Past Blogs

“Wear a crown of eyes around your head,” was the advice of Joan Miro’s art teacher in Barcelona. That is wonderful advice for any student who yearns to be more observant.

“Do not put your eyeballs in your forehead,” is what I tell my middle school students in my best teacher voice. My younger students draw spontaneously and would be harmed by constant criticism. But by middle school, the techniques of art are appropriate subject matter, and a lesson in self portraits always includes warnings about eyeball placement. Then I add, “Don’t make me go crazy when I walk around the room in fifteen minutes and your eyeballs are where your brain is supposed to be…literally.” The kids laugh, knowing they would never do that.

The students start drawing and erasing, and I hold up examples of portraits by da Vinci, Rembrandt, Matisse, Grant Wood  and Alex Katz. I note that these masters do not situate eyeballs in their sitter’s foreheads.

I begin my walk around the room and stop at a desk. I quietly say to the student, “Look hard at what you have just drawn. Do you see anything wrong?”

A short period of silence is followed by a sheepish voice saying,”I put my eyes in my forehead.”

“Well, you did draw that eyeball beautifully,” I will add. “Now draw it again and try to put it where it belongs.”

This exchange happens all the time, and, almost always, the artist and I can laugh about it.

Getting the details right, but failing to see how the details fit into the bigger picture causes grief in more than art classes. That tower at Pisa has beautiful detailing on the outer walls. None of us is immune.

Brains are great things to have, but they can lead our eyes seriously astray.

Here are 2 kindergarten portraits, and 4 middle school portraits by my students.

I’ve always loved Fridays. I was born on a Friday and have been looking forward to these exceptional days ever since.

As a child growing up in a Catholic family in the 1950s, I asked the same question then as I do now: How can giving up meat be viewed as a sacrifice? My mother cooked all my favorite meals on meatless Fridays; home made macaroni and cheese, fish fillets topped with buttered crumbs, tuna casserole. And to top that off, bedtime was extended. I viewed staying up late as one of the best perks of adulthood.

Fridays continue to charm. The concept of a seven day week is, of course, totally arbitrary, being without any astronomical underpinnings. Nothing goes around anything. Perhaps the week was invented to accommodate the deeply felt human need for T.G.I.F. .

Friday is named after my all time favorite mythological figure, Freyja (fray ya),  the Norse goddess of love, beauty, battle and magic. She was the leader of the Valkyries and the strongest female figure in the Nordic pantheon of superheroes. Freyja was wife to Od (who mysteriously disappeared) and mistress to many. She broached no nonsense from guy gods but made love to four dwarfs who crafted her magical necklace named Brisingamen. Freyja wept tears of gold which turned to amber if they fell into the sea.

Freyja’s mode of transportation was stellar: she had a chariot pulled by two large gray…some say blue…cats. These fabulous feline totems were named Bygul (bee gool) and Trjegul (tree gool). Today’s popular image of a witch with a black cat originates from Freyja and her cats. She is the goddess of cats and those who care for them.

So when Friday rolls around, relax, anticipate the weekend, slowly eat a lovely dinner and raise a glass to Freyja and her cats. All those other love goddesses, Venus, Aphrodite, Lakshmi and Erzulie must be jealous. They don’t get a cat chariot.

I have figured out the ultimate solution to my footwear needs. Only two items are needed, sandals and cowboy boots.

Despite my parents’ best efforts, I spent most of my childhood and teen years with bandages on my bleeding feet. Tender skin is standard equipment for redheads.

Shortly after I married, my husband valiantly tried to end my foot agony. He took me to an upscale shoe store and plunked down two weeks of grocery money for the “perfect fitting” shoes. One hour later, I was limping to the bandage box.

It took many years, but now my feet are always happy. From May to Halloween, I only wear sandals. All of them come from thrift stores so someone else has broken them in. A little scrub, and they’re good for many comfortable miles.

Winter in Wisconsin requires me to enclose my feet. A gorgeous solution presented itself one lucky day at Goodwill. Someone had deacquisitioned a pair of  red leather Dingos, genuine cowboy boots. “They’ll tear your feet to ribbons,” my brain warned me.

