“I am not an artist”

There is a single word, “Grace,” cradling a seed that sprouts a solitary flower in bloom.

The flower is layered over a brilliant blue sky, a mural in miniature painted around all four sides of an electric utility box on a sidewalk — the kind of box that’s usually an ugly imposition on an already imposing urban landscape. But on this one, “Seed for the Soul” is inscribed on a corner of the box, and purple mountains rise majestically on the back.

It is not the only oasis of public art in Pawtucket. Across this gritty, post-industrial city, there are other boxes with uplifting words — Healing, Love, Hope — lettered across a spectrum of unabashedly bright backdrops, grassy plains and sunsets, different scenes on different corners, all of them striking. Many are the work of one man who will tell you he’s “not an artist.”

Retired Pawtucket police officer David Borek saw these scenes and liked how they transformed the brutal into the beautiful in a very public way. And as he admired the works, an idea sprouted. Through friends at City Hall, he tracked down the painter, a lifelong city resident named Paris Fisher. The fuchsia-petaled daisy rising against a wispy blue sky on the portico of Borek’s Pawtucket home marks their first collaboration.

Two years later, we’re in the driveway at Borek’s home, looking at their latest project.

In front of the garage, there’s a blue tarp dotted with paint cans and spattered with a rainbow of spills, an accidental Jackson Pollock. Fisher stirs a brilliant yellow paint below the enormous canvas of a double-wide overhead garage door, its once conservatively bland white aluminum finish now an arresting panorama, a desert road heading into a sunset.

“I am not an artist,” he tells me as he brushes paint carefully along the edges of the mural’s golden sun. “I know artists,” he says, growing as he does from a talented family tree — his mother, an uncle, a cousin. “I am just a community worker who uses art to encourage others.”

Fisher is a lifelong resident of Pawtucket who grew up in the Prospect Heights housing development and searched for ways to help his community. His younger self used hip-hop, rap and oratorical talents to organize neighborhood events. He found he could channel his energy into drawing others in. He got a degree in social work and expanded those efforts.

These days, Fisher is an independent contractor working with young people in the community, focusing on mental health. “Not in the clinical sense,” he says, but rather “in the day-to-day coping” with difficulties and stress. “Kids are going through a lot these days,” he says, so art is the vehicle he uses to teach techniques and tips to help them balance life and stay healthy.

There’s a parallel that runs through what he does and what the kids do. No matter what you’re doing, he says, it’s not about whether you’re a great artist. “It’s about how great you use the talent you have.”

Tomorrow he’ll be back to his regular job, leading a substance-abuse prevention program at Pawtucket’s Blackstone Academy Charter School. It’s there, in the fertile fields of earnest potential, that he performs his real artistry: planting the seeds of hope, healing, love and grace so the community’s next generation can sprout and blossom and create its own scenes of ethereal brightness.

copyright 2019 / Kris Craig / The Providence Journal / 2 Much Time design

Dog, Gone

Thirty-six hours before my dog died, we played fetch in the dark. It was something she loved to do, something still within range, but it was more than that. It seemed to liberate her from the indignities of age and make her feel like a puppy again.

Her eyesight was in decline, and in the glare of day it was hard for her to distinguish shapes. But against the curtain of night she could spot and chase our glowing, LED-lit ball. She’d lope across the field in the gathering blackness, tongue out, tail wagging furiously.

And then on a floodlit day that dawned too soon, the blackness closed in. On her last morning alive, I tried to get her to share my vanilla ice-cream cone, an existential bribe. Please, Isis, eat something. Anything. She ignored the treat but rewarded me with a tail wag for the gesture.

My dog is dead and I am lost. I’ve never been much for the drumbeat of routine, but if Isis taught me anything, it’s was this: Routines and rituals are rhythms that lend a richness to our days, a soothing pattern, one I followed and hardly noticed.

I notice it now, morning to night. I find pieces are missing, the puzzle incomplete. The 16 years, 8 months and 27 days of Isis’s existence flowed through my life like a river carrying the steadiest and sweetest routines of my adulthood, and I am lonely where being alone was never before an issue.

Named for the Egyptian goddess of the moon, fertility, magic and healing, Isis was never farther than a whistle away. Like people and dogs will do, we woke together, her head popping up from her bed as mine from my pillow. We walked, ran, paddled or swam together daily, exercise coach and workout buddy. Weather permitting, she worked with me, sleeping in the car between photo assignments, occasionally nuzzling forward to remind of her presence. She ate when I ate, played when I played, worked when I worked.

I joke that my siblings and I were raised by dogs. With the number of mutts, mixes and pedigrees that have shared our lives, there’s truth in that. It’s hard to tell who gets the better end of the deal. Who’s taking whom for a walk, and who gains more from it? A recent Swedish study found that, other things being equal, people with dogs are less likely to contend with cardiovascular disease and premature death. There’s a lot of research, analysis and common-sense articles chronicling the physical and psychological benefits of canine company. “Man’s best friend” has the power to regulate our blood pressure, soothe our anxiety, stress and depression, encourage socialization and enhance our physical well-being.

Am I who am I am because of Isis and the other dogs who have shared my tracks? Probably not, but I know their unfettered, unfiltered, unconditional love has shaped my sensibilities.

There are far greater tragedies in this world than the death of a pet, especially one who lived so well for so very long. But right now I can’t think of one. Things will stay quiet at home for my wife and me. We will adjust. I’ll donate Isis’ pillows, toys and treats to animal rescue.

But I’ll keep the LED ball where it is for now, in a fruit bowl on the counter. There’s probably one more dog’s life in our future, and one day there will be another reason to turn it on, head out under the cerulean sky of a summer evening and race against the dying of the light. It won’t be the same, of course. It can’t be. The timeless quest is a fresh expedition each time. That’s the point.

I imagined Isis would leave this world running full speed across a field, tongue out and tail wagging furiously. I think we came close enough to call this one a win.

____________________________________________________________________________________________           This photo was taken by close friend and photographer Cheryl Senter during a short visit in NH. I’d gone north to the woods to be away from people and by myself for a few days and of course, my dog came with me.

copyright 2019 / Kris Craig / The Providence Journal / 2 Much Time design