Sustainable Sunday. Part Three. Somewhere in the early 90's.

Alone at Christmas. And fine with it. You too? On the Christmas I speak of here, I had a huge darkroom in an old walk-in safe in a very old abandoned railways workshop right beside the sea.

Welcome back to Sustainable Sunday and a Letter from the Kitchen’s Garden Farm.

Firstly a big huge ginormous Festive Season thanks to all this weeks readers and observers and commenters and Likers (I love a Good Like). Hugs to my new Paid Subscribers; Your support is putting the sustainable in my Sustainable Sunday. Huge Smiles for our NEW readers, we look forward to getting to know you.

All in All; a big thank you.

Today on Sustainable Sunday I am bringing you the third of three Christmas past stories. About a decade apart.

When my children were small their father and I separated, then divorced. I was in my late twenties. I had five live children. I had adopted out my own first child. My own mother (who insisted on the adoption) had died, my own family dispersed. Every year after that, for fourteen years actually, I spent Christmas alone.  My children went to have Christmas with their beloved Grandmother. Their father’s mother. She was a wonderful person, she adored her grandchildren. She died a while ago. Every single summer they would travel almost to the top of New Zealand with their father and have Christmas with Oma and Opa.  This was their tradition.

They would leave a few days before Christmas and would be gone for two weeks. And I would spend the holiday alone. Me and my dog, Mazout.

Now, please don’t get me wrong. I was not a sorry orphan at Christmas.  I woke up alone on Christmas morning but I had friends I could choose to visit, usually for a Christmas morning drink with champagne and strawberries. Hanging out on their verandahs before the sun got too hot. Then they would go to their families for lunch. Twice I was even gently kidnapped to go to their parental homes with them on Christmas Day but my aloneness followed me like a silent cat and they were gracious at my rejection of their offers after that. Sometimes I would just go out all night on Christmas Eve and be awake to see the day break then move onto my Christmas Day project.

Knowing that this day out of all the others belonged solely to me I always set myself a Christmas Day Project. Usually in my dark room.

On the Christmas I speak of here, I had a wonderful darkroom in an old walk-in safe in a very old abandoned railways workshop right beside the sea.  It was an enormous mystery of a space, the workshop. High, high ceilings, enormous doors and huge expansive concrete floors holding old oil stains. It smelt like cold machinery. There were a number of abandoned offices, some with broken windows trailing dark green ivy from the outside. Some still had big wooden desks with broken chairs and doors that creaked. There was electricity but very few lights so I remember it as cavernous and dark - inviting; I always felt that if I searched more I would find treasures.

It was close to town too so I would park there when I was meeting friends in the beach front bars.

Darkrooms are perfect for absenting yourself. Time means nothing in a darkroom. So, I would take my dog and work in there. I would just close the door and be gone for hours. Mazout, my dog, laid on his blanket outside the door.

There was another artist who used this space. He and I had shared studios before. He painted huge wall sized paintings of circles or dots. They sold for a lot of money. We would create wild exhibitions in strange locations (once I painted his whole naked body white then put black dots all over him (he had given me drawings so I got the designs exactly right) then I took large format photographs of him in front of a black and white back drop he had designed specifically for the project. I sold the photographs in an exhibition we had in an abandoned apartment above a furniture shop.

“You are the most beautiful woman here.” He had told me that night.

I had laughed. “You’re drunk”, I said.

He was the same size as me and sometimes pulled on my jeans in the morning just to irritate me. His eyes were as black as solid night. His skin freckled, his limbs long and strong. We were all skinny in those days. Our 501 jeans baggy. Big belts. Doc Martins. Black worn out leather jackets. Our hair long and wild. He and I had an understanding. We were both free so every now and then, when my children were gone, we would sleep together, lazily, share books and coffee in the morning then slip off into our days.

