bus, hating the way they looked and sounded, the way they shed their normal inhibitions and their occasional manners in the wind screaming through the open windows. They'd open the windows, sometimes, in the afternoons when it had become warm or even hot but the heaters were still going full blast from the cold morning, and a window would stick and still be stuck down in the morning when it was freezing and the driver would say that's what we got. For what we did.
I remember that to get your head slammed against the window by a bigger kid walking past was called a comic strip.
To be slapped on the side of your head as someone went by was a cuff, a new word to me when I was ten.


I remember we hated it so much when our elementary school bus had to take the high school kids home; they hurt us, comic strips all the way down the aisle.
I remember getting on the bus with little kids after I was the one in high school, seeing apprehension on their faces, realizing my advanced age, wondering if we were hurting them, as we had been hurt. Watching and being relieved that, no, we were ignoring them.


I remember the smothered, trapped feeling of being in the bus with a fist fight. The way the fighters spilled from their own seats, lurched into the rows around them. Kids scrambling to get out of the way, getting smashed, getting pinched between fighters and metal seats, separated from friends and siblings, stranded and crawling under seats, getting punched sometimes when they were in the way, losing homework lunches show-and-tell prized possessions in the mud and gritty black ice water on the floor. Not being able to get out of the way. Not having anywhere to get to.


I thought, at the start of this writing, that these would be some funny stories coming on, writing about riding on the bus. I thought I'd be silly and self-deprecating and make at least myself laugh, remembering.
I've done my best.


In California I had walked across the street to my school.
There's a great school building in Kanosh.
Busing to Fillmore began the year my family moved to town. I was eight.
School in Fillmore was going to be so much better for us all, more opportunities if we were all together.
It would get everyone ready to play on the same team in high school, cut out the small town allegiances.
The people who decide knew it would be so much better for the kids. Fillmore would have so much more to offer. There was tax money for the getting.
How much could you offer me in return for two hours of every school day of my life from third grade through twelfth? How much for a ride that left me sanded and stripped, rubbed raw, tumbled and jagged hoping only my house would be empty when I got there so I could hide from my sisters, hide from my chores, hide my homework, hide from being oldest and in charge while my mom was at work, bury myself for an hour or two in silence till I felt alive and ok again? How can any adult be sure of values, making a trade like that?


What would you give me in return for my time, the hours of my life?
How much, really, has Fillmore got?


I sat on a bus for a while recently on the way to someplace special and important, watching the kids no one wanted to sit with, the others crammed four to a seat, listening to the peculiar wall of bus noise, frantic and unyielding, smelling the smell, watching from the edge of the yawning pit of bottomless silliness, thinking about how I have tried so hard to offer my children what I think is best.


My children have taken piano lessons and dance. Special reading programs at the library, swimming lessons. We drove them to Lehman's Caves and to the sand dunes and the beach. Endless museums of artistic, historic and cultural interest. Karate, tumbling, 4-H. Cheer and rodeos (did you know tiny children ride sheep?). Ballroom. Art classes. Magic and singing and juggling. Dance and dance and more dance--two-day-long dance competitions. Volleyball, t ball, softball. Peer suicide and crime prevention retreats and leadership councils because my kids were outstanding. That's what people said. These opportunities were going to be so good for them. They have hosted leadership meets and taught acting workshops and run youth courts. Theater at home and across the state since they were tiny. National and state competitions. School plays and school teams. Choir. Band.

I made an acting company for them.
They liked it.
At the time they liked fabulous dress-ups at least as well.
Flour in ziploc bags, the handcart and batteries for flashlights.

Yes, we took them to see Hamlet in Stratford, and yes, that was nice but they remember better that to get the tickets we all slept (or whatever) on the bricks you see in this picture and that after we got the tickets we roamed almost aimlessly, certainly without a plan, through a long summer day filled with serendipitous deliciousness, following Tom's vague, pleasant mission memories, waiting for our show to start.

Tudor warehouses on a silent river. The tiny lady in Glouchester cathedral, no taller that Leah herself, who leaned toward Zoe and Leah whispering, "Do you like Harry Potter?" and whisked them away for more than an hour who-knows-where to show them the secrets of Hogwarts-in-a-movie. Nearly strolling past the Tailor of Glouchester's house but recognizing it from its portrait. Mulberries and blackberries sweet and dark and staining. A stumbled-upon concert, the King's Singers warming up in Tewkesbury cathedral with only ourselves for an audience. Zoe turning to us triumphant, flushed and defiant after meeting them, talking to them. Zoe, a serious young singer, having just watched them work, listened to them build their sound, reminding us she had been denied a coveted spot in the school choir because she was going to be gone over the summer and would miss a two day workshop. "That workshop is going on right now. Right now." Zoe, smiling like a cat, walking dreamily away to eat mulberries.


