For 50 years, I let a few things go to my head, where some of it stayed and was useful at times. Then I was hit by a drunk with a truck. A doctor said I acquired the same global injury former representative Gabrielle Giffords suffered when she was shot in the head.
I also acquired a “temporal window.” That’s the amount of time I could keep track of something. A few seconds or less than that. I lost what I heard as I heard it. And also lost what I wrote as I wrote it, yet threw my whole self — or what remained of it — into everything I attempted. No quitting, no hedging, no holding back.
I used my left hand to stick a pencil in the brace on my right hand and wrote not with my fingers, but with my wrist. In the same way, I used implements of construction to make collages with paper and paint. Lovely little worlds in double die-cut frames, 2 x 2 inches square.
I liked making things I could see and touch. Things that stayed themselves. Then I began building homes for birds, using salvaged wood. Created from broken barns, each piece stands on its own, needs no sequence, and creates safe space for lives. “I miss you,” I want to tell my daughter. “I hate that we lost our nest.”
Any progress at anything came and went. Improving was not like being on an elevator where you go from floor 2 to 3 to 4. It was like being on an elevator where you go from floor 23 to floor 2, then floor 91 to floor 19, then floor 82 to 9. This showed up on hundreds of tests. I was as smart as a pretty-smart human, then as smart as a special-needs stone.
Thank you so much for your comments about the writing and about the art.
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