Author: Merilee

Floral Friday – Art is a Mood Thing

/ Merilee / Leave a comment

 

One day when I was young, I don’t know, maybe late teens, I discussed art with my father.  He said, “Art is a mood thing.”  In other words, you need to work when inspired.  I thought this was an odd thing for him to say because how would he know?  He wasn’t an artist.  The closest he had come to art and artists was my mother’s sister, who was a well-known artist in California.  I agreed with him at the time because I knew that for myself if I didn’t want to work, I didn’t.  Why waste time if you’re not into it?  So, yes, he had a strong point.  You need to wait until inspiration hits you.

But here’s the thing about being an artist.  It’s hard work.  I mean, if you’re serious, you WORK.  Not simply making a drawing once every couple of years.  I’m talking about making at least five drawings per day.  No matter what your mood is.  You don’t have the luxury of working around your mood.  You must learn a lot, build multiple skills and muscle memory.  I know.  I was an artist long before I seriously picked up a camera.  I attended Art Center College of Design in Pasadena and later on was an illustration major at Cal State Long Beach, tapped to go into medical illustration.  It was hard work.  There was no waiting for the mood to strike.

At a certain point, I decided my father was wrong.  I didn’t care about moods.  You must work whether you feel like it or not.  Inspiration comes from working, not waiting around for it to hit you.

Today, however, I realized that my father was correct.  That’s the thing about our parents.  We may or may not take their advice about life or listen to their wisdom.  Kids always think they know more than their parents.  That’s how Nature wired them.  However, later, sometimes decades later, a lightbulb goes on and the realization that maybe Mom or Dad had the right instinct hits.

I like growing sunflowers.  I’ve been doing it for years.  I order my seeds from rareseeds.com every winter and in spring I sow all kinds of sunflowers in my sizeable yard.  I live on a big piece of property that is baked in the sun on the top of a hill.  Some things will grow here and other things don’t.  Sunflowers love it, if you can keep squirrels from tearing them apart.  It’s a big battle every year between me and the squirrels.  Cayenne pepper seems to keep them away from the giant sunflowers, but there’s only so much I can do to keep them out.

This past week as I was starting to enjoy the huge heads on the Mammoth Giant sunflowers bending over on their tall stalks, I had to cut them all off and bring them inside to keep the squirrels from destroying them.  But I like leaving the smaller sunflowers.  Birds eat the little seeds, and I love watching the plants go through their life cycle, from seeds sprouting to dried, faded flower heads when autumn comes.  I like leaving them like that.  I want to look at them.  They signal the shifting of the seasons.  The in-between part is what I like the very best, when plants are starting to fade.

I went out this evening to take pictures of backlit sunflowers, because their time is ending.  I left the dinner dishes and went out in the back for quite a while, shooting sunflowers and thought, boy, I could do this for the next four hours straight.  I love it.  I love these flowers and what they represent to me.  They are inspiring.

Then it hit me.  Suddenly my father’s words came screaming back to me.

“Art is a mood thing.”

I realized, oh, man, he was right.  Why am I suddenly seeing this now?  Hearing his words screaming at me.  Then it connected.

I thought back to all the projects I’ve worked on and when they just flowed.  Quickly.  Without even having to think about it.  That applies to not only painting, but photography and even writing blog posts.

When I think about the blog posts that were extremely popular, (some still are years later), they were the posts that for some reason, while editing photos, I suddenly saw the words that went with them and started writing.  Fast.  The whole thing fell into place easily.

I’ve felt that way when I’ve been working on a painting and suddenly it’s like…. Oh.  I just need to put about five brush strokes, and this is done.  I’ve said all I need to say.  Or when I’ve gone nuts over a certain photographic subject and spend hours upon hours shooting something and can’t stop.  The photos turn out saying precisely what I want them to say without having to think about it.  It’s almost as if something takes over and does it for me.  The result is something that I LOVE.  Maybe not everyone else loves it, but I do, and that is what matters.

The things that I labor over, work too hard on, over-think, try to please other people with, etc., end up being stale and lifeless and I don’t love them.  That’s because I wasn’t really inspired.  I was trying too hard.  Trying too hard at anything in life is a fruitless endeavor.  Work hard, yes.  Try too hard, no.  You’re just beating your head on a wall.  It’s not going to be what you think that you want.

What you want is that certain thing that sends chills up your legs, that you can hardly wait to work on and you can’t get enough of.  Like taking photos of the last sunflowers of the year in my yard, knowing that I’ll have to wait until next spring to plant more seeds.  Enjoy watching them grow and blossom, bees buzzing around them.  When you stick your nose into their centers, they smell like vanilla and dark chocolate.  Sunflowers grown at home have an imperfect, irregular quality that appeals to me.  That’s the kind of thing that makes me feel alive.  It inspires me.

