melissa shook

Sherlock and I are awake...

2012-01-24T01:21:00.000-08:00

and it's impossible to lie there, trying to get back to sleep when I'm exhilarated, either from too much coffee or the sheer pleasure of teaching that three hour class that I swore I'd never teach again. Right now I'd like to teach one class a week for the rest of my life....to see what on earth those folks are going to do in 13 weeks. We have 36 more hours of class-time left... There is a Carrie, a Rose, a Maxim and a Melissa, among others...

I haven't heard the name Carrie since it referred to an aunt Carrie, a contemporary of my grandmother, Laura... in the backyard of that house in Liberty, Indiana, fireflies and darkness, listening to them talk, hearing her ask about my half-brother who I hadn't, until that moment, understood was different than a 'real' brother. I was eight.

It's doubtful that this group understands my sense of humor and it must be very difficult to understand what I'm getting at if English isn't the native language and that cement floor is death on my back, sending shooting pains after an hour and a half of standing, but here I am, awake and thinking about photography. And glad to be teaching again.

(Unfortunately I can't find my camera and transfer the illustrations, but it will turn up. They are very dull images, but record the chair I always sat in and the new building appearing outside of the catwalk....)

Part of what is keeping me awake is thinking about a Robert Coles book. He taught at Harvard and was something of a rage when I moved up here, though I never liked his writing very much. But he did one book about Eskimo people which was illustrated by a guy who had studies at RISD in those Harry Callahan days. So he produced very formal, large format, photographs, beautifully composed, these somber people staring into the camera. And he had the good sense to write an essay about how different his photographs were from those taken by the Eskimos themselves and to publish their snapshots which were just all over the place, no straight horizon line, no standing and staring into the camera, just a jumble of laughing faces, mostly outside, in snow, on sleds. They were, to my mind, fabulous and gave a glimpse at the enormous fun they were capable of having, of the natural groupings and clusters of friends. He was well aware that those images had much more vitality than his did, though his gave information about the interiors and the clothing in their formal way.

I know I bought that book, at least I think I did, though it's been years since I ran across it.

Partly I've been thinking about this in relation to most of the Zoe Strauss' images which do, to me, seem very much what I've seen before, except for that glorious image printed on the book covers, hidden under that bland dust jacket. Those two men, an illusion of those moments of tenderness or happiness.

At any rate, I seem to be longing for photographs that express that joy that the snapshots taken by Eskimos on their trips and hunts...while my own photographs are dull as dishwater.... Much as I'd like to stop it, I do use right angle and I do take photographs as if I'm staring straight to the horizon and I edit out those on a tilt... I remember hearing about one fellow teaching a workshop of old camera club people, who certainly always photograph in an upright way, and suggesting that they just toss the camera in the air, spin around, loosen up.

On the other hand, when someone, like Gene Richards, uses the intense 28mm lens to emphasize the poverty, or addiction or danger of a situation, his predictable style becomes editorial...though it's a passionate editorial....

But I am muchly inspired by having read the introduction to her 10 year project that Zoe Strauss wrote...it has the quality of those eskimo images...funky and lively and thoughtful and crammed with ideas... and want to do a gorilla show with the class, if I can prod them in that direction... and want to do a scattered project myself..more about that later...when it's day light and I can take photographs to illustrate what I'm trying to write about.

2012-01-24T01:12:00.001-08:00

Bread & Roses Centennial and my last ditch attempt and Zoe Strauss

2012-01-14T07:35:00.000-08:00

Fortunately S. came for a visit, arrived Wed. evening and we drove out to Lawrence in the morning. Labor history is one of her many interests so the Centennial celebration was particularly meaningful to her. We got there just as Rosario of Justice for Janitors was speaking...and I dearly wish that we'd heard all of her speech and been able to get a glimpse of her... The room was packed, standing room only behind informational flats ...or crowding against the back wall. It was great to see this group, many of whom were students listening or not, but who perhaps had the chance of walking down Essex Street in the rain behind flags shouting strike, strike, strike early in the day. We missed that, but I would have liked to walk in that crowd, to, in some way, mimic the original march. And it's nice that it was so dismal, a bit icy, since Jan. 12th, 1912, was one of the coldest in recorded history, as were those two months of active striking.

I didn't realize until the next morning that I'd been holding my breath in worry that someone wouldn't like his or her interview. But of course they couldn't have seen them, newly installed, and turned off in all the noise and celebration.

