A friend who has started reading my blog commented that she would like to hear about dress for us mature women--that's a good idea, and while my education contains little in the way of fashion, I do have a very dear colleague with whom I worked with for decades  who was our self-declared "fashion policewoman." She would like this inscription on her tombstone: She Was a Great Shopper. I personally plan to make sure that this happens--if I outlive her, that is. We are at that point in our lives: who will go first?
She and I had many a chuckle over the year at our colleagues' sartorial oddities. I remember a business school prof''s wife who showed up at a party heavily  made up (makeup comes later on) and wearing (in the summer, mind you) a small red felt hat with an extraordinarily long white feather draped over her right raccoon-like eye, her small chubby feet stuffed into red high heels. Her dress was made of some kind of flowered taffeta. Since this was a garden party, perhaps she thought a hat and flowered frock were in order, but I am not sure why she decided on the heels. She stumbled through the garden, not making eye contact with anyone and only speaking when spoken to. We heard that she later divorced Jay--or did he divorce her? I can't remember now.
Then there was our dean. She had her strengths, both as an administrator and as a Renaissance French history scholar, but even her visits to France to archives there had done nothing to enhance her choices in clothing. A short woman, she was barrel-shaped, and she chose dresses and fifties-style suits that only accentuated her wide straight body.  Her color choices also came from the fifties: burgundies, heavy navies, and sometimes deep spruce greens. When she interviewed for the job, my friend vowed she would take her shopping if she came to Salt Lake, but I don't think that their relationship ever evolved to that point. My friend advised dark neutral colors, bright jewelry, and more pants--not dresses. Maybe a charcoal gray tailored pantsuit with a bright scarf draped around the neckline, drawing attention to her clear skin and bright eyes, would have enhanced her appearance. Her feet were usually jammed into heels, and her hemlines came right at the knee. This had the unfortunate effect of highlighting her calves, which had absolutely no definition. They plummeted from knee to shoe in a line so straight it could have been drawn with a plumb line.
I find it interesting that women around the world, most of them, like fashion and try to express themselves through their appearances as best they can within the limits of their own cultures. I met the young women in the picture above at a medressa in Mostar, Bosnia, where I went a year and a half ago to lecture and give workshops on American women poets and their appropriation of Greek myths in their poems (H.D., Adrienne Rich, Harryette Mullen). Of course I had preconceptions and stereotypes of Muslim women. I knew that going there and tried to be open-minded, but I was surprised at the jewel tones of their hijabs. Though they wore no makeup and their hair was covered, yet they projected a clear sense of style and feminine beauty. (During my brief tour I thought about how Fox News would have reacted if they learned that the American Embassy in Sarajevo was spending our tax dollars to send lecturers to Muslim schools and universities.) And when I taught in Sofia, Bulgaria, in 2002, when the average income per capita was $64 a month, I could not believe how many fancy underwear boutiques and cosmetics shops lined the streets. I had brought lipsticks with me from the States, but the month before I went home I ran out and had to purchase one. The cheapest one I could find was 40 lev ($20)--wow! I could have doubled my Fulbright stipend by filling my suitcase up with lipsticks from Rite Aid and hawking them on the university's wide stone steps. . ..
I really like clothes and fabric, like many women around the world, though I am opposed to spending a third of my monthly income on a small tube of lipstick. (When I think about it now, I think my Balkan friends' desire to make themselves look beautiful was a sign of hope in an economy that had been stricken when Communism collapsed all over Eastern Europe.) I think I acquired this penchant for fashion because my grandmother Ruby, who lived with us when I was growing up, had been the town seamstress. She still did lots of sewing after her retirement, and she taught me to sew on a treadle machine and to knit by the time that I started elementary school. I loved to go into her room, which was on the ground floor of my great-grandfather's house, on the northwest corner of the house next to the stairs. She had big tall windows with wavering glass panes, so there was abundant light in the room, and when she opened the window next to her bed in the spring the smell of the lilies of the valley that grew beneath a spruce tree wafted into her room.She had a chest of drawers along the wall where her headboard rested and another, taller chest of drawers on the wall next to her closet, which had a heavy damask curtain draped in front of it. Grandma had little money, and I remember that when she developed back problems in her seventies, my aunt Elizabeth Gerkin (assistant to the president at Dry Dock Savings Bank in New York and a  graduate of Smith) sent her $200 for a nice mattress. 
