Cuba

We got new art! Purchased from our dear friend and true artiste Joe Forte His art is collages and layers and pictures and bright colors and lots of French and Chinese and other languages. In our case, Spanish. Our piece a huge yellow canvas with pieces of Cuba embedded in it--sugar packets, train tracks, Scrabble pieces, Spanish clippings. It is unlike anything we have and I think we will move all our art around to accommodate. It was so hard to choose--one other piece still sticks in my mind--a huge, bold canvas of a man and his inner thoughts. (Really. They are scribbled all over the canvas.) But for today we chose Cuba, which means a lot to both of us. Jonathan's mysterious, tightlipped grandfather, and probably his family name, came from Cuba. And for me, my trip to Cuba--days after the pope left, was one of the best trips of my life. I loved the music, the rum, the sky, the storms (the day we landed our plane was rerouted from Havana the winds were so strong, then a storm broke and by the time we got into the city after driving through lightening and thunder for an hour, our taxi was half underwater) the crumbling colonial buildings, the shadow of Castro and Che, and being in a non-capitalist country.

Our furniture is cheap, old, worn out, and covered with wine, vomit, child-stains and life. But our art is beautiful. I am surrounded by pieces made by friends and family. All of it is spectacular. Right down to the primitive tiger with a man-head drawn by Theo, pasted on my refrigerator door.

And now I must go.

I'm going to pull out my beautiful new canvas from the behind the couch, toast it with a shot of tequila, and drink in its beauty!