At any rate, when the History Center gets earphones, it will be an attractive video installation, the mechanics hidden by two vintage wooden boxes...quite handsome. I'll try to add a few more in Spanish before long, just not right now.

I'm tired. Partly from all the work I've been doing this summer and more particularly in finishing up these seven interviews in English and two in Spanish, but also by trying to hold my stomach in, and push my shoulders back and do the exercises necessary to make this last ditch attempt to straighten myself out...having seen a physical therapist, Lorna Brown, who somberly instructs me that I am responsible for making a decision about whether I want to continue this work everyday, everyday, and not slack off because even if I make progress in these eight weeks while she's watching me, it's easy to fall into my stoopedness.

Having considered myself a head carried around by a not too important, but often annoying, body, it's a big adjustment to pay quite this much attention to the mechanics of learning to undo extremely bad habits.

One of the few things that I remember from the otherwise nearly blank first twelve years when my mother was alive, is her saying, "Don't sit on your spine." How can I remember that if I've forgotten her? Almost entirely. But never mind, that reprimand has lodged in my brain and I can recall it, though I can recall nothing else of what she might have said that I've used as unconscious reasons for being so self-destructive and making such poor choices that I know would have annoyed her.

So, what was also interesting is that S. brought Zoe Strauss's book, Ten Years...and I had a chance at it...

I've never been in love with photographs, though I've seen hundreds of thousands and made an endless amount myself. It's just not a medium I find very interesting unless there is text.

So I didn't find her photographs particularly interesting, except a few, one of which is totally magnificent and covers the hard binding, though you can't see it because of the dust jacket...but it's a fabulous image of these two men on a bed with what seems to be such a display of affection, dare I say love...it's exudes warmth and spontaneity...

I couldn't understand what all the fuss is about, all these color plates and three essays, a fat, heavy book with a boring dust jacket...

since many of her images have ordinary right angles and not very inventive framing, the sort of images we're used to seeing, (though I'm certain they are considered by many curators to be remarkable in themselves, not as emblems for her original thinking, etc., )

But once I read her introduction, I really liked her thinking, her premise, her tenacity, her ambition......her ten year plan to make herself into a photographer...(she's one of the blessed few who are young and haven't been through MFA programs!!! and wasn't programmed, except by her own intelligence and competitive nature..).to exhibit prints once a year on pillars under the I-95 in Philadelphia, arranged in four categories, one of which is defining gender.

I understand now why S. has been so enthusiastic about her work, the broader social concerns and the intelligence with which she defined her process.

I can't remember whether Strauss explains the wedding ring gold teeth image in her introduction, but the woman she photographed has one (or two?) gold front teeth because her husband works as a mechanic and his ring got caught on various objects, so they decided to melt them both down and cap their teeth with the gold...this is the reason I need text, why I love text. It's far more interesting to me to look at that image, a smiling woman near a gas pump, if I remember correctly, and know that she's wearing her wedding ring.. she's okay on her own, but nothing like with the story...

but that's my personal bias...and my take on photographs in general...that they're flat and silent, but for the visual noise that they might or might not supply......

From my point of view, Strauss' premise is unusual as is her thrust toward photographing folks from the lower end of the economic scale, the often subtle references to what's befallen us as a country over the last ten years and I do enjoy that she occasionally throws in a photograph to tweak the images (made by men) in the canon of well-known photographs.

And I greatly appreciate the very small footnote at the very back of the book remarking that even though Strauss refers to Lynn Bloom as her wife, it is not legal for two women to marry in Pennsylvania.

(It is from my seventy-two-year-old perspective quiet amazing that marriage between two people of the same gender is legal in Massachusetts...we, (the human race), advance glacially, but that is an advance..Let's hope for Pennsylvania...)

I can't wait to read her blog....

a tantrum on the 30th...

2012-01-01T05:53:00.000-08:00

My car drives to Lawrence automatically after first stopping at Starbucks for a latte. It drove there three times last week, or was it twice, I can't remember. One was for an interview with Whimpper who seems to me like an angel in a human form that grew up in Ecuador, became a lawyer and also a volunteer firefighter two nights a week before moving to Lawrence where he teaches AP Spanish in one of the six high school divisions. He loves Lawrence, and I don't think that's a misplaced word, and the potential of the kids to whom he teaches language and life. He speaks in a marvelous way and I did a visually boring, but intensely interesting video of him. Now I'm hoping that he might facilitate an interview with five or six students about their lives. I was impressed by his mild-mannered dedication.