Because art is a mood thing.

The Best Dog In The World

/ Merilee / 11 Comments

I lost my dog last month.  He was a little over a month away from his 18th birthday.

The entire experience was so overwhelming for me that I decided that I did not want to talk about it.  To anyone.  I wanted to be left alone.  To grieve.  To be by myself.  It’s how I cope with things that are traumatic.  I go silent.  It’s personal and no one needs to know anything that is in my head or my heart.

Now that a few weeks have passed and I no longer am waking up at one, two, three or four o’clock in the morning to answer his call to be taken out to potty, I feel like talking about my dog.  For myself. I need to.  Buddy was like my soul dog. I want people to know what kind of dog he was.  I frequently told him that he was The Best Dog in the World.  Because he was.

I look for him every time I walk into the kitchen and pass by where his bed used to be.  At 5:00 pm I feel pulled to give him his dinner.  I have the urge to call him when I have a meat scrap.  These are all getting lighter as each day passes.  Unfortunately and fortunately.

His name was Buddy and he was a red dachshund.  He was supposed to be a miniature, but when he grew into adulthood, he ended up being closer to a standard dachshund.  More like what they call a “tweenie”.  He was about 16 pounds.

I brought Buddy home in 2008 on the same day that our other dachshund, Simon, passed away from kidney failure.  Simon had to be rushed to the vet while I was in Death Valley painting.  I’ve had terrible guilt all these years that I was not with Simon when he had to be put to sleep.  I felt like a failure as a pet owner that I wasn’t there to hold him when he crossed the Rainbow Bridge.  I let Simon down and could not forgive myself for not being there.  It’s weighed on me for eighteen years.

The day I was to go home from that trip to the desert, I had a strange intuition, knowing, an idea that was like a voice, but it wasn’t a voice, it was like a thought, but it wasn’t.  It said, “If you call the breeder, she has one red male puppy.”

It startled me with its specificity.  “One red male puppy”.

I realized that on my way back home from Death Valley, I would be driving near where Simon had come from, a dachshund breeder who specialized in breeding mild-tempered, good-natured dogs.  I called her when I was near her home.

“Hi, I bought a puppy from you fifteen years ago.  He passed away.  Do you happen to have any puppies?  I cannot go home to sad people. I’d like to bring home a puppy.”

“Yes, I have one red male puppy.” she said.  I was flabbergasted.

That one red male puppy came home with me and he was named Buddy.  I brought him home to my sons so they would have a new “buddy friend” and not be sad about losing Simon.  But Buddy ended up being more my dog than anyone else’s.  He was the family dog, but he and I were bonded from the beginning.  There was something between us that was – there.  I can’t explain it, except to say that I firmly believe he was supposed to have been my dog, that somehow it was planned out ahead of time.  We knew each other.

Buddy exuded Love.  When I would pick him up and hold him, pure love emanated from him as he wagged his tail.  That warm, enveloping, “everything is right with the world” kind of feeling that can only be called – Love.  Animals and small children are readily able to give out this kind of feeling.  Adults, well, maybe.  Sometimes.  Only if you can bypass the tough exterior.  But babies and dogs and cats and horses and just about any animal you can name seem to have direct access to that vibe of goodness.  Buddy had it in spades.

I never knew Buddy to dislike anyone except for three people.  One was a past gardener that Buddy wanted to attack every Monday at 7:00 am.  I couldn’t understand it.  The gardener did not seem like a bad guy at all, until I found out that he had accepted a bribe from my neighbor to come “just a little bit later” every morning, so his blower wouldn’t disturb her.  Buddy knew.  When I found this out, the gardener was fired on the spot.  He also did not like the pest control man.  I still can’t figure that one out exactly, but there’s always been something about the pest control guy that seems a little “off”.  Like I don’t entirely trust him.  The third person was an attorney.  I think Buddy had an ethics radar somehow.  Animals always know.

Buddy was in many respects the quintessential dachshund.  He loved to eat.  All dachshunds have an appetite that is off the charts and will eat themselves to death if they have a chance.  He liked to “hoover” the kitchen floor when I cooked, inhaling all bits and pieces of vegetable cuttings, even onion skin, which I’d quickly pull out of his mouth.  Onions are bad for dogs.

He had that typical dachshund stubborn streak, or more like, “selective hearing”, when he refused to come when called.

