More than half a year has passed now since my husband lost his ring. It happened after a whole day of a frenzied cleaning in the house and of heavy food shopping outside. By the time he realised the ring was no longer on his finger, it was dark outside and hours of re-tracing his steps with a torch and running to the shops before they closed proved absolutely fruitless. After an adrenaline filled hour of searching through rubbish bin bags, electric hoover bags, drains and of turning everything upside down and inside out again and finding a plethora of other things, but not the ring, I was left full of a superstitious heavy despair and a deep genuine sadness. Then I thought a lot of my Grandmother and her way with lost and missing things and her image and words came back as vivid as ever and I saw her sitting there shaking her head and laughing the situation away.
My Grandmother had a habit for losing and misplacing things on a very regular basis. The years before she was confined to a bed, she would sit on her chair to clean vegetables, such as runner beans, parsley, spinach, potatoes, carrots, ladyfingers and so on. She started with a pile of one single vegetable in a plastic tub and she had with her a sharp knife and another empty plastic tub. She took absolutely ages to go through the vegetables and selected, cleaned and cut them so, so carefully and meticulously that around an hour or so later the previously empty tub was only half full with the most elegantly cut, selected and turned vegetables imaginable, while the other tub had doubled in size full of shavings, off cuts, stalks, stringy bits and rejected leaves. It always seemed to me such a huge waste that only one fifth of her grocery shopping, albeit in a beautiful condition, ever made it to the cooking pot. If I was in the house I had to censor the tub with the rejected bits, as within it one could find my Grandmother's glasses, her sharp knife, a pen, a lighter, matches, paper clips, rubbers, sharpeners, money and other such things. If no one was around to check the tub, more likely than not, we would have to retrieve the rubbish bag from the street and try to save some of the missing things. My mother always used the bags that the medicine were delivered in at her pharmacy as those bags had her surname printed on them and it made it much easier for us to retrieve them amongst all the other rubbish bin bags.
My Grandmother always said that she wished that things had a voice and could talk to you. That way you could just shout out at them when you lost them and then they would reply back so that you could find them in no time. All the wasted time lost in looking for all the misplaced things would be gained back. I would remind her then, that if things had a voice of their own they would probably wish to talk all the time and not just reserve the talking for when you called out to them and there would be so much noise, whispering and shouting out amongst them that it would make it unbearable to live. But my Grandmother shook her head and said that it was rubbish and that any sensible person should be able to block out anything that they did not wish to hear and only listen to what was important to them. I struggled to argue back with her when she came up with such weird things, so I had to make my peace with watching her finger around things in the house without her glasses, feeling for lost items and for her glasses, when all the while she was moving things around as she went and pleaded to God to give objects a voice of their own so that she could find everything that she had lost.
After my Grandmother was confined to her bed in her room and was unable to go to any other room, a great change came upon the household. Things still kept on getting lost, because by that time we had all acquired a feel for misplacing things, or worse for tidying each other's things away in the wrong place. But now my Grandmother had developed an amazing gift for finding where things were from the comforts of her bed. She would just ask a few questions, such as "so who gave you that book then?" and "was it the one that makes you laugh by yourself in your room?", "oh, I think that book must be at the bottom of your rucksack, under the pencil case". And that was where the book was. She helped my mother find important lost documents, tickets to the cinema, music cassettes and lost pairs of scissors without ever getting up from her bed. I started to wonder whether things were actually talking to her at last, but when I asked her about it she said she didn't need them to talk to her anymore.
