Maria woke up with an angry face this morning, and if you have ever live with an artist, you know that is a bad face to be around. She was in a pure black mood, irritable, snarling, complaining bitterly about the world. Her work was no good, no one cared about it, she would never sell it.
This is from an artist who sells just about everything she makes the second she offers it for sale. I do know there is no rationality in this argument, it comes from a deep and irrational place. I just try to stay out-of-the-way, mutter as many platitudes as I can. “yes, dear, you are probably right, dear, of course dear.”
Artists have fierce tempers and unpredictable dispositions. Anything can set them off.
I tried everything – smile, cajole, jokes. Good news rolled in. Our friend Susan Popper sold her house in Long Island and is moving to the country (yes!), a friend of Maria’s bought the new house she wanted, another friend, a musician, is lining up music gigs every where and I sold four of my photographs this morning on Maria’s etsy page. Ed Gulley and I had our first fight over the phone and it was fun.
Nothing worked.
Finally, I went to extreme measures. We had just stopped down at the Post Office, Maria was sending out some of the art she never sells to different places all over the country. I said “what about some ice cream,” and she spluttered, hissed and grumbled that she had done nothing today, she should be working, there was no time. What a ridiculous idea. But she didn’t say no, which I took for yes.
So we set out for Bennington in the middle of the day and headed for Billy T’s Northside Bar, the best ice cream around. (They also have pretty good Lobster Rolls.)
Maria is a sucker for sweets and treats, she loves ice cream, she continued mumbling but went along with the ride and warned me not to try to hold her hand or touch her. Sure, I said softly.
Okay, she said, but I have no business doing this. She grumbled all the way, stopping only to glower at me when I opened my mouth, or roll her eyes if I said something stupid, or if I failed to be appreciative of something she was saying, or respond quickly enough. Silence is no alternative. There is no escape from Maria on the warpath.
Most of the time, she is sweet as cane sugar, but when she loses it, she loses it.
I was desperate. I know her weak spots.
“Listen,”I said, “ice cream has fructose in it, and fructose goes right to the Bionic Nerve System, which controls the flow of blood to the side of the brain that regulates happiness and mood. Five minutes after you eat your first scoop, the Bionic system will spring to life and push enzymes to the brain and you will start feeling better.”
My deadpan was good, but the statement was so ridiculous I could hardly keep from laughing out loud. I had mumbled the last few words in the hope of confusing her, and she saw it was ridiculous, but she must have bought a little bit of it, because she burst out laughing.
The thing about Maria is, she knows this is bullshit, but if she likes the idea of something, even if she knows its not true, it often works. When she can sleep at night, I just tell her a story of baby animals, and she is in a deep sleep before I can even finish. She likes to think the baby animals are there, even if they are not.
Five minutes after the first lick, I said, you will start to feel better.
We got to Bennington without my getting hurt and went up to the stand to order two small cups of ice cream. I think she got vanilla, but I’m not sure. I kept on talking about the Bionic Nerve System, and she kept laughing when I did. For some reason, the sound of it made her laugh.
Five minutes after she started eating, she broke out into a smile or two, the lines from her face began to vanish, the angry face morphed briefly into the sad face, and then to the beginning of the happy face, above.
She muttered and grumbled and glowered and groaned a few times but the time we were home, she was herself, smiling, laughing, tell me endless stories about animal traits she is reading about.
A big day in the life of sheep and donkeys. Today was the first day of grazing for Bedlam Farm, 2018. No more hay until November or December. It was a warm and partly sunny day after days of rain. The side pastures have turned green and the grass is an inch or so thick. We opened the gate and some happy sheep and donkeys rushed out to graze, the first time they have eaten fresh grass in 2018.
This is good for them, and for us. It means we don’t have to get up at the crack of dawn in cold or lousy weather to bring hay out to them. We will have to begin rotational grazing to make sure our three pastures don’t all get eaten down. I’ve already ordered the hay for 2019, most of it first cut. We’ll leave the gates open tonight, and sleep late tomorrow, and then start limiting grazing time to three or four hours.
This is one of the major events of the year on our farm, it was a pleasure to see it. Come along. The shearer is coming soon to trim some coats.
