Elizabeth Aakre Fund at Narrowsburg Public Library

More donations have been made to the Elizabeth Aakre book fund at the Narrowsburg Public Library.  Thank you to those who have given.  If you are interested in doing so, here is where to send the money:

Tusten-Cochecton Library
198 Bridge St.
Narrowsburg NY 12764


In the meantime, the librarian would like to know what books the library should buy with the money. Do you have any suggestion?  Please write and comment if you do.

And thanks again for the support.

Elizabeth's birthday

One year she wanted to have a party at the pier, before she was seven I would guess, or maybe when she was eight, with several friends and dozens of water balloons.  We filled them in the sink in the kitchen, bombs loaded with water, bombs with their brightly colored skins whose lips were thicker and might snap while wrapped around the tap.

This was in the days when the pier was sort of shabby and had a miniature golf course and a hot dog stand, and just a little play area perfect for exploding water balloons.

The girls and boys came wearing bathing suits.  How relieved we were at the bright sun that June day.  Elizabeth was delighted to throw a balloon at me, but surprised when it didn't burst.  You really had to heave the things, and when all the children were assembled, heave them they did. 

If you haven't seen it, please read the comment under the post for Scooter above.  It is very lovely, and I am grateful to whomever posted it.  It is her first birthday comment today.  What a great day it was the day she was born!

Water Bombs filled with water, from German Wikipedia

Scooter (1998-2011)

Scooter died today.  He was 13 years old, and spent his first eight years as Elizabeth's pet.  Born in Sullivan County and rescued shortly afterward, he was the runt of the litter who managed to march to his own drummer.  The day we drove up to the animal rescue, there were a baby deer, many puppies and other kittens contending for adoption. (Well not the fawn, but she was distracting with loveliness.)  We had been told there was a kitten there whose name should be trouble.  He strayed from the group.  He was a biter.  He got lost, and tumbled down hills.

Scooter with Elizabeth in 1998

Still, we took him home where he soon adjusted to life with the loving Elizabeth.  She let him sleep in her bed.  He was a great companion to all.  His favorite position was flat out on your chest when you were in a reclining position.  He liked to be scratched behind his ears.  Like many other cats of my acquaintance, he did not really approve of reading, and did his best to prevent you from doing it by tearing the newspaper to shreds for instance, or sitting on your book while you had it in your lap and thought you had made it clear it would be better to stop back later after this chapter.

As a hunter, he would bring us shrews and mice he had caught.  He had no use for bats, even though they tempted him and made him take ungainly leaps upward which proved only how difficult it was to capture a bat without a butterfly net.

When Elizabeth died, he seemed to look for her and would sometimes howl with grief. Her last note hanging on our door was "Be nice to Scooter! Play with him!"   We did our best to follow her advice.  His greatest pleasures were lying in bed alongside Richard, and eating fresh chicken Richard had fried. We will miss him most dreadfully.

This picture was taken in 2004 or so when we were in rural Pennsylvania.  Elizabeth complained when I cut my hair.  She said now that you are 50, you don't have to do that thing that 50 year old women do.  You don't have to cut your hair. 

During the summer we had time to spend with each other without looking at the clock.  We would drive and get ice cream and go to the movies in Callicoon, and take long swims.  By now I would be thinking of what to get her for her birthday. 

Listening to Lizzy's laugh

In the process of spring cleaning, I came upon some audiotapes recorded when Elizabeth was four years old.  There is a lot of laughter and fooling around, and some singing.  Besides her dad, I can't think of anyone who liked to laugh more.  She could be very serious, and loved serious books, and did not shy from sad movies, but she had a light hearted side that was lovely to hear on these old tapes.  At one point she was singing Ring around the rosy with her friends Khalila and Jazmyn. 

Photography and Elizabeth

Starting a project in my studio lighting class about you. Projects in digital seems funny, when the subject is you. I hope you aren't too angry that they're digital. We aren't taught how to use film with soft boxes. I love you.

Cousin Nicholas

Ah Elizabeth another year without you

Without your lovely grin, your ability to download photos at the speed of light, without your found images on the walls of the your room, without you carefully groomed fingernails and your ability to be friends with males.  You were  passionate about Harry Potter and the Golden Compass.  When you dove into a book you wouldn't come up for air until you had to eat or starve.  You let the book consume you as you consumed it. 

