Why I Still Boycott Publix and How It Has Changed My Life

To Publix, I am Case Ref # 1758234.

I triggered that moniker when I wrote the grocery chain after reading in my local newspaper that the Florida company had contributed “more money to Adam Putnam’s gubernatorial bid than any other candidate since at least 1995 and likely for the entirety of the company’s history.”

Tampa Bay Times reporter Steve Contorno reported that Publix, the heirs to the company’s founder and its current and former leaders had given Putnam a whopping $670,000 in the last three years, “or enough money to buy 74,527 chicken tender subs.”

I was not the only one who was outraged by this story. Putnam, who was running as a “proud NRA sellout,” was not popular with those who favor more strict gun regulation. News that Publix was pouring money into his campaign coffers sparked calls for a state-wide boycott. The store quickly released a press release insisting that its support of Putnam was not an endorsement of the National Rifle Association, but merely the support of a fellow hometown boy. Both Putnam and Publix trace their beginnings to the same rural area in Florida: Polk County. 

But that didn't stop the bleeding. Teenagers from Marjorie Stoneman Douglas in Parkland announced that they were going to stage a "die in" at their local Publix. They had recently experienced gun violence in a very directly and took Publix support of a "proud NRA sellout" personally.  “I guess I should’ve bought my flowers for the memorials somewhere else,” tweeted Alex Wind, who had survived the horrific massacre at the school that killed so many of his classmates.

Pictures of students lying down in the aisles of a South Florida grocery store was a public relations nightmare. Wisely, Publix didn't interfere with the students' peaceful protest and immediately announced that it would suspend all political contributions and review the matter. 

That seemed to do the trick. Things quieted down and most people went back to shopping at the place “where shopping is a pleasure.”

I didn’t.

I was alarmed that Publix had gotten away with leaving unanswered the really disturbing issue raised in Contorno’s story which had nothing to do with guns. Contorno had outlined how the man whom Publix was showering with mammoth political contributions had worked on the grocery store’s behalf to hide reports of health infractions at their stores from the public. Those contributions sounded awfully like a simple quid pro quo. We scratch your back and you scratch ours.

Putnam was not only Publix's hometown boy, he was its mole in state government. Putnam heads the state's Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services which conducts health safety inspections at grocery stores. In other words, as head of that department, Putnam was overseeing the regulation of Publix’s 785 stores in Florida.

And in 2016 that hometown boy did Publix a big favor.

According to Contorno’s story, in 2016 WFTS- 
Channel 28 had reported that seven Tampa Bay area Publix stories had failed the department’s health inspections. In those stores, food inspectors found rodent droppings, bugs and hundreds of pounds of meat and other food stored at unsafe temperatures. They found that employees were not washing their hands, as instructed in every retail bathroom I have ever been in. WFTS-Channel 28 found out about those health hazards at Publix stores because at that time the Department of Agriculture -- yes, the department headed by Putnam -- routinely posted on its official website the names and addresses of all the stores in the state who “failed” inspection.

The next day after the TV report — the next day! — Putnam scrubbed the department’s website of all the notices of failed inspections and announced that he was eliminating the department’s pass/fail grading system which had been in place to warn the public of infractions. Now that it was Publix that was on the list, Putnam no longer wanted the list to be public.  Publix was an “industry leader” and “ought not be mislabeled based on minor infractions,” Putnam explained to WFTS-Channel 28. He failed to mention that Publix also was one of his major political contributors.

Six months later, Putnam launched a new approach to informing the public about the results of his department's inspections. Instead of receiving a failing grade, which might imply that it was so bad the establishment needed to be shut down, the worst labeling a supermarket now would face is “re-inspection required.”  Putnam (apparently a proud Publix sellout) decided that it was more important to protect Publix than to let the public be informed about which stores have rodent droppings or are leaving meat unattended.

I emailed Publix, raising my concern about this apparent quid pro quo and the lack of transparency that it now created. I received this email back, marked Case Ref. # 1758234. Note that the letter addresses me by my last name only, but signs with a first name only, as if from a friend:

Dear Ms. Hammond,

Thank you for taking the time to share your experience with us. We regret that we have failed to meet your expectations. We would never knowingly disappoint our customers and we appreciate the trust you have placed in us to address your concern.

We recognize that our political contributions have caused an unintentional customer divide, and for this, we sincerely apologize. As we shared last Wednesday, we made the decision to suspend corporate-funded political contributions, and reevaluate our processes to ensure that our giving better reflects our intended desire to support a strong economy and a healthy community.

