Downside Up

2:00 p.m. Tab is photographing a wedding today. He left a half hour ago and probably won't be back until midnight. Stephanie is taking Daniel to a play this afternoon and will be keeping him overnight, leaving me just the twins. I'll be using the time this afternoon while they nap to get our tax information in order for the accountant. We decided about six years ago that Tab's freelance photography business complicated our taxes enough to make it worth hiring a professional to prepare them. That way, we don't have to worry about how to amortize equipment purchases, not to mention all those zany deductions.

Every March since 1993 we've been going to Ryan's Accounting to see our buddy Harry, a man with all the charm of a newel post. His mother, Kathleen, was my parents' accountant before they moved to Maine, and Kathleen's father prepared my grandparents taxes. So we put up with Harry's lackluster personality for the sake of family tradition, and because he seems to know his stuff.

I still remember our first trip there back when I was 8 1/2 months pregnant with Daniel. The business is located in a house in which some of the Ryans still live. We waited for fifteen minutes in a cluttered living room, watching "Jeopardy," which was playing, too loudly, on the TV. Occasionally one of the family dogs would trot in, sniff us, and leave. Then Harry came in, introduced himself, and showed us to the "office," which was the even more cluttered dining room. Boxes, papers, and tax forms littered the surface of the large dining room table.

Harry sat across from us; further down the same table on our side sat an elderly man, another client, rifling through a large box of loose receipts, with his accountant (another Ryan) across from him. The dogs investigated us here, too; once I nearly jumped out of my chair when I felt a wet nose nudging the palm of my hand. Harry had a horrendous cold and kept sneezing throughout our meeting. I ended up catching his cold; when I went to the hospital to deliver Daniel ten days later I had almost completely lost my voice.

8:15 p.m. This afternoon before working on the taxes, I did my first upside down drawing in Right Side. The task was to copy a line drawing while looking at it upside down. The left hemisphere of the brain wants to label everything and make linear sense out of it, but when you look at a line drawing upside down, it is hard for your left brain to interpret just what you are seeing. So the left brain abandons the effort, leaving the right brain in charge for once.

While I worked on the drawing, I could sense when my right mode was fully engaged in the task because the inner "monkey voice," the one that chatters in my head almost ceaselessly, was quiet for once. That alone made the effort worthwhile. Another side effect I noticed after the assignment was that I have become much more attuned to the actual appearance of things. During my walk with the twins before dinner, I noticed the gentle curve of the telephone wires and the spiky little lines of bare branches and twigs silhouetted against the sky. The drawing itself came out pretty well, too. Far better than it would have if I had attempted it right side up. I plan to do more upside down drawings this week before moving on to the next chapter.

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