Lawrence, like Chelsea, is a city of immigrant, a gate-way city.

And then my car took me to interview Esther, from Spain, who I first met in Cafe Verde where I crawled after photographing my brains out on the third floor of the Lawrence Public Library, aided immeasurably by Louise Sandberg, the archivist, who keeps candy on her desk and had a box of figs covered and filled with dark chocolate that someone had given to her husband. If I were to die by chocolate, I would die happily eating those....

Esther was eating at another table and we smiled at each other. The next time I went there, she was eating with friends and I stopped at her table to talk and, no, I don't live in Lawrence, I'm doing blah and blah for the Centennial Celebration which will open on the 12th, interviews that will then be deposited in the Lawrence History Center, which is another whole story with a terrific staff and Susan Grabski who is part of getting that exhibit up.

I have taken well over a thousand photographs, which doesn't mean that I've photographed a thousand pictures, but that I've bent over the table in that history room at the library, taking many of the same one, or stood by a shelf in the History Center, taking many of one...and then gone home and sorted them out and dumped the bad ones and turned what I wanted into jpgs for a long, long, long video of Jonas which was the first one I did, way back in June, when I was starting to hunt for interviews which I imagined would be quite short and shown at the Essex Art Center....

Now I have to do another whole set for that show because I somehow got caught up, thanks to having met Karen at one of Cathy McLaurin's workshops, in this upcoming celebration.

In general I have worked very hard this year, 22 videos about folks in Chelsea, and many photographs for 2 local shows, and now this. I have been productive and proactive and not really been in a rush, except now when I put more on my plate than I could manage, technically. Luckily Cathy put out a call and Stephen responded so my car also goes toward the Museum School where it obligingly finds a parking space and I find him waiting for me at the desk. He has saved the two long interviews with Jonas ... dolled them up and made them more interesting than watching one person talk for an hour would be. He added some pizzaz to all the photographs I stuck in there, a good rough edit, but no fancy stuff. He's responsible for the fancy stuff, I'm overjoyed to say.

But I have three more videos to edit by tomorrow and I just couldn't do even one yesterday. My first tantrum. Generally I've been quite good this year. I've gone to openings and turned up at various activities and participated, etc., etc., The usual depression that starts on Thanksgiving and ends in early January skipped over me and I've managed to work in Lawrence this December and come back and, if necessary, go out with K. to shop or have a bit to eat or whatever....only occasionally going to sleep at 6, calling it quits.

But yesterday I could not force myself to go to Madeline (spelling) and Muna's party. I could not say happy new year to one person, not one. Bogie and Sherlock only demand treats and no wishes for the year to come. Oh, another year. How is that possible?

A Vacation

2011-12-09T04:24:00.000-08:00

Going to Foxwoods on the bus with folks from the Senior Center isn't nearly as good as taking a vacation with Nance and Wendell in Tucson, but it will have to do and it did... Earlier on in my life, when I was a steady rebel, I could not have imagined myself doing this, but something in me said, why not, and I did....Eileen and I went together and were taught the ropes by Mary. We are all Empty Spools Quilters...and sometimes Eileen and I do things like when she came with me to video tape Jean who has macular degeneration, is 90 and does just fine, thank you.

Eileen and I have the same sense of humor and amuse each other. I doubt that anyone else finds us funny or understands what we are laughing about.

$18, a bus that leaves at 7 and gets back at 7, free buffet, all you can eat, and table service by a woman who has four children, all boys, the two oldest are in college (one is at Texas A&M and studying something like space engineering) and the youngest is three.

I paid $10 for bingo which I will never, never play again. It takes a type of brain organization that I don't have -- quickly reading the numbers under B, for instance, from the upper left, down, up, down again, up, across the six cards (many people have many more...) I'm absolutely not that organized, since my mind jumps around, here and there... So I played a bit, then walked around, and then went back and played again and then gave up entirely.

This is the only sign I saw that wasn't in English. That means none of them were written in Spanish at Foxwoods. Our bus was slightly more full of people who speak English. Eileen and I sat at the divide between the groups and I tried to eavesdrop with my bits of newly acquired knowledge. Sharifa, who is from Afghanistan, sat in front of us.