Her tall chest of drawers housed nothing but fabric; I loved to finger through the folded cloth and dream about what I could make. She used her scraps to fashion doll and baby clothes. I still have a small metal red steamer trunk that holds my Madame Alexander doll, Jo of Little Women, along with the clothes that my grandmother made for her: a pale blue watered silk cloak with a hood trimmed in white lace, a red satin ball gown with black velvet ribbons, and a green cotton frock for summer days. The trunk even had a drawer at the bottom that held extra shoes. Since I have three granddaughters now it will be hard to decide where Jo goes, though right now for some obscure reason I like to think that she is in the attic over our garage, waiting for me to take her down and change her clothes. I haven't done that in a decade. Right now it is just too cold to go to the garage but perhaps in spring I will remember that she is there and look at her again.
By age nine or ten I was able to sew clothes for my Barbie doll. I don't remember having any attachment to this doll other than that she provided me  an opportunity to make something. I designed her clothes and then put them together, making one unique outfit after another. (I don't remember that I wanted to make anything for Ken--he seemed boring to me, and I couldn't think of anything I would like to design for him. I never saw him as anything other than a prop for Barbie. . .. ).  I loved to make things: stories, plays, architectural drawings, pictures, even jewelry out of sea shells (my first cousin and I used to fight, and once she delivered the ultimate blow: she called me "a stupid old jewelry maker"!). By age twelve I could knit rather competently. My first project was a sweater for my grandmother, made in a lime green acrylic yarn I had purchased at Woolworth's. It had three-quarter length sleeves and cables down the front: it looked quite finished. There was only one problem: it was way too big for my grandmother. Now, you need to know my grandmother's build: she was 5' 10" and weighed well over 200 pounds. That this sweater was too big meant that I must have purchased all the yarn Woolworth's had in stock of this particular color. Naturally she professed to be thrilled with my gift. I think she even wore it occasionally, on top of another sweater no doubt.
I still like clothes, though I find now as I am only working part-time plus I live in a very informal community where many people spend most of their clothing dollars on outdoor gear, summer and winter, I don't really need many outfits. Some of my best buys have been at thrift stores here: the three dollar gorgeous handknit heavy wool sweater; a black cardigan with brightly colored appliques of frogs, birds, and dragonflies from a New York boutique; and a very puffy ski vest made out of muted watercolor fabric that looks like parachute silk. I still love to knit sweaters, but after all these years of knitting I still have trouble with the fit. I do best making top-down sweaters for myself (I knit them from the top down, so I can adjust for my long arms and torso), and for children. Since my creations are still too big, I figure eventually my granddaughters will grow into them.
I must confess that I love to look at fashion magazines, and I get Harper's Bazaar delivered, along with the Henry James Review, Atlantic Monthly and a couple of poetry journals. Harper's has a section toward the back on clothing choices for women of various ages, starting with teens and going -- imagine!-- to the eighties. In one issue they recommended purple for those of us in our sixties. Gasp--and it was bright purple, too. We need to stand out, they pronounced. But not that much. 
As I have been running, my legs are still strong enough that I can wear skirts, but I have to wear tights or pantyhouse with them. 1) I am too lazy to shave my legs in the winter; 2) I have some pronounced veins, "beauty spots," all that jazz. I even show up at water aerobics in a bathing suit, but since we are all under the water no one can see what I have--or don't have.
I find I do better with muted colors, grays, blacks, browns. I love white and cream, but I spill: wine, coffee, chocolate sauce. Doesn't work.
Hillary has freed us from the notion that we have to have short hair--thank you very much--so mine is longer, though I am ready to cut it. I get a platinum weave in my hair about every five months, but I think I need to let go of that--it is expensive and time-consuming, and I am not sure it is working, anyway. Make up is another issue, but if I go somewhere like Macy's or Nordstrom's for makeup, most of the women at the counters are very young and don't seem to have any particular training in making up grandmothers. There has to be a market for this: makeup and makeup consultants for that euphemism, "mature woman."
Don't you love it!? i never knew when I lived at my house at 622 North Second Street, Titusvillle, PA, that I was destined to become a "mature woman." If I ever heard that term, I probably equated it with a prostitute or something. 
How old we grow and how little we know.
Signing off for next time--
Yours in sartorial bewilderment,
Susan
P.S. I must close in haste, as I am off to Nordstrom's Rack with my favorite retail companion, the fashion policewoman, to shop for that wardrobe essential, black jeans.