This is Noah and Leah and Zoe. We are hiking mount Snowdon. Eden has come up part way and decided that was far enough. She and the painter have gone down. Can you see that the wind is rising, clouds forming, a storm coming? Can you see how they are dressed? After more hiking, when Noah can no longer feel his legs from cold, we will decide to go down. Zoe and her dad will go on to the top with a few other students. Turning back will be as hard as the hardest things Noah ever does. But he can't feel his legs. And there is Leah. And there is the storm. After everyone is down we will say, when we talk about it, that all the decisions were good. This will be because no one died. We have talked about that hike and those decisions ever since. Maybe we always will.

That summer the girls missed camp (again). Their mothers felt, not guilt, not really, but a small uncomfortable thing not unlike guilt about that missing. Some evenings in our funny Cardiff living room as that summer wore away we added it all up to reassure ourselves of the trade we had made on our young girls' behalf. On the one hand: their travel in three countries, three capitols, their living away from us with six college students, budgeting, planning, shopping in another culture and another currency, cooking in their turn, learning to bake bread, do their own laundry, street contacting with missionaries, volunteering in Primary, negotiating Cardiff without parents, stomping off downtown to pay their bill and get their power turned back on; on the other hand, a week of camp. Eden's camp leader said to me, loving but obviously worried, "It's not that we don't understand you want to travel, of course we do and we think it's great, it's just that we worry she'll miss these great memories."


They fly in planes and ride in trains on other continents and from end to end of this one.
They also need to be left alone.
Have I ignored them enough?
I rode a bus, too, every day of my year that wasn't my beloved summer break.
It was going to be what was best for me.
We haven't been to a rodeo in a while. They don't have them just everywhere, you know, and I've been talking it up, I miss it. Leah informs me she has no memory of rodeo other than that she got a Sprite at one. I am horrified. ("That's it?" and " I bought you a Sprite?") We go, she loves it. We try to plan our 24th celebration. She asks if there are any more rodeos. I pause. Are you sure? Don't try to please me. This is your summer.

When we moved to Kanosh I schooled them at home to avoid that bus ride.
For the first time since I was eight I enjoyed the turn from summer to fall.
But we were driven to discover books on tape because somehow we still lived in our car.
Everything, everything was in Fillmore by then, because it was so much better that way.
Now we have moved and my youngest went to a great school with everything I could want her to have in a great school and we are only a few blocks away. I walked with her to school every day, so she wouldn't feel so only.
This year she will go to middle school and I'm bunched up about that like I haven't been in a long time. She could ride her bike, I guess, part of the year, but it's really a bit far to walk.
My run to the bus stop was not nearly as far as our walk to the new school.


I think about it all the time, I try so hard because I am just so scared and unsure. I second guess every offer, checking whether whatever it is I hold out to children, demanding obedience or offering a trade instead of simply letting them master an hour of their own dear time playing, is worth it. Really worth it. One more day gone. One more day.


Take for instance my acting company. Here's me. "Come do Hamlet with me. Just three or four (ok, maybe five) hours a week for months."
Worth even those hours lost lying on their backs staring vacantly at the sky?


"I'll teach you a little bit about the culture of the sword.

I'll show you Shakespeare's words til they feel like your own."
Worth even an hour drawing, doodling on the backs of their hands?


"I'm here with you. All the way. If you need me, I'm on stage with you. This is the biggest hut, the best pretend, anyone can ever build. It's another time, another place. I promise, it'll be worth it. I'll make it worth it."
Me, talking, when they could be poking ants.

I watch the summer days and no matter how mindfully I live they shorten and shorten. One more day, gone.

Whatever trip I offer, it had better be worth the bus ride.


Photos: Hamlet, KAC, 2006
2008 BYU study abroad, Wales
Noah's photos

Help. The Last Part.

Descent from the Cross. The painter thinks maybe it's finished.

Festival, Brian Kershisnik

*****
His people on the grass, around the cross, are lovely, so sad. Some are crying. Almost all of them are moving, stepping up to work, enclosing the dead son in a safe circle of their love, in their steady concern and bewildered, heart-broken care. They wear the neverwhen clothing the painter's people always wear, their hair is dark, as is almost always the case in his work, the men are mostly clean shaven. The air is filled with angels.

