Beginner Tattoo

At fifty-three I was a beginner at the tattoo game. I was taken into the arena by my son, Vic who has several tattoos and had been teasing me into getting one for a couple of years. While visiting him and his brother Zach (also heavily tattooed) in San Francisco, he offered to buy me into the game. “Why not?” I said, “Ante up.”

The sidewalks were mostly deserted on Saturday evening in Oakland. It was June, 2001.
Vic and his friend Meredith (who also has tattoos) drove me over the Bay Bridge to Oakland for the act that would make me forever identifiable. He had made the appointment with an artist that had inked him a time or two. We had an appointment, but when we arrived, he was not ready for us so we took a walk around the block. We passed a Chinese take-out restaurant, and Meredith decided to have some egg rolls. She offered me one, but my stomach was rolling in apprehension and could not be trusted with an egg roll.

We got back to the parlor and went in to wait my turn. It was well appointed in religious furniture: an altar out of a cathedral, a stained glass window, church pews. I felt as if I were in a dream watching myself move from one world (unadorned) into another (decorated). There were numerous tattoo designs displayed on the walls. The music was loud and hard, not oldies from the sixties which is my music of choice. The owner of the tattoo parlor (not my appointed artiste) came over to me while I was sitting on a church pew. He leaned down in front of me with his hands on his knees. “Is it your first tattoo?” he asked.

“Look at me,” I thought, “Of course, it’s my first tattoo.” But I said, “Yes.”

He asked if I wanted some water or a soda. I didn’t. He asked if the music was too loud.
I said, “No.” He asked if I was nervous. I said, “Yes.” He told me that in his experience women held up better than men during the procedure, were braver and less likely to complain. He said that if I wanted anything to just let him know. I said, “Thanks.”

Eventually, my tattoo artist was ready for me. I went behind the screen and got onto the gurney. Vic and Meredith went with me. Vic, a photographer, was loaded with his cameras to record this historic event. I gave the man (who had more than his share of tattoos) my design choice. I had decided to be permanently marked with my favorite literary character, The Little Prince. I had chosen a tiny picture of him standing with his sword, but Vic said it too small for the outside of my leg just above the knee. I then opted for the picture of The Little Prince flying up on strings attached to birds. Since I am scared of birds, we changed the birds into stars. The artist drew it then traced it onto my leg.

It took about an hour and a half for the tattooing. It didn’t hurt as much as I expected. I had chosen a fleshy part of my body because I had heard it doesn’t hurt as much as on a bone. I also wanted it in a place that I could see it. What is the point of putting a tattoo on my back where I can never look at it? The picture is five inches high; The Little Prince with his yellow hair, in a light blue suit with a yellow scarf flying like the Red Baron’s is rising on four yellow stars. There is a pink planet with a Saturnlike ring floating nearby.

The whole procedure is well documented in photographs. I got the instructions about how to care for it, and we were done. When we got to the car, Vic said, “Mom, you were a trooper; you didn’t even cringe.” I felt proud of myself. We drove to where Zach was working to show it off, and then on to several of their friends. I was a novice heroine.

The next day was Father’s Day. We called my father to wish him a good day. When I told him what I had done, he said, “Go home! Those boys are corrupting you!” A few days later I did go home. When I got to North Carolina, I was more of an oddity than a heroine. My husband didn’t approve. When school started, my high school students were unbelieving (until I showed them) that their fifty-something English teacher had gotten a tattoo over the summer. I was “rad” for a while. After six years, I hardly notice it anymore. When I do, I still feel proud of myself, heroic, and identifiable.

The tattoo artist said that it would not be long until I would want another tattoo. So far, I have resisted, but just in case, I have found a picture of the little girl in the Golden Book I Can Fly. It was my favorite children’s book. In it the little girl is always game to become a heroine.

