Ethel, Bobby, Jackie and Jack-illustrated

Margot and her hat

She looked smaller than I remembered, her red coat like a gown hanging from her shoulders, fastened up to her neck as precise as a math equation.

Margot was eating toffee pennies, folding their gold wrappers into quarters, putting them inside her pocket and chewing with her mouth open when she finally saw me standing in front of her. 

We had been here once before, some months earlier, when the sun shone a different colour on the trees; Margot in her hat, the sound of water somewhere in the distance.

She popped another toffee penny into her mouth, stroked her cheek with the inside of her hand and smiled the small smile of a young girl embarrassed by the idea of herself. It made her seem even tinier to me and I felt my heart pull inside my chest as the wind played music amongst the leaves and echoed up into the sky. A breath between two moments.

Ethel, Bobby, Jackie and Jack

I sat down to watch a documentary on the life of Ethel Kennedy tonight and as I watched I remembered a book of letters written to Jackie after Jack's assassination that I read greedily some time after Christmas.
As Ethel quietly spoke about that day over black and white footage of people hearing the news for the first time, I saw the grief fresh as clean linen settle on their faces, and I thought of those letters, each written to try and make sense of the senseless. And I wondered if the people I saw, with their set hair and wet eyes, had sat down in the time after to write Jackie and to reach out to her; and I thought of the grief they shared, the man they lost, the dream they said goodbye to.
And then I imagined them all, Ethel and Bobby, Jack, Jackie, the children, in Cape Cod, dancing across blue seas on a big boat, sweaters tied around their necks, the sun making glitter on the oceans surface. And I imagined myself there too, laughing alongside them, before it changed into something else completely.
Before the waves crashed us back to the waters edge to begin again.

Sharing you with memories (all or nothing) illustrated

First

He took me to a bookstore that first day (and the race track a little later, although I'm not sure now if that part really happened at all) and we looked for a book with two grey birds on the cover that he had read when he was younger. I hadn't really noticed his face before or, more accurately, noticed how his features made up his face, and I found myself tracing the lines around his eyes in my head as he thumbed through the shelves looking for that memory from his childhood. Upstairs and all of a sudden he kissed me on my mouth, smiling quietly as he pulled away; a shared joke I was yet to know the punchline to.
Later we lay still on the grass, my head on his chest, his hand in my hand, and I counted his heartbeats out loud until the numbers sounded foreign and lost their meaning, a vain attempt to stop time.

Mirikitani

I watched a documentary recently called ‘The cats of Mirikitani’ about a homeless 80year old Japanese artist living in New York in 2001 (the full story here.) His story astounded me and made me sad and angry and then happy that he made work and that it was this work that pulled him out of the deepest darkness that life could throw at him.  He was difficult and broken and scarred so completely that his history hung like a badge on his chest at all times; he and it could not be separated. That has stuck with me since; how much of all of us is history and how much of it is who we actually are? I cannot stop thinking about it.

Angela Lansbury-illustrated