We hope we have answered your question to your satisfaction. Should you have additional follow up, please do not hesitate to contact our Customer Care department at 1-800-242-1227. You may also contact us via email at www.publix.com/contact or write us at Publix Super Markets, Inc., P.O. Box 407, Lakeland, FL 33802, ATTN: Customer Care. Please be sure to reference your case identification number. We look forward to hearing from you again soon.
 

Sincerely,
Hannah
Customer Care

Here’s how I responded:

I was disappointed to receive this email which obviously was just a computer-generated response to anyone who sent an objection to the recent disclosures about your political activity. “Hannah” clearly did not read my email nor did she “answer” my concerns. I had already explained in my letter what I thought of Publix’s statement about “suspending” corporate-funded political contributions and, no, “Hannah” did not address the questions I raised. 

As I stated in my previous email, I was not thrilled that you gave such a large contribution to a “proud NRA sellout.” This country desperately needs more sensible gun control. Those Parkland kids have got it right.

But that was not my biggest concern. As I stated in my previous email, I am even more disturbed about the quid pro quo that you received, thanks to your generous contribution to Adam Putnam. Thanks to your political pressure through a substantial contribution, you were able to change the transparency that was in place to let the public know about health infractions at our grocery stores. Having any mention of such citations scrubbed clean from the Agricultural Commissioner’s site is not reassuring. I realize every industry does some political lobbying, but your getting away with such a blatant quid pro quo is very alarming to me. 

I am not so naive as to think that all grocery stores in Florida don't benefit from your political lobbying on this issue and that the grocery stores I have chosen to replace you could now also have health violations without my knowing, but as the 800-pound gorilla in the room, you were the one who pushed your weight around (with your greasing the palm of Adam Putnam) and made it impossible for me to know which stores have passed and failed inspections. In this era of political lies, corruption and unaccountability, I feel I need to draw a line in the sand. I need to hold you responsible for your actions.  Continuing to patronize your stores while you simply “reconsider” your political contributions is akin to letting you get away with what you have already done. I realize that my boycott will make no difference to you, but it is a stand I feel I need to take in order to send a message that such corporate influence on politicians is not acceptable.

So, I will be “suspending” my shopping at your stores and “reevaluating” whether you are putting the concern for your profits over your commitment to the needs of the general public. I assure you, I will be back as your customer the moment I see that you have used your considerable influence over politicians to assure that the results of the inspections of your stores — and others — are made public and that your industry is made accountable for health infractions. 

Meanwhile, I am shopping at Winn Dixie, Aldi’s and some small local produce markets. Believe me, I would rather be giving you my business. Like a lot of Floridians, I always thought you were the good guys. You treated your employees well. Your stores were clean. And, yes, shopping at Publix was a pleasure. So, do the right thing. Don’t just put out a lame public relations press release. Let people know that you support inspection transparency. Let people know you are for more reasonable gun control in this state. If you did that, it would then be truly a pleasure to return to your stores.

Sincerely,

Margo Hammond

Publix never answered this second email. I have continued to boycott the store. 

Meanwhile I have added a number of other grocery stores to my list of where I shop: Trader Joe’s, Lucky’s, Gordon Food Service, Walmart, Mazzaro’s, Meat House of St. Pete, Whole Foods, Earth Fare, Spiro’s Pasadena Produce and the Saturday Morning Market in downtown St. Petersburg.

In some cases, I had never set food in these stores before boycotting Publix. Ever since moving to Florida 25 years ago, I had only shopped at Publix, trekking there once a week for a big blowout shopping excursion. Now I shop in spurts, popping into a store whenever I can: before or after meeting with friends, before or after attending a concert or lecture, while I'm running other errands. I feel like a European who seeks out speciality shops and places with exceptional produce. Of course, I am retired and have this luxury of multiple shopping stops, but to my delight I find shopping has become for me more of a pleasure than devoting my whole Saturday morning to Publix. 

I also have discovered amazingly good buys. 

I have become addicted to the French Vanilla ice cream at Trader’s Joes, the fruit at Spiro’s (where do they get those delectable grapes?), the $5 sushi at Lucky’s on Tuesdays, ham hocks at the Meat House of St. Pete, potato salad at Gordon Food Service and $5 whole pump chicken at Earth Fare on Fridays.

I also learned that my husband really does listen to me when it counts.

I never asked him — or anyone else for that matter — to join my boycott, but he, too, has not set foot in a Publix except to pick up his free medicine at the pharmacy.

