It was the summer of 2021, and after initially joining back into the world after the Covid lockdown we were all sent back into lockdown with the Omicron variant. I had been working diligently on some paintings to process grief over the unexpected loss of my mom, who was my best friend, in the spring of 2019.
But to tell this story I must back up a little bit. In 2015, my email address began to be included on a bunch of housing email lists when I began looking into a possible relocation to New York's Hudson Valley, where I grew up. Over the years since then, every now and then something comes into my inbox with a street address I recognize. Mostly I ignore these messages. But on a late July morning in 2021, one of these emails contained the address of the house next door to the house I lived in, the house where I had my first job, babysitting a newborn while the parents went into the city on Saturday nights for dinner and a show. I think I was probably around 12 years old at the time I began the position. I loved that there was always Coca-Cola stocked in the fridge, and a fresh bag of BBQ potato chips would be out on the counter for me to enjoy. I would be shown these things, each time before the couple left, to remind me where they were. I don't think I ever even saw the baby, maybe only one time. It was asleep when I arrived and was asleep when I left, usually around 2 am, when I myself would be asleep. I would only wake when the husband of the couple entered the TV room where I had drifted off some hours before their return home. He would drive me home since it was a very dark night, likely wintertime, and it was up a steep hill and then long steep driveway to my parents’ house on Bryant Pond Road in Putnam Valley. This makes me think of the times a child would be carried sleeping from the couch or back seat of a car, or wherever they fell asleep, to their bed, by a loving parent. Being very small at that age, it was one step beyond the neighbor carrying me from their tv room couch to my house. There is a difference though. Dollar bills were exchanged in the car's front seat before I got out of the passenger side and groggily made my way into my house and bed.
The housing listing caught my eye as I quickly perused my inbox since the street address instantly looked familiar. As a result, it sparked my attention, so I clicked on it. Very quickly I knew it was the house I used to babysit in. As I checked out the photos in the listing, I was gobsmacked that the kitchen was the same kitchen! Same bright red Formica countertops and built-in booth with red Naugahyde upholstery, complete with the original decorative metal upholstery tacks, and the same kitchen cabinets! I then saw the room where I used to sit and do my job. My job consisted of sitting on a couch and watching a color tv. And drinking Coca-Cola and eating barbeque potato chips. My house did not have a color tv at this time, only a very tiny black and white tv, so this position was quite the first gig!! In that room I very clearly remember a built-in glass doored cabinet, inside which would have been religious curios, icons, etc. I always remembered that cabinet as it was very unusual and commanded presence and attention, especially the ceramic statue of the Virgin Mary inside it. There it was, empty but still there! The entry doorway of the room just to the left of that built-in cabinet, there it was, exactly as I remembered. I took a whole bunch of screenshots, my excitement mounting. Then I discovered the Google maps icons, and immediately clicked the street view option. There I was, on the road where I used to live. It was a bright sunny morning when the Google truck took those photos. With the most gorgeous and painterly puffy white clouds reaching overhead. I walked (clicked) up the road to what used to be my parents’ driveway. I saw the mailbox of the current owners. I walked (clicked) up a little bit further, to the next house up, which used to be the Dworkin’s driveway, where I loved to pick and gorge on the wild berries that grew prolifically on a huge thicket every summer. And where there was a large field with a beautiful old red barn that I painted in autumn with a palette knife and fell in love with oil paint as a child. And where the school bus would turn around before heading back down the dangerously steep hill and pick me up on its way back to the main road a mile or so below. After one storm the ice was so treacherous that on the way down the bus slid off the road and was hanging on a tree trunk —the only thing keeping it from toppling over off a cliff and crashing. Coincidentally, that was one of the few days I was absent that year, not boarding the bus that morning.
The Coke and chips would be reaching their pinnacle in my brain by the time the intro song would come on for the Mary Tyler Moore Show. I was in absolute comfort mode, so happy, so hooked, my heart cemented into every bit of action that came after. I learned how to be an American woman on these Saturday nights, and I was so excited about one day being in the world and having a job and being able to support myself and have a family of co-workers. I felt such a sense of possibility and “sky is the limit” enthusiasm about my abilities to thrive with my talents, but above all, complete and unparalleled optimism about the future.
On that day in July of 2021, it all came flooding back, as a healing balm to what I currently felt. I had been through an extremely rough couple of years with my mom’s sudden passing two years prior, and then the pandemic soon after. During these years we all questioned whether we would make it. The political divisions in the country, the escalating climate catastrophes brought on by global warming, coupled with the pandemic virus added to my own personal complicated grief over losing my mom, my primary support system. It all had added up to a chronic sense of loss, uncertainty — a sense of fear over an impending permanent state of gloom and doom, disease, and death. That morning, when I found the YouTube video for the opening credits, listening to the song and watching Mary throw her hat into the air as the music crescendoed “You’re gonna make it after all!” — in an instant it all changed for me. The high note, the last note, an air of hopefulness, the screen then freezes with the final image of the hat above Mary’s head. There was the proof, the feeling I had in my heart that morning. Anchored by how music can trigger something beyond nostalgia, a pure and real emotional response, I believed it! One hundred percent! I was gonna make it after all! We were all gonna make it after all! It was the first time in years that I felt any kind of hope. I phoned up my mom’s lifelong best friend Ellie Greenfield (we became very close after my mom’s passing) and shared the experience with her. I told her it was going to be the title of my next show at the Grant Wahlquist Gallery. I told Grant I had the title for my next show.