After going through every single action my husband could remember doing the day he lost the ring, I obsessed about it enough and finally found myself focusing on an action I was convinced held the solution as to where the lost ring was. At some point during the cleaning frenzy he had shook a child's small weaved tapestry outside the back window. His fingers were cold from the chilly weather and thinner than normal and such a violent, shaking action could be able to remove a ring and send it flying very easily. Convinced by this fact and glad to finally be free of repeated and uncontrolled visualizations of countless ways the ring could have got lost, I started to try and re-create the actual scene of the misfortune. I took a beer bottle top and held it with my finger while shaking the small tapestry at the same time. I tried this three times and all three times the bottle tops were carried away by the shaking motion to the left, onto a patio belonging to a ground floor communal area. I soon realised this area was not accessible to the tenants and a high metal gate stood locked with a padlock on it, as if safeguarding the lost ring inside. I contemplated jumping over, but then I thought I might as well do it the right way and talk to the concierge about the incident, raising his awareness too, in case the ring was found by someone else in the vicinity. The concierge kindly unlocked the metal gate for me, but stayed there searching with me, making it impossible for me to search for a very long time or anywhere else but on that little patio. Above it there was an area of unruly growing weeds and reeds, but I was so self aware in my searching with the concierge over my head that I did not look there at all.
Deeply disappointed and mildly perplexed as to how and why my scientific approach to finding the ring had failed, I tried to rethink things that night before sleeping. Just as I was about to let go of the whole thing, succumb to sleep and finally make a welcome peace with losing the ring, I thought how the weight of it was all wrong. The beer bottle top was not only solid and not hollow in the middle (so wrong shape), it was also much lighter than a man's gold ring. And there the madness began of trying to find a metal wire, thick and heavy enough to re-create the actual size and weight of the ring so as to reenact the scene of the misfortune all over again. This time the fake rings were not carried away by the movement of shaking the tapestry to the left, but all fell further away and straight ahead in a little area between the railway tracks' fence and the fence of our block of flats. That thin strip of land was full of reeds,weeds, grass and pebbles and I was now convinced more than ever that I had indeed worked out where the lost ring was.
I thought then that if I in fact managed to find the ring in that little strip of land, I would be a kind of hero in my husband's eyes and also match my aunty's amazing achievement of finding a bundle of money she had lost as a student. She always told me this story during the summer holidays and I loved listening to it again and again. She had collected the money of her fellow students and her own, as she always did on the first of every month. The marble sculpture students all lived and practiced on the island of Tinos and rented an old lady's island house in a small village. My aunty took her bike and had to ride all the way the the capital of the island to the old lady's son's house where she would present her with the money. On the way there she had lots of other chores to do, drop off things to different people, stop to mail letters and feed some stray dogs on the way. She also stopped to drink some water in a fresh water spring of a small village in the middle of the way and met there a very elderly lady who she took cookies to. All the while the money was rolled in a bundle secured with an elastic band which she kept in her fist while riding the bike and in her pocket at all other times, as she always had done before. But that particular time, when she reached the capital and was about to ring the old lady's bell, she realised in a moment of cold blind panic that the money was no longer in her pocket and no longer in her fist. She cycled all the way back and stopped at every single place she had stopped before, talking and asking every single soul she met if they had seen a bundle of money or heard of anyone who might have come across it. After a fruitless search, exhausted and absolutely at a loss of how that money could be raised again and how to break the news to her house mates and to the old lady, she went straight to bed having decided not to tell anyone about the lost money yet and to find it first thing in the morning.
During that night, my aunty played back in her mind, just like a movie, every single scene of that day and tried to see it from the perspective of the lost bundle of money. She described it as follows: she tried to be the bundle of money and see how it felt at that right moment; was the bundle warm in someone's hand or was it laying cold in the night dropped somewhere along the way? And then she felt it; she could feel the frozen water and she could almost see the pebbles and the wet slippery moss and hear the slow, melodic gurgling of the spring water. The bundle was laying there in the spring's little pond, covered in freezing water, the moon shining above it, just where she had bent to drink the cold water directly from the spring using both her hands as a cup. She was so sure of it, there was no doubt in her mind about it, so that she got up, got dressed and sat outside waiting for the first ray of light to appear behind the mountain. And when there was light enough to ride, she went off on her bike, as fast as she could and when she reached the fresh water spring with its little pond she bent down and stretched her hand and as sure as the day light, there was the bundle of money, just as she had seen it in her mind the night before.
