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Nostalgia April 2012

Cardboard and Canvas

By Lois Greene Stone

Perhaps morality of the 1950s sent me a sub-conscious message: this glowing naked body was inappropriate to bring back to a place where death had so recently visited.

"Hey, Mom. I thought you painted live people undressed," my 23-year-old son called from the basement. I dried my hands on my terry-cloth apron as I descended the stairs.

Alan was leaning over a carton of oil paintings. My eyes caught the word basement spelled “bastment” by the moving-van packers. I smiled with remembrance of my desire, at the time, to fix the word’s spelling. A yellowed cloth that had covered the old carton was carelessly pushed on the concrete. The box bottom was moist and showed mildew.

"Didn't you do life-oil paintings once?" I nodded my head and mentioned I'd left them at the Milwaukee airport. My son, in medical school, had squeezed in art classes while maintaining pre-med courses and grades. How could I save these – he pulled out two landscapes – and not the others!

I turned 20 one April; my father died that May. As I was already signed up to attend a summer session at the University of Wisconsin, my mother insisted I go. My junior year at the University of Connecticut had been completed, and I'd been given an opportunity to take Shakespeare part II, American Literature part II, plus Oil Painting. Permission was necessary to carry a third course.

Six weeks after seeing my father's smooth pine box settled in open earth, I boarded a train to Chicago. I had a roomette, for that part of the journey, but remember isolation rather than sleep. Madison was hot. I'd only thought New York could be. McCarthy had made people frightened; I began to consider my signature sacred.

I moved into a dorm that had a wide back porch that faced Lake Mendota. Real bats appeared on that porch at night; I'd never before seen them, even in zoos.

Giggling girls from high school getting college experience lived on the same floor. I'd lost, at the graveyard, an innocence about living. Sometimes at night I felt envy, then anger. Mostly, I felt guilty that I was not helping with the burden of bringing order from chaos that my mother and sisters shared. They sorted papers, thanked mourners, sat on the same couch that carried my father's body from life to unmoving heart. I saw sailboats. Each day coupled and formed a week.

Each day it rained I remembered the wet from the sky falling on my head at an open grave, and wondered how I’d emotionally get through the coming week.

A fraternity used a hearse to pick up dates for a party. Would I have joined them with remarks about “clever idea” if just weeks before I'd not known a hearse had a loved-one's coffin?

At a real easel, stretching canvas rather than using masonite board, I wore clothes my father had bought for me; I got oil paint on a lovely skirt. I recall my self-anger as carelessness dropped permanent hue on a white dirndl patterned with black and yellow ribbons. I continued wearing inappropriate attire.

A posed woman was being recorded by my brush strokes. Only when she got up to take a break did I notice my male students. I felt embarrassed, each time, for she became a naked lady until she blanketed her body beneath a robe.

My son, with four years in co-ed dorms and shared bathrooms, couldn't relate to this. I felt exposed when she changed from model to person. He wondered why. Wonder isn't new to any generation.

Pulled from the basement box were the landscapes. Captured on canvas was the view from the dorm’s porch. A dead tree contrasted the water where life moved in below and a sailboat with people could be seen. A smaller canvas caught a view from a building's window; I'd even painted the panes.

With my belongings, I took the bus to Milwaukee. My return to New York was by air. I will never know my real reasons for leaving the canvas of the lovely, painted, unclothed subject in the Milwaukee airport. At the time, I felt frustrated from trying to maneuver manually what couldn't fit into luggage. Perhaps that was true. Perhaps morality of the 1950s sent me a sub-conscious message: this glowing naked body was inappropriate to bring back to a place where death had so recently visited.

"Didn't you do life-paintings once?" Once, before man walked on the moon, acrylic paint, disposable diapers, instant coffee, microwave ovens, GPS in cars ...once, before germ warfare, Viet Nam, Agent Orange, microchips, SAT's ...once, before VCRs, flat screen TV, camcorders, smartphones ...once, before American clothes were made overseas, digital watches, plastic piano keys, saturated fat knowledge...once, before technology transformed living into a fast, expendable, sophisticated life.

Decades ago, my oldest child, carrying my father's name, had caused me to think of these things I'd repressed just because he'd found a damp cardboard square marked BASTMENT.