I attended college in one of the smallest cities in Alabama. It’s not even a city, really, more like a village. Surrounding the campus are fields full of cows. As a freshman thirteen years ago, I divided my time between the theater and the welding studio, eventually settling into my darkroom where I would declare my major and spend the next 4.5 years with my hands in harsh chemicals.

My boyfriend and I lived together in a small old one-engine firehouse that had been built by my sculpture professor for the town in the late 70’s, replaced by the newer (two-engine!) firehouse in the late 80’s. Adorning the wall beside the pole that ran from the sleeping loft to the ground floor was a rather large bronze plaque that had been affixed there at the start of my sophomore year. It wasn’t ever mine to have. The story of it’s acquisition included me, in a combined blurry haze of creatively-fueled mania and what was quite possibly the longest case of insomnia ever, stealing the plaque along with five other art/theater majors and fellow Purples. (I realize no one reading this blog will get the Purples reference. Suffice it to say, we were young and full of a collective creative madness that has been hard to match since then and made certain weeks of those five years some of the most memorable times of my life.)

Anyway, the plaque said this

Peterson Hall

Dedicated to the students and their lively spirit on this year, 1914

So there was a tradition of this plaque getting painted on every February for most of the twentieth century. A competitive spirit embraces the campus at the start of every spring semester ensuing in large-scale theater productions and games, which causes a bit of ‘livelihood’ (re: vandalism) of rocks, trees, and other stationary objects that end up being painted various shades of either purple or yellow, depending upon whatever ‘side’ is doing the painting.

At the midway point of my freshman year, a few of us Purples had taken the high road and had restored the plaque to it’s original bronze state, scrubbing and peeling off seven or eight decades worth of paint and warning other Purples against vandalizing it any further. That spring term, to our dismay but not to our surprise, the plaque went back to a garish yellow almost immediately after we restored it. That was when a few of us decided it needed a better place to be for a while (or until a certain few Golds, disrespectfully referred to by our team as ‘Yellows’, graduated that semester.)

It was decided amongst us that it should be passed around from Purple to Purple for a while, and because I lived in an apartment rather than a dorm it stayed in my residence first. Despite letters written to the school paper and to the administration from Golds who demanded it back, it rotated from house to house until my sophomore year when it made it’s way back to the little firehouse where I lived. That was where it stayed for the next three years. Professors smiled when they saw it, other art and theater students knew it was there. It could have left at any time, we could have returned it or kept passing it around, but it just became part of that old wooden structure.

When I graduated and moved out, my sculpture professor and architect of the house, T, commented that he would eventually return the plaque to the school when he went to renovate the building unless I wanted to take it with me. I told him no, to give it back to the school.

I moved to New York, and a year or so later received an email from my former professor T updating me on how things were in the art department. He mentioned that the plaque had been stolen from the house as he was renovating it, and rumor had it that it was now circulating amongst the Golds. That was in 2002.

I haven’t thought about the Peterson plaque until I received a facebook message from my old boyfriend yesterday, the one whom I had shared the firehouse with. At the very end of it was this:

Maybe they’ll be smart and encase it in glass this time around.

I’ve collected these flowers from the years 1998-present. From theater performances in college, my first gallery opening, graduation, bridal bouquets I’ve caught, films I’ve worked on, wildflowers my ex-boyfriend and I picked on our cross-country road trip, a wreath I made in Alamo Square Park… from Birmingham to Brooklyn to Manhattan to San Francisco. It’s probably time to let them go.

according to my brofriend Drew, who works in a hospital almost every day and is taking vitamins instead of a vaccine to boost his immune system.

More info here.

The midwifery professor teaching my Technology and Vaginal Ecology class started off by asking rhetorically, “What is a vagina?”

I answered, “A series of tubes.”

No one got the joke.

Use your imagination or go outside.

Now get off my lawn.

Grandma Therese and me, 1978

My grandmother was one of those women that everyone was curious to know. She was strong and she was beautiful. Her abstract paintings reflected the different times in her life as she painted them; the journeys, travels, pain, joys, illness, and healing that she experienced. She journaled, meditated, prayed, and healed herself through ovarian cancer in the early 80s at a time when treatment options were limited. At first diagnosis, when she was in her mid-50s, she was told she had about four to six months left to live. I was six years old at the time. She began teaching me how to meditate, and as she fought cancer she also taught me that who we really are cannot be confined within the boundary of our bodies. She felt we could heal ourselves, bless ourselves, and trust that human spirit prevails over time and matter.

She died when I was twelve, of complications from the cancer that kept coming back from remission for so many years. She told me it wasn’t that she was tired of fighting it; it was that she was now prepared for the next journey of her spirit, one that didn’t need her body anymore. She said that, to her, death was healing, that it was light, that it was God. She was lucid when she told me these things and passed away a few days later.

The bookshelves in the room where she died are full of those journals, and a few years after her death my grandfather told me I had permission to read them, as she had wanted to wait until I was older to share them with me. Some of the notes she had taken were placed as bookmarks in those journals, reminders and affirmations she had put down on paper to help her deal with her death. I’ve kept a few of these with me through the years. Her scrawled typos and woo-woo New Age sayings make me smile. I know that they were her Truth and they saw her through her life, and ultimately her death.

My aunt Beth is now in the final stages of cancer, the same age my grandma Therese was when she died from it. Beth was also close to grandma and sometimes the three of us would meditate together. My cousin Julia told me Beth is having a hard time letting go, that she feels so attached to her pain and her body.

Beth and Julia, 1981

I took out my grandmother’s notes and sent them to Beth so that her children or her Hospice assistants can read them to her. I think grandma Therese would have wanted her to have them. I took pictures of them before mailing them off.

Have compassion with someone suffering, and at the same time, know suffering is not of the soul.

I’m sorry you’re in pain - and still, I don’t join that the soul is suffering.

Embrace the pain, soften around it. I can let it in because it’s not real.

I’m entering in this to be with you in your hour of pain — of trial. Allow the tears and talk principal safety, because they hurt. (?)

Oh Grandma, you were a bit too New-Agey even for me, sometimes.

I see the light in you.

I heal you in the name of Christ.

Nothing else to do but be.

Nothing having to be any way other than the way it is.

Patience is peace.

~m.