Sunday Best (for her)
Sunday Best (for him)
Paintings and story by Lehan Winifred Ramsay
Sometimes our dreams are like sleet. Cold and thickly slow. But I’m lucky I guess to have nothing to begin with, rather than to put everything I had in and still find it cold and thickly slow. I’m almost at a standstill and I’m foggy with boredom in here. People said: you should have saved money. And instead I thought that if I kept on doing what I was supposed to be doing, I might reach somewhere. So I paid those kids – those graduates of my school – from my salary to come here one afternoon a week and do projects with me. When they didn’t bother to do anything because they couldn’t see the point I tried really hard not to chide them. I was just paying them so I could teach them. I figured sometimes a teacher just had to pay for their own development. I worked on my study at the university in Melbourne, and I took up a new craft, painting. Working with diligence, two-and-a-half years, one-hundred-and-forty paintings. But that wasn’t my dream. That was my investment and my life-saving.
Window Dresser's Arms, Pig & Whistle 
It is a lifetime intent of mine to recall and never forget the red velvet dress on Sunday and the curve of the stitching tickling my throat and it had a Peter Pan collar. I wore a boater of ordinary cane straw to keep the tropical sun from burning my face.
I just knew this was the discomfort of love.
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Lehan, you wouldn’t have a favourite colour by any chance? 🙂
How close to the actual red is the red on the computer screen? I found it really frustrating trying to convey the colour of my gerbera.
As I get older, I find I appreciate conventional wisdom more. It’s not necessarily True, but as the distillation of the experience of countless other people, it’s not a bad starting point. Risks matter less when you have more time to recover from them, and more time to benefit if they pay off.
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Hi Voice,
it’s pretty close. It’s red with yellow or gold in it. I’ve been making variations of it for about 4 months, in my house and on paintings.
I’ve become a little irritated by such conventional wisdoms, I’m afraid. Fine if they’re mentioned before or during and then left alone, but said afterwards they leave the recipient feeling a little humiliated. The thing I most wanted to hear, all these years, was “well it’s good that you’re doing what you think is right”. Never came.
I thought there were some parallels between that and what we were doing with students. Always accepting a small effort, never encouraging people to really push something as far as they could. And I could understand why people didn’t try to push. Nobody thought there was any real reason to do so. So it bothered me.
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To be told “I think it’s good that you’re doing what you think is right” would personally have been very encouraging. But it’s not just that that bothers me. About general ideologies and struggles that you might read about in Unleashed, for example, there seems to be the agreement we should fight for something. But in my experience, on a smaller level, that’s not what they think at all. What they think is that we shouldn’t.
Perhaps that’s the reason why the world is the way it is. But a Quest is a Quest. No different from the great quests that atomou writes about, T2 writes about. If there is no respect for that, how much more difficult is it to do it? Don’t fight for what you believe in. Shut up and put a little money into your savings account.
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When I say “they” here, I guess I mean “we”.
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An example at point is this levy for the floods. The major criticism being put forward is that the Labour Government should have been more careful with money to begin with. But you notice that most of the announcements of cuts accompanying this levy are in climate change policies that were brought in recently by Rudd. One man’s vision for change, one man’s quest? Being brought down by common sense. Nobody seems particularly concerned that we actually started something to try to make a difference, and have abandoned it while it is still young because it seems too hard.
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Though I am throwing in wildly different stories, I also think about the “Tiger Mom” story that is being talked about in America. The Chinese American woman who recently wrote a book about the strict upbringing of many asian children. So much criticism against it. But the young people in our schools and homes are being given too easy a time, from my observations, and I’ve also seen some things that lead me to believe that they don’t always like or appreciate being given such an easy time. It makes them a little contemptuous. And also takes away their spine. How to struggle to excel when you know that people around you hold that kind of struggle in contempt? It’s not necessary these days.
But it is necessary. And we need Tiger Moms as much as we need gentle nurturing.
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Bob Ellis says it was Penny Wong who came up with most of the environmental projects, so perhaps I’m wrong too.
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(sorry, it was Glenn Milne who wrote that)
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Very good but tinged with something sad. We are somewhat privileged to be allowed to peer into your soul, Lehan, by way of your paintings which are very personal .
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Sad to invest so much of one’s self yet, not see much in terms of a dividend. We all get to share in Lehan’s painting, as well as her observations, so, I guess we get the dividend without the risk! Love that little fellow with his white shirt buttoned to the top.
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Love your paintings, Lehan, very, very good.
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Wonderful observation and sentiment, Lehan.
Cold and thick and often, at first blush, pointless. But they’re certainly an investment. As dreams, that is. Turn them into reality and they vanish: the sleet, the cold, the dream, the desire. Back to the need to dream because that need is bigger than the need to make the dream a reality, to turn it into form and into an owned possession.
To dream is to embark on a journey; and it’s the journey that’s exciting, not its end.
Kavafis (aka Kavafy, the Alexandrian Greek Poet, d1933) said it well in his poem “Ithaca.”
Ah, and paying the students so you can learn! Mrs Mou will tell you just how much of my teacher’s salary I’ve spent on students who came to school with no books, no pens, no paper, no hope. But they’ve taught me more about life than would all the books that Dr Faustus have read could ever teach me. The most rewarding investment in my life.
I just love the vibrancy of your pictures, Lehan. They certainly match the vibrancy of your thoughts. Both, pictures and thoughts, shake loose the nooses of a sloth ridden brain like mine. Many thanks.
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Love that Kavafis poem Ithaca, absolutely wonderful.
But I hate it when every dick and harry, and channel Ten people talk about ‘my journey’, kind of Oprah speak, absolutely horrid.
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Gorgeous. These paintings are great inspiration just to keep on keeping on (love the chook you posted as well) and the stories as I do all your writing Lehan. 🙂
Have few minutes left in Bordertown library to let piglets know I have been reading comments in email and just have had a cursory look through Arms stories and comments. For now… see ya again. 🙂
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Nice seeing you here Sandshoe, stay a bit longer next time!
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Hello Lehan again and hello dear H!
I am back earlier than I thought, a little unexpectedly. Two reasons and not that I think to have a reason per se, two reasons…when I rushed off from the library after making my presence known Lehan, your paintings kept recurring in my mind of the children…but not so much the paintings rather a sense I took from them with me so I wanted to say immediately I had felt their soul and not described what I latterly experienced. As I walked down the street the little boy’s shirt with its ‘I’m a tidy boy’ twist tucked in his trousers replayed in the midst of the ‘I’m a tidy town’ streets and past the park and down the main street to my place.
In my place which is beautifully bare, there is plenty of room and the two jaggedly tidy children kept appearing in my mind. They say a world for me of uniformity and its colours, its shape, the hue…my sadness about the over-discipline of children, my elation regards children being cared for and about most especially the imperative their freedom is, that they experience formative creative play, that they get to know freedom and its respect and its inner, self motivated discipline.
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I feel terribly frightened for Queensland and my families and friends in the north.
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