“Buddy!  Come”.  He would sniff the air.  “Buddy, come!!”  He would look up at the sky.  “BUDDY!  COME!!”  Turns and looks the other way, ignoring the command.  It was comical and frustrating at the same time. He wasn’t having it.

Buddy did not like to go for walks.  If I suited him up in his harness and leash to go for a walk, I’d get about two houses away from home when he would suddenly STOP, yanking me backwards because he was done. DONE.  He wanted to go back to the house.  Unless you were on an interesting walk, like out in the woods, or on the beach, then he might walk, but he really wasn’t much of a hiker.  It’s hard when you have short legs and there was that time when he stepped into a nest of red ants up by Mulholland Drive and screamed all the way home.

Buddy was always thrilled when anyone came home from work or school or errands.  He would bark with joy, do a few zoomies and then would grab a toy to bring to you.  It always amazed me that without fail, he was absolutely filled with Joy when people came home.  He was a favorite at the vet when he boarded while we went out of town.  He was given special privileges because all the veterinarian staff loved him.  He got to be out and about in the back with the staff where they would throw his squirrel toy for him.

Buddy and I had a sort of lesson-learning relationship. Things would happen to Buddy and a few months later, something similar would happen to me, or vice versa.  One example is when he injured his back chasing a squirrel.  He would watch the squirrels from the window in the door, itching to go out to get them and when I’d open the door, he’d burst out, full speed.  One day, when I opened the door, he ran out with such force that when he hit the tree the squirrel had climbed up on, it stunned him.  Then he screamed in pain.  It was his back.

Dachshunds have notoriously bad backs and can herniate a disc easily, which is what happened to Buddy when he hit that tree.  The emergency vet told me that we had three options: a seven-thousand-dollar surgery that might not work, could make it worse, and that I could not afford, or we could try putting him on crate rest with anti-inflammatory and pain meds for six weeks, or I could put him down.  I chose Option 2, crate rest with meds.  It worked.

Nine months later while lifting a heavy suitcase filled with cameras and lenses, I felt a pop in my lower back and in that instant, I knew I had just done something very bad.  I had herniated a disc.  A severe, right-sided herniation that was not fixable.  I could try surgery, but there was no guarantee that it would help and might make it worse.

Something felt familiar about the whole thing and after talking to two surgeons and feeling deflated, I thought about Buddy and the crate rest he had been on and decided that maybe I should try the same thing, only without the crate.  I rested on the couch for weeks, establishing a routine with a hot pad, prescription Aleve and no bending.  It worked.  It took a long time, but it worked.  The herniation is still there, it’s not going away, however, I manage it well and can function normally now.  Thanks to Buddy.

When the first little white hairs started showing up in his coat and on his paws, my heart sank, knowing that the inevitable was heading toward us.  Old age and the eventual crossing.  I didn’t want to acknowledge it and occasionally would tell him, “You will live forever.  You cannot leave me.”

But a couple of years ago I noticed something strange was happening with Buddy.  He would ask to go out, but when I opened the door, he acted confused and would turn and walk away.  I noticed him staring into space or staring at a wall.  I knew he was losing his eyesight and hearing, but this was something different.  His personality changed and he wasn’t himself.  Something about it felt very familiar to me.  Then one day I realized what it was.  He was showing the same symptoms as my father, my stepmother and my mother-in-law when they all developed dementia.  I have done the walk with dementia and Alzheimer’s.  I know the signs.  On the next visit to the vet, I asked if dogs could develop dementia.  She said absolutely.  Dogs can develop cognitive disfunction just like humans. This made me very sad, but at least I had experience with it.  I knew enough to try to help him or at least to have understanding and empathy.

His health was great.  He had the bloodwork of a dog much younger.  But his cognitive abilities went steadily down over the last year, and particularly in the last six months. He even started “sundowning” every day in late afternoon.   Buddy developed other challenges as well, like walking and standing issues.  We had to carry him out to potty for months, which the vet said was fine, but with the understanding that the time is coming to let him go.

It was a full-time job caring for Buddy for the last three or four months, but I don’t regret giving the time to care for a dog that had been so loving and devoted to his family for nearly 18 years.  On the day last month when I realized that Buddy’s quality of life had come to an end, I had to face that brutal decision that no one wants to.  I had to put him to sleep.

I promised him that when he was ready to go, I would hold him so he would feel loved and supported.  I couldn’t do that for my other dog, but I made sure I could help Buddy cross the Rainbow Bridge knowing that he was loved.

And that he was The Best Dog in the World.

Buddy the Dachshund

2008 – 2026