On this day, this Christmas Day long ago, I had not seen him for a wee while because my children had just left with their Dad to go up North, I had been out a few times. Shaking out the cobwebs of a long school term. I was a bit lost that year. We had not caught up. That Christmas Eve I had been drinking and dancing. I had seen my friend out the night before but I had been with Chi from the beach, so I had waved as we passed by the bar he was leaning on. He watched us walk by. All James Dean and broody. His bar stool moving with him as he tracked me. I looked back at him. My camera bag hanging from my shoulder. Dressed in skinny black as usual. My 80’s curls falling down my back. High heels. The noise of Christmas Eve in the streets with Chi was a cacophony - a jangle. Chi knew everyone. He was a brown nut of a man, his head shaved bald, a smile as huge and sound as confidence. Him and his brothers surrounded me towing me along like a mascot. The summer evening was sultry and dark, flashing. My artist friend had not returned my wave.

Later, much later in the night-morning Chi from the beach had gone home so I retrieved my dog from the railways workshop where I had parked my car and I went back out into the streets with my camera. Taking shots of the night people. The early, early morning people. The shadows and hard cuts from street lights. Drinking strong coffee in cafes to stay awake, until my stomach juddered. I hoped to capture the rising mist from the waves on the sea as the moon left and the sun rose. All in black and white. No breeze. Just black stillness above the waves. Walking the streets along the beach in my high heels and short black dress. My black dog walking behind.

The doors to our railways workshop were huge wooden things, with a small man sized door cut into one. I called it the Pope door. Though I have no idea why. In the late dawn they looked ancestral, forbidding.

When I walked through the pope door, still in my little black dress, carrying my shoes and my camera bag; I heard him working. I looked into his studio. It was not often he worked so early. But it appeared that he had worked through the night too. There were - I don’t know - probably twenty or so wet paintings tacked up on his wall. Every one was of a heart, the hearts were painted fast one over the other in varying densities of orange and red and blue and green. The brush strokes were sure and passionate.

I leaned around his door, slipping my bare feet into my darkroom jandals. Dropping my heels with a tap, tap. Reaching up for the darkroom apron I left on a hook by the door. Later I would take off my dress, hang that on another hook and work in the wrap-around apron and my underwear and slip. I did not have enough good clothes to risk ruining them in the darkroom.

“What’s all this?” I said.

He turned to me, his hair falling over his face. Lean. Focused. Almost surprised. But not. You know. That look he had.

“You know what it is.” He said. He watched me for a few more seconds as though searching for something then turned back to his painting.

I didn’t, know what it was, so I said nothing. I walked across the vast floor, Mazout wandered to his blanket and I went into our tiny kitchen space which was just an old table with a kettle on it and a big window looking out to the beach. I made us a cup of instant coffee, in our usual mugs, left his on his windowsill then went into the darkroom to process the film from my camera bag.

Later after pulling the last length of black and white film from the developing tank, that my Dad had given me years earlier, I set a fan to gently blow the strips of film, pinned to my darkroom clothes line, to dry them. I would begin printing my Christmas project soon, just as soon as the film was dry. I wandered back through to my friends space to see if there was anything else going on.

By now there were three walls covered in hearts. Probably forty or fifty images. On varying sized sheets. Taped to the wall. They looked temporary. Some pictures were already detaching from the white walls. Slipping sideways. The empty pads of painting paper slung about the floor. Jars filled with paint. Different sized brushes in buckets of water. Chaotic. He was on a ladder painting the high pieces with a house painting brush. The images had got larger and madder. The paint dripping into each other. The hearts struck me as being words but I could not hear what they were saying.

He took no notice of me as I stood there trying to decipher it. He was deep in his work. Standing on his ladder. His clothes spotted with the colours of the night. His feet bare on the steps. So engrossed in his hearts. He was using acrylics. So the paintings were drying fast. The sun was coming through the windows and it was warming up. The light slanting onto the walls. It would be hot in here soon.

“These are amazing”, I said.

“You know better than that.” He said. His back to me. His shoulders slightly hunched but that was normal for him. I felt annoyed that he was here. And in a mood. In my Christmas Day quiet. Then I felt ashamed with being annoyed at him. Which made me even more annoyed. I shook my shoulders.