Art and Money

We are building a big storage building (16x24) to become my art studio. I am not a “real” artist: I cannot draw a straight line from the back door to the outhouse, let alone add perspective to it. But I can take outlines of drawings (that I paid for the privilege of tracing) in workbooks and arrange them and rearrange them until I get a design that I want to paint. I also get germs of ideas from catalogs, magazines and everything I see. I like to flatter others by piggybacking on ideas. I work mostly with oils; I paint mostly furniture.
“Mostly” implies that I do other stuff too.
This week “mostly” has included carpentry. We bought this building to be put up without windows (an art studio?) except for a cheap Plexiglas skylight. I did not want the contractor’s paltry little single-paned windows, all the same size, one on each wall. Instead, our friend and carpenter-consultant, Doug and I went to Habitat for Humanity Reuse Center (my new favorite place to shop) and bought seven windows. Only two are the same size; those two and one other (smaller) are transoms that we installed vertically. Three of the windows are double-hung and they open (another visit to Habitat Reuse will produce screens, I hope); the others are for light. One of the big windows (the ones that open) has muntins in the upper sash; one has muntins in both sashes, and the other has none. I framed three of the windows by myself and helped Doug install all of them. George added his stength with the larger ones. I cut the brick molding upside down twice, but used it anyway. (This house will not be on Parade of Homes.) I am feeling my “I AM WOMAN” testosterone.
I even helped level the building and got a physics lesson in the bargain. Doug created a lever to raise one corner a shim at time. My job was to sit on the end of the 4x4 so the other end could coax the building up. I have power in my butt.
Mr. Mosca has finished wiring, and fixtures go in next week. We framed a window air conditioner into the wall so that it can drip water out into my future flower and herb garden. Brent and Austin (his 6-yeard-old) installed a cold water sink Friday night, working until 9:30. Brent lives next door (and says the rate is only $160 an hour). If I need hot water, I will heat it in the microwave. George filled in the trench left in the yard by Mr. Mosca and Brent.
George is making this big investment in our project so that I will get my mess out of the front bedroom and garage (and the living room and dining room). I want to put our old couch out there. He says, “No. You will just pile it up with stuff.”
I say, “That is the point!” Oh, and he might put an elliptical out there.
Next come caulking, vents for air circulation, insulation, and steps at the back door. Every stage requires another trip to Lowes and/or Home Depot. We are building our own money pit, artsy though it may be.

Nostalgia and Memory

The previous post was written earlier this year, prompted by a picture of that red barn. Now, some weeks later, I have been to that 850N/New Richmond road corner of the world. Since 1993 I have driven past the farm three or four times, but this time it was different.
My vision of the farm reflects the way it looked for four decades, probably longer counting the years before I remember it. Gradually over the last fifteen years, buildings have disappeared: the chicken house, the woodhouse, the smokehouse, a corncrib. As new people (not Taylors) have moved into the house, lifestyles have changed. Such buildings have become irrelevant and since they are not used, they deteriorate into eyesores and hazards. But this time the barn was gone.
“But” is a big word in looking at that bare spot where the barn used to stand. It was a focal point, like a royal throne from which a king kept watch over his lesser subjects in their less stately chairs. It is not a question of acceptance; what is not there is not there. Perhaps I wanted to see the farm to feed nostalgia even though I know that I do not yearn for that life for myself now.
I am thinking about the difference between nostalgia and memory. I do not need to recover life at the farm; I just want to remember it. The older I have become, the more grateful I am for the roots that I had growing up. It occurs to me that roots are underground, not displayed on the surface. My roots are not in the bricks and boards that have disappeared; memory goes deeper than that.
I will never go back to the farm. There is nothing for me to see now. I will visit through my mind’s eye, photographs, and remember-talk with friends and family. This is not a melancholy choice because what I remember is so much richer than what is there.

