2011 Year in Review

So, a lot of folks are eager to kick 2011 to the curb, and some of them have good reason to feel that way, but this was a pretty good year for me.

It started off with a trip to Kauai with my wonderful husband, pictured here. We stayed in Princeville, had a marvelous time just being lazy and happy and warm. Good thing, too, because almost as soon as we arrived there he got a call from a recruiter asking if he could start a new job the following week. Yeah, that made it so much easier to relax and enjoy the pool. the ocean, the food and each other. It also made coming home just a little bit easier as well.

Just before we left on vacation (Christmas day of 2010), I learned that a photo of one of my art journals was going to be published in a major art magazine, Cloth Paper Scissors. After we got back, I got busy making art for my first-ever one-woman show at Cafe Luna on Vashon Island. I also hosted a travelling exhibit, Leaving Dakota, a collection of photographs by Kyle Cassidy, and started an exhibit of my own, Art on My Door, which now stands at 175 pieces of art, each displayed on my office door for a working day during the past year. You can see all of those pieces on Flickr.
The Cafe Luna show kept me busy throughout the spring and was successful enough to encourage me to try showing my work more. At the end of May, one of my pieces was shown in the Seattle Erotic Art Festival. In June, I participated in 30 Days of Creativity, a wild ride of art-making that had me trying new things and really having a great time in my studio. Around this time, I noticed that there was no art hanging at our local coffee shop, Cafe Ladro and asked if they were looking for artists to exhibit. As it turns out, they were, and they asked me to hang a show in September.
The Seattle summer was mostly "meh," so I had plenty of time to work on pieces for the September show. We did manage to have some fun and go camping with friends. I also walked in the Komen 5K with some of the best people I know, among them my dear friend Allena who was undergoing chemo at the time and is now, I am happy to say, cancer-free.
The last few months have been busy and blurry and mostly filled with all the ordinary stuff that makes life good. Highlights included a week in November when we saw Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer in concert together at the Moore Theatre on a Wednesday night and then went back to see the amazing and wonderful Jason Webley in the most magical and strange concert I have ever seen on 11/11/11.
We are warm and safe and generally happy. We have love and chocolate and art and music. That's usually more than enough.
I hope 2012 is every bit as good for me as 2011 has been. If you're one of the folks whom 2011 treated poorly, I hope the New Year will give you some special treats to make up for it.
Happy New Year.

What I remember

I remember being not awake enough to fully grasp what I was seeing, what Matt Lauer was talking about on the Today Show as I poured my first cup of coffee.

I remember sinking onto the couch as the reality sunk in.

I remember worrying about friends in New York City on business and feeling utterly despondent over the unfathomable loss.

I remember the next few days under a pristine blue sky, unmarred by contrails.

I remember the strange silence under that sky.

I remember a few days after, walking to the convenience store/deli on the corner not far from work and telling the Middle Eastern owner and his wife how sorry I was that people had come into their business and called them horrible names.

I remember watching as liberals and conservatives, Republicans and Democrats, folks of all stripe and order, came together as Americans. We reached out to each other in charity and fellowship. We gave what we had to give, and sometimes a little more. We helped out. We practiced random acts of kindness. We set aside, for the most part, our petty differences.

Yeah, I remember that.

Memento Mori

Some events refuse to fade from our consciousness. They linger in our memories, insinuate themselves into our value systems, shape the way we think about basic concepts such as home, love, innocence, and security. Moments that are either too wonderful or too awful to forget stay with us, to comfort or confound us as their context demands.

One such event from my youth was the murder of a school mate more than 30 years ago. She was a nice girl who dated a not-so-nice boy. She had a sweet smile and a soft voice. I will remember her forever with feathered bangs and the striped shirt that she wore in her 1977 school picture. The picture that her parents and police provided to the media during the brief search that ended with the chilling news that her body had been found.

It is that moment, six days after she went missing when we learned that she was dead, that haunts me. Death had come knocking before in the guise of old age, accident, even suicide. It wasn't death that left its mark, but something darker, stranger, far more terrifying. A girl who went to my school, walked the same hallways that I walked, sat in the same molded plastic desks, ate lunch in the same cafeteria, had been murdered. Brutalized, raped, and murdered. Until then, I had no idea that such things could really happen outside the pages of books or the dark, blighted alleys of the inner city.

Mary Irene Gency's murder changed the way we all thought about our town, our friends, the people down the street. Fear came to stay after that. I don't know if I ever felt really safe again. Especially since no one was ever charged, tried, or convicted of the crime.

But that may change. It seems that forensic evidence has provided police with a break in the case after 33 years. The men accused of committing this heinous crime, it turns out, are the two boys suspected at the time: her boyfriend, who lived down the street from me, and his best friend, who had dated one of my friends.

Time will tell whether they actually committed the crime. Justice may or may not be done. Regardless of what happens, one thing will never change: Mary died a horrible death, she was robbed of her innocence her life and whatever future she may have dreamed.

The news comes in part as a glimmer of hope that her family may find some peace and closure and in part as a new chilling reminder to embrace every minute as if were your last.

Mary, I do hope you're able to rest in peace.