*****

Here is a tiny story about the painting of Descent from the Cross.
Nothing quite like this has ever happened in the painter's studio. Interestingly, this sequence of events was captured on film (or the digital equivalent thereof), which has also never before happened in the painter's studio.

He began the painting on a large canvas which, having been stretched, gessoed and prepared but never used, had waited on his wall, bored, for years (another first, or perhaps more correctly, an only). This one time his working would be captured in a sort of stop motion for use in a documentary (Painter: The Movie). The work went well, he was pleased. And pleased, too, with the animation, a baby movie of charcoal and paint flying onto canvas, figures growing up and fleshing out in mere moments. He liked showing people his work so far, liked the funny little tricks he played with the cameras; himself apparently shuttling about in front of the painting without moving his feet, a box that zipped about as if under its own steam.

Not that he approached this painting and its subject lightly. No. Far from it. He uses music to help him as he works, help him get his head and heart where they need to be, and I don't at all know how he could face day after day of the sad, sad music he has been using. I can hardly stand to be in his studio with it; I make him turn it off till I leave. He's, uh, expressive when he works. Laughs, cries, stalks about, sings, rants and whispers. I understand, I do it too. Talk to myself, mutter. Sketch things in the air, brush them away and draw them again, the same and different. I don't laugh, much, and I don't sing but I do listen to music, a song over and over, tears running down my face till I just get tired of it. We agree working alone is vital, otherwise you'd never envision, never build, you'd only ever perform and while that's important it's different. Also, people would seriously think you were crazy. Touched. Making up a true thing is really difficult work. It's been hard, hard, this painting, not like Nativity where the tears could be for the beginning of life and for the joy of a baby. This dead son hangs heavy, heavy. The painter's been weeping for months. In each week he stops work to read letters at his studio, e mails from our far-away missionary-boy. And he weeps. An anniversary comes and goes; our dear friends have been living a year since the death of their son. Other friends talk with them of respite, the easing of tearing, rending pain that only more years will bring, speak with knowledge as the death of their own boy moves slowly away and slowly away from them.

Curtain, Brain Kershisnik

All these sons are with him as the painter weeps in his bright, sunny studio, painting a family stirred and spilled in the first moments after the loss of their son. So he needs a break.
Sometimes he would have to be silly, laugh, this isn't a hopeless subject after all. The work went well, he was pleased.

One morning he called to tell me the world had ended.

*****

I've had a quote, or something I've made into a quote, lodged in a crack in my memory since I started mulling the images in this painting and these ideas of help. I haven't quite been able to shake it free; I've decided it must be a line of movie dialogue from years ago. Perhaps someone who reads this will remember too and tell me. Donnette? Julie? Tom?
This is the line, "who do you think you're helping?"
Or, no, "who do you think you're saving?"
Like in a movie with...knights and castles, perhaps? I have this vague picture of a sort of peasant person shaking himself away, pushing off a knightish person, a knight who's trying to do something helpful and noble. They struggle a bit, awkward. The peasant is looking up at his knight in disgust. "Who do you think you're saving?" The knight is taken aback and nonplussed. Doubting his nobleness, a bit, suddenly. Who do I think I'm saving, he wonders. I was pretty sure it was from The Holy Grail, but the painter, who will recite every shred and particle of all things Monty Python ("Ah," you breathe, "now I see!" and feel you finally comprehend his work) says, emphatically, that it is not. (He also says, "When you don't know what you're talking about, be emphatic." Now you truly comprehend his work.)

Pastoral with Injured Fool, Brian Kershisnik

*****

He had gone in the morning to his studio, flipped on the special cameras before beginning work at the large canvas, covered now with figures clustered around the cross where the body of the dead son hung, partially supported by the strength of nails driven through hands and wrists and partially held up in the arms of encircling family and friends. The painter stepped back to look, to see, stepped forward to work and just flicked away a bristle stuck to the canvas, a little hair from one of his round hog-bristle brushes. They stick in the paint sometimes. A great chip of the painting came away with the bristle.
Another first in the painter's studio.
He was bewildered, in an agony, in a fury. Sections of the painting flaked, fell away as he scraped at them. If that could happen, was happening, what else could, might, happen? To how many paintings? Why, of them all, to this one?
[*Note. Do not, DO NOT do this to paintings. The paint's not going to come off and you might cause damage. Painters do all sorts of things to artwork which no one else is allowed to do. This was a rare, unheard-of, one-in-a-million sort of event. DON'T SCRAPE AT PAINTINGS. Thank you.*]

That was a desperately dark and difficult day, and there were a couple more of them in the wings awaiting their turn to...not shine...glower? Quash, dismay, oppress, ruin, devastate, shatter, quell? Probably a good thing about the filming right there at first, probably people were more civilized for the camera. Smile like you mean it.