My most beloved poet, Emily Dickinson, once wrote that a poem has more windows than doors. At this point in my life, though, I have become fixated on doors. Over the years I have taken pictures of doors I like: in Paris, in Rome, in Crete, and at random in other spots. Now in my watercolor class I am trying to paint a series of them. I don't know where I am going with this, though frankly at this point in my life I have nearly--nearly--stopped worrying about where I am going. After near blindness in one eye and bouts with cancer, I feel fortunate to be on the planet at all. My illnesses forced me to realize (though surely we all know this from the moment we gain consciousness of ourselves as a self) that I have no idea what might be next.
My eyes were no surprise--I have been blind as a bat forever. I was born in 1947, started school in 1952, and at that time no one bothered to obsess over children's growth and development. We were here--we were loved--but for the most part no one, in my family at least--paid any attention to us. So, I probably occasionally stumbled through my house and wandered through my neighborhood without anyone thinking it was strange--I was just another clumsy kid. Maybe the fact that I learned how to read by the time I was three should have clued someone--my dad, my mother, my grandmother Ruby--that I might be a little nearsighted, but it didn't. In fact, I still remember the first book I could read, and in my head I can see the pictures. The book, whose title escapes me now, was about a little girl named Susan  Samantha, who must have been around 6 or 7 in the story. She lived somewhere on an anonymous but picturesque Midwestern farm, where it had been raining for days. She is despondent at being housebound, but suddenly a truck pulls up to her house (white, of course) and delivers a package. The package is for Susan Samantha! And it contains a red rain slicker and a red slick hat. She quickly pulls them on and out she goes, to splash in puddles and wander in the farmyard. Her wise mother tells her, "We need the rain to water the crops and makes things grow, like green beet tops."  And she lives happily ever after, for a while, I mean. I must have read the book over and over. 
But by second grade, someone, no doubt an observant teacher, must have noticed that I was having trouble seeing. I don't remember going to Dr. Bernstein to get my eyes checked, and I don't remember going back to Dr Bernstein to get my glasses, but I do remember going to school, the only child in the only second grade at Elm Street School wearing glasses. The next thing I remember is opening the top to my small wooden desk, taking my glasses off, and stowing them inside where no one could see them. Eventually, I guess, I reconciled myself to the fact that I would be four-eyed, because all my elementary school class pictures after that showed me in glasses. (Of course there were very few other pictures of me from that time--parents then did not take pictures of their children on a daily or hourly basis. Picture taking was reserved for special occasions--birthdays, holidays, maybe the rare trip to Presque Isle in Erie or to relatives.) The best record I have of those times remains inside my head.
Now, naturally, I am thrilled to have glasses and I only remove them to sleep. My vision can still be corrected to 20/25 with glasses, despite the 5 surgeries that I had for a detached retina, and while I have a troublesome cataract in my "good eye," that will come out next summer with little fuss.
And cancer--right now I am a survivor of breast cancer, which cropped up when I was sixty. I was an unlikely candidate to contract this disease: there is no family history, I am not an alcoholic or heavy smoker, I exercise a lot, I am thin. I did, however, take hormone replacement pills for five years. Stats now suggest that 24% of women who took these pills get breast cancer. During a routine annual mammogram an odd (though beautiful) series of random white tiny stars appeared in a duct of my right breast, looking just like an undiscovered constellation in a dark night sky. After a biopsy--the worst part of the whole thing--the diagnosis was confirmed. And I had all high grade cells. Because the disease was confined to a duct, though, I was at stage zero. The oncologist recommended a lumpectomy. So I had one. The worst part of that was having black wires inserted in the breast--"x marks the spot"--and then having to find my way from the breast cancer imaging center in my bathrobe, my husband pushing me in a wheel chair.
So, the lump came out and my surgeon, who by then had become a friend because he liked Henry James and envied me my career as a scholar (who knew?), called me at six am from his conference in New York to tell me I was cancer free--with a 1 millimeter margin with no cancer cells around the spot. Well, I don't know much about metric measurements, but that didn't seem like much of a margin. In fact, my oncologist contradicted him. She wanted me to have another lumpectomy and then weeks of radiation. I went and talked to a radiologist: I would be fatigued, the skin on my back would burn, I had to go every day to the hospital for weeks (I was still working full time then), and this whole procedure might not work, because all the cells that they removed turned out to be high grade ones.
I went to Moab, Utah, for a weekend to think about all this. Hiking in the desert air and running on paths around town, I came to the decision that I had to fight harder to overcome this disease. I needed to remove the entire breast. I called Jim on  Monday morning and he scheduled me for surgery the next week. For some reason, one of the things that bothered me most during all the tests and procedures had been the ugly gowns they made me wear while they were sticking things in me, cutting me up, and making me lie on a table face down for an hour and a half without moving. Enough already. I decided to make myself a pretty gown to wear in my hospital bed. Only Walmart sells material in Park City and I don't like most of what they have, but I found a pretty soft pink flannel and a pink flowered flannel for trim. I bought a basic pattern and sewed frantically, finishing this long gown the day before the surgery. 
If I could do one thing for women going through this now, I would organize a group to make pretty gowns for these patients. I asked several people at the Huntsman Cancer Center about this, but all indicated that the homemade gowns would not pass the sanitation/laundry requirements--I was so tired by the end of it all that I gave up. But that might be a door I could try to go through later, as after Christmas I will not teach again. There is just too much left to do, I have decided, that I don't have time to go to work.
So, I started with doors and look where I have gone!.Frankly I don't like it when people talk about their medical problems. It can become a hallmark of conversations among seniors, and unless we are exchanging helpful advice on doctors, procedures, etc. it is probably better to talk about something else--like what doors we might go through next.
I have gone through another door learning about painting. Maybe doors have always interested me because I am curious about what lies behind them, particularly when I am in another country where the language and culture are strange to me. How do these people view the world? What mysteries to they have? What have they lived through? All of us follow the same trajectory from birth to death, we just take different paths. 
At some point I would like to think that most of us come together, realizing toward the end of our lives that it isn't money, fame, or fortune that matter. It doesn't matter where we live and it doesn't really matter what our work was (though mine did bring me enormous satisfaction). It is that we loved someone, that someone loved us, and that we were in places where the planet is still beautiful. Whatever our achievements were, we will leave them behind. It is Lucretius in his De Rerum Nature [The Nature of Things] who said it best: in the fourth century A.D.: “We are each of us angels with only one wing, and we can only fly by embracing one another.” 
― Titus Lucretius Carus