Early in my boycott, when I mentioned to a Winn Dixie cashier that I was boycotting Publix, she said, “You do realize, don't you, that your boycott won’t make any difference?”

If she meant financially, of course that is true. Publix's bottom line did not suffer as a result of my staying away. The company’s profits are up and it is doing so well, it recently announced, that it is expanding its Lakeland headquarters and adding 700 new jobs there.

But that Winn Dixie cashier was wrong. My boycott has made a difference. To me. Sometimes it has been inconvenient. From my house, I pass two Publix to get to any of the stores I now frequent. Sometimes I miss the croissants I used to buy at Publix. I have never found any as fluffy and crusty, and believe me, I've tried. But for all the bother, my private boycott has proven to me just what I am willing to do when I see something I think is wrong. For once I put my money where my political mouth is. 

And, as it turns out, doing what I think is right has had benefits I never would have imagined. My boycott has gotten me out of a shopping rut, forced me to explore the town I’ve lived in for more than a quarter of a century and showed me that my husband will stand with me.

On November 6, we all have a chance to voice our protests over what we have seen as wrong in these past two years. We have a chance to express our political opinions at the ballot box. Adam Putnam will not, despite all those Publix contributions, be on the ballot. In the Republican primary, he lost his bid to become his party's gubernatorial candidate. And after November 6 Putnam also will longer be the state’s Commissioner of Agriculture. Term-limited, he could not seek re-election to a third consecutive term.

So this is no longer about Adam Putnam. 

Instead, Floridians have a chance to elect an Agriculture Commissioner who might actually put consumers ahead of profits. In her bid to be our next Agriculture Commissioner, the Democrat, Nicole “Nikki” Fried actually puts protecting Florida consumers at the top of her list of what she would do if elected. As a bonus she is not the candidate endorsed by the NRA. And, yes, that is a marijuana leaf that she's holding in her ad below: She vows to fight to fully implement Florida's medical marijuana law.

I didn't ask anyone to join me in my boycott of Publix, but I am asking everyone who reads this blog to join me in voting for Nicole "Nikki" Fried for Agriculture Commissioner.

If she wins, I've decided to end my Publix boycott. I will never return, however, to only shopping at Publix. My boycott has changed me. I'm a diversity shopper now and there's no going back.

Aging Dicks: Still Fighting Crime After All These Years

     Bring Your Shovels: How to Move a Body

     Now there's a panel topic you don't often see.

     Unless, of course, you attend Bouchercon. Figuring out how best to dispose of a corpse is all in a day's work for people who show up to the annual gathering of mystery and crime writers and their fans.

        Usually Bouchercon (named after critic Anthony Boucher who pronounced his name to rhyme with voucher) is held in a large city like Toronto (last year's) or Dallas (next year's). This year's convention, however, was held at the Vinoy Hotel in my hardly metropolitan hometown.

     St. Petersburg, Florida. Population: 244,769.
                                                                             
     Of course, I signed up.

     Anyone who loves to read a good book of mystery and mayhem would kill to see this all-star cast: Ian Rankin, Lawrence Block, Sara Blaedel, Laura Lippman, Lisa Unger, Tim Dorsey, James Swain, Jonathan Lethem, Michael Connelly, Sara Paretsky, Cara Black, Mark Billingham, Amy Stewart, Lisa Scottoline and the appropriately named Karin Slaughter.

      For three and a half days, these authors and dozens of other mystery, crime and thriller writers addressed such subjects as Holding You Hostage, Who We Kill and Why, Threatening Families and Aging.

      Aging? Yes, I was fascinated by how often the subject of aging cropped up. Not the aging of the crime writers but of their fictional creations. The world of crime and mystery fiction, it turns out, is awash in aging dicks.

      In many cases, these detectives, cops and private investigators were never intended to last beyond one book. Their creators had no clue that they were destined to become iconic and would continue on and on in many books to come. But as those books kept selling and the series continued, these protagonists moved forward in time, getting older and older. Now twenty plus books later, they are still fighting crime -- but also the ravages of age.
 
      Michael Connelly's Harry Bosch, for example, now retired from the LAPD, is a sixty-something with creaky knees and poor eyesight. Ian Rankin's John Rebus, forced to retire from the Edinburgh police force, is overweight and prone to fits of coughing. Lawrence Block's Matthew Scudder, an ex-cop, ex-alcoholic P.I., has slowed down to a snail's pace: He's 80, the same age as Block.