He worked it out. He reviewed and ruminated and reflected, experimented and examined, stomped around, made phone calls and prayers (did a little more scraping) and worked it out. It was an accident, a freak, an anomaly (good, good news), an aberration which irrevocably carried away the painting (bad, bad news). End of the world.
(Right?)

*****

In the composition the angels weep. Angels reach to help the man lifting down the top crosspiece. Angels reach out to touch hair, faces. The people standing on the earth don't look up, don't see the angels, don't realize, probably, that they are being helped. Are too cocooned in their pain. Have no way of measuring how much worse, if they were truly alone, this could be.

*****

The writers of the accounts that would one day be called The Gospels had a lot on their minds, a number of goals, a number of challenges and issues pressing them. I am, as many other people are, fascinated as much by what they could choose not to say as by what they wrote down. Pick events and phrases from something like thirty three or four years of a life you believe to be the most pivotal, vivid and important life ever lived. What do you not say? It grabs my attention that Matthew, Mark and Luke all stop the narrative, the account at the cross itself, the place where it's all going on, to jump for a tiny moment across town to Herod's temple. They tell us that as Jesus' soul tore away from this earth, racing back to the Father of us all, the veil of the temple was rent in twain. Take that statement a moment at face value, whether you believe the story as recorded in the New Testament or not. You're in Jerusalem, doing your thing in the temple, and suddenly the veil is rent. Not by any force you can see. Torn. How strange would that be?
Matthew does step back further, up onto a crane for a long shot, as it were, a sweeping 360 to show us the chaos and general upheaval in nature as time undid itself and the dead prepared to come forth. Except for that little phrase though, Mark and Luke never let us take our eyes from the close up, the same intimate scene the painter has chosen. Just a few words, like a voice-over, with all the attention still trained on these people here at the cross, these faces. The veil of the temple was rent in twain, and, according to Luke, from top to bottom.
Why would they want everyone, forever, to know about that?
Why just then?
I wouldn't pretend even to guess in a scholarly way what that's all about, but I'm willing to say what it means to me, right now, in a human way. I once told myself God tore the veil because he was so very angry with everyone for their hideous treatment of the son he loved, but I've shed that thought the way I've shed my braces and my fear of dogs. I believe the veil tore because, on some plane, people, a lot of people, needed to get through. Quickly. Their help was needed, and they came. The Veil, even the symbolic representation of the Veil, ripped, gaped, tore right across. Riven by the speed and density of their coming. I think one of the vital truths those men, those writers, wanted us to see and understand is that this is what happens when the world ends. God smashes open the windows and pours out help. I would, if it were my kids. And it wouldn't matter if it were the ending of a big important world with everybody on it and torture and mayhem in the immediate future or the end of the world in the size and shape of a three year old lost in the local grocery store. The end is the end. Nothing hurts worse than the end of the world.

Flight Practice with Instruction, Brian Kershisnik

*****

The painter started over. He had to. What else on earth was he going to do? Cameras were rolling (or clicking. whatever). The second painting, the one I've been talking about, grows, blooms in stop motion as quickly as the first one did. He'll show it to you if you express the least amount of interest. Possibly even if you don't. Here's the thing. The second one is better. Immeasurably better. There would have been no second painting had it not been for the death of the first.
Help.
Was that help?
Was someone helping?
A peasant sort of person angrily pushing away a knightly sort of person. "Who do you think you're saving?"

*****

He has a painting of Christ struggling with a man, holding him by one arm, holding him close and still as the man pushes against his Lord in surprise and maybe pain? shock? Jesus is, after all, rubbing mud into the man's eyes. Push, pull. Almost an embrace, almost a dance. This is healing. After he clears his eyes, the blind man will see.

*****

What am I trying to talk about? All the stories, these memories of help. Quick, unthinking. Practiced and measured. Unrecognized and vital. Back and forth, give and take. Help that hurts us in the giving and the getting. Hurts that make us whole. Healing we shove away, bewail and bemoan. Who do you think you're saving? People in Descent from the Cross stand in the grass without shoes. They could not draw nigh, the closest friends can go to death falls far short, but they could put off the shoes from their feet, stand on holy ground. There were only a few of them together there, but enough for a circle, all facing in to a present need, a common goal, and he was in their midst, still, as he had promised he would be. The air all full of angels. The terror had torn the veil. Angels could get through. They'd been waiting.