I loved reading on the porch with you toe to toe, you and me, lazing in the summertime, lost in our own thoughts, nobody breathing down our backs with some deadline.

You and I would sometimes walk along the railroad track to the one mile marker, then skid down the sooty bank to the river below where its clear shallow waters took us down stream and we could float on our backs and watch the birds.  Sometimes there would be an eagle, or the merganser ducks who swam in packs herding their little ones into the shallows where they could dive for minnows.

You were a great swimmer.  You were good company, funny and bright and stylish. 

Sometimes after the cat has eaten his fill he walks around howling.  I call this his postprandial howl.
I think that he is calling for you.  Can you hear him?  It is a soulful howl, and it says what I feel, left here to navigate without you.

Scooter, August 2010

Thinking of you especially today. Elliott Smith on my I-pod. I miss your hair and smile. I love you forever, Lizzy.
Love,
Cousin Nicholas

George Clooney

Lizzy would have liked Clooney in his new movie, The American. It is easy to watch his face, with his minor resemblance to Cary Grant both in masculine handsomeness and appeal to both men and women, for two hours.  He doesn't say much.  He doesn't overact.  He holds our attention because we sense he is thinking when he is silent of something meaningful and important.

Elizabeth loved his ability to play a rogue hero, beginning with his part in the television series, ER.  The doctor who had an uncanny ability to save children in peril had a special place in her heart.  When she was eleven, she spent a night in the Children's ICU at St. Vincent's Hospital with a bit of plastic from her mechanical pencil lodged in her lung.  The doctors and nurses there took great care of her, and she developed a deep respect for medicine and thought about becoming a doctor.

She loved Clooney's ability to perform in comic parts like Oh Brother Where Art Thou.  She liked the way he wore his tuxedo while commandeering the other handsome actors in the Ocean series.

Clooney and Brad Pitt

 
In The American, he plays a mysterious spy employed to make customized weapons.  He is extremely good at evading the enemy,  and has an eye for a pretty girl.  Pretty girls have eyes for him also. 

As Clooney ages, and goes beyond just being a leading man, he has developed a less kinetic, more still presence on screen.  His hair is now gray.  He is almost fifty, and his good looks are taking on some seasoning.    He reminds me of Paul Newman in The Sting, when everyone stood up and took notice at how his acting became more natural as he aged, and his prettiness hardened into something more like beauty.  When a handsome man is young, he is often taken for granted as just a pretty face.   

Consoling as it is that Elizabeth died at the peak of her beauty, watching someone like Clooney, who she loved, get better and better as he gets older, makes me wish that Elizabeth could have had that chance too. 

George Clooney

Birthday

Elizabeth would have done something for her dad on his birthday.  The day went by with her in the back of our minds.  The last time she could she made a lovely card with pictures and sent it to R through me so that I could print it out and give it to him.  There were colorful small drawings and her tiny delicate script and a mind at work that let him know she loved him. 

Shadowchild by P.F. Thomese

What a beautiful book this is.  I have only read a few pages but already I want to read more by P.F. Thomese, a Dutch writer whose little girl died when she was a few weeks old.  The book was published in 2005, in a translation from the original published in 2003.  Here is an excerpt:

Does love disappear when the person disappears? Where does the love go when the body is burned to ashes? It flees into similes.  The body has been taken from the earth, but not all the things that remind you of it.

 "Thine eyes are like the ponds in Heshbon, by the gate of Bathrabbim: thy nose is as the tower of Lebanon which looketh toward Damascus. Thine head upon thee is like Carmel..."  Like, indeed, like, like. Love looks for an embodiment it can no longer find.

Narrowsburg

It is a quiet Sunday night in Narrowsburg, NY.  This morning Richard and I saw a scarlet tanager flying from branch to branch eating insects I guess.  All of the birds here seem to dine on insects for their main diet.  We have flycatchers, cedar waxwings, phoebes, kingbirds, catbirds.  There is also a ferocious mother hen wild turkey who doesn't fly or eat insects as far as I can tell; I have yet to see her chicks.

Elizabeth loved the peacefulness of this part of the state, and we miss her when we come here, but we remember how we used to sit together on the big front porch and read or paint, or watch the hummingbirds bomb each other on their way to the feeder.

