Reaching for Butterflies
By Brett M. Van Hoesen
From mid-March until late-August last year, my experience of the pandemic conformed to a coterie of predictable activities: physical distancing from friends, wearing masks, learning how to Zoom, teaching online, coordinating my kids’ online learning schedules, completing a few writing projects, baking, gardening, enjoying some early morning hours at Lake Tahoe, and resisting the long-overdue need to clean out our garage.
Right before Labor Day weekend, I hurt my hip—a mysterious injury presumed to be attributed to our new rowing machine. By late October, after weeks on crutches and many sessions of physical therapy, I was 90% recovered. Then, November 2020 changed everything.
To my great surprise, I was diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer. No family history. No history of suspicious mammograms. After many scans, procedures, hip surgery, and my first round of chemo, here I am, at the start of a new beginning.
I agreed to write this essay several months ago, with the theme of resolve as my guide. At the time, it seemed like such an optimistic, necessary concept after a challenging year of COVID-era restrictions, adjustments, and sacrifices. Resolution, new year, strength, commitment – these things admittedly dulled when the word cancer, or “cancerned” as my youngest son likes to say, entered my personal vocabulary.
After a few months of serious doubt as to whether I really had any worthwhile advice to offer at this particular time, I decided that my original three constants that have kept me going during the last 10 months were still worth promoting: friends, music, and reaching for butterflies (aka: continuing to see the beauty in the world).
I. Friends
Hanna P., October 2020 from the Friends series, three mini polaroids. Photos/Brett M. Van Hoesen.
One great irony of physical distancing during the pandemic is that I have become better socially connected with friends – from childhood to college days, from work colleagues to an amazing group of local moms, who have helped to coordinate meal deliveries for me and my family several nights a week.
During the course of becoming a professor of Art History, I have experienced several periods of extreme social isolation that are often integral to academic occupations. When I was working on my dissertation, I inevitably lost connection with friends and family, which only made the project more difficult. I learned from this experience and, years later when I received sabbatical at the University of Nevada, Reno, I made it a priority to make more friends and to stay better connected. I’m most likely an extroverted introvert and, as a result, I am often attracted to people who are good communicators. My friend Marian, for instance, who I met many years ago at a new faculty function, introduced herself as, “Hi – I’m Marian, and I need friends.” I was instantly charmed by her bluntness.
Over the past 10 months, in addition to meeting friends physically distanced outside or writing more postcards and letters to family and friends far away, digital communication culture has necessitated an increased flexibility with multiple modalities: calls, texts, voice mails, emails, Facebook, Instagram, Zoom, FaceTime, Messenger video calls, etc.
Not all of my friends subscribe to this digital shift. My friend, Hanna, who is an incredible advocate for contemporary art in Reno, normally privileges in-person contact. These visits always involve generous gifts of art-related articles, gallery guides, and books, many marked with Hanna’s notorious sharpie notation, “to keep,” signaling that the item is a permanent gift. When in-person meetings became less viable, especially during colder months, I have savored more than ever the continuation of our friendship via email, post, and phone. Having friends of different generations and those who help you access different times of your life is really important when you get older. It sounds cliché, but I tell my sons that I wish for them to always have a strong friend network. That construct is more essential now than ever.
II. Music
Music for Virtual Travel, December 2020.
My paternal grandmother, Juanita Pearl, was originally from Butler, Oklahoma. She grew up on a rural cotton farm, the middle child in a family of 11 children. Their main source of entertainment was music – playing guitar by heart and singing old hymnals. This passion persisted during her years with my grandfather on their farm in Wisconsin, and again later in life, once widowed, when she relocated to Southern California.
As a kid, I loved visiting my grandmother, to sit at her 1950’s Formica kitchen table, where she would plug her steel string guitar into a small Fender amp and belt out Patsy Cline-style country tunes. I can still hear the surge in her voice as she sang the chorus to I’ll Fly Away or the way she mimicked the sad twang of the Carter Family’s The Cyclone of Rye Cove.
As quarantine and smoky skies slowed down time in Reno this past summer, I rediscovered some old recordings of my grandmother, mostly on cassette, including some sweet duets with me and my brother. The acoustic journey took me to songs that embody my grandmother’s essence: Bill Monroe’s Precious Memories, the Chuck Wagon Gang’s I’d Rather be an Old Time Christian, and Tanya Tucker’s Delta Dawn, to name a few. COVID-19 culture has reignited my appreciation for music; it has reminded me that conscious listening and uninhibited singing are good for the soul.