*****

Years ago the painter made a song based in part on a dream. In the dream we are all dancing barefoot in long grass on level ground, learning a dance sort of like a square dance and sort of like a line dance but in a circle. A complicated circle. It's fun but it's really hard and has to be done right. Slowly we realize the man coaching us through the dance, patient but exacting, is Jesus. We're not doing a perfect job, we aren't up to steps as complex as these. We lose our breath, we start to laugh and our steps are ragged. The dance master doesn't laugh but he doesn't get mad. And he doesn't let us stop. He's going to keep us there till we get it right or till we leave, I guess, but no one wants to leave. It's fun, really fun, and he's nice and funny but making us work so hard. It's just too hard. We keep laughing because we dance into each other and on people's feet and some of us are getting hurt and he just keeps making us do it again and again. It's got to be right.
The last line from the song the painter made is this.

Standing with Jesus on the grass.
Everyone has taken off their shoes.

There was a Kershisnik painting of Jesus on the grass discussed at a seminar a few years ago and I asked him about the song. He shook his head. Too long ago, couldn't really remember. I remember. It was my dream.

There's a painting of a friend holding his dying son to his chest, carrying his son who is a big boy and hard to manage. It has to be a close embrace. Push and pull. It looks like dancing. The air filled with banners. It's not a hopeless subject.

Father and Son Dancing, Brian Kershisnik

*****

I haven't the slightest idea how to tie it down. This is fundamental to my walk in this world and I can no more explain it than I can explain the earth that holds up each and every one of my footfalls. I believe in help and in helping. I do. This I believe. I want to help. And I want Help.

We are called to the work. Will you, won't you, will you, won't you, won't you join the dance? Push and pull. Give and take. Where we struggle, where we step, this is holy ground. Angels reach down. People reach out. He gives and he takes. I can't come back if I never leave. If I never die how will I live again?

Con'se-crate [...to dedicate; from com-, together, and sacrare, to...devote to a divinity, from sacer, sacred.]
Webster

Dance with naked feet.

What is it I need?
Light in the dark.
Health if I'm sick.
Water.
Bread.
Life when I'm dead. Whenever I'm dead. Every time I'm dead.
Help to a better place, whether I like it, understand it, recognize it or not.
Who do you think you're saving?
If the people in Descent from the Cross reached out, they could hold hands and make a circle.
A dance, great and terrible. Me and you. Give and take.
Dancing with Jesus on the grass.
Everyone has taken off their shoes.

Behold, I say unto you, as I said unto my disciples, where two or three are gathered together in my name, as touching one thing, behold, there will I be in the midst of them--even so am I in the midst of you.
Fear not to do good, my sons, for whatsoever ye sow, that also shall ye reap; therefore, if ye sow good ye shall also reap good for your reward.
Therefore, fear not, little flock; do good; let earth and hell combine against you, for if ye are built upon my rock, they cannot prevail...
Look unto me in every thought; doubt not, fear not.
Behold the wounds which pierced my side, and also the prints of the nails in my hands and feet.

D&C 6:32-37

They Dance, Brian Kershisnik

Blessed, Honored Pioneer

Brightly Colored Burdens, Brian Kershisnik

In the summer, especially in July, we think about pioneers. We can't help it.

Whenever I think about pioneers
I think of brave women and men.
I like to remember that children came too;
I would like to have been a child then.

