I have been carrying this little painting around half-finished since 2005. I started it during the fall of my first semester in history graduate school, when I still reflexively turned to paint and brush to record and reflect my feelings and thoughts. Through seven years of school and four moves (even as far as another continent), I carried this remnant from my previous life as a painter, thinking that in a spare moment I would finally finish it.
But that moment never came. As long as I had research, writing, teaching, job applications, interviews, job talks, and teaching demos to do, I had no time for painting. My attempt at attaining the status of an academic position became a totalizing obsession, filling my every waking hour.
All the while, little Maevie was growing older. The silver around her lips and eyes grew more pronounced. She arose from her bed slowly and stiffly. She cried out in pain occasionally. One day I found myself holding her in my arms in the bright New Mexico sunlight and wailing “don’t leave me! Don’t leave me.” She just looked bravely off into the distance, absorbing my grief as she had done for most of her life. From the beginning of my time as an historian in 2005 to nearly the end of my academic career in 2021, Maeve was my companion. Her life spanned my academic life, filled with its many joys of discovery, so much struggle, such profound disappointment, and even injustice.
Maeve in fact invigilated me into life. When I asked the Cowboy for one of his border collies, what I imagined I wanted was something or someone to watch over me. I recalled Maeve’s grandmother Lula taking in the Cowboy’s every move, her eyes following him as he moved from the kitchen table to his Lazy-Boy recliner. He told me “the city is no place for a border collie,” but then called me one day and said, “I got one. She doesn’t like cows.” He put Maeve on a jet plane in 2004 and I picked her up in JFK with my friends Bruce and Diane.
Maeve did watch over me, and helped me to become real.
Her facial expressions were legion. They spanned the gamut from jolly, to skeptical, from judgmental, to loving, to straight out verbal communication -- get me this, I am not well, what is wrong? Her watching me from the corner of my Brooklyn studio may have been the first time in my life I felt truly seen. What I saw through her russet and golden eyes I did not much like. One day I threw my cell phone against the wall in a pique of abject frustration, and then caught her looking at me from her corner. Really?? She seemed to say. I was often ashamed of how I behaved around her and sometimes towards her.
Yet, over the course of her seventeen years with me, I got better. I improved. I became more patient, kinder, more of a human being. In her final years, I discovered (to my amazement and joy) a deep well of patience, caring, and nurturing as I picked her up, moved her around to make her more comfortable, cleaned her teeth and her ears, purchased delectable foods to tempt her, and stroked and loved and adored her with complete abandon. Finally, I made the decision to end her life. On June 19, 2020 she died and I buried her in my backyard.
The last gift she gave me before she left me was to help me to realize that I was desperately unhappy. She showed me that I was still only living a half-life, one lonely and bereft of intimacy. Academia was draining me dry. My heart felt like dry husks. I was bitter and angry. When the tears flowed from my eyes onto her silky forehead, I felt pure, alive, a gushing human baptized in love. My love for her clearly contrasted with how I felt, and pointed me towards the man I could become.
Soon after her death, I began to paint again, even as I was still trying to get a job in academia. I was a finalist for two tenure-track jobs in 2021, both of which required job talks and teaching demos, one in French no less. Yet, I still did not get a position. I had applied over 1000 times in the nearly ten years I had been in academia, and had been a finalist thirteen times – all to no avail. My academic career ended because I just could not do it anymore. I could not write one more cover letter. I could not try to explain my book in a new and hopefully exciting way. I could not move again and try to build a life in a new location with new people I hardly knew. I had done that four times with little Maevie as my constant, and now she was gone, and it was over.
Burnout is real and it took me a long time to heal up. Two and half years after her death, I pulled out this little canvas, and let little Maevie teach me again. This time she was showing me how to recall my first language, of color, stroke, and line. How to record or trap or capture a distinct personality: a compact little body, the gloss of a coat, and the luster of a set of eyes. My memories were my model.
I see now that she will always teach me, and mirror me, and gaze upon me for the rest of my life, and for her life I will always be grateful.
Portrait of a Dog, oil on canvas, 22.5 x 26,” 2023
