TWO WOMEN

fresh leaves

Lunch at the Circle L with Winfield, a good visit where we connected conversationally. I think. It felt to me like neither of us was dissatisfied at the end like one of us had an agenda that wasn't addressed. I love the Circle L. It's the people that go in there I like to dine among. I don't know nearly everyone I see in there. That's not why. When I see someone I know, it's someone I'm happy to see. It's a place where people talk at their tables, carry on conversations while they eat. That's what it is I like there. Jim and I talk so much it's the right place for it. We get a bit animated and sometimes loud. I forgot to tell him about the Evo Morales documentary I saw a day or so ago. It was down home among the Indian population of Bolivia, bottom class, the working poor. Winfield is going through big changes right now, having to accept he may never go to rural Asia again. For years he would go to a different country in South America every winter for 3 months where the knew the language. Then he started going to Asia where he didn't know the language, walking, riding buses and trains, renting a room for however long he wants to stay in a particular spot for whatever reasons. Meet people, talk with people from all over the world who are traveling like him, hearing different perspectives.

A 1:30 appointment for Chuck Billings to change oil and grease the Catfish. His daughter Crystal was in the office. She was next door at Chuck & Diane's house where she has her photography studio on the ground floor. The house is built on a slope and this floor looks toward the woods in back and comes out level with the ground. The next floor up is level with the ground in the front of the house. Crystal was assembling the parts for a prop she wanted to make for a photo shoot with 8th grade kids, graduation maybe. I went with her to see what she was doing while Chuck worked on the car. First thing I saw was she had an all day project on her hands and and helping hand might get her done by the end of the day. I had no schedule for the rest of the day. I saw the chance to do something outside the house, help her with her project. It involved cutting shapes out of 1" styrofoam with my pocket knife and a kitchen knife to make a minimally stylized Cinderella's chariot.

It's exciting for me to see Crystal opening up so fast in her photographic eye and her photos of the young who like themselves photographed beautiful by someone of their generation with their generation's way of seeing, someone reaching out and finding a style all her own, trusting her own eye. When I saw she could do with some help and wanted help, I was glad to spend the afternoon with her figuring out what to do with the resources we had, which wasn't much, but we put it all together and it worked. Even what we thought would turn out terrible came out all right. Not as well as if we'd had proper fine-tooth saws or whatever you cut thick styrofoam with. One of her friends dropped by and suggested smoothing the edges, which was our pressing problem at the moment, with curling irons. Crystal brought out 2 of her mother's. They didn't work. She found using a bic lighter worked fairly well, then the lighter was too hot to hold. We left the rough edges, and they're fine.

We had to paint all the parts with white latex paint, which her dad fortunately had half a gallon of in the garage and a good 3" paintbrush. Also found a roller. Crystal rolled the flat surfaces and I painted the rough edges with the brush. She had 4 different colors of spray paint. I questioned if those cans could cover the surface we needed to cover. They did. A couple of the cans were down to the rattling marble. She had a picture we were going by. We weren't attempting to imitate the picture, but use it for a guide. It amounted to making up a puzzle, making the pieces, then putting them together so they can be taken apart and put back together again. Justin came by after work and made a stand of some one by threes. By the end of the day, it was done. The fun in the project was figuring out step by step how to do what's next. The sort-of detailed carving on a gilded decoration was so rough it was pitiful, using my pocketknife to carve it out. The gold paint ate at the styrofoam, roughed the smooth surface to work with the rough edges that smoothed a little from the toxic meltdown until the whole thing looked like something from the 19th century hand-carved out of wood and gold plated like a picture frame. It came out better than had it been smooth and perfect as the ideal. Much better.

I'm all the time happy for Crystal seeing how she has followed her own light and is quickly becoming successful at what she's doing, because she's doing it very well. She has someone in her life who knows more than she does and has to keep her understanding it, not Justin, always telling her how to do whatever she's doing. She was talking about how tiresome it gets, and I told her straight on, what she's doing is a success, and it is her vision, it is her project, it's working for her, she's doing it well, in hard times she's busy all the time. She's making the decisions, they're working because they're the right decisions, she knows what she's doing, it shows, it is obvious. She doesn't need you-know-what-you-oughta-do. She's on her track, she's doing what she oughta do. I passed to her my answer to put a stop to all such intros: Yes. It works every time. That's the end of it. I look back at my younger years when I believed other people probably knew better about what I oughta do than I did. I tried a lot of you-oughtas and not a one of them worked out. I embarrass myself thinking of all the time wasted believing other people's notions of what I oughta be doing. I wanted to give her that while she's young and needs to follow her own light, which really is a guiding light.

I've worked with a lot of women along the way, enough to know their intelligence, which I respect in a big way. I mean life intelligence. Women pay attention to what's going on around them. For sure, not always. There are dim women like there are dim men. On the whole, I'm speaking of, I prefer to work for a woman than for a man, because the women are so much more intelligent than the men, in general, and the men don't have a clue. The women know to keep what they know to themselves. I was enjoying Crystal's conversations with her friend Lena, who is working for her part time. At one point they were talking about some guy who was probably going to make a play for a friend of theirs and she knows it's only trouble if she goes with him, but she may now have the power to resist. I was seeing the intelligence in both of them and was awed by it all afternoon. I was glad to see some people of their generation who are reaching out and doing something with their imaginations, visions, women doing what they want to do and making it happen. It takes a lot of energy. I couldn't help but reflect on how different their generation is from mine. I have little experience with their generation. What I find is we're all people. Generations more or less have something to do with music listened to, styles, slang, like that.

We were 3 people together working on a project. Because I respect that this is Crystal's project and she knows what she's about, that the decisions to be made are hers, not mine, we work well together. We talk things over, look at it this way and that way and when she sees what she want's, there it is. I don't want to interfere in her artist eye at all, only to encourage. She has a good eye and a good mind for what she's doing, the perfect personality for what she's doing, and all I can say is, Do it to it. It was also fun working with that young feminine energy. These were well rounded goddess figures in my way of seeing. They both seemed to me women with a connection with goddess they're not yet aware of. Lena is getting close. As young Alleghany women, they have a lot on the ball. A very great deal on the ball. They were refreshing for me to dance with in the interactions of working on the project. Over the last 2.5 years 3 of the souls I am closest to have split for the other side of the veil. I dwell too much in loss. At about the lowest point in this sorrow over loss I get to work with these two woman who impress me with their drive to make their own way on their own terms, both of them starting from scratch in a little town in an Economic Downturn when businesses are shutting down. If I wanted to generalize the younger generation by these women, all I can say is I'm impressed.