For starters, this sentiment was, for me at least, patently false. I wasn't normally one to question, or indeed, even to notice the lyrics of the songs we sang Wednesday afternoons when the bus dropped us all off at the church for Primary, but these sort of jumped out at me. (Interestingly, if you weren't headed into the church for Primary meeting the bus still dropped you at the church and you walked the rest of the way home. Same for the activity bus that brought you home from the school in Fillmore if you had to stay late. You walked from a central drop. Alone. In the Dark. I'll tell you more about that another time. Back to Songs About Pioneers.)
I did NOT want to be a child then, or at any rate, there. I did NOT want to cross the Great American Desert (named by the namers of names before they got very far west and found out about the actual great American deserts. Baker, anyone? Barstow?) on foot or in a wagon or on a fast horse or a light spring buggy or any other way. I wanted ocean and trees and cliffs and mist and stone walls haunted by aristocratic shades with romantic tales attached, not stoic ghosts moving ever westward with such grim determination they had never noticed (or so it appeared to the child I was) that we were here. This was it, The Place, we had gone no further and had been here as if for years really quite some time now. The pioneers we sang of every July in preparation for their day on the 24th seemed to me like sailors in ghost ships, clinging eternally to their prairie schooners, ceaselessly roving westward, losing an endless supply of loved ones along the way, sharing out flour by teacupfuls from sacks mysteriously replenished, raising by their faith the essential draft animals which were doing their solid best to expire, fiddling, singing and dancing their ghostly heads off around their buffalo-chip campfires. (Good thing our civilization didn't destroy the buffalo any sooner, how on earth would anyone have ever gotten themselves and their families across those plains to colonize and conquer the west without the buffalo? We'd still be stacked up on the eastern seaboard, standing in line for passage in sailing ships headed 'round the Horn, stymied in enacting our Manifest Destiny till the invention of air travel.) The pioneers of my childhood were contradictory that way, always, always still in their crossing though I knew they ages ago got here; I lived, after all, in a town they made out of nothing. All the Mormon relatives that stretched between them and me were somewhere in the cemetery, to be ordered and stacked by those with the interest to do so. What was now the granary on our lot was first a house with one inch of milled lumber, a layer of tar paper and several of pretty wallpaper between the pioneers who lived inside it and the Utah Territory that lived outside it. The upstairs loft where the entire family slept (always said as if there had been thirty of them, at least) was my playhouse. They made, used and left the blacksmith's shop still standing twenty feet beyond the granary. I knew they had gotten here. But all the stories of them I ever heard as a child were snapshots en route and our Primary songs embalmed them in forward motion on a great wheel, Sisyphean, running on a barrel in water, an exhibit for all time of The Crossing, frozen in their faith, a grim and impossible comparative measure for ours.
I'll show you.

Day after day the wagons are rolling,
Onward and westward we ever must roam.
Roll along, roll along, covered wagons, take us safely to our new home.
Night after night we sit round the campfire
Singing the songs that remind us of home.
Roll along, roll along, covered wagons, take us safely to our new home.
Someday we'll reach the land of our dreaming,
Settle and build on some land of our own.
Roll along, roll along, covered wagons, take us safely to our new home.

See what I mean? When do they arrive? Not in any Primary song I ever sang. There's that ominous ever must roam for good measure. Nobody's got an ETA, sister, so settle down and pass the ashcakes. And just for further glorious confusion, where in this song is home? The songs that reminded the child-me of home were the songs about the pioneers leaving home to come to...home.
This is the catchy descant from To Be A Pioneer

We are marching, ever marching,
We are marching, ever marching,
Marching onward, ever onward.

Doomed to walk for eternity... The actual verses remind us that, of course, one needn't do the normal things we associate with pioneers, walk a thousand miles OR MORE, or leave your family dear, to gain pioneer status, but believe you me, any Kanosh Primary child worth its salt (a very large lick of which sold for not very much at my dad's General Mercantile) knew the difference between pioneering and BEING a pioneer. What camp of the Daughters of the Utah Pioneers does your grandma belong to? Your people come in wagons? Handcarts? On the shameful train? Don't be trying to tell us stuff.

Pioneer children sang as they walked
and walked
and walked
and walked.

Like that? Good. Repeat it. In addition to walking walking walking they got to wash in streams, work and play, camp, read and pray, but the song leaves them as it found them,

Week after week they sang as they walked
and walked
and walked
and walked
and walked.

That last walked, the last note, has a fermata so a wise chorister can draw it out to the gasping point, leaving the walking children suspended on our fading breath, for as long as necessary to drive home the point.

Little pioneer children, gathering berries for food;
See the pioneer children hunting chips for wood.

Do you know how many berries lie between me in my Kanosh chapel and the Gateway to the American West? This was why they needed the bottomless flour sacks, like in a fairytale. The very best part about this song was that the chorister had to explain chips to us. It wasn't that we thought it was interesting or a big deal, it was that she thought it was.
I think they are a dismal, dispirited bunch, those little songs. Slow, plodding, melancholy. Child-sized dirges for our departed ancestors. The only one with any spirit at all was The Handcart Song.

When pioneers moved to the west,
With courage strong they met the test,
They pushed their handcarts all day long
And as they pushed they sang this song:
For some must push and some must pull
As we go marching up the hill;
So merrily on our way we go
Until we reach the Valley-o.

