Perfect Picture

After I posted last week I realized that cemeteries would have been a more appropriate post for this week, oh well. This is a memory I wrote. It is part of a larger memoir I have to write for one of my classes (unless I edit it out :) ).

We stared out at the gray rock in the ocean, like the head of a seal poking it's head above the waves.

“Where are the seals?” My parents, siblings, and I heard the question, muttered by the congregated tourists. We mirrored the skies and the calling sea gulls.

“Can I see the binoculars?” My dad asked my mom. She unlooped them from around her neck and passed them to him.

The water moved hypnotically below, the gray of the Pacific crashing into white. Tired of looking for the missing seals on the distant rock, my fingers traced the rust marks on the guard rail. Suddenly a shout rose above the waves and the sea gulls. “There they are!”

A single seal had pulled its dark bulk out of the water onto the shelf of rock. That one seal's movement explained to its audience what to look for. We looked out and saw that the lumpy gray rock of moments before, had been transformed into a swarming hive of seals.

“Oh.” I paused, and then gave a little nod “I'm taking a picture!” My hands moved towards my eyes framing the rock and the seals as I pushed an imaginary camera button. “Click” I said, audibly, and stored away the 'picture' in my mind.

Cemetery

In cemeteries I have laughed, walked, taken pictures, spread flowers, eaten lunch, talked, thought, cleaned, and documented. (I was going to say "dug" but that doesn't sound right... but I have dug around gravestones that are half buried.)
My favorite are the old New England cemeteries, the dappled light amongst the trees, the soft mossy ground, the crumbling stones that read out old puritanical reproofs to live a better life.
Out west the cemeteries all seem so new, the stones covered in detailed etches of faces, horses, mountains and trucks (who wants a truck on their tombstone anyway?). It just isn't the same ambiance. I suppose, they tend to be a bit more somber too, considering on the newer gravestones I might see the name of someone I actually knew, instead of the long dead ancestors where the gravestone is all I know of them.
Names, dates and hopefully a precious line of something else, a poem, a commemoration, a title, from these a tiny bit of a history can be gleaned, understood or imagined. The death date of a baby son only a few days after the birth, and the grieving parents, only a row over, suddenly gain more life. Another tomb labeled "Mother, Wife, Friend" brings to mind my own mother. Was this long dead mother, loved for the same reasons mine is?
The quiet stones tell their own stories.

Bones

I decided that although I liked my last several posts I thought they were kind of boring to look at. So here is a picture I took this week. They are rib bones from my bone class. Osteology if you want to feel smart.
That class, among others, continually amazes me how divine this world is, how things have been created in such amazing perfection.
"all things denote there is a God" (Alma 30:44)

Painting Smudges

Water pours over my hands, and then flows into the yellow basin and down the drain. I halfheartedly rub my hands together, somehow missing the larger blotches of color. In the mirror I can see my reflection turn off the faucet and reach for the towel. Then, grabbing the plastic cup covered in layers of colors, I rinse it once more and leave the bathroom.
As I place the cup back on the table in my room, and line my still wet paintbrushes onto the Tupperware container that holds my paint I critically examine the two feet high canvas. The patchy outline of a phoenix flies through a starred sky. It's a good beginning. I reach out to push it back from the edge of the table. The back of my hands are speckled with faint white freckles, and smudges of blue the color of the night sky reach up to my elbows. How they got up that far, I don't know. Good. I think again, that means I've actually done something today.
Several minutes later my dad comes home from work and my mom calls me for supper. I kneel across from her, my dad making the third point of our triangle.
"You're shirt looks kind of messy." My dad points out to my mother as he sits down at the table.
"That's what happens when you work all day" my mom replies, excusing the vibrantly mashed strawberries spotting her front.
Today, like every other day I can remember, she had worked hard. Today's occupation happened to be paring, slicing, and drying pears, picking strawberries and cooking meals.
My family gets frustrated with me when I tell them I won't go into art. "What's the point?" I say "Art is useless."
The next day, blue smudges still make a pattern up my arm. For some reason the washcloth brushed over them lightly.

Defining Friends

A long time ago I had a conversation with someone about what a friend really was. Opinionatedly I told him that a friend was someone you could be completely yourself around at all times. My companion disagreed and he told me that my definition was too extreme.... I wondered why I had no friends.
After a little more life experience and time (especially serving a mission) I have revised my statement. I don't think I am ever "completely me" with one person. I adapt my interests and ideas, the things I talk about and how I say them depending on who I'm communicating with. No matter who it is. Is that wrong? Am I two-faced, or ten-faced? It is not that I am trying to be dishonest or am necessarily hiding things, but I just adapt. I guess I really am a chameleon.
The other interesting note I have to say about friends is finding them. I have made friends (no I still haven't defined what that means) because of convenience (age/location). I have made them because I was living with them 24/7 and it was better to be friends then enemies. I have made them when someone else initiated contact and friendship. I have come to call many people friends, a lot of whom I have nothing in common with. How does that work? It is not about "clicking."
While serving my year and a half mission I served with seven different people. Sometimes we would ask each other "would we have been friends in high school?" Sometimes the answer was yes -we would have searched each other out because of similarities in interests or opinions- but sometimes it would have been no. Either way, we are friends now. And that is important.
Friendship is about love and service and time. Friendship is not about me, about being "myself" completely. It is about them, do I love them, serve them, listen to them, laugh with them. That is friendship.