The problem was that there was no way I could get to that strip of land between the train tracks and the building. I could potentially jump over the fence of our building, but how could I get the concierge to let me through the first gate and then make him leave me alone so that I could jump over the fence? Jumping from the railway side of the fence was even more difficult to achieve as there are cameras there and I would probably get arrested if I got caught. I thought of befriending a rail worker and ask him politely to look for me for the ring. Then I thought of approaching the railway staff and asking them to let me through and check myself when the trains no longer run. But I was told that freight trains run all night through, a fact that I already knew very well, and that members of the public and passengers and in fact the staff themselves, were not allowed behind the railway tracks. I noticed that occasionally some gardeners worked on the weeds and planted flowers on the other side of the rails, but despite observing them every day they never worked on the thin strip of unruly grass on my side of the rails,but instead stayed put and beautified the opposite side. So what else was I to do but use my binoculars from the back window to observe inch by inch all the undergrowth and plants on the thin strip of land. I was quite amazed of how much detail one can see if one concentrates on a very small sample of something. I was really hoping to be writing this post once I had found the ring, but such a thing has unfortunately not happened yet. I am starting to make my peace with the possibility that we might never find the ring and that we might need to get a new one. This fact still brings a deep sadness in me, but one that is now mixed up with a bit of disappointment for not been able to find it. But I am still convinced that the ring is somewhere around and I am now left with a very strange habit of looking down from the window at the undergrowth with the binoculars while confused passengers occasionally look up at me from the train platform wondering what exactly I could be looking at.
My Grandmother had a habit for losing and misplacing things on a very regular basis. The years before she was confined to a bed, she would sit on her chair to clean vegetables, such as runner beans, parsley, spinach, potatoes, carrots, ladyfingers and so on. She started with a pile of one single vegetable in a plastic tub and she had with her a sharp knife and another empty plastic tub. She took absolutely ages to go through the vegetables and selected, cleaned and cut them so, so carefully and meticulously that around an hour or so later the previously empty tub was only half full with the most elegantly cut, selected and turned vegetables imaginable, while the other tub had doubled in size full of shavings, off cuts, stalks, stringy bits and rejected leaves. It always seemed to me such a huge waste that only one fifth of her grocery shopping, albeit in a beautiful condition, ever made it to the cooking pot. If I was in the house I had to censor the tub with the rejected bits, as within it one could find my Grandmother's glasses, her sharp knife, a pen, a lighter, matches, paper clips, rubbers, sharpeners, money and other such things. If no one was around to check the tub, more likely than not, we would have to retrieve the rubbish bag from the street and try to save some of the missing things. My mother always used the bags that the medicine were delivered in at her pharmacy as those bags had her surname printed on them and it made it much easier for us to retrieve them amongst all the other rubbish bin bags.
My Grandmother always said that she wished that things had a voice and could talk to you. That way you could just shout out at them when you lost them and then they would reply back so that you could find them in no time. All the wasted time lost in looking for all the misplaced things would be gained back. I would remind her then, that if things had a voice of their own they would probably wish to talk all the time and not just reserve the talking for when you called out to them and there would be so much noise, whispering and shouting out amongst them that it would make it unbearable to live. But my Grandmother shook her head and said that it was rubbish and that any sensible person should be able to block out anything that they did not wish to hear and only listen to what was important to them. I struggled to argue back with her when she came up with such weird things, so I had to make my peace with watching her finger around things in the house without her glasses, feeling for lost items and for her glasses, when all the while she was moving things around as she went and pleaded to God to give objects a voice of their own so that she could find everything that she had lost.