There you go. These are my people. (Hey, Sam.) Strong, merry, tested, but moving on to somewhere they called the Valley-o. Who could resist? Plus, this has a rollicking good tune and made me feel excited for them. Like they were working through something hard but that it had a way through and it had an end and God didn't want them to suffer for the sake of it, He wanted them to make it and He knew they would and that they were going to be very happy-o when they got there. Got there. These people got there.

In the summer we think about pioneers.
We put in sod right before we flew to New York City. I told the painter we can do it but it will take all of us and anyone who will help and it will take all we've got, absolutely all of it, but then it will be over and we can sleep on the plane. I figured it would take us three days. We had two and a half. It was hard and hot and horrible and friends came to help us. On the worst day, the middle day, the dirt-moving day, one friend showed up and stayed with us all day. It made us work more cheerfully. Cheerful, because we had to be. She and I leaned on our shovels in the blistering afternoon sun (I don't know if she got a happenin' tan from this endeavor; I did not) and talked about our pioneer ancestors. Only the women because we don't understand men in the first place and we wouldn't have been them, anyway. Our talk was of hardship and unending physical labor. Our summation was that we could not have Done It. Could not. The next day tons of people showed up throughout the day and into the dark of the night they still came to help the painter while our youngest child had a birthday/end-of-school bash on the part of the lawn we didn't fix and I began packing. A sod bee, a grass raising. With those people I also talked about pioneers putting in fruit trees and plowing for grain, digging irrigation ditches. And we made it. In the morning there was green, green grass where before there had only always been dirt and we got on a plane and flew away while our automatic sprinkler system saw to our gorgeous non-productive planting. And we flew home to grass. Done and done.

July 24th is Pioneer Day. We celebrated it in Wales. Noah will celebrate it in Macau. It's my mom's birthday. She can use it to never have a fuss made about her birthday because what can we do? The Kanosh Town 24th celebration is consuming and enormous and what can we do? We can always feel a tiny bit, just a very little, guilty because we forgot to get something for that day, forgot the greeting because we were in charge of the Nursery float for the parade and all the two year olds had to be in costume in the back of the crepe paper decorated truck by 8:30 for the parade to begin at 9 and we had to keep them alive till it was all over. Perfect Pioneer Day. Just a pinch of guilt to season the dutch oven beef.

I went to the Kanosh house for three days to clean and fix. The painter stays there mostly alone so there isn't as much of that cleaning and fixing. I sat for a time in what I intended to make a flower garden. It never prospered, never took, but I sold myself into bondage and slavery spinning dreams of a day, someday, with lush dense flowers, clear beds, tamed paths, circle-in-the-square. I worked my brains out; it is nearly gone now. It's been watered and the paths mowed, but it's as if without constant observation my flowers just shimmered away into the wind that always, always blows. My sister tells me she went to the house she sold a couple of years ago, where the new owners have watered and mowed faithfully though they are not really gardeners. She asked for starts from her old plants; sure, they said. But there was nothing, nothing to take. Beds full of grass; weeds where gravel paths had been. Just that much time, looking away for a few seasons, and it was all gone. Why, we asked each other. Why did we work so hard? For what? For everything to just blow away when our backs were turned? Does nothing survive?

We thought about pioneers. We talked about England and how we had tried to build it in Kanosh. Singing the songs that remind us of home. Scandinavia. The British Isles. This other Eden. Our people came to Utah from God's gardens. Green and mists and cliffs and stone walls. Is this dusty Kanosh yard all that there will be when I'm gone? Stickers and foxtails? I was suddenly irrationally joyous I had written a few words and a few people had read them. Shakespeare was right, not marble, not monuments, words. These stay. This is also why I always sang Primary songs about the Crossing, those were the words most of the pioneers wrote down, a momentous life event, not the day-to-day once they reached the Valley-o.

I spent two solid days in my old house (though all my houses are old) in a deep melancholy. Deep even for me. Soft midnight blue velvet coffin lining. I thought a lot about death. I thought about impermanence and wasted effort. I thought in a panic about my children inheriting my messes as they now stood. On the third day, as I was vacuuming the ceiling I started talking to God (perhaps because I was looking up). I thought about the family that had built the house, a family I knew had struggled. Zella Allen, who died after being a widow for a long time. The builder, a man never really well, never really strong, a barber. When we tore out the plaster in the bathroom it was full of human hair. Curly, straight, lots of colors. Zella wove rugs. Nothing remained of their work in my yard. We found a bit of foundation on the property line, an out-building we would really have appreciated using. But the lot was nearly bare when we bought it. An old apple, a lilac and some roses. Those last. A young English walnut, a young black ash and a young locust. Those volunteer. A large Siberian elm. Those can't be killed. A terribly bumpy lawn, you could never lay on it or even sit without great care.
I wondered about hard lives and I asked God, is this house just haunted by a sad, overworked ghost? And He asked, would that be you?
After I got over that for a while I finally got tired of myself and asked Him, am I going to just be broken-hearted about this for the rest of my life? Do I have to think about this forever? And He asked, what can you learn?

Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it,
Prone to leave the God I love.

I had talked to my sister about pioneers, about nothing being left of the gardens they made except where someone kept on keeping them alive. I thought about the apple trees, the lilacs and the roses. I thought about going with the painter's mother to Reliance, Wyoming, to show the girls the house where Grandma was born, about finding a town run-down and bereft, about the frozen horror of the memories of parties and football, of Beautiful Garden contests and prize vegetables. There are no gardens now in Reliance. Grandma could only find the house where she was born by counting buildings, first in her memory and then on the street. I thought about pride and I thought about squalor. Impermanence. I thought about myself fighting Siberian elms tooth and nail all the years I kept a garden in Kanosh, fighting them because they are boorish, trashy outlaws. But they cut the endless wind, they grow quickly, they don't drink much and they give shade. Had I fostered a few of them they would have given me shelter and respite--and I thought about my ancestors and some of the relatives at the reunions this summer.

Here's my heart, oh, take and seal it,
Seal it for Thy courts above.

In July we sing to our pioneers. We cannot help ourselves.

What can I learn?
If I had it to do over I would have rolled out the bumps and filled the holes in the lawn at the Kanosh house the first year we lived there. My sister points out it is difficult to accomplish such a thing in Kanosh, the geography is against you. Where do you rent a roller? This is the point, I would do it differently.
I would plant apple trees and lilacs and roses.
I would let the trashy elms give me shade.
I would build high fences to keep out the wind.
I would finish every room in my house. Every room. There is not, right now, one finished room. I would finish every room.
We would dress the backlot and grow our own beef because cattle do well in Kanosh.
I would go visit England and build a Utah garden in Kanosh.
I would try much harder to keep in touch with the friends I had outside Millard County. This will surprise both of them.
I would, someday, write down everything that happened so people could remember that my son always sang as he walked through the gardens and my middle daughter spoke English like she learned it on Mars and the little one rubbed her face in the cats she always always carried. Write it down when I read a book or do a play or can peaches or sing with a friend. Words last, don't let them all be about not having gotten there yet.
I was raised on bits of stories, pieces of sentences I never thought to corroborate, fill in, flesh out. A woman in the first company to reach the Valley-o confiding to her journal she'd far rather go on as far again as she had come than stay in The Place they had found. Chicken coops, empty on every backlot, left after no one was selling eggs anymore, but people still telling me how the eggs were stored, shipped. Stories of fruit raised as cash crops, peaches you can hardly grow any more and watermelons stolen from fields at night. Watermelons? Who can grow watermelons? Brigham Young zipping through Kanosh, going somewhere warmer, promising no one would ever lack for food if they'd be good. Faithful. The Mormons who didn't pick up and go on to California, who stayed in the place they got to and submitted to being made into Saints. The Place, they were promised, would be good for that.

I see the emptiness of allowing myself to just keep journeying, distracted by hard work from being where I really am, no matter how faithful I may think it makes me look. I see the point is to get there, to at least be there as if for years. Day from day in my own Valley-o.
The painter says, we're older now. We've learned.
It's time to arrive.
My pioneers planted lilacs and roses alongside the apples and grain. Have you heard the stories about all the dances, the parties in the Valley-o? How they played as hard as they worked, right from the start? Every day, day after day, on the way and after they arrived.

It's a bonfire at my house. Someone will bring a guitar (he'd better). Plan to stay late. I'll put out quilts. The grass is green and smooth.
Lilacs everywhere, I found old roses still alive under the pyracantha, in the spring I'll plant apples.

We learned other pioneer songs in Primary too, from Sister George, in months other than July.

Come ye children of the Lord,
Let us sing with one accord.

When dark clouds of trouble hang o'er us,
And threaten our peace to destroy
There is Hope smiling brightly before us
And we know that Deliverance is nigh.

How blessed the day when the Lamb and the Lion
Shall lie down, together, without any ire.

...singing the songs that remind us of home.

Whenever I think about pioneers
I think of brave women and men.


Winter Dancing, Brian Kershisnik