The Albany Warriors Soccer Team, a band of refugee children is coming to town tomorrow to visit Ed Gulley and have lunch and go on a hike and visit the Battenkill Bookstore.
Maria wants to lead them on a hike through the woods if there is time. I ordered them a gift, different color sweatbands for them to wear during practice and on hot days. I think they’ll like them, they are very much into styles and color. They go up against some pretty well supplied opponents with soccer shoes from Europe.
There is nothing happier than a barn cat on a hot Spring day. It was 83 degrees yesterday and I thought Minnie would just melt into the ground. She is very happy. Neither she nor Flo have any interest in coming into the house at night, they’ll be outside until October or November.
When A Friendship Begins.My hands, Ed’s hands. Writer’s hands, Farmer’s hands.
I thought that Ed Gulley and I were close friends, and I suppose in the way men make friends, we are.
But I now think that our friendship really began this morning.
I believe that women and men are quite different in the way they make and maintain friendships.
Women are more open emotionally, I believe, they grasp the meaning and importance of friendships, their friendships often come first, or are at least on the top of the list. It’s not that way for men. As Dr. Frank Pitman wrote in his important book Man Enough, men’s values are built on obligation and responsibility.
Friendships often come last.
Ed and I have devoted most of our lives to our work. Friendships were never as important as work, we never took the time to develop and nourish and maintain them. We know a lot of people, we have few friends.
Yesterday, I went to lunch with my friend Ed, who learned last week that he has an inoperable brain cancer, and has declined further medical treatment. We are an unlikely pairing for friends, he is a life-long dairy farmer, I’m a life-long book writer and now, a blogger.
You can see by the hands in the photo above that we have led very different lives. But the second we met one another a few years ago, we became friends.
We are both adjusting ourselves and our friendship to the new reality of Ed’s brain. Although I have worked with people in this circumstance for some years, I have never been especially close to one. The work was quite bounded, and thus safe.
This is very different, and I am working through it. Ed says he thinks I’m taking it harder than he is, while there may be some truth to that, I consider that view a deflection and told him so. Ed will do almost anything to avoid seeming vulnerable.
I told him I do not unravel, I’m definitely one of those people who bends but does not break.
Whenever one of Ed’s animals gets hurt or frightened, Ed has this almost mystical way of calming them down. “You’re fine,” he says, “you’re fine,” he says, and it always seems to work. He says the same thing when Carol falls down or bangs her legs on a gate.
The animals always seem to believe him, the people are more skeptical. Ed is always telling the world that he is fine, he can’t bear for anyone to worry about him, and can’t bear to be pitied. He doesn’t want to be defined by illness.
I felt obliged to talk to him about this brain thing at lunch, although I knew he probably wouldn’t like it.
I have spent much of my life telling people things they don’t really wish to hear, I’m cursed.
I told him Ed thought he seemed determined not to show much feeling or vulnerability. I hoped he had taken some time to pull back and absorb this stunning and awful news. One way or another, his life had been upended. Talk about trauma.
I said I thought it was something he needed to take time out to do – to go inward and find his center – or it would come back to bite him. I’ve been worried about it.
I have seen this happen too many times in my life not to mention it.
Ed is answering letters, posting videos, writing journals, planning cross country trips, holding court on his couch, making plans for the farm to be transferred to his family. I wondered if he didn’t need to go inside, not outside, for just a bit and talk with himself.
Sometimes, I said, you have to be with yourself and come to terms with what’s happened, you need to find your Center and talk to it and love it. You will most likely need it. Before you decide that you’re fine, find a sacred space and go in it for a day or so. Take care of your self.
I am very loathe to give advice like that, fools don’t take advice and smart people don’t need it. And Ed is as pig-headed as I am, if not more so.
But in this case, I felt that the moral responsibility of friendship – something I take seriously – required that I be honest with Ed and speak my mind. We all must grieve in our own way, there is no one way or right way to do it. I am not the Grand Master of illness and death.
But I had to say what was on my mind. A friend shouldn’t tell another friend what to do, but he ought to tell a friend the truth, or his idea of it. He ought not hide how he feels either. A friend can say anything to a friend, trust is the foundation of friendship. At least, this is what I think a friend should be? But how would I really know?