“Aren’t you going to have Christmas with your Mum and Dad” I asked him.

He said nothing.

I watched him work a while longer, but he offered no more, so I went out the pope door and across the empty little dead end road to a small ivy choked public toilet block, dark where it backed into the hill. We had claimed it and cleaned it up for ourselves. I filled my darkroom bucket with cold clear water and looked out across the beach to the surf. The sea was kicking up white horses. The sea breeze was up now. Promising heat. Stinging with salt.

Ducking back through the popes door carrying my bucket of water, I returned to the darkroom with it’s antique enlarger and my rickity timer that used to belong to my Dad with its loud click, click, clack.  

By the time the door of the make shift darkroom was shut and I had turned my red light on, I had already forgotten about my friend and his heart. I worked. Sinking into it. The whole world dropping away. Projecting light through the film onto the photo paper. Cropping images. Adding or subtracting light to create the edgy contrast I liked in my work. Twiddling my fingers around the exposures to deconstruct the corners. Rocking the trays with an almost hypnotic rhythm. Using my fathers old metal tweezers to turn the prints in the fluids. Watching an image emerge. The magic of it. Setting the wet black and white prints out to dry on towels on an old table by the wall. Working in the dark like this, in this weak red light, was where I belonged. When the children were gone I went straight into the dark.

There is always one image in a roll of thirty six that is brilliant. Well, almost always. Ten that are OK and three that are good. You never know what is on a roll of film until you crack it open and process it. You cannot see what you have captured until you get the film into the projector and clamped down and the image brought up into focus. This was the magic of film. We shot carefully, doing the equations as we worked. Thinking hard about framing and light. Always the light. A picture has to tell a story. Give out parts of a narrative. Start a sentence. Launch a movie. Freeze an emotion. One picture I was particularly drawn to that day was my own night shadow in a street light. The tripod shadow was crystal clear. I saw my own legs and my tripods legs, my body leaning into the camera. The curve of the back. Truncated from the light so close. Yet suggesting length. Promise. The body of a long bird. Distorted from the angle. The length of the light and dark. I pulled the blacks in hard so it was a silhouette. I blew it up. I printed this one large - the focus was good, it would look great framed with a wide black mat, I thought.

I seldom printed this large and the paper was too big for my trays so holding the paper at either end I slid it in and out of the developer; instead of rocking the tray I rocked the curved paper like a baby through the developer, then through the fixer and into a big bath of water. I had to focus hard on the rhythm of the paper while the seconds ticked by on the clock, pulling it through the developer making sure the centre subject was soaking in developer and perfectly rendered. It was dicey printing like this, and exciting because of that. Paper was expensive we did not waste it.

When I was done with all the prints hours had gone. When I came out of the room my watch said it was almost two in the afternoon. I nodded. This had been a good day.

It was time for the second part of my alone tradition. Time for my Christmas lunch.

I packed up, pouring the chemicals into labeled jars for a second use the day after tomorrow. I put my dress back on, hung up my apron, laid another towel in the back of my station wagon and placed as many of the wet prints as I could into the back of the car. The large print was too big to lay flat in the car so I left it and a number of others on towels on a desk in one of the abandoned offices. I wanted my friends input - he had a good eye.

He never held back with his critique. Blunt. Hard. He pushed me as an artist.

I hung up my apron and exchanged my darkroom jandals for the heels and I walked back through the railway workshop, but my friend’s studio was afternoon dark, the walls stripped bare. Empty of hearts. He was gone. I looked behind me to the kitchen room and through the door I saw the heart paintings thrown into a rough pile on the dirty green linoleum beside our big forty-four gallon rubbish bin. I went through, crouched, squatting on my heels and looked at them for a while, sifting through, drawn to the bright bloody colours. The eclectic combinations of size and colour of each heart. Some hearts stood alone on the page some were transposed onto another heart, the colours bleeding. A few were two hearts together on one page but not touching. I looked out into the quiet of our workspace. I could hear the sea through the door. The wind. The gulls calling. I wrapped the paintings in a big sheet of brown paper and placed them on the passenger seat of my car.