The Farm

The setting of the story of my family is The Farm. The Farm is most easily located at the at the intersection of county road number 850N and the New Richmond blacktop, Montgomery County, Indiana, USA, Northern and Western hemispheres, the world, the solar system, the universe. (Citation to Thornton Wilder.) The center of the farm was a half mile down gravel road 850N, going due west. Two houses, the barn, and outbuildings were clustered there. If I stand in front of the big house, at the edge of the road and stretch my arms the half mile east and the same west, I will grasp the boundaries of the farm; if I pivot ninety degrees to the left and hold out my left arm, I can trace the north edge. It is a "land of perpetual flatness," as Vic calls it.
I cross the road to stand in Gordon Miles’ cornfield (every other year, soy beans) and look directly at the farm. The mailbox connects us to the world, rural route four. Behind it grows a graceful maple tree. Its limbs reach toward the sky in winter; in spring and summer leaves obscure the branches and provide shade across the yard; in fall it is pure gold and after the leaves drop, they create a golden carpet. There is a hole in the tree about nine feet up the trunk in which an albino owl keeps residence; he observes all activities on the farm from his vantage point. A swing with a board seat, hangs from a lower bough. My mother cut a vee-shaped notch in each end of the plank to keep it steady on the rope. The farmhouse is white clapboard, two stories, with a brick front porch and a window, so big it cannot be opened, facing the road. The twelve inches at the top of the window are leaded into ten columns, each topped by a four-inch diamond shaped piece of stained glass. Behind the house stands the windmill, taller than the roof, the coalhouse, the smokehouse, a green-shingled doghouse, an outhouse (no longer used, but notorious as the site where my Uncle Jim was caught smoking on sixteen millimeter film), and across the driveway past the barnyard gate, the chicken house. Set back from the house, beyond the board fence, is the big red barn trimmed in white. There are corncribs and silver silos to the right. A backdrop of dense woods stands tall above the other farm buildings. Fifty yards east of the house is the little white house, built for my great-grandmother in the early 1950’s. It was one of the first National Homes; labeled prefab, it went up in less than a month. This place is the cocoon and the cosmos of the Taylor family.
My mother’s thirty-seven acres was at the 850/New Richmond road corner. She was always adamant that this field was Her thirty-seven acres. I do not know how this ownership came about, but it was clearly an important designation. The bluegrass was on the opposite end of the farm. This field, about twenty-five acres, was never cultivated, but left in bluegrass for the horses. My granddaddy would drive out there in his Oldsmobile (the only cars he ever drove) and chase the horses in his car. He could observe which ones were lame, which mares were in foal, which yearlings were ready for breaking. It was a sort of roundup, a wild ride; the car bumped along, occasionally bounced, and he turned the wheel sharp to herd the horses in the right direction.
My great-grandfather, Charles M. Taylor, purchased the land in the 1920’s. He lived in New Richmond, and my grandparents, Donald and Mabel, lived on the farm. My father, Richard, was born there in 1927. I went to live there in 1948. The farm belonged to the family until the last decade of the century. Finally there was no one among the thirteen grandchildren interested in farming and living on the land so the family sold it.
When I think of the farm (it was designated THE Farm by my first cousin Jamie Sue), I remember the land itself. My favorite time to look across it is the spring. After plowing last year’s crop under in deep furrows, the disc breaks them into fine clods, and the colors are on display. Black soil drifts into deep brown and then flows into a lighter tan, all rich, all fertile.
I remember the family there at Thanksgiving and Christmas, sometimes on Memorial Day. On November, 24, 1963, the whole family gravitated to the farm, without anyone calling one another, to mourn the assassination of John Kennedy. Together we witnessed the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald on television, a remarkable event. We gathered for celebrations: graduations, engagements, births. Women gathered for work: making jelly, jam and juice, canning vegetables, dressing chickens. Men gathered to discuss crops and livestock, especially horses.
The family gathered again in June, 1993, to clean out the house and say goodbye to our home place. The last family member to live there was Mabel. After she died, the land was sold and her home, our home, divided among us, her three surviving children and thirteen grandchildren.
In my mind I still swing under the maple tree, play house on the brick porch, hide beneath lilac bush, and make hollyhock dolls. We Taylors have never left the farm; our life as a family is captured in that setting.

A Line from Mother's Goose 3

The clock strikes nine
To mark the time
The mouse comes out to play
He follows his nose
By the wall he goes
To the tick-tick-tock
Of the ever tick-tocking clock
The night is young
The clock chimes one
Loud, long bong
He holds his ears
As he rides the gears
Then uses his snout
To find the way out
Back to his hole
There goes the mouse
To his tiny mouse-house.

A Line from Mother's Goose 2

Mary had a little lamb
Its fleece was white as snow.
And thinking, "This is very cool,"
I followed them to Mary's school.
The teacher said, "Mary, hello.
But the lamb, my dear, has to go."
Mary said, "Goodbye, my pet.
I'm sorry you do not belong."
And so we spent the entire day
"Baaing" Mary's favorite song.

A Line from Mother's Goose

When all the king's horses
And all the king's men
Came looking for me
I twirled three times
Then stopped to see
Where I had been
Up on the mountain
Down to the sea
Over the rainbow
On the back of a flea