FROM MEXICO WITH LOVE: Full Circle

By guest blogger Emily K. Grieves

It is Ash Wednesday and I am getting ready to go to church to have this little ash cross drawn on my forehead. I don’t really understand the why of it. I’ve asked around, and nobody really knows, beyond that it is tradition to begin Lent this way. I finally found out what the ash is made of. It’s from burning the saint’s fancy clothes from the past year, since people are always making him new ones and donating them to the church, so rather than toss or store the old ones, they go into the fire to make ash for Ash Wednesday. We’re supposed to begin this Lenten austerity plan, not eating meat, leaving vices behind, not swearing or thinking sinful thoughts. I kind of imagine it like taking New Year’s resolutions up a notch. But I also imagine it as it might have been in Christ’s life – taking his teachings up a notch, really living by them, living each moment with heightened awareness, greater consciousness. So when I go to church and let someone draw a cross on my third eye with ash made from the saint’s clothes, I ask for the blessing of awareness. I ask for balance in my inner vision, for blessings of awakening.

I stood in front of a crowd at my art opening on February 12 and tried to explain this quest for awareness in Spanish, how I use the symbol of the feather in many paintings to draw connections to the divine, how the symbols of corn and of the four petaled flower bring the blessings to Earth. I think it went well. Everyone seemed to enjoy the paintings and I even sold a few, always cause for great gratitude. One thing I really noticed but did not express to the crowd was that in some way the completion of this dream, of presenting a solo exhibit of my art, was an ancestral full circle. As I looked at all these people gathered to see my work, that I was able to dream and work so hard to complete, I thought of my grandmother, who never fulfilled her dream. I realized that I was fulfilling it decades later. I was living out her dream.

I mentioned my grandmother briefly in a recent blog in which I discovered my grandfather’s history. But my grandmother is this really interesting character in my history as well. She was always the villainess in the lore. She was the one who smoked and got drunk and yelled and criticized. She was a failure in her own perception and lived vicariously through my father’s successes. She was insensitive and cruel. The way she raised my father dictated the way I was raised. She died when I was 10, right before Christmas, and when I googled her the other day her name came up twice. One post was from a Reno newspaper society column in 1937 where she apparently had just started a new teaching job, prior to the birth of my father. The other post that came up was a photo of her grave stone in Modoc County, California. Oddly there is a “Find a Grave” online service that just the previous week had posted the photo of my grandmother’s grave. I guess someone goes around to every cemetery in the U.S. and takes photos of tombstones for genealogical purposes and posts them on these services. Oct. 16, 1912 – Dec. 23, 1980. Just exactly as I remembered it when we went back in the summer of 1981 to see the placed stone and make a graphite rubbing of it as a …. hmm, souvenir, I guess…. knowing that we would never again be going back to that beautiful hinterland of Modoc county in a remote Northeastern corner of California where a bunch of 3rd cousin rancher relatives lived who I’ve never seen again since.

The history had been told that she had been abandoned by her husband, who never really returned from WWII, like many veterans I imagine. But as my grandfather’s story emerged it turned out that more likely than not, she had been the one to run him off as she sunk into her world of frustration, teaching and running crude little schools in even cruder little mining towns around Nevada’s back corners of desolate desert. She stayed a single mom with her only son, my father, until the day she died, having smoked and drunk herself to an relatively early demise. When I stood in front of the crowd at my art show, I remembered her dream. She had been the first in her family to not only go to high school, but college as well, at a time when the mere concept was a stretch for women. She must have finished college sometime in the mid-thirties. Apparently she had studied art and she was offered a job, as an artist, with a new company that was taking off in Los Angeles. At that time, in the 1930’s, the world was a very different place for women. Society considered it inappropriate for a single woman to go off to the big city and live an independent life, and so she turned down the job offer, listening to society’s norms instead of to her dream or her heart. The company was Walt Disney. She spent the rest of her life in an obvious downward spiral of frustration and resentment. I imagine that in her heart of hearts she played the “I wish I would have…” game over and over like a broken record, lashing out with the rage of what she perceived to have been lost opportunities, and in her heart of hearts she just wanted to be an artist.

I think of this cold woman who always wore mumu dresses and cat eye glasses – she looked like one of those ladies straight out of a Farside cartoon – and now I realize what shaped her, what formed her, what made her who she became. And so I sent her a little prayer from my show, that hopefully I’ve completed a circle for her. In the 1930’s, she couldn’t allow herself to be an artist. But in 2012, here I am, her grand-daughter, and as I said in my last blog, by golly, “Yes, I am an artist.” I let myself dream, I followed the dream, I completed the dream, and I’m ready to take it all up one more notch. I’m gonna go get my ash cross on my forehead and I’m going to dream even bigger, and I’m not going to let anyone tell me “no,” least of all myself.

Image: Alice Parman Grieves, 1940

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