I walked over to the Grand Hotel, thinking I might see the Diana exhibit. There was a long, long line of quite properly dressed ladies, a long, long line. I might have paid the $20 if the line had been shorter.

One of the things I found out in the hotel is that they provide no comfortable chairs, none. All straight back or benches. I wanted to sit down in an arm chair, the kind they always have in hotel lobbies and in Starbucks, and write.

Late in the day, I discovered that you can put a five dollar bill in the penny slot machines and it takes a long time to loose money. I didn't have time to play, so I only lost a dollar and some cents, but I could happily have played for a couple of hours, slowly loosing my money.

Mary's sense is that there were so few people because it's near the holidays and people don't have the extra money to spend. Usually the huge bingo hall is filled for the Early Morning Special which costs $10 to get the basic package, but most people buy more inside. Mary had all the equipment, the daubers, etc. We were delighted that she won a couple of hundred dollars...

At one point Eieen and I walked around, past endless shops, into a fantastic Chinese bakery and then into the poker hall where all the action was. We decided that I really couldn't take photographs there and that my presence had been noted by ceiling cameras in the slot machine parlors, but that I was considered harmless in those almost empty rooms.

Anyway, the poker rooms were where I would have wanted to be if only I could play poker. But my aptitude with numbers, games, logic is minimal and that fact makes me furious because it means I'm so much less intelligent than my father who got his PhD in math from the University of Chicago, undoubtedly as if it was just the next thing for a poor guy from the mid-west to do. He was extremely intelligent and very logical and I, at least, got to observe manner in which that sort of person goes about managing practical tasks when he's not pickled in Scotch.

Later we learned that Sharifa had spent her day playing poker.

One of the changes in my face is that the fat that's under the surface when a woman in producing hormones vanishes when she isn't. It's very strange to see the scarring, now, so obvious. When I had that bout with ulcerative colitis and was taking prednisone, it puffed up pleasantly and I'd lost so much weight that it didn't look fat, only filled out.

Who can imagine the changes ahead?

This self-portrait was quite purposeful, next to one of the two lion statues that were near a large plastic horse drawing a sleigh that was next to a huge Christmas tree. There were many decorated trees here and there, but the space was so massive that their presence was diminished and it was possible, almost possible, to ignore the Christmas carols.

I also took many photographs of myself in the bathroom with oval mirrors framed in gold.

Eileen said that I'm like a jumping bean, always getting up to do something else and constantly eating. Even if I'd liked bingo, I couldn't have sat there for two and a half hours. When we were walking in, a woman told me that going to bingo was so restful for her, took her mind off of everything.

If I went again, I would take the free shuttle from the hotel to the Pequot Museum. That would be interesting and I'd be happier to pay $20 to get in there than I would have been to pay $20 to see Diana memorabilia, though I would have gone in as a lark had the line not been so long.

whatever

2011-10-22T08:58:00.000-07:00

I can't stop making the stick folks, such a relief from hunting for jpgs and making yet another 11x17 print..it all has to be done by Tuesday...so I'm close. But in the meantime, I distract myself with the figures, though this morning I was actually cleaning, foolish as that was, and broke the leg off a figure stored in a corner, waiting for an upper body.

Had I not been so broke when I started my obsessional photographing, born out of not knowing what my mother looked like except through some snapshots, I would have done video. I like the talking. I've never been all that interested in photographs, though they serve as markers, as ways to discuss issues, preserve memories...they are, of course, lies, fictions, as much as stories and poems are, but serve as a jumping off point....

Though I took an etching class and sculpture at the Art Student's League, and for a few months imagined I'd be a sculptor (my mother's father was a sculptor of religious statuary). At least I imagined that before I started the class and unfortunately positioned my stand in back of a young woman who must have been working for months, if not years, and, of course, eager to fail, I measured myself by her work and left the class....I did that with drawing also, leaving my easel when the instructor, George Grosz came around. His was the only name I recognized, which is why I took his class, and it was shortly before he returned to Germany. And in college I took art classes also...... but I wasn't intent on becoming anything, much less an artist, until my daughter was born and I began taking photographs of her. And reluctantly and slowly became a photographer.