While I listen to music in a variety of ways, I have also recently reconnected with my CD collection, which enables virtual travel, a much-needed tonic for this year’s months spent at home. Bonnie Rait and Bill Withers albums take me back to my early childhood in Boston, Massachusetts; The Cars, The Go-Gos, Madonna, Depeche Mode, Koko Taylor, and Muddy Waters remind me of my adolescence and college years in Iowa City, Iowa. French Yé-yé music transports me to late-night dancing at the Roter Salon during graduate school years in Berlin, Germany. Sebadoh, The Figgs, Elliott Smith, Nada Surf, Cheap Trick, and The Strokes signal the long-time influence of my husband’s musical taste on my own – tracking our times together in Boston, western Massachusetts, Iowa, and Reno, Nevada.
As a family, we have turned to music as entertainment to an extent that I don’t remember in the past. Kitchen dance parties care of Spotify or YouTube, playing instruments solo or together in our living room, meditation sessions to classical music, or the recorded sounds of thunderstorms. My sons have started sharing experimental compositions newly created on Garage Band. There’s been lots of whistling in the house, for better or for worse. In short, all modes of music have served as a necessary therapy, reminding me of some of the simple tenets of my grandmother’s musical way of life.
III. Reaching for Butterflies
Sedric Ware, “Reaching for Butterflies,” 1994. Visual letter; collage.
The summer before my last semester of my undergraduate degree at the University of Iowa, I saved up money and took a three-week solo trip along the east coast from Boston to North Carolina. Staying with family and friends along the way, I interviewed for a wide range of art museum internships. My career goal at the time was to work in an art museum.
Upon graduation, my first internship was with the Community Outreach Coordinator for the education division at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland. On a record-cold day in January, I moved across the country to settle in a city that I barely knew. Since most internships during those days were non-paying positions, I also secured two additional paying jobs – waitressing at Phillips, a large seafood restaurant, and selling clothes at The Limited.
Sedric, my mentor at the Walters, took me to lunch on my first day. Unforgettably, he wore a full length faux-fur black jacket and purple canvas tote bag; he was nice, but aloof. Over my seven-month internship, we became very close. I learned so many things from Sedric. He taught me the importance of proofreading and the value of a mentor’s decisive, albeit empathetic tact when reprimanding an intern for submitting outreach projects riddled with typographical errors to local senior centers. To this day, I still think of Sedric when I proofread any text.
Sedric taught me that my work was a reflection of the institution for which I interned – and that that pride in the Walters should be a motivating force. He also encouraged me to seek internship experiences with other departments – to learn new skill sets and the culture of each museum profession. He set a high standard and, at the same time, made me feel like my work was worthy.
After a successful internship in Baltimore, I moved to Boston and started a new kind of internship experience at the Harvard University Art Museums. Sedric and I wrote letters to each other for the next several years. Mine brimmed with enthusiastic details of a mid-20-year old exploring the city of her birth. His tended to be beautiful cards with short philosophical statements and, on occasion, hand-made collages that gave me a sense of his continued value for the arts.
What I didn’t know was that Sedric was battling chronic disease during and after my time as his intern. Maybe in hindsight, I now appreciate that his references to Buddha and quest for peacefulness were signs that his health was shifting. What he made clear continuously, in person and in letters, was the gift of life – “reaching for butterflies” – seeing beauty in the world. To his mind, this might reside in the Egyptian art collection at the Walters or in the inspired faces of multi-generational African American community members, who we served regularly as part of our outreach practices.
Over the last few months, when I have needed physical and mental strength to get from one medical appointment to the next, in the midst of teaching, mentoring, and parenting, I have thought a lot about Sedric’s “reaching for butterflies” – both as metaphor for life and an action that embodies his unique brand of optimism.
So, in this continued time of new beginnings, and the lingering challenges of COVID, let us remember to reach for the things that bring us inspiration, to connect with friends in new and flexible ways, and to listen to music that creates virtual travel, near and far. We will get through this time – it’s just going to take some strategy and strength.
Playlist – Links to Music:
Bill Monroe, Precious Memories
Bill Withers, Ain’t No Sunshine
The Cars, Just What I Needed
Koko Taylor, Wang Dang Doodle
Sylvie Vartan, Twiste et Chante
The Strokes, 80s Comedown Machine
Brett M. Van Hoesen is Associate Professor and Area Head of Art History at the University of Nevada, Reno. In 2019, she received Nevada Humanities’ Outstanding Teaching of the Humanities award. She lives in Reno with her husband and two sons.
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