Dear Family and Friends,

It is the end of fantasy,
the matured bones have returned home
to sit in the old wicker chair
& dwell on a mystery drive
down a country road with pebbles flying.

I love the arts, I really do...and it isn't because I am really talented or
gifted in any one of them. You could call me a dabbler actually...or say that
I go on art binges.

Of course, you know this already...she who writes Sunday Passage week after
week with burning candles, Andre Bocelli playing in the background, surrounded
by books of poetry and rain...always rain. Sometimes I write from a country
far away...or in a friend's kitchen...or on an island that I love...usually
just at home as I wind down my week ends with you as I write on my old English
pub table.

But I mean I really explore the arts...my house and life are full of
testimony to that fact. I have a lovely old piano that I try to play every
day...usually the same songs over and over again. I remember when my sons went to
college, it was my only consolation to play the piano (I think it was Phantom of
the Opera) late into the night hours weeping onto the piano keys. (Artists are
very emotional and passionate, you know). I have some wonderful instruments
high on my library shelf from passionate purchases...a Celtic harp that I
bought during an intermission of a show because my friend, Nancy, said I just had
to have one for my storytelling shows. Oh, how I love that harp...I take it
down and dust it every once in a while, pluck a couple of strings and think how
enchanting it would be to play it...I sigh...place it back on the shelf. I
have a handmade flute from a native American, Two Crows....again, he said for my
storytelling...it, also is enchanting...I cannot make one sound out of
it...but doesn't it look lovely next to the harp...and the dulcimer and thumb piano
and the list goes on.

My spirit is an invisible chauffeur, nameless
his engine runs on air, it purrs
its thoughts like a clean electrical animal.

Sometimes I take out my paints (I have them all...oil, water base, chalk, pen
and ink) and my papers and I draw and sketch and swirl. I like showing these
to children, they think my art is wonderful! After a time they too go back
into the closet as I take out my new love of photography and making my own note
cards....

Sometimes when I am tired of rehearsing stories (yes, I actually do that!) I
pull that mike off the stand and sing...sad, sappy songs..Don't Cry for Me,
Argentina, or Memory, or something from Les Miz. I sing and weep and just know
I could have won the Oscar had someone known about me. Sigh.
My children know only too well of their growing up years..Italian dinners
with poetry and music to match..Emily Dickinson nights...Solstice nights..ghost
story nights...Christmas sings (everyone bring their favorite poem to recite!).
I remember camping with them on the shores of Lake Superior reciting
Hiawatha...or reading literature to them in hotel rooms and trains and tensts. They
are all grown up and gone, I can only hope that occasionally they will set the
table with red and white napkins and listen to Bocelli.

We park beside a dream, by the leaves at a lake
the dark water widens her brow, a woman
whose stillness is love on a picnic Sunday
& whose breathing is heard by the infants of memory.

So who is left for me to influence? My neighbors, my kids at school. My
eleven year old neighbor, Mackenzie and I have moon journals. We sit outside on
my stoop and write about the night. We write and draw about Saturn and Venus
and Van Gogh. I talk and tell her stories. She listens. Then we both listen
to the night and watch the clouds race across the face of the moon as I recite
to her The Highwayman.

I have such a wonderful job at school...teaching theatre and all of the arts
that go with it...I write grants, bring in artist groups..expose children to
all that I can in the time that I have. Today I took (well, along with
colleagues, Tonya and Colleen) 33 elementary students to celebrate the arts in Fort
Wayne to the FAME festival, The Foundation for Art and Music in Elementary
Education. We all dressed up in our Sunday best (we are artists, I reminded
them) and went on the school bus (OK, we had to get there somehow!!) The event
took place in the newly reconstructed Grand Wayne center and it was full of art.
The theme for this year was East Central and South Africa. We spent an hour
listening to the Fort Wayne Philhamonic. They were exposed to composers such
as Rossini, Verdi, Saint-Saens....we walked through exhibit after exhibit of
African art and spent the last hour with hands on activities. They had so many
choices. They could make a Silver headress, the cloth of Zaire, the cloth of
Ghana, Zulu beadery, African Batik, masks...they wore their pieces of art as
quickly as they made them. They hardly asked for anything..only a couple of
times for water and a bathroom break...and only a few asked me when we were
going to McDonalds while we were enthralled in the music of Verdi. Only one
small conflict arose during Rossini, and it really seemed to be more fun to put
the seats up and down while we were giving a standing ovation...all in all,
they were well behaved.

Most carried home with them small clay Nigerian masks with instructions to
bake them at home. They were sealed in small plastic bags and decorated with
beads. They showed them one at a time to me on the bus...but it only took one
child to smush the clay...one by one the masks began to disappear...instead of
Nigerian masks, we now had Groucho Marx eyebrows...handle bar
moustaches..moles...warts...and other facial matter too inappropriate to mention....up and
down the bus. No one went home with a mask...but they certainly entertained
themselves on the way home.

All I hope is that when they are grown up...they might decide to take their
own children to an art's fair. As one little girl replied as she got off the
bus...I get it...it was all about Africa...yes, she did get it.
In a small sky the driver is less than invisitble;
I see the knuckles of his white gloves, his exitence
is irrelevant; what is important is the life
& the motion that follows the footsteps into the water.
Joe Rosenblatt

And now on this to-be-rainy night for this misplaced artist...I think I'll
take down my harp and plunk out a string or two.
Until next week,
Lou Ann

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