So I did give Ed some advice, and he listened carefully and we talked and ate and we had a great lunch, full of warmth and laughter. I don’t think Ed liked all of what he heard, I didn’t really expect him to.
This morning, he wrote on his very wonderful blog that he was on top of things, he was fine. Reading it, I realized right away that he was speaking directly to me.
“Relax and enjoy the ride on this one, Jon,”I have the tumors and just want a friend…something neither one of us really took the time to have..a really good experience as a friend…Believe me, this old farm boy from the Crik (White Creek, N.Y.) has got his shit together…may never have showed that much emotion so far…but in all reality I am still here and my bet is you ain’t seen that ‘who’s next’ list, either. Love you man.”
It was interesting that Ed didn’t tell me that when we had lunch, or call me up and tell me himself. That, as Pitman writes, is the drama of men, most of us don’t know how to talk openly with one another, or to anybody else. Every woman on the earth seems to know that.
I was startled by the blog post, and honestly, my ego was stung a bit, I hoped Ed would hear it.
I have learned many times that blogs and e-mail and Facebook messages are not a good way to talk to friends about hurts and differences. It’s too easy to misunderstand meaning.
Sometimes, you just have to pick up the phone, which Ed rarely does.
So I did, preceding the call with about a half-dozen text messages to poor Carol, who was in danger of finding herself trapped in between two loud mouth old horses pawing the ground.
It seemed to me that Ed was patronizing me, patting me on the head like a pesky little brother and blowing me off at the same time. Sit back and enjoy the ride? I don’t think so. This isn’t the Cyclone on Coney Island.
Perhaps Ed didn’t know me all that well. Or perhaps he knew me too well. But he didn’t know me well enough to know that telling to sit back and relax is like telling Maria how to make her quilts. It doesn’t work out. And I don’t wish to be that kind of friend, doing chit-chat when there was something heavy on my mind.
What was the real message here? It was a very male message, the familiar one. I’m fine, don’t bother me. Let’s talk sports or the weather.
On the phone, we talked easily and openly. Our natural closeness and openness just came right up and asserted itself. I think we both knew we could do it, and we boh wanted to do it.
I called Ed up and we got right into it. Ed and I trust each other, we are always honest with each other. But this was a defining moment in our friendship, especially now. I had to know if I could be the friend I wanted to be, and that he needed me to be, or the fiend he was telling me to be.
I said I wasn’t speaking as a hospice volunteer, but as a friend who was concerned about him. I said if we were to be friends, he didn’t get to tell me what to say, and I didn’t get to tell him. We each had to say what we felt, and the other was quite free to ignore the advice without penalty.
I didn’t wish to tell him how to feel, or what to write or say or do. But if I saw something that might be helpful to him, I would offer it, and he could take it or leave it.
Ed said he thought I had some of the same issues about emotions that he had, and he wanted me to talk about them as well.
I said he was right, this was true, this was one reason we understood each other so well but that I wouldn’t accept the idea that our problems were equivalent right now. An inoperable brain tumor isn’t the same thing as my own trauma issues, some of which remain unresolved today. I am happy and busy, and in a good place.
I said I know that it is true that I have been closed up for much of my life, I have been opening up slowly but steadily for some time, you simply can’t be married to Maria and hide anywhere.
Ed is very perceptive, he senses the things inside of me that I cannot speak about, and he is correct to call me out on them. I see that they also need to be confronted, and I appreciate the jog. I am no better than anyone, let alone him.
I think what helps Ed the most right now is normalcy, swimming in the normal rivers of life. He will deal with it in his own way, when he is ready. But we have begun a precious dialogue. When when we need to talk, we can. It is up to him, he is the one who gets to call the shots.
My challenge as a friend is to help when I can, and respect the choices he makes.
This is tricky ground we are on, this is a bold new adventure for both of us. As long as we can talk as we did this morning, we will be fine, we may be learning to have a true and lasting friendship. I feel closer to him than before. Now we know we can do it.
I have often described Ed and I as having a genuine friendship. But the truth is, I think we really became friends today.