After my Grandmother was confined to her bed in her room and was unable to go to any other room, a great change came upon the household. Things still kept on getting lost, because by that time we had all acquired a feel for misplacing things, or worse for tidying each other's things away in the wrong place. But now my Grandmother had developed an amazing gift for finding where things were from the comforts of her bed. She would just ask a few questions, such as "so who gave you that book then?" and "was it the one that makes you laugh by yourself in your room?", "oh, I think that book must be at the bottom of your rucksack, under the pencil case". And that was where the book was. She helped my mother find important lost documents, tickets to the cinema, music cassettes and lost pairs of scissors without ever getting up from her bed. I started to wonder whether things were actually talking to her at last, but when I asked her about it she said she didn't need them to talk to her anymore.
After going through every single action my husband could remember doing the day he lost the ring, I obsessed about it enough and finally found myself focusing on an action I was convinced held the solution as to where the lost ring was. At some point during the cleaning frenzy he had shook a child's small weaved tapestry outside the back window. His fingers were cold from the chilly weather and thinner than normal and such a violent, shaking action could be able to remove a ring and send it flying very easily. Convinced by this fact and glad to finally be free of repeated and uncontrolled visualizations of countless ways the ring could have got lost, I started to try and re-create the actual scene of the misfortune. I took a beer bottle top and held it with my finger while shaking the small tapestry at the same time. I tried this three times and all three times the bottle tops were carried away by the shaking motion to the left, onto a patio belonging to a ground floor communal area. I soon realised this area was not accessible to the tenants and a high metal gate stood locked with a padlock on it, as if safeguarding the lost ring inside. I contemplated jumping over, but then I thought I might as well do it the right way and talk to the concierge about the incident, raising his awareness too, in case the ring was found by someone else in the vicinity. The concierge kindly unlocked the metal gate for me, but stayed there searching with me, making it impossible for me to search for a very long time or anywhere else but on that little patio. Above it there was an area of unruly growing weeds and reeds, but I was so self aware in my searching with the concierge over my head that I did not look there at all.
Deeply disappointed and mildly perplexed as to how and why my scientific approach to finding the ring had failed, I tried to rethink things that night before sleeping. Just as I was about to let go of the whole thing, succumb to sleep and finally make a welcome peace with losing the ring, I thought how the weight of it was all wrong. The beer bottle top was not only solid and not hollow in the middle (so wrong shape), it was also much lighter than a man's gold ring. And there the madness began of trying to find a metal wire, thick and heavy enough to re-create the actual size and weight of the ring so as to reenact the scene of the misfortune all over again. This time the fake rings were not carried away by the movement of shaking the tapestry to the left, but all fell further away and straight ahead in a little area between the railway tracks' fence and the fence of our block of flats. That thin strip of land was full of reeds,weeds, grass and pebbles and I was now convinced more than ever that I had indeed worked out where the lost ring was.
I thought then that if I in fact managed to find the ring in that little strip of land, I would be a kind of hero in my husband's eyes and also match my aunty's amazing achievement of finding a bundle of money she had lost as a student. She always told me this story during the summer holidays and I loved listening to it again and again. She had collected the money of her fellow students and her own, as she always did on the first of every month. The marble sculpture students all lived and practiced on the island of Tinos and rented an old lady's island house in a small village. My aunty took her bike and had to ride all the way the the capital of the island to the old lady's son's house where she would present her with the money. On the way there she had lots of other chores to do, drop off things to different people, stop to mail letters and feed some stray dogs on the way. She also stopped to drink some water in a fresh water spring of a small village in the middle of the way and met there a very elderly lady who she took cookies to. All the while the money was rolled in a bundle secured with an elastic band which she kept in her fist while riding the bike and in her pocket at all other times, as she always had done before. But that particular time, when she reached the capital and was about to ring the old lady's bell, she realised in a moment of cold blind panic that the money was no longer in her pocket and no longer in her fist. She cycled all the way back and stopped at every single place she had stopped before, talking and asking every single soul she met if they had seen a bundle of money or heard of anyone who might have come across it. After a fruitless search, exhausted and absolutely at a loss of how that money could be raised again and how to break the news to her house mates and to the old lady, she went straight to bed having decided not to tell anyone about the lost money yet and to find it first thing in the morning.
