SUNDAY, JUNE 27, 1999
Mine

I finished a painting on Friday, and I want to tell you about it carefully, because I don't trust myself when I'm pleased.

It's thirty by forty inches, which by 1997 standards is a postage stamp. It's the creek at about seven in the evening, from my window: the water, the bulkhead, the back of the scrap yard, a tug pushing a barge of gravel toward the East River. Nothing happens in it. The light is going. That's all.

But the light is right. The water is that particular green-brown-violet that the creek gets for twenty minutes in June, and I got it, not by accident, by looking. I mixed it on the palette slowly, the way you'd tune a radio. I put it down with the wrist on the stick and the tremor running through it, and the tremor is in the brushwork now, a little flutter in the edges, and I've decided I like it. It looks like air moving.

It doesn't hum like the comet painting. It hums lower. It's a pilot light, not a bonfire.

Arturo came in and stood in front of it for a while with his hands in his back pockets. Then he said, "There you are." That's all he said. Then he went back down the hall.

I made it on a Tuesday afternoon, after eight hours of sleep and a bowl of oatmeal, between a blood test and a class. I'm calling it Creek, June. It's the first thing in two years I'd put my name on without apologizing.

THURSDAY, JUNE 10, 1999

The radio says the bombing in Yugoslavia has stopped. I've watched the refugee lines from Kosovo on the news all spring, whole families on tractors pulling hay wagons, and every night I thought about how little I have to complain about and then complained anyway.

Lab this morning. The Mets tattoo has had a baby and is on maternity leave, and the new technician took two tries and apologized both times. Level 0.8. Kidneys fine. Thyroid fine. I am, medically speaking, a well-maintained 1949 sedan.

The school asked if I'd teach the summer session in July and August, same nights. I said yes. This time I thought about it first, for about four seconds.

THURSDAY, MAY 20, 1999

Last class of the spring term tonight. We pinned everybody's work up around the room and walked it like a gallery, with jug wine and a bag of pretzels.

Hector, my retired letter carrier, who spent thirty-one years walking the same route in the Bronx and started the term painting like he was filling out a change-of-address form, brought in a painting of his mother's kitchen in Ponce from memory. A blue wall, a yellow oilcloth, a window with a mango tree in it. The blue is wrong. The yellow is wrong. It's the best thing in the room. He stood next to it and couldn't look at it, and I knew exactly how he felt.

Twelve people signed up in February; ten finished. That's apparently very good. The woman who runs the program told me they want me back in the fall. I walked to the subway afterwards and I noticed I was walking fast, and I made myself slow down and check: Sleeping? Yes. Spending? No. Talking a mile a minute? A little, but it was a party.

Ben stood in line all Tuesday night for the midnight show of the new Star Wars. He's twenty-seven and married and he brought a sleeping bag. Laurel says he came home at four in the morning and woke her to describe it. I'm so proud I can hardly stand it.

SUNDAY, APRIL 25, 1999

Some news that isn't news to anybody but me and two credit card companies: this month I paid off the last of the 1997 paint. Nine thousand dollars of cadmium and linen, bought in about five weeks, paid back over twenty-one months, at an interest rate I don't want to think about. I cut up the cards on the kitchen table with the good scissors.

And something's moving in the work. Small things, in the mornings, before I go into the city for class. The light on the creek. The radiator again, but better. It's like the difference between saying the words to a song and singing it. I'm singing a little. Quietly. In the shower.

I keep checking myself for signs, the way you pat your pockets for keys. It's slow. That's how I know it's all right. When it's the other thing, it's never slow.

SUNDAY, MARCH 14, 1999

Fifty, as of yesterday.

Ben and Laurel took me to the Polish place on Nassau Avenue, same as every year, and the waitress, who has been there since before Ben had teeth, brought out a slice of cheesecake with a candle in it and sang in Polish, and the whole room joined in, including three men at the bar I've never seen before in my life.

Lenore sent a card. A Matisse on the front, the one with the goldfish. Inside, one line in her handwriting: "Fifty looks good on you. — L." I've stood it up on the windowsill next to the lobster buoy.

Fifty. I figured on the way home that I've been ill for about half my life and known it for eighteen years and treated it, really treated it, for less than two. Put that way it sounds like a lot of wasted time. Put another way, I'm fifty, I teach on Tuesday nights, and I got cheesecake. I'm choosing the second way today. Ask me again tomorrow.

THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 25, 1999

Four weeks in. Here's a thing I didn't expect: I'm good at this.

Tonight I did the color lesson, the one I've been thinking about for twenty years without knowing it was a lesson. I put a gray square of paper on a red sheet and a gray square on a green sheet and asked them if the grays were the same. Nobody believed me. Then I cut a hole in a card and they looked through it, and the grays were the same, and the nursing student in the back row said "Oh!" out loud, like she'd been pinched. That "oh" is the whole reason to teach anybody anything.

On the way home I felt lit up, and it frightened me. So Monday I asked Dr. L.: how do I know the difference between happy and the thing? He asked if I was sleeping. Yes, seven hours. Spending? No. Racing? No. "Then it's probably happy," he said. "You're allowed. Call me if it stops being probable."

I wrote PROBABLY HAPPY on a piece of tape and stuck it on the mirror.

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 2, 1999 — late

First class tonight. Painting I: Color and Light, Tuesday and Thursday, seven to ten, fourth floor, room with a skylight and radiators that knock like Arturo at two in the morning.

Twelve students. A retired mail carrier. A nursing student who works days. A lawyer who says he wants to "loosen up" and holds a brush like a fountain pen. Two sisters in their sixties who paint together on Sundays. A kid of nineteen who is better than I was at nineteen and has no idea.

I was so nervous I drank a whole bottle of water before I walked in, which, with the lithium, meant I spent the break sprinting down the hall. I told them I'm a painter and I've been one for thirty years. I didn't tell them the rest. It isn't a secret. It just isn't the syllabus.

My hands shook when I demonstrated a wash. I said, "Watch how the tremor breaks up the edge. You can do that on purpose." Two of them wrote it down.

SUNDAY, JANUARY 17, 1999

I got the job. The interview was in an office with a dead ficus in it, and the woman who runs the program asked what I'd teach, and I talked about color for twenty minutes before I noticed she'd stopped writing and was just listening. That's either very good or very bad. It was good.

Mailed back the signed contract on Monday. Thirty-three cents. It would have been thirty-two last week. The Postal Service and I are both getting more expensive.

Now I have to write a syllabus. I've never written a syllabus. I've barely written a grocery list. I bought a yellow legal pad and have so far written "WEEK ONE" and underlined it three times.

FRIDAY, JANUARY 1, 1999

Resolutions:

1. Take the pills.
2. Teach the class, if they'll have me.
3. Paint one thing I'm not ashamed of.
4. Floss.

In order of difficulty: 4, 3, 2, 1. Some days 1, 2, 3, 4.