They felt like mine. So, I just took them. I decided not to double check my rationale. I just took them.

I went back into my office and carried the large black and white print on it’s towel into the kitchen. It was still wet but beginning to curl around the edges as it dried, I laid it on the kitchen table close to where the heart paintings had been. I ripped off a piece of brown paper and wrote ‘Legs Have Legs. Cecilia’ Leaving the title by the print.

Calling my big old black dog from the corner where he slept I instructed him to sit on the floor in front of the passenger seat below the heart paintings so as not to crush them and off we went.

I drove home smelling of fixer. Wet black and white prints drying upside down on a towel in the back seat of my family sized station wagon. The hearts beside me.

I always ate the same thing on Christmas Day. I had fillet steak (we seldom ate steak - too expensive) and mashed potatoes with gravy (made with Marmite of course) and a salad.  For years I had rented the movie Breakfast at Tiffanys for Christmas Day. So, I poured myself a glass of Christmas champagne, sat on the couch, put my bare feet up on the old scarred science classroom coffee table with fifty year old rude words carved into it.  I was still in my skimpy black dress from the night before, all the windows open to the day. My hair piled up on top of my head. I ate my fillet steak and mashed potatoes with gravy, watching the television, saying Holly Golightly’s lines for her with my mouth full.

I know this sounds a bit sad but really it was not.   My kids were having a great time. I had used my day well. They would spend the whole afternoon at the beach with their grandparents, cousins and family. They always did. My project of the day was complete, the kid’s beds covered in drying prints. A few I would put up on our picture wall. A few I would exhibit. I ate my steak and drank my champagne, watching my movie.

Later, in the lovely warm Christmas evening I loaded another roll into my Nikon, took my big black dog whose full name was Marzelet Mazout the Marzipan Kid, and went for a walk. A really long walk. Mazout and I would walk for hours - right into the dark. No-one is on the roads on Christmas Day, all the shops are closed. On Christmas afternoon New Zealand goes to the beach, so by evening our little world is sunburnt and worn out; still.  There is a magical Christmas hush that I used to believe was my consolation prize. This massive empty moment, when you long for your children’s voices but know that they are well and loved and will be back soon.  Not being all together is OK. My aloneness is OK.  I walked. Me, my camera and my dog. The endless clatter in my head gentled. 

Of course Boxing Day was a completely different story. Boxing day was party day at Celi’s. My big, bright, scented summer garden would heave with friends and music and laughter on Boxing Day. Every man and his dog would be there. Everyone would bring food and wine. Someone would arrive with a box full of tapes specially chosen for the occasion and we would play Red Hot Chilli Peppers and Edit Piaf, Santana or Alice in Chains on my tape deck in the house with all the great windows open and the wooden speakers, as tall as small children, up on chairs aimed out into the garden. We would carry couches and tables and chairs under the trees, eat everyones left overs, barbeque sausages and just lay about in the warm.  But I would still feel my Christmas Day stillness.  It was strangely precious. Like I was watching from behind my own eyes. Laughing with my friends, drinking wine out of coffee cups and let that deep Christmas quiet settle back away for the year.

My friend the artist with the black eyes came to the garden on Boxing Day that year with a bottle and that lazy leggy walk of his, he leaned on a tree, his jar of wine tucked into the elbow, using his arm like a little shelf and chatted with my best friend Donni but he never mentioned the stolen heart paintings.

When I went back to our studio the day after Boxing Day the black and white print and the note were gone. The towel folded on the table.

So I never mentioned that either.

I still have the heart paintings. Somewhere along the line in all the shifts from country to country I lost track of a few but I have one hung beside my bed, right now, this Christmas Day, thirty odd years later.

There are many, many parents like me who are alone like this. Many, many divorced parents who spend Christmas Day alone. Many, many people without children who spend this day alone.  A few of my own children will be without family today: far away out there in the world where I cannot reach them.

If you are alone on Christmas Day, maybe even reading this, then you are in good company.  Being alone is like being Free. I think so anyway.

Do you?

Celi