L’eau de Pear                                                                        3 November 2013

Okay, so I am retired and I am going to learn new things—I read about that all the time: if you learn new things, your mind will function better, you will be happier, your health will improve. . . . . on and on. And of course this is true. We should be learning things, if for no other reason than that it helps pass the time.

I have always loved being a student, since kindergarten. In fact, during my senior year in high school I was voted “best student” in my graduating class at Titusville High School in 1965. While at that time I would have preferred being “prettiest,” “most popular,” “best friend,” etc., that was the label I was stuck with. Fortunately in life said label has stood me in good stead, as I eventually landed in a career as a teacher and college professor and was quite happy doing that. Had I been “most popular” I might have been been too busy socializing to put in four years in graduate school taking classes in Shakespeare’s histories and writing a dissertation on Russian writer Ivan Turgenev and Henry James. Who knows? It is a moot point.

Oh  yes—the point. And therein lies one of my problems. In conversation—and in the lectures I give at Westminster—I tend to ramble. I start on one track and before I know it I have switched to another one—sort of like the old eight track tapes we used to have on those huge tape recorders with the plastic reels. S0—being a good student has turned out to be a huge plus for me.:I am able to tolerate my own company for long periods of time. My mind is geared for learning, and now that I have some leisure hours, I just have to decide what I should learn.

Although I drew and painted as a child, sometimes copying house plans from the Pittsburgh Sunday paper, I never displayed any particular talent for art. I was married to an artist for four years, however, in my extreme youth, and I spent a lot of time looking at art and talking about art and watching people make art, and even, once, acting as a nude model for my first husband’s pinhole photographs, something that made me quite uncomfortable, to tell the truth. But I loved my black and white photography course at Allegheny College. It was the only course I ever took that fascinated me so that I would stay up most of the night working on it—in this case, spending time in the dark room developing and printing photos until long after midnight. (I usually follow Franklin’s mantra, early to bed, early to rise).

After I retired full time from Westminster, I spent the fall taking a digital photography course at the Salt Lake Art Center, from a gentle older man named Grant. He focused on light, composition, and color, and I loved the course, putting what I learned to good use, I thought. I imagined that I might enjoy taking other art classes. I have always loved the look of watercolors, so when we moved to Los Angeles for a year in 2012, I signed up for classes in Palos Verdes, where I spent Tuesday mornings learning to paint in the company of friendly more experienced artists who generously shared their knowledge with me. I can’t say that I produced anything remarkable, but I loved the paper and the colors of the paints that came in little metal tubes. I had no clue what I was doing and I think my teacher and classmates secretly believed I was hopeless, but I enjoyed the process so much that I didn’t care what anyone thought.

And this fall, fortunately, I have found a very competent and patient instructor at a private studio in Salt Lake, Colleen Reynolds. I attend her class every Wednesday morning before I teach my writing class. There are never more than four of us in the class, so I get lots of help in technical matters. I have about 1500 photos on my computer, and I am slowly moving through them, learning to transform them to paintings. Because I am a perennial student, I am more than happy in this role.

