Happy 3rd Adoption Anniversary to Junee!
Juneteenth is special to me for two reasons: black history and my four-legged roommate
I’m in my early 40s and have zero interest in denying it. In fact, I act more like my great great aunt and tell my age before people can even ask me. I don’t quite know if I’ll find a creative song like Regina Hall did (by the time I turn 50), but I’m working on it. Still, there are moments where I go from being proud of being a Geriatric Millennial to busting out laughing at some things that are perfectly normal to me.
A while back, I walked into Kohl’s department store and paced around for 20 minutes while trying to find photo albums. I was getting frustrated because this is a fairly common thing to buy — or so I thought. I finally stopped an employee who was about half my age and asked her where the photo albums were.
“Photo albums?” she asked. “Like … to put pictures in?”
I stared at her, waiting for the punchline. “Oh, you’re serious? Yes, a photo album for photos.”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” she said. “I just … I put all of my photos on Instagram. I have no idea where those are. Let me ask someone else.”
And she turned around and asked an employee who was around my parents’ age. I busted out laughing before I could contain it. I’m from a world before the Internet, where I walked around taking photographs with 110 film and developing 35mm film in a “dark room.”
I still check Shutterfly out a few times a month to see what their photo deals look like so I can buy a bunch of photos all at once to put in my collection of photo albums. (Yes, she eventually found a whole stack of them for me on clearance.)
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Last week, I was browsing through my Shutterfly digital albums to figure out which photos I needed to replace after framing some and which ones I’d never ordered — and I happened to glance at a photo album of ceramics I’d painted in my teenage years. Unlike my mother, who keeps her ceramics as collectors items, I sold about 75% of the things I painted. Most of them were sold before I even thought to aim a camera at them. But I never gave up the very first ceramic item I’d ever painted: a dog.
I was about 13 or 14 years old when I painted this dog. The ceramics studio was black-owned by a married couple who had a massive collection of molds. They would shave the facial features around so the clay of the noses and mouths were more full and plump. If there was an Afrocentric ceramic piece to be had, they had it. It was South Side Chicago’s go-to ceramic studio for black figurines and gifts.
But for whatever reason, Tina (the co-owner/wife who was my teacher) wanted me to start with a non-human piece before I started practicing how to paint human eyes. My dog at the time, a Labrador Retriever mix named Shep, had started going to a veterinary office near this ceramic studio. Shep was on my mind, so I chose a dog instead of an object as my first piece. And she got to work teaching me how to dry-brush ceramics.
I don’t remember who picked the colors. My guess is she did. I don’t even remember how long it took me to paint this dog. But I glanced at the photo of that dog in my Shutterfly album, then stood up and walked over to one of my wooden monuments where my (remaining) ceramics sit behind a glass door. And I stared at this dog.
Then, I looked at Junee. And I looked at the dog again. Give or take more white patches, I basically painted Junee two decades before I even knew who Junee was. And I’m entertained by seeing the two next to each other because it took me three years of her following me around to even realize this happened.
Happy Anniversary to my Hound mix. And Happy Juneteenth to all!
Recommended Read: “My first time celebrating Juneteenth was with Mos Def ~ Learning about Chicago’s Inner-City Muslim Action Network”
Now let’s see if she can get through the day without finding a way to get paint on her butt like she did last Juneteenth or during my drywall adventure. Wish me luck!
Shamontiel is a dog lover to her core: 588 completed walks with 99 dogs, eight dog-housesittings and six dog boardings at the time of this publication.
Did you enjoy this post? You’re also welcome to check out my Substack columns “Black Girl In a Doggone World,” “BlackTechLogy,” “Homegrown Tales,” “I Do See Color,” “One Black Woman’s Vote” and “Window Shopping” too. Subscribe to this newsletter for the weekly posts every Wednesday.
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