I slipped one on. The arch support was high as a skyscraper and my toes weren’t anywhere near the pointy front. The leather felt like velvet.

I wore those boots every day (November to May) for the next eight years. Finally, I wore a hole right through the leather uppers. After their demise, a parent at my school questioned if I could really be Mrs. Tooley without my red boots.

My current  cowboy boots, a tooled black pair, and I will part ways for a while in a few weeks. But spring has been slow to arrive this year, and I set off to school this morning shod in cowboy boots. When they go in the closet, that’s when spring begins for me.

We’re spinning, and it’s not a lazy twirl. Zipping around at 700 to 900 miles per hour at mid-latitudes is major travel.

Each dawn our rock spins toward the sun; each dusk it spins away into darkness. Being the most egotistical species on the planet, we say the sun rises and sets, implying that our star ascends and falls in the heavens to create our days and nights.

Intellectually, we know that the sun isn’t doing the moving and “rise” is a stunningly inaccurate word.

Diane Ackerman in her elegant book, Dawn Light, tells the true scenario:

“Night falls, we say, as if it were the closing curtain in a one-act play. But, really, day falls – we fall toward and roll away from the sun.”

I understood that earth is spinning like a top by age four. I had to wait until I was forty to internalize that fact. My husband and I were sitting in O’Hare Airport and drinking coffee waiting to board a plane to Europe, a long flight from east to west. The conversation veered to the implications of flying fast against the earth’s west to east revolution. I could sense the disorientation that was about to occur to my body’s circadian rhythms. I’ve felt like a space traveler ever since.

As we become more and more interactive with technology, we become less and less in touch with the natural forces that dictate our lives. Magical thinking sets in, and it’s not good magic…global warming is denied, nuclear plants are built over fault lines, water is polluted and resources recklessly squandered.

Would we be jolted out of our stupor if one morning our little, blue planet failed to spin into the sun?

Here is one simple idea to help us reconnect. It’s a question I ask my elementary school students when we study the solar system, and it refers to a bigger trip than our daily spin. “How many times have you personally gone around the sun?”

I am usually greeted with puzzled stares or denials that this feat is possible. But then one child connects and blurts out their age.

So on your next birthday, ponder the number of trips you have taken around our star. It’s enlightening.

It appears as though I have become a pariah to 50% of my fellow Americans. Strangely, it’s the same old me: I haven’t changed. But to half of America, it’s now a sin to be a Democrat.

I don’t intend to change. Inside I’m still the little girl who listened to her father talk about being beaten up by the company thugs at the foundry where he worked as a young man. His offense? He was on strike for a five day, forty hour workweek. The factory owners weren’t Democrats.

I married into a Republican family. Forty-seven years ago, political affiliations were of little or no concern. My husband’s family were from a small farming community in northern Wisconsin, and they were more concerned that I could not tell a Guernsey from a Holstein, and that I would not be able to feed their son properly.

My husband and I lived on the unfashionable south side of Milwaukee for over thirty years. The south side is the epicenter for all things Democratic. Our monthly party meetings were held at Serb Hall which in addition to Democrats featured fish fries on Friday (both regular and Serbian), bowling alleys, a wedding hall and a bar. A sign hung behind the bar which read,”No standing on the jukebox.”

Our kids are Democrats, too. I think I know why. When we went to our monthly party meeting at Serb Hall, their Great Aunt Vi came over to babysit. They adored her and couldn’t wait for us to leave. Aunt Vi was on a par with the Cat in a Hat. On several occasions our meetings were canceled, but we didn’t tell anyone. Aunt Vi and the kids would have been too disappointed. We just left and had coffee for three hours.

Besides the fact that I was born with Democratic genes, I think I would have chosen the Party anyway. Democrats have more fun. Sure we mess up, fight among ourselves and air our differences for all to see. But we can also laugh with each other and at ourselves. Along with Will Rogers I am proud to say,”I am not a member of any organized political party…I am a Democrat.”

And for any Republicans out there, how can you hate a person who has to be told not to stand on a jukebox?