Health update to art show …

It is February 2, 2021. Yesterday there was a heavy, sideways-snow covering us. I am in one borough of NYC, Robert is in another and has been for weeks. He’s been sent hither and yon into the hospital, then a rehab, back to the hospital, to another rehab. He tested positive for Covid on January 4th: he contracted it while in the rehab.

We have become untethered: His brain is slowly unwinding. This past year it became most obvious and then the process began to speed up in June and more-so in September. He no longer makes an attempt to call or to initiate a connection,  I don’t even know if he remembers how to use a phone. Yesterday was the day that his care “team” at Riverwalk called and told me about him: I felt like the parent of a tantrum-throwing toddler: I learned from the OT/PT that Robert is belligerent and uncooperative. He must be one angry, confused dude. He doesn’t want to participate, and he needs help with all of his activities of daily living.

I know what must be: He must remain in a rehab facility, or more. I wanted him to remain where his is but they are not accepting new patients. They are still waiting for the results of the last Covid test and if he is negative he has to move to a “regular” rehab. I don’t know if the place from where he came will accept him back, if his bed is still available. The place where he got Covid!

I am strangely placid, inexorably calm; I have made peace with the outcome long before it has occurred, my gut has guided me for months, taken to me to this place as the wind blows and whites-out the distraction from reality. As the snow piles and blows and my neighbor makes the first pass with the snow blower, bless him, I know that Robert can’t come home: He will not write another check, take another photograph, read another The New York Times at the breakfast table, fire another tile, paint a work of art. His life is all up to me, his life is now my job. From afar.

I will no longer find him lying on the floor, sometimes naked, in confusion, I will no longer clean up his primitive messes. I will not watch him eat the roast chicken in microscopic bites, one at a time, as though he is stretching out the joy, shredding the glazed bird and putting minute morsels on the tips of the tines of his fork, feeding himself in bits that even an infant could handle.

I will not, any longer be part of that couple that travelled and landed in Italian hill towns, six or seven times, or go to weather-wavering-Denmark, or on the streets of Lichtenstein, or in the muddied market street of Oporto: Travel has ended, it is far behind, done, seared into synapse, visions in memory, linked to a quick smile and then on to the next mind-photo. All that we saw, heard, smelled:  the olfactory memories of Venice, where even the smell of the sewers in the streets was forgivable near restaurants: it is all in the past.

The almost six-week-honeymoon in Italy, forty plus years ago, the stay at the Hotel Gabbrielli-Sandwirth, in a palatial, aged room, including meals.

While sitting on a patio hotel restaurant at dinner, the most divine pasta course in front of me, I took a bite and began to choke, silently, thinking how embarrassed I was to be dying at dinner at a classy hotel.

There was an interminable inability to inhale, to exhale, the end of my days was facing me and then I don’t know what happened, an angel must have saved me, pounded me on the back with huge wings. It’s not your time, eat your pasta, feed the breadcrumbs to the sparrows. Enjoy your life! I gasped and the air filled me, the Italian air, rushed in and then out. I was still alive. I am still alive. Those same angels are looking after me now.

On that first Italian trip the summer of 1976, I learned how epochs of time connected to buildings, the Gabrielli-Sandwirth, on the Grand Canal could be found in centuries-old paintings in Venetian art museums, the building, in its original glory, perhaps the home of an aristocrat of the 17th century. Paintings viewed on museum gallery walls, as photographs, verifying what was and what was still: the house had been morphed into a luxury hotel, and was once once affordable and now, not.
I miss my Italia. I miss the memory, I miss Robert.

If I ever return to Italy, the place that connected to my soul six times, you, Robert won’t be with me: there is no going back: There is no going forward.

As for museums. There have been many others.

Once when we were we at The Brooklyn Museum, or perhaps, The Whitney,  a painting popped off the wall and called to Robert, “Hey! you know me! I am by Charles Alston! Your professor at CCNY!” Charles Alston was a painter, a contributor to the Harlem Renaissance, a sculptor, a magazine illustrator, a cartoonist, a muralist, an educator, and the first African-American supervisor of black muralists, in NYC to oversee a works project in Harlem Hospital.

If Robert could he would dedicate his work to his late teacher.

I will dedicate this page to both Robert and to Mr. Charles Alston, his professor.

Let’s go to …Gallery 2

Early Oils on Canvas

Red and White Store; Eastern Ohio 1970

 

Back Street; Catawissa, Pennsylvania 1970 Oil and rubber stamp letters on canvas

 

Farm near Long River, Prince Edward Island 1970 oil on canvas

 

The Levin Farm; Cambridge, New York 1972 oil on canvas

📌The series starts here:
Part 1: And The Band Played On … a mother’s life, a daughter’s journey

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