Ian Rankin and Lawrence Block at Bouchercon

          "I started writing about Matthew Scudder in the mid-1970s, and it's been a great pleasure watching him grow and evolve over the years," Block says on his website.  "An aspect of the realism of the series is that Scudder has aged in real time; he's forty years older than he was when I started chronicling his fictive existence."

        Sharing a stage at Bouchercon, Block and Rankin talked about the aches and pains their protagonists have experienced as they have grown older. Both Scudder and Rebus started out in their forties, but now, as Block put it, they are no spring chickens. "Most of Scudder's friends are dead," Block admitted. Rankin's hard-drinking, chain-smoking curmudgeon now has a good reason to be cranky. "Rebus is facing a gruesome disease," said Rankin. "COPD."

      "To quote Eubie Blake who said 'If I knew I was going to last this long, I'd taken better care of myself,' I would have taken better care of Scudder," said Block, turning to Rankin. "You would have taken better care of Rebus.  But they are still here."

      Fictional crime fighters didn't always age. For 40 years Perry Mason never had a birthday nor did his secretary Della Street for that matter. Los Angeles, where they operated, was changeless, too. Rex Stout, on the other hand, moved time forward in his Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin series, from Prohibition to the era of J. Edgar Hoover, but Wolfe never moved out of his mid-fifties and Goodwin was always in his early thirties.  Nancy Drew began as a teenager and remained one throughout her various updates.

     Agatha Christie also never aged her detectives -- although, to be fair, Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple were already long in the tooth when we first met them.

     Now, in crime fiction, however, characters are expected to age.  Readers want to see their heroes face all the challenges of real life. Murderers. Serial Killers. Arthritis. It's far more interesting -- and believable.

     In Cara Black's latest installment of her Aimée Leduc series, which takes place in 1999, Leduc is a single maman who needs to juggle her job as a P.I. with taking care of her now 10-month-old child. At Bouchercon, Black talked about the tricks she's used to stop the flow of time: flashbacks to fill in the backstory of her character (in Murder on the Quai she took us back to Leduc's college years when she first inherited her detective agency) and the art of slowing down the aging of her characters.

      Because, after all, fictional characters don't age exactly as we do.

    "Older. Braver. Better," said Sara Peretsky, when asked at Bouchercon to compare herself to her serial character, the Chicago-based V.I. Warshawski. Why better? "Because she doesn't age anymore." Peretsky had been aging Warshawski, letting her complain about her "tired middle-aged legs" and about Chicago winters, "no country for old detectives," but in recent books, she's frozen her in time. In fiction, authors can slow time down to a crawl.

    When Sue Grafton started her alphabet series with A is for Alibi, P.I. Kinsey Milhone was 32. By the time she reached Y is for Yesterday, Milhone, born in 1950, was only 39. Writers call it novelization time (as opposed to calendar time). Grafton never completed the alphabet: She died at the end of last year.

      Some mystery writers have made aging an integral part of their story. "I might not be the best but I am certainly the oldest," says the gumshoe who narrates Barry Fantoni's spoof on the private eye genre, Harry Lipkin, Private Eye. Too sore to get up on the roof of his decrepit house to fix his tiles, Harry keeps up his job as a P.I. because what else is there for an 87-year-old to do in Miami?  With a 40-year-old Impala, a spare set of dentures and a .38, he solves the caper -- moving as slowly as possible, all the while complaining about acid reflux.

     Inspector Salvo Montalbano, a middle-aged cop working in a small Sicilian town, also constantly complains about growing old, worrying about his fading virility. Author Andrea Camilleri, who himself is 94, has already sent the last Montalbano book to his publisher so he can control just how Montalbano is finished off. "When I get fed up with him or am not able to write any more, I'll tell the publisher: publish that book," he told a Guardian interviewer. "Sherlock Holmes was recovered, but it will not be possible to recover Montalbano. In that last book, he's really finished."

     I wish John D. MacDonald had done that for Travis McGee.  When The Lonely Silver Rain, the 21st book in John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee series, came out in 1985, a New York Times reviewer said it was "about McGee's vulnerability to loneliness and advancing age."  McGee, the reviewer reported, had grown "a bit flabby, a tad slower, a good deal less caring." He was convinced that McGee -- whose age never was determined -- had to be using bifocals to read. The reviewer speculated that MacDonald was about to end the series. In the book, McGee does seem to be tying up loose ends: questioning the wisdom of clinging to his loner status ("the most deadly commitment of all is to be committed only to one's self. Some come to realize this after they are in the nursing home") and happily discovering a grown daughter whom he didn't know existed. But I think in this last Travis McGee novel MacDonald might have been haunted by feelings of his own mortality. He died the year after The Lonely Silver Rain was published.