What I learned from Elizabeth

July 10, 2010

Elizabeth grew more sure of herself as she grew older.  Her beauty was more assured, she knew how to write better, she took more daring photographs, she matured and blossomed and showed great promise as an artist, as a reader, as a student.  Lenesa said she wondered what she would have brought the world.  Something with giving in its nature.

Now I think of all that she gave me as my daughter.  She was loving, and funny, and creative, and thorny and independent from a very early age.  As the years go by, I have grown in my love for her, and I hope that I too am growing more wise and independent and blossoming in some way.  Part of that has to do with being her mother.  Learning from motherhood, learning from her. 

I missed you yesterday. This is the dinosaur that gets me through. I love you forever.


Nicholas.

Thoughts on Elizabeth's birthday

When I think of Elizabeth, I think of her head on her cat's head, kissing his nose, her voice coming from the other room, laughing on the phone, her walking miles through the city, in her fringed suede boots, in her sneakers with the holes in them. 


She was raised reading Harry Potter, listening to Harry Potter on tape, going to Harry Potter movies.  She was part of the Harry Potter nation, the Harry Potter generation who are now graduating from college.  She thought of her cafeteria at school as part of Hogwarts, and it did share a certain grandeur, with its open atrium high ceilinged space, with Hogwarts.


Elizabeth wrote notes in a tiny precise hand writing.  She put her long straight hair up in a bun.

Today I went swimming in the Delaware, and did the back stroke so that I could look at the swallows darting for bugs.  I thought of her.

Meditation on a piece of string

A funny thing happened when I went to use the leather strip I had bought years ago to repair my raccoon fur hat. That hat was six inches  high,  lined with red felt, and had ear flaps with a leather thong that tied under your chin. It was really warm. But its last use by Elizabeth was in the Christmas pageant when she was asked to dress as one of the animals in the manger. She didn’t want to be a sheep or a cow. She wanted to wear the hat.

The fur itself piled high on her eight year old head said to the crowd I am a beast, not human, not vegetable or mineral, but animal, present at his birth.

She walked with the other children, four feet high most of them, down the aisles of church to the altar where the manger was set up.

Years after I wore the hat on sub zero days until the thongs broke. I bought some leather string to fix it but could not successfully anchor the piece in the mounded fur. Now the hat and Elizabeth are gone, and I only have the string.

Sorry for the absence, faithful readers

Elizabeth  would have loved Iron Man 2. 
Robert Downey Jr she referred to as "genius."
We loved to watch movies together.

She would have graduated this month from college

Every Sunday I get a report on who visits the blog.  I see there are people with Smith College addresses  looking ... we are all probably wondering why Elizabeth didn't get to graduate with you all.
All around NYU parties were taking place last week, and young women walking around with graduation gowns.  I try to feel happy for them without feeling sorry that Elizabeth isn't among them. It is just plain impossible.

I saw my next door neighbor, six months older than Lizzy, and she is a grown woman.  She is ready to start out in the world now, like so many of her friends.  Good luck, you all!

A mother of a Smith graduate sent me this picture from the program.

Memory

When she was four or five, and it had rained very hard,  we put on our boots and jackets and went to Harrison St. where the deepest puddles were.  We splashed around until we felt we had tested the rain gear sufficiently and found it satisfactory. Or not.  For a few minutes, we were roughly the same age.

photo by Enzo D.

Book Fund at Packer Collegiate

Today there was a reception to view photography books purchased in Elizabeth's name for the library at Packer.

Books by Lisette Model, for instance.

And Meatyard

Kertesz

Erwin Olaf

And pictures of New York by

Ruth Orkin

And one by Klein of Tribeca, after snow

I felt very elegiac, and overwhelmed by the emotion of returning to the school, the first time since the memorial service over three years ago.  So many of her teachers were there, people who mattered deeply to Elizabeth's education, people who taught her what she should be.  People like Eric Baylin, who read this poem:

Elizabeth's Books

Through her eyes a photograph unfolded
Through her gaze surface grays and blacks began to breathe,
     gave way to stories.
Faces came alive
Through her careful looking.

And so these books - Elizabeth's - are filled with surfaces to be
    plumbed through quiet gazing.
For years beyond our own a string of curious minds will find in these
    new ways of looking, new ways of thinking
And through their eyes and in that trail of small epiphanies, lighted
     moments stretching past our view,

She will be gazing still.

Eric Baylin
April 22, 2010