Barry Moser: I Knew I was Home, Part 2

Guest post by Barry Moser

The following post, continued from yesterday, is adapted from a talk given at the 2014 Glen Workshop in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

A few years after my first Glen, the drawing class convened once again. One of the members of that class was a woman from Florida named Patricia Oetting, a registered nurse.

She had never drawn before, and obviously had never had the experience of drawing from live models. But she was game and was taking my instruction with seriousness and the mandatory good humor. And she was getting a real kick out of the fact that she had worked with naked patients most of her life, and knew the anatomy of the human body quite well—better than I, but had never actually looked at a naked person in such an honest, forthright, and casual way.

We had lots of laughs, as we usually do in that class, and Patricia and I became good friends who stay in touch. Another Glen reward.

She is a remarkable woman. Sine qua non.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about her is that, as a medical professional, she travels to Haiti once or twice a year to treat—and to bury—babies who have fallen victim to disease and tragedy in Haiti. She’s been doing it a long time—and always at her own expense. In one of her 2011 letters she wrote:

“Let’s see: hurricane season, extreme heat and humidity, no [air conditioning], [lots of] mosquitoes and rain…and now cholera…. And I am happy as can be!”

On the last night that year, she and I broke off and had a more or less private dinner together out on the balcony of the refectory.

She told me about her husband who had died a few years before. He was thirty years her senior—just as I am to my wife.

So right away Patricia Oetting and I had some newly discovered and intimate things to talk about. She told me that they, too, were deeply in love with each other: truly, madly, and foreverly.

But then dark Thanatos came knocking. She was with him when Death came to collect him. She was up on the hospital bed with him, cradling him in her arms and telling him over and over and over “I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you,” until, at last, he gave up and went on ahead. The last words he heard in this life were his young wife’s, “I love you.”

We held hands for a while, had us a good cry, and came up here to hear Over the Rhine’s Saturday night concert.

After the concert came the annual anointing, a ritual in which I had never participated. Patricia, on the other hand, is a deeply religious woman, as you can tell by her unselfish ministering to unfortunate Haitians and to homeless men in her Florida community.

So when it was our row’s time to get up and circle back around, she asked if I was going with her.

I said nope, and stayed sitting. Patricia went around and was anointed. She came back and sat next to me.

She reached up to her forehead and recovered a bit of oil from the cross that had been made there. She took my right hand in hers and made the sign of the cross on the back of my hand.

My working hand.

It’s a gesture that I will never forget.

I have not missed being blessed and anointed since. I don’t know why, exactly. But I think it has to do with certain manifestations of love, though I don’t know what I mean by that either.

I still don’t know what anointing means. I don’t understand, and I am not sure that I want to understand. I just know that it means a lot to me, and that’s enough. It is a welcomed mystery.

A year or two later one of my students here at the Glen asked if she could have a word with me during the break.

“Sure,” I said.

So when the time came, we went out onto the roof of the arts building. Brilliant sunlight. Clear skies. Sticky roofing underfoot.

After an awkward moment, she asked me—out of curiosity, I assume, because it was not at all a challenge, “If you’re not a believer, why are you here with us?”

I turned away from her and looked out over the San Felipe Reservation and the distant Sandias trying to form some sort of reasonable answer to her question.

My immediate, unspoken, and smart-assed response was, “’Cause I wanna be.”

But that was too cheap.

It would have been an inane response to her serious and thoughtful question. A few moments passed as I looked out over that gorgeous, sun burned, desert landscape.

Then I said, “Because you will have me.”

Indeed. You all have me back year after year. A thorn in your collective side, perhaps. An agnostic in your midst. A heathen given to heathen lusts and appetites, and perhaps to too much verbiage. But, nevertheless, you have back one who seeks truth and meaning.

Two years ago I was stricken with some orthopedic malady that laid me so low I had to cancel my trip out here to Santa Fe.

I did a short spiel via Skype to the good folks who had signed up for my class.

And it was all well and good.

Though ultimately it was terribly unsatisfying.

Now that I am getting really old, traveling is startin’ to be difficult, especially traveling alone. So last summer I begged off the Santa Fe gig and opted for Glen East. So did Over the Rhine. It sounded ideal.

Glen East is on the campus of Mt. Holyoke College where I taught in the spring term of 2013. The campus is directly across the street from the bookstore that my sweet wife, Emily, manages. It’s 25 minutes from home.

What could be more perfect?

Ummm. No.

What was not perfect was my involvement. Being off campus and sleeping at home meant that I did not take breakfast and supper with my students and new & old friends. I taught my morning class and ate lunch.

And being so close to home and my studio I couldn’t resist the siren call of my work every afternoon.

I missed the conviviality of Santa Fe. I missed just being around. I missed afternoon cocktails with friends and students. I missed impromptu dinners in downtown Santa Fe.

And I missed the anointing.

So I couldn’t stay away from here again. And here I am.

And I still wonder why you all keep inviting an old, unrepentant, apostate, reprobate like me. Gotta be some reason why y’all keep doing it.

Best I can figure is that Love must have something to do with it.

Greg. Karin. Linford. John and Paul, in absentia. This was for you. I love you.

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Barry Moser is an artist, engraver, illustrator, essayist, typographer, and educator. His work can be found in numerous collections and libraries around the world, including the National Gallery of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Vatican Library, and the Israel Museum. His books of engraved illustrations include the King James Bible, Moby-Dick, and The Divine Comedy.