    At Bouchercon MacDonald was honored as the Ghost of Honor. I couldn't help but wonder how he would have imagined his new Travis McGee -- ready to leave his beach bum existence behind -- coping with aging.

    Maybe we should all take a page from these fictional heroes, throw out the calendar and embrace novelization time. That's Block's advice:

     "If I have one piece of advice for y'all, it's this: Don't age in real time. I'm talking about you, not your characters. Slow down. What's the damn hurry?"

 
 

FEELING YOUNG IN ART CLASS

     Recently I went on a writer's retreat in Gulfport, Florida, a town on Boca Ciega Bay just 20 minutes from my house in St. Petersburg. A one-woman writer's retreat, that is.  For one week I cut myself off entirely from family and friends --  even from Facebook -- and just wrote. The retreat was made possible by a friend who lent me her place in exchange for walking her dog and feeding her cat while she was up north for a week visiting her mom. She once had been my editor when we both lived in New York City. Her house is in Gulfport, a town that prides itself on being weird.

     During the week of my writer's staycation I was extremely productive, writing at times 8 hours a day (I am working on a mystery, my first work of fiction). My dog-walking chore gave my day structure. Most mornings we went to Stella's on Beach Boulevard where we sat at an outside table, me enjoying a breakfast sandwich with a cup of coffee, Banjo savoring the doggie treat and water bowl the staff provided. One day, in the Gabber, a local free weekly newspaper, I read that the Senior Center down the street was offering a 12-week Drawing and Painting class.
     I signed up.

     Why did I decide to take the painting class, the first ever in my life? Maybe because it was free (although the art supplies are costing me). Maybe because I wanted some excuse to keep going back to Gulfport (although I often met and still meet my editor-friend at SumitrA, a popular laid-back coffee & tea place on Beach Boulevard). Maybe because I just thought it would be fun.
      I really wasn't sure why I suddenly had an itch to do something visual.
      "Cross-training," a fellow writer said when I told her about taking the class. Yes, of course, that was it.  Like walking the dog, art class was giving me a break from writing, a chance to exercise a new skill, a counterpoint to flexing my writing muscles.
     Soon after I returned home from my writer's staycation, the wisdom of my decision to take the art class was reinforced by the oddest coincidence. My local library informed me that a book I had requested weeks before had finally come in. Touted in O, The Oprah Magazine, the book had a long waiting list. I had wanted to read it because it seemed a good topic for this blog which focuses on creativity and aging. Now in light of my decision to "cross-train," the book's subject matter had taken on even more significance for me. The title?

     Old in Art School: A Memoir of Starting Over

     The author -- Nell Painter -- certainly was starting over. She had spent the bulk of her life not in art studios but in libraries and classrooms. She's an historian. And not just any historian. A world-renown historian with a PhD from Harvard and a professorship at Princeton and a whole stack of books to her name, including...

and also...

and the New York Times bestseller, The History of White People:

    

   So why go back to earn more degrees at age 64?

   In her memoir, Painter explains it all -- and then some. With jaw-dropping honesty, some truly off-beat descriptions (she compares art supply stores to vaginas for starters) and laser-sharp observations about the people who inhabit the world of easels and canvases, Painter takes us on her journey -- both external and internal -- of being "old in art school."  A journey, she points out, made financially possible thanks to "Saintly Husband Glenn" who still was working as a mathematics professor at Rutgers and could support her.
    Painter gives us a crash course on how art is made, conceptualized and promoted. We have a ringside seat as she tangles with her fellow classmates and teachers about What is Art and Who is a Real Artist. I read her book with my laptop close at hand so I could use Google images to see the work of the myriad of artists she references -- those approved by "The Art World" and those who in her view have not gotten their proper due. I learned about crits, about the widespread practice of appropriation in art these days, about transcription and about how not to get hung up on looking to others for validation. 

    Painter's friends tried to talk her out of going to art school. They told her she didn't need a degree to do art. She disagreed. Who would take her seriously unless she engaged in "formal study" and earned a degree?  (Spoken like a true daughter of academia where titles are permanently attached to its denizens' names.) So Painter attended Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University for three years and then the Rhode Island School of Design (the second most prestigious graduate school  for the arts in the country after Yale) for two more.

