Art inspired me to write
Las Cruses
Yesterday I left the historic Mabel Dodge Luhan House to find the crosses of old Taos made famous by one of my favorite late turn-of-the-century painters, Georgia O’Keefe. I walked down to the main road from the house without a clear idea of where they were, except for the names of a few lanes that someone had mentioned the night before. I walked down Kit Carson Road, remembering what a friend had said about the locals wanting to change the name to something more palatable to the locals in honor of the natives. Good thing, I thought. When I found the road named “Las Cruses,” I knew it was the right one; “cruses” being the word for crosses in Spanish of course.
It was a narrow path lined with a scribbly bark fence along one side and attractive adobe houses on the other. I walked along admiring the homes with their red chili garlands and turquoise doors, until I found “Penitente Rd.,” and took a left following along a path flanking an old cemetery full of crosses bedecked with artificial and real flowers — hard to tell which were which, not that it mattered.
Cemeteries have always frightened me, just as much as they attracted me aesthetically in an irresistible way and challenged my sense of equilibrium. What misfortune was going to befall me, I wondered. But I calmed myself by saying that if I didn’t take any photos this time, then nothing bad would happen. It was in Armadale, Victoria, in Australia, that, after taking a photo of a tombstone marked simply, “Mary 1894” I received the most expensive speeding ticket ever, as I sped away from that old settler’s graveyard.
My mind back in Taos, I briskly walked the gauntlet, suddenly feeling an urge to say a few words to my father who had passed away a short time ago. I asked him to please guide me, to please help me not feel so alone in this world, to let me forget the man — the men — who broke my heart over the years, to comfort me in a way he never could in my younger life because he was always away. Tears broke through and I found myself weeping again, but not with sadness or grief, but perhaps more with a feeling of tenderness toward myself as I imagined my father would have felt for me in those final months in the nursing home when he could not move or speak, but acknowledged the presence of my sister and me silently with eyes permanently shut.
The ground beneath my feet suddenly softened and the sound of bees and the flapping of a butterfly’s wings heightening. I remembered an eerily similar experience of an intensified cacophony of frogs in a Puerto Rican rainforest where I was attending a conference four months ago when he. died. I had received that surreal message at the exact moment of his passing. This I discovered later in my room through a text message from my sister.
And now, as I walked purposefully toward Georgia’s first cross, a sign caught my eye. “Please honor this sacred area and do not take photographs,” or something like that. No photographs. Good, I thought, nothing bad is going to happen if I do that. I moved around the fence and discovered the long, low adobe hermitage with its painted turret which supported a white wooden cross and thought, this can’t be Georgia’s cross. I was right. As I rounded the penitents’ building, an imposing and austere, lone blackened wood cross loomed up in the courtyard before me and I knew without a doubt, this was it.
The most remarkable thing about this emblem of Christ, however, was the broken, raw wooden cross that laid at its feet, like a penitent itself, leaning into the larger crucifix as if for salvation. It touched me so very deeply. I felt like that cross, a little broken, a little worn out from self-flagellation, in need of comfort.
My next thought was how to capture this poignant scene. No photography allowed. My visual memory is pretty good as I’ve been a drawer since childhood, but how would I keep this special memory or share it with others on FB? I reached into my backpack and discovered I’d brought pens, but no notebook. A sigh of regret, and then I remembered the old napkins that I had grabbed at the service station on the drive up from Albuquerque and stuffed into a pocket for emergencies.
Well, this was an emergency, and they would have to do. I smoothed two of them out as best I could. With a sharpie in hand, I began with the black cross, inking its blackness and letting the rough texture of the paper reveal the woodgrains. It was perfectly satisfying, so much so that I thanked Christ out loud, and I can say with absolute certainty that the picture drew itself, line by line, tree by tree, tufts of grass growing out of the foreground without any plan.
Maybe it was my father bringing me comfort, or maybe it was the guiding hand of Georgia O’Keefe herself, moving my pen as God watched in silence.
