Frank Gehry and Me

Frank Gehry and I recently celebrated our 80th birthdays.

Who is Frank Gehry? I asked a friend if she was familiar with him. “No,” she said, “I never met him.” He does not go to the senior center or the Baptist Church. He is a world-famous architect.

Who am I? I am an unimportant old lady who writes this blog.

Gehry designed the Guggenheim Museum in Balboa, Spain, and the Disney Concert Hall in Las Angeles, California. Both are innovative designs which changed the way people think about buildings, the way Pablo Picasso’s paintings caused a revolution in the way people look at paintings. I stood before famous buildings throughout the World, and to me Gehry’s designs seem outlandish. I looked at paintings in all the great museums in the U.S. and Europe, and I admit I prefer the Impressionists to Picasso. But Gehry and Picasso influence those who know more about architecture and art than I do.

I am a writer whose unpublished manuscripts fill four big boxes in my garage. I feel I have no influence on anyone about anything.

According to the New Yorker, on his birthday Gehry said, “I told my staff that when I was eighty I would slow down. Well, I did, but not much. I don’t feel like eighty. I guess you never think you’re the age you are, and, as long as you don’t look in the mirror, you aren’t.”

When I leave the dialysis center after sitting immobile in a chair with needles in my left arm for four hours, I FEEL like eighty. I continue to write. That’s what I do. I have a good life: a comfortable home and NO Debts. Charlie, my cat, throws up hairballs, which I have to clean up. When I come home from dialysis, I hit the button to open the garage door, and Charlie starts to meow from behind the kitchen door, where he is waiting to escort me into the den and climb up onto my lap. I scratch his head and feel content. Maybe a few people enjoy reading my blog.