Well, again I am rambling. Two weeks ago I heard about a two day workshop on abstract painting. While I like impressionists, abstract art usually does nothing for me. I looked at the teacher’s paintings on her website, though, and I liked her use of color and shape. Always curious, I mused, “I will learn something,” so I signed up.

When you take an art workshop, the teacher posts a list of materials to bring. We could paint in either watercolor or acrylic, and we should bring one fruit or vegetable. Well, it still takes me so long to figure out what I need to bring to any painting class—brushes, tubs for water, paper, paints, tape, masking fluid, a white towel, a portable easel, etc., etc.—that I forgot to bring a fruit or vegetable. The woman across from me had an extra pear, though, and let me borrow it.

I was not sure what to expect, but the instructor told us to look at our object and make designs from it. She gave us 9 or 10 suggested configurations:  opposition, radiating, rhythmic, vertical, linear, etc.  While her sketches of these configurations were interesting, I had no idea how a pear would fit into them. I looked at the pear and drew it as carefully as I could. I off-centered it on the page, because I had just learned about the golden mean, which suggests that the most pleasing focal points are off-centered on the page. Then, behind the pear I drew a shadow of it, which I penciled in lightly, and behind that a third pear, which I darkened. Well, it looked fine to me, but when we did our critique, I learned that it was not acceptable.

During the critique, despite my high school fame I learned that I was the worst student in the class. Some people drew a desert landscape, one woman geometric shapes and curves with dark lines, another a road curving into a city, yet another kite shapes based on a box of Kleenex on her desk.  One sketch looked like a combination of a large intestine and a chambered nautilus.  Gradually, as the class raved over these images, a light bulb came on: we were NOT supposed to draw a pear. We were supposed to draw something that was as unlike a pear as possible.

When I put my sketch up, the instructor said that I was thinking about shadows, which was good, but the pears I had drawn did not take up the entire space of the page. Right, I thought: a sketch that looks like pears is wrong. But when she turned to the last two sketches, in raptures over them, I learned that my hypothesis was incorrect. One person had drawn two large pears, one behind the other, with a thick bar going across the top of the page. This was splendid, she commented, and had great potential. Another drew one single giant pear (which she later painted purple) with something small behind it at the top left. Magnificent. It could be a pear after all—just not mine.

Where had I gone wrong? Was it that one or two pears worked for an abstract painting, but not three? I had learned that odd numbers were better in art, so I had thought I was okay there. Was it that mine looked just too much like a pear? The other two sketches had an idea of pear, a whiff of pear, but owed no allegiance to any specific pear. I admitted to myself that I had no idea why my sketch was so bad, the others so amazing and beautiful. It had nothing to do the subject: pear or not pear, that was not the point. But what was the point? I was clueless.

Despite this blow to my artistic ability—not to mention my lifelong identity as peerless student--I continued with the workshop though not at all confident that I would succeed. We painted from our sketches (though I did others, with exaggerations of  parts of pears filling the page and a radiating sort of spider web thing) but when we put up images for critique, there was dead silence whenever  people looked at mine.  The class adored everyone else’s paintings, though: gorgeous, startlingly, impressive, ooh, ah! Might this be a case of “the emperor has no clothes”? Some of the abstractions were beautiful, while others truthfully looked as though the proverbial monkey locked in a closet with paints and brushes had made them. Oh brother, I thought, how I wish I were at home eating ice cream with my homemade “low cal” chocolate sauce. *recipe below

Finally, during the last hour of the class, I slapped some bright violet shapes on top of flowing blue-green paint. The woman across from me looked at what I had done:  “You are finally using color, Susan!” Again, we put our final work up for others to critique. The instructor noted, “Look at the use of yellow in between the blue and green lines on Susan’s painting!” Dead silence from the class.

I did learn about color, shape, design these past two days—but most of all, I learned how hard it is to create abstract art and how arbitrary our taste in visual images really is. When I got back to the outskirts of Park City, I ran for nearly an hour on some paved trails. I had not run this far since I was 50. I am thinking that I may have to give back my title of “best student”!

*Low Fat Chocolate Sauce

Mix 1 c. sugar and 1 c. cocoa powder in a deep saucepan. Add 2 to 2 ½ c. water and combine. Cook on high heat until mixture comes to a rolling boil, constantly stirring. Cook on high heat for 3 min. Then reduce heat to lowest point possible and cook 5 more min. Remove from heat and add 2 tsps. vanilla.  Cool and refrigerate.