      At Rutgers, Painter tried to fit in with her younger classmates, even changing the way she dressed (donning cowboy boots, but holding the line at getting a tattoo). In Providence, she tried to move beyond her "twentieth-century eyes" and forget about her research training in history, concentrating on process over substance in her art. She tried to create art that operated in a space beyond history -- all the while fighting the very real historical battles of racism, sexism and ageism.
       She tried and tried and tried but was continually plagued with self doubt.
       Art school, she discovered, was brutal.
       A female teacher told her she "couldn't draw, couldn't paint." A male teacher told her she would "never be an artist." These art teachers didn't believe she would ever be an Artist with a Capital A because even though she produced a dizzying amount of work, she didn't focus on her art exclusively.
       They had a point. As she enter graduate school, for example, she was still busy editing the final proofs for THWP, as she called her New York bestseller. She couldn't attend the RISD's painters' kick-off barbecue because she was in Durham, North Carolina, for the opening of her archive in the John Hope Franklin Center in Duke University Library. She postponed the meeting with the second reader of her thesis (a requirement for graduation) because she had to be at the Harvard commencement to receive a Centennial Medal, "an honor of a lifetime."
      Painter also had some serious personal demands on her time that prevented her from doing art full-time. Not from Saintly Husband Glenn -- he gave her all the freedom and support she needed. But as an only child, her aging parents were another matter. She was constantly rushing out to Oakland where they lived to deal with her mother's illness and death, her father's chronic depression and eventually her father's need to move East, closer to her.
       Painter didn't have time to be an artist with a Capital A.
       In the end, however, she prevailed. Painter, the painter, prevailed. Her friends had told her, "Keep on. Keep on making art. Keeping on making your art." And she did.
      "I'm an artist who lives and works in Newark, New Jersey," she writes at the end of Old in Art School, providing us with an update of what happened to her after art school, "an artist whose other -- not, as I once said 'former' -- lives as an historian and as a daughter are still crucial parts of me. I am a wise old person, not a hot young artist, not a hot anybody with a young anybody's future before me. I know the value of doing my work, my work, and keeping at it. I do keep at it -- in the pleasure of the process of making the art only I can make.
      Serious artist? Yes. I make and show my work regularly. Professional artist? Yes. I get paid for my work. An Artist artist? Probably not, probably never, because I still do other things. Do I miss not being An Artist artist? Yes, a little. But not enough to live my life any other way."
        Painter got her degrees -- a BFA from the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University and  MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design -- but she got a lot more out of being "old in art school." She learned to listen much harder to the voice within herself.
       My own foray into an art education is far more modest than Painter's. Unlike her, I am not looking to art to provide me with a second career. I am merely cross-training.
       Yet I can see how learning to paint -- even the most basic lessons like mine are -- can change the way you look at the world. After I have squeezed blobs of paint on my palette in class, I walk outside and see cobalt blue skies and Phthalo green grass. After layering for paint with Dioxazine purple for my picture of grapes in class, I notice the dark and light shades on the rounded fruit in my fruit bowl. I am beginning to experience the world visually in ways I never had before.

       After only two classes, I painted my very first piece. Everyone in the class did. Our subject matter was whales. The teacher gave us all a printout of a painting of a whale lob-tailing its flukes out of the water. She first showed us how to sketch a copy of what we saw onto our canvases. Then she instructed us on how to mix and apply our paints -- cobalt blues, pure blacks, titanium whites. For the splashing water, we first were instructed to paint only with water and then dab paint into the wet spots. My splashes didn't look right, so I tried to rub them away with a piece of paper toweling. As I rubbed, however, I found that I liked the effect the smearing was creating and went with it.
     At the next class, the teacher had us pick out what color mat we would like to use to display our paintings. One by one, using our chosen mat,  we showed our "framed" picture in front of the class. Each one of us had completed the assignment a little differently. Different taperings of the whale's body. Different finishes to its flukes. Different ways to show the splashes of water surrounding the tail. Different colored "frames."
     "You've each made it your own," the teacher pointed out.
       I felt a bit giddy when my turn came to be applauded by the class for my feeble effort. Not because I got some outside validation -- we clapped for everyone -- but because of what I perceived within myself: I felt like a young student again, starting from scratch and eager to learn.
     When I got home, I pulled out the canvas and showed it to Saintly Husband Carl. "Can you tell what this is?" I asked. "A whale's tail," he said. Yes, exactly, I thought, my whale's tale.
     At the next class, I showed the teacher Painter's book, suggesting that she might want to read it. She took one look at the title and turned away. "We're not old," she said.
     No, not in art class anyway.