Why can’t every day be a sunny and unseasonably warm Monday afternoon in Seattle? I’ve been asking myself this question a lot lately.
I began this line of inquiry about three weeks ago, when I went to Seattle for a book event at America’s oldest travel book store, Wide World Books and Maps :
I can assure you, Dear Readers of this blog, that our own Commentor Linda June brought her special sparkle of energy to the gathering and helped turn the event into a salon of witty and fun give-and-take (I love Seattle readers!) and as if that weren’t eventful enough, everyone there was treated to the premiere of my one and only Gardens of Awe and Folly Book Event dress:
See? It’s got flowers, the way gardens have flowers. Get it? I looked high and low for a dress that made me look like someone who knew her way around a garden (or a dress shop) and this number thrills me because it’s “flowery” but not “FLOWERY”, if you know what I mean.
So that was Tuesday, but I’m talking about Monday when it was sunny and unseasonably warm and should-be travel memoirist and fellow Capricorn Beth from Seattle and I were having tea in the wood-paneled Fireside Room. . .
. . . at the famous haunted Sorrento Hotel, which quickly became a few rounds of cocktails outside in “The Garden” . . .
. . . and just as the gin/chardonnay combo of the second Fred Astaire kicked in and the Seattle sun was glinting all golden and honey the way the Seattle sun rarely glints all golden and honey, and all worries and cares had floated off to the place where worries and cares are told to calm the fuck down, and Beth was telling me about the Scottish Terrier she knew who could count to six, I began a serious investigation, deep in my brain, on Why can’t every day be a sunny and unseasonably warm Monday afternoon in Seattle?
Or, to put it another way, How hard would it be to create these peak moments in life more often?
I don’t have the answer, I just have the question. I also don’t have many photos from my fabulous visit to Seattle to show you because one of the side effects of this Seattle-induced rumination on the meaning of life was that I didn’t take may snapshots of Seattle this time around, although I did spend some time trying to figure out how to draw Scotties while I was in The City on Puget Sound That Has No Nickname:
Which I will now leverage into a blog post about how I figured out how to draw cats while I tell you about the other side effects of travel to Seattle, which included dire physical consequences, but let me begin with my first attempt at painting my sweet Candy Kitty in 2006:
This is me in one of my first attempts at watercolor, in which you can see I am very wary of the watery personality of the medium so I’m using the paint in a very dry application, almost as if it were colored pencil. After a bit more practice I got used to the slippery nature of the H2O, so I made another attempt at the same sweet kitty about six weeks later and I painted Candy Kitty #2:
I think you can see in Candy Kitty #2 that I’ve relaxed a bit, and that I’m getting comfortable with letting the paint do what it wants to do when it’s doing its thing with water — which is the same thing I try to do with every picture I paint. I liked this little pic so much that I put it on page 178 of my first book, When Wanderers Cease to Roam. Here’s a side-by-side comparison:
P.S. I also switched paper after I painted the Candy Kitty #1, from a very heavy watercolor stock to the 90lb. Canson stuff I use exclusively these days.
I’ve been very busy since I returned to the Isle of Long from my travels to the Great Pacific Northwest, schlepping to the optometrist for a new pair of reading specs to replace the ones I left on the plane and then carting myself off to urgent care for a chest x-ray (bronchitis tends to make you wonder if your lungs are putting in an honest day’s work) and generally spending my waking moments feeling pretty miserable and eye-sore.
Between those hours on end that I spent feeling very sorry for myself I also searched high and low for the psychic reason for these physical calamities, because it seemed obvious to me that there was some element of metaphor in all this squinting and wheezing, which has nothing to do with the picture I am showing you below, which I painted around the same time as I painted Candy Kitty #2, c. 2006, which we’ll call Nino’s Winter Mind #1:
In reviewing my recent travels, as a returned traveller tends to do, and other deep thinking, I came to an understanding of what I was trying to tell myself with this bout of ill health. It’s about being a writer who might not want to write any more.
You see, I’ve spent the past dozen years sitting in a small room with my own self, writing three books. I’ve also spent a lot of time watching Bravo TV.
Then, as a side effect of writing one of those books, I went to Seattle and experienced what it’s like to get out of the house, and it was a lot better — a whole megaton better — than sitting in a room by myself, and it’s even better than watching a Real Housewife get the comeuppance she deserves (oh hell, they all deserve to have their uppances cometh).
I got a taste of what it might be like to have a Real Life and it is as bright as a gin/chardonnay combo on ice and as sharp as a meeting of the minds with a Capricorn from Seattle.
Now, if you remember the little pic from above — Nino’s Winter Mind #1 — I want to show you how I re-worked that same idea a few years later, when I tried to paint like Maira Kalman:
My first book came out in 2008 and I thought I had invented an whole new kind of reading experience and had the entire field of illustrated memoir all to myself, but in 2009 Maira Kalman came out with her illustrated memoir The Principles of Uncertainty and blew me and my quirky little travelog/chapbook off the literary radar into the deep space of the mid-list (where no one can hear you scream). I looked at her book and tried to figure out what made it so appealing to The New York Times in ways that mine had failed and I thought it might be the illustrations. She doesn’t do outlines. So I tried to make my pictures bigger (than a tea bag) and less structurally persnickety, and Nino Winter Mind #2 (above) was what I came up with.
This is Maira Kalman’s illustration of a scene in a foreign city (Cairo?) sidewalk from The Principles of Uncertainty (pages 32 and 33):
So I went to Ikea in Hicksville, Long Island and came up with this:
I think you can see why I came to the conclusion that I was a terrible fake Maira Kalman and I went back to doing the kind of illustrations that I can only do:

left to right: Pinky, Winston, Vivian, Belle, and Nino, the gray and white kitty with the Winter Mind.
I know that, with this digression about me being a terrible fake Maira Kalman, I’m circling some great idea about authenticity and the side effects of travel, but I can’t quite put it together within the time limits of this blog post. All I really know for sure is that for the time being, I seem to be allergic to the idea of sitting in a small room for another three years, writing another book, even though the only thing that I can do half-right is sitting in small rooms for years on end, writing books.
Oh! I forgot! I can also paint cats! (It only took five years of practice.)
For new Dear Readers, you can catch my tutorial How To Paint a Cat by clicking onto the link back there, seven words ago. (Smooches to our Dear Kitty here, Lizzie Cosette from The Marmalade Gypsy blog.)
As Dear Commentors Deborah and Monique and Kirra observed last week, getting out of the house often leads one to doing something stupid, saying something stupid, or driving 40 miles the wrong way. But ever since I let the thought of being a Three-And-Done author take up a rather comfy space in my brain I have felt as if there’s a Seattle sun beam glowing in my heart.
This Summer I think I’m going to be spending a lot of time out of the small room I’ve been cooped up in lo these past dozen years. Now, I know that real life is not like travel, where you have to make up every day from scratch and you never know if it’s going to end with epiphanies over vintage cocktails in a haunted hotel or other kinds of epiphanies over a take-away dinner of Pop Tarts and wine. Every day can’t have a peak moment as sunny and unseasonably warm as a Monday afternoon in Seattle.
Or can it?
It’s Memorial Day weekend here in America and I hope you’ll all join me in paying respects to James Alexander Malloy, 175th Inf., 29th Div., KIA June 16, 1644, the only Scotsman buried in the American Cemetery on Omaha Beach. We Will Never Forget.