Post-thunderstorm clouds in late April (2025)
A year from now, here are five things from this week that I'd like to remember:
MONDAY
It’s 3:48pm and I’m driving to pick up F from school. N bounces around the backseat eating grapes and chattering about her day when a phone call interrupts the ever-present stream of K-Pop blasting our brain cells. I glance at the screen and see a name that hasn’t appeared on my phone in 127 days: Pops.
I pick up immediately. Hello? I shout into the phone, jubilant with excitement.
Hello! he says back and I can hear the smile through the speaker, the crinkling of his eyes. I can hear the warmth, I can hear the sun.
I haven’t seen your name on my phone in a thousand years. You got your phone back? I ask, and he laughs. He didn’t. My mom dialed for him. But: he’s holding it. Talking to me. Slowly remembering.
We talk for 15 minutes before N asks for her K-Pop back. Pops and I laugh; we understand. N sees her dad every day. She never wonders when she will see him next, or if she should start saving voicemails, or if he’ll remember her name.
She doesn’t know that the world will ask her to grow up. To stop calling her mom all the time. To stop asking her dad for advice. That we, her own parents, will urge her to move away and step into the entirety of who she is, even when what we want most is for her to stay.
The days peel away so quickly. The years dissolve in front of me. I blink and it’s the month of May in a year that I never thought would exist. The older I get, the more I still feel like a kid: excited about cake, a thunderstorm, and a phone call from my dad.
TUESDAY
A few months ago, UK children’s magazine AQUILA reached out to me to illustrate an essay about Dr. Sake Dean Mahomed, a British Indian who chronicled his many adventures in The Travels of Dean Mahomet.
Sake Dean Mahomed for AQUILA Magazine (April 2026)
The art director wanted a central portrait of Mahomed, but also for the illustration to touch on the many varied aspects of his life: among his many endeavors, Mahomed was also a surgeon, soldier, and writer. He opened the first vapour masseur bath in England, and the first Indian restaurant in England: the Hindoostane Coffee House in Central London.
I was asked to make the illustration heavily inspired by the Brighton seaside, where Mahomed’s bathhouse was established, so I ushered the four windows into his life inside an outline of the Brighton Pavillion. It was challenging to work within the narrow measurements I was given, as the illustration would sit squarely in the middle of a spread, and I’m sure there are more efficient ways to creatively solve this issue, but I feel satisfied with how it all came together.
A photograph of the printed illustration in the April 2026 issue of AQUILA Magazine (2026)
A photograph of the printed illustration in AQUILA Magazine (2026)
The April 2026 issue of AQUILA Magazine (2026)
Please excuse these shabby photographs; I took them on a gray day here in St. Louis. If you have children in your life, AQUILA is a beautiful, award-winning magazine; and many thanks to AD Benita Estevez for the fun assignment!
WEDNESDAY
Sam Beam at The Pageant (2025)
I saw Sam Beam play as Iron & Wine this week, and though I only knew one song out of the entire set, I was reminded that a good songwriter can lift you out of your body, away from your impossible mind, and into the music.
David Byrne at Stifel Theatre (2025)
I also saw David Byrne play this week. Though I am still mostly speechless, I will say that he is evolutionary—someone capable of pushing us, as people and creative people, in a different direction. He’s also a medical marvel. At 73, he is spritely, creatively agile, socially and politically aware, and very loving. I spent the entire show completely mesmerized; I am convinced that his good health is because the music is in him.
THURSDAY
“In the end, people don’t view their life as merely the average of all of its moments—which, after all, is mostly nothing much plus some sleep. For human beings, life is meaningful because it is a story. A story has a sense of a whole, and its arc is determined by the significant moments, the ones where something happens. Measurements of people’s minute-by-minute levels of pleasure and pain miss this fundamental aspect of human existence. A seemingly happy life may be empty. A seemingly difficult life may be devoted to a great cause. We have purposes larger than ourselves. Unlike your experiencing self—which is absorbed in the moment—your remembering self is attempting to recognize not only the peaks of joy and valleys of misery but also how the story works out as a whole.”
—from Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal, which I recently finished and loved.
FRIDAY
She was Eliza for a few weeks
When she was a baby—
Eliza Lily. Soon it changed to Lil.
Later she was Miss Steward in the baker’s shop
And then ‘my love’, ‘my darling’, Mother.
Widowed at thirty, she went back to work
As Mrs Hand. Her daughter grew up,
Married and gave birth.
Now she was Nanna. ‘Everybody
Calls me Nanna,’ she would say to visitors.
And so they did – friends, tradesmen, the doctor.
In the geriatric ward
They used the patients’ Christian names.
‘Lil,’ we said, ‘or Nanna,’
But it wasn’t in her file
And for those last bewildered weeks
She was Eliza once again.
—Names by Wendy Cope
Of all the things you can put in front of your eyes, I’m grateful that my little letter is one of them.
If you’d like to support me, please buy my books. My art prints and line of greeting cards make excellent gifts for yourself or a friend. You can also hire me for your next project—I’d love to work together.
xx,
M
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