“Let’s work backwards.”
Over the years, I’ve come to recognize this phrase as the first step in my husband’s careful plan to avoid stress. Broken down in reverse order, a 10:10 departure from LAX means airport arrival at 9:20, carpark at 9, dog drop at 8, lock front door at 7:35, wake-up at 6:15.
“Start with what you want,” he explained recently to our mutual pal. “There is only so much time.”
Of course that means knowing what you want right off the bat. I don’t always know, and many years passed in happy partnership before working backwards didn’t feel like a tiny reprimand to my admittedly scattered and whimsical self. But, ultimately, I’ve grown to find the structure comforting, especially because once we establish a hard out, we don’t have to keep returning to the debate about whether it’s time to leave.
In the daily deluge of chaos and uncertainty, order is more and more therapeutic.
Last Sunday, while working backwards from wings up at 5:10 pm, we found ourselves with not enough time for a big museum visit, but too much time to go straight to the airport. After brunch with my jubilant newly married cousin and his wife, we let chance guide us (for approximately an hour and thirty-two minutes.) We followed a cobblestone street until the lure of a strong bass line led us to the DJ booth at a pop-up vintage clothing market in the park. When our ears began to ring, we kept walking, eventually arriving at a glass and steel structure housing CAM Raleigh.
The first gallery was filled with the work of Vernon Pratt, a minimalist artist whose untimely death in 2000 left his family and friends scrambling to figure out what to do with his prodigious creative output. Over a period of sixteen years, many of the paintings were given away or donated to museums and institutions. The work on display at CAM Raleigh was, at one time, destined for the landfill. Standing in front of each painting, I was aware of not just the artist’s work, but also the efforts of those who had loved him.
Downstairs, Ursula Gullow’s amazing self-portraits offered company as I attempted, yet again, to get a handle on the events of the past two years. A daily chronicle from March of 2020 through September of 2022, Gullow’s contemplation of herself and the world around her gave me a sense of seeing a staged version of my own experience. I was standing in the gallery on the second weekend of November, 2022, but I was also in my kitchen watching Mayor Garcetti give his nightly Covid address. I was hearing the clang of pots and pans as my neighbors stepped into the street to salute healthcare workers. I was watching as a former president and his crew used tear gas to clear protesters from a public space. I was curled with my husband and my children for what seemed like the one-billionth movie night. The woman in the paintings was not quite me, but she was often engaged in action I recognized. I saw the emotions I had felt (and keep feeling.)
I was amazed Adam Narcross’s, careful attention to detail (worn jeans, chipped toenails, the plush of a stuffed bunny,) but even more so by the way he seemed to be able to land the soul of the model. The people on his canvases are taking ownership of space. It seems as though he arrived with his brushes just in time to preserve this action for posterity.
Outside the museum, the sky was clear and blue, and the sun held that metallic edge that it does in winter. We had just enough time to stop at a local spot to grab a box of empanadas for the plane.
I love this.