My grandmother tells stories.
After nearly 93 years, she clearly has many to choose from. And sometimes I hear new ones. But mostly they're the same ones, the ones I actually really love despite having heard them several times.

She tells one about her first job, at a Five & Ten in the city. She had graduated high school, which would make her eighteen, and it would be 1937. She talks about taking the streetcar and working the candy counter and being moved to the makeup counter, being promoted several times in the first few months. She talks about the magazine she read, Mademoiselle, and how her new issue had two new shades of nail polish that the store didn't carry. She asked the manager why they didn't have them, and he had them in stock the next week. She was about to be promoted again, too. I've forgotten the name of the position, but the woman walked about the floor between the different departments, and had the keys to the locked cases, etc.

She got a call from her mother on a Friday morning. It was the feast of Our Lady of Mercy - the name of her high school. Phone calls were, of course, quite an important thing in 1937. Even that makes me nostalgic, for a time I never experienced. Her mother told her that Bausch & Lomb had called, that they had wanted her in for an interview that morning. And she didn't tell them where she was going when they let her go, but she went. She took the streetcar and Bausch & Lomb hired her and told her to get her lunch and come back at 1. She always says, at this point, "Who starts work at 1 o'clock on a Friday afternoon?" Her first paycheck, for four hours, was $1.20. Thirty cents an hour.

She worked at Bausch's for about six years, as far as I can recall, promoted several times. She has a fantastic story about working with the payroll office on Fridays, and taking peoples' paychecks to them in envelopes. She went across the street, to Building 14 she said, with her box of paychecks, and got in the elevator to go up. Besides the elevator operator, Curly, there was another gentleman in the elevator, dressed to the nines in a grey suit and a hat. When he saw the box she was carrying, he said something to the effect of "I can take care of those for you." And my grandmother (this is the easiest part of the story to picture) said "You most certainly will not! Don't you dare come near these!" She got off the elevator, distributed the checks, and returned, where a rather mortified-looking Curly let he know she'd just told off Mr. Bausch himself. Her boss called her into his office when she returned, and told her Mr. Bausch had stopped by, and told him not to let her go, because she was clearly not going to let anyone near those paychecks.

She met my grandfather at Bausch & Lomb.

After about six years, she started nursing school. 1943, that would be about right. What better (and more terrifying) time to become a nurse? She loved nursing, she says, and I believe it. She still tells stories about specific patients, about her roommates and friends, about how she spent her nights off. Dancing and "going with" guys and living in a city that was alive. Sometimes I feel I'd give anything to live in that city, rather than it's contemporary counterpart.

When she married my grandfather, she was just shy of graduating, I believe, and being promoted. But she left, and she never looked back.

I think a lot of people I know might say that's sad, that she "threw away" a marvelous career opportunity just to get married, just to be with a man, whom she has told me absolutely did not want her to work. Not that he was oppressive about it, necessarily, but just that he felt it his duty to be sure she never had to work, and he made that very clear. Promoted in every job she had, she could clearly have gone as far as she wanted.

And so she did. She tells me repeatedly that she doesn't regret it. And I believe her and I love her for it.

I feel like so much of me is from her. My passion for travel, my stubbornness, my love of finding beauty everywhere. We're different of course, being two generations apart. But sometimes we think just the same way. We were driving home from lunch a few weeks ago, and as we drove along the Lake Road, she commented to me how she's driven this path hundreds of times, and she never ceases to be amazed by how beautiful it is. "Look at the sky, the trees," she said to me. "How can you not see God in all this?"

She's more Catholic than anyone I know, and certainly much more than I am in the traditional sense. She wouldn't give her religion up for anything, and she never has. She married my grandfather, a protestant, and I find this fascinating. Despite her very strong convictions about her faith, she clearly wasn't going to let it color her view to the point where she wouldn't fall in love with him. And she didn't want him to convert; just to let her keep her religion. She tells me about her mother-in-law (who didn't approve) and her father-in-law (who did, and played the fiddle, and taught my aunt to dance an Irish jig in our kitchen when she was little).

She tells me how her mother used to play piano, in the 20s, at their house for parties. She and her sister would stay awake, sneaking to the top of the stairs to listen.

I can't imagine living in her shoes, experiencing all the changes that have happened between 1919 and now. So many things happened, in a way things just don't seem to happen anymore. Think of how different the world is. It must seem much more gradual to her than it does to me, but it's still quite astonishing.

Things do happen, of course. I can only hope that someday my grandchildren will be even half as fascinated by the things that are happening to me as I am by all the things that happened to her.

This semester I am taking my fourth class with a particular professor here. He has really interesting things to say: great concepts about art and culture and anecdotes that function quite well, but the lecture rarely stays on course long enough to conclude anything. Particularly in my current class, there is that one person who always has something to say about everything. And that something is nearly always the same thing: trying to define art.

I am all for asking this question. It's an extremely important one to consider in art, anthropology, art history, and museum studies, and I've been a student of each. And it is worth discussing in this class, which consists largely of examining different cultural approaches to art. The thing is, after the initial class discussion (where we, inevitably, agree that there is no concrete, concise answer to this question - which I think is part of the point) this particular person just never let it go. They can't seem to get over the idea that we cannot adequately answer it, and so instead of pressing on with the course material, the class discussions become incredibly circular and repetitive. I just want to move on sometimes, get out of this rut, but it seems like every time I try to make a point I just cannot summon the words. Everything seems to collide in my head and I suddenly get quite breathless and end up sort of just deflating.

The thing is, despite all this, I've recently been really enjoying the reading. We covered MoMA's infamous exhibit on "Primitivism" in Modern Art, and Duchamp again (who, by the by, never considered his ready-mades "art" as such and made them particularly to question the art world of the time), and art vs. artifact in non-western cultures, and all those incredibly enticing issues that are so important. I'm looking at it from a museum studies perspective now more than ever. Last week we began discussing aboriginal Australian art and its many varied and complex meanings and functions and forms. I absolutely adore these cultures and their stories of the Dreaming.

The article for tomorrow was about cattle and aesthetics and the people of Southern Sudan and it was really interesting. There is a very diverse range of terminology for colors of cattle; relating to different types of patterns and contrast and hue. There was just a brief passage about how children learn all this vocabulary and its more abstract and symbolic meanings as they grow up surrounded by cattle, in a culture that both subsists off of them and structures much of their aesthetic around them (according to the article, which I must say convinced me). It led me to consider the way we learn color categories in the west, as children. My first thought was of colored blocks and shapes: more abstract forms to which we assign several properties, but then I began to consider more concrete objects and how we are taught colors. The sky is blue, grass is green, etc. It's a really interesting overlap of language and aesthetics, two subjects I find fascinating in themselves.

I still rather dread sitting through the discussions, but it was a pleasant surprise tonight to find myself completely engrossed in reading for a class I truly thought would be my least favorite this semester.