During that night, my aunty played back in her mind, just like a movie, every single scene of that day and tried to see it from the perspective of the lost bundle of money. She described it as follows: she tried to be the bundle of money and see how it felt at that right moment; was the bundle warm in someone's hand or was it laying cold in the night dropped somewhere along the way? And then she felt it; she could feel the frozen water and she could almost see the pebbles and the wet slippery moss and hear the slow, melodic gurgling of the spring water. The bundle was laying there in the spring's little pond, covered in freezing water, the moon shining above it, just where she had bent to drink the cold water directly from the spring using both her hands as a cup. She was so sure of it, there was no doubt in her mind about it, so that she got up, got dressed and sat outside waiting for the first ray of light to appear behind the mountain. And when there was light enough to ride, she went off on her bike, as fast as she could and when she reached the fresh water spring with its little pond she bent down and stretched her hand and as sure as the day light, there was the bundle of money, just as she had seen it in her mind the night before.
The problem was that there was no way I could get to that strip of land between the train tracks and the building. I could potentially jump over the fence of our building, but how could I get the concierge to let me through the first gate and then make him leave me alone so that I could jump over the fence? Jumping from the railway side of the fence was even more difficult to achieve as there are cameras there and I would probably get arrested if I got caught. I thought of befriending a rail worker and ask him politely to look for me for the ring. Then I thought of approaching the railway staff and asking them to let me through and check myself when the trains no longer run. But I was told that freight trains run all night through, a fact that I already knew very well, and that members of the public and passengers and in fact the staff themselves, were not allowed behind the railway tracks. I noticed that occasionally some gardeners worked on the weeds and planted flowers on the other side of the rails, but despite observing them every day they never worked on the thin strip of unruly grass on my side of the rails,but instead stayed put and beautified the opposite side. So what else was I to do but use my binoculars from the back window to observe inch by inch all the undergrowth and plants on the thin strip of land. I was quite amazed of how much detail one can see if one concentrates on a very small sample of something. I was really hoping to be writing this post once I had found the ring, but such a thing has unfortunately not happened yet. I am starting to make my peace with the possibility that we might never find the ring and that we might need to get a new one. This fact still brings a deep sadness in me, but one that is now mixed up with a bit of disappointment for not been able to find it. But I am still convinced that the ring is somewhere around and I am now left with a very strange habit of looking down from the window at the undergrowth with the binoculars while confused passengers occasionally look up at me from the train platform wondering what exactly I could be looking at.
Observe carefully a small section of an undergrowth and using clay (adjust the materials according to the students' age: e.g. use play dough or plasticine for younger students) create a tile and on it recreate the textures and shapes you have observed. Create at least three different marks in relief and three different marks as indentations. You can collect articles from the undergrowth (twigs, seeds, pebbles etc.) and you can use household equipment (rolling pin, garlic squeezer etc.) to help you make your marks. Each tile should also contain a creepy-crawly creature (worm, snail, ladybird etc).
Lesson for year 7 students from a great Art teacher at a school in Brentwood, Essex.
Bellissimi lavori e come sempre un accurato racconto di Natalia Charogianni
ReplyDeleteThank you very much Rocco. Mille Grazie, Natalia
DeleteI know this intimate voice (or more than one) that guide you when you don't have the eyes to see. We live in a creation that teams with life, and is benevolent and carrying, it is dark it is light and all things in between. Never shoot the Messenger, he or she may just have been the most valuable next step to share with you to over come a belief that limits you from experiencing all of you and the love that surrounds you.
ReplyDeleteThank you very much for reading my blog and for your insightful comment.
DeleteNatalia