It's a luxury now to be working on a project for the Bread and Roses Centennial. I have gotten myself into making videos for it, and am in way over my head with that. However, thanks to Cathy McLaurin's day long workshop, I've also found myself making meditations on "Bread & Roses" by Bruce Watson. They are very relaxing, a pleasure to make.

One group of photos are up at the senior center and seem to enliven people. That's too the good.
And the next goes up later this week.
and tomorrow I'll look for more sticks with my dear-heart-stick friend.

Complicated...

2011-10-16T11:52:00.000-07:00

This image is from the first workshop, all one Saturday, that I took with Cathy McLaurin at a studio she rented near the Essex Art Center. It was about exploring, which I did, starting with layering newspapers on garbage bags. She believes in creating a complicated ground for work and spends quite a bit of time building one up...but mine was just newspapers plunked down, glued, washed over with gesso (so I didn't shoot myself because of the mess I'd made) and my first attempt at some way of using material about the Bread and Roses Strike in 1912.

The other night I went to a dinner party for a friend's birthday...it was like being in a movie set without having dressed for the occasion. But I wasn't an extra nor was I kitchen help, much as I would have liked that role.

There were many speeches given, glasses clinked. And I found myself standing up to comment about the birthday woman and also about another guest. This brave event brought up, naturally, many nighttime rehearsals of what I might/should have added. So now I'll elaborate.

The general conversation had come around to UMass, a very interesting place to teach with students who I considered quite remarkable. Those who had been involved there certainly praised it lavishly. They were all more prestigious than I am, which doesn't mean I wasn't an effective teacher, but perhaps I wanted to speak about a different type of experience.

At any rate, there I was, standing up at this long, elegant table, speaking about having moved up here from a tenement in New York for my first teaching job at MIT. I have learned enough over the years to realize that it was important to mention my one coup to this particular audience -- teaching at MIT. And to say that after my three years were over, I was like a barking seal, waiting for sardines to be thrown my way, little jobs (I don't think anyone there could understand what that's like, single parent, having to earn a living catch-as-catch-can) when I was offered a night Photo I class at UMass.

Obviously one class wouldn't have done much and I was so dumb that I didn't know I had any chips that I could have played, hadn't heard of CAA (College Art Association where one hunts for jobs)....didn't know how to look for another one so it was as if I'd been cast adrift in Brookline, spending more than half my income for that apartment so my daughter could go to that particular school for that particular tutoring).

But the point of this was that by the next fall, I had been slid from one evening Photo I class into a tenure-track position which is entirely illegal!

And that the fellow who had performed this leger de main (sp?) couldn't undo it. (I don't really understand why, if he'd been so free with the rules, he couldn't just drop me off the cliff as he'd done to the man teaching full-time previously. But he couldn't.)

So, there I was, much to his distress.
And that's where I met the woman whose birthday we were attending.
And the man, who happened to be Dean when I was up for tenure, was sitting two seats away from me.

So I could take the chance/opportunity of telling the story of my tenure case which took a very, very, very long time to go through the College Personnel Committee.

The woman who had come to my aid, who decided I was worth helping, was from the Woman's Studies Department. She combed my long, required statements for any sign of self-deprecation.

(This is what I forgot to say at that dinner party...how much she helped me and how hard a time she had convincing me that self-deprecation is not allowed in making a tenure case. A person must be sure-footed, positive and never weigh possibilities or elude to the fact that one isn't terribly important.

Of course, I think self-deprecation is perspective. A sense that no one is all that important, even people deemed extremely important, and that the game is usually rigged, there are ghosts in closets and there's always the strong possibility that someone who would have done as well just happened not to have had that opportunity...we can move into discussions of economic and class differences, educational and economic opportunities, race and gender quite easily from here...)

But anyway, I stood there talking, and muddled on to the point where I'd gotten really tired of waiting for the process of my dossier passing through that Committee which seemed very hopeless and tedious. Why not go back to working in the Women's Shelter? Didn't pay as much, longer hours, perhaps I wouldn't be as effective as I was in teaching, but why not go back, I thought.

And wrote a note saying that the whole promotion process felt like being pushed out on an iceberg with a rusty tea kettle and a hairpin. (there were means of collecting water and spearing fish, I assume...) And I was finished with it. Or some other phrase that to any sensible person would have read as the fact that I was resigning.

But I'd passed the committee on day before they received the note. (I passed because they leaned far to the left and knew that I did also...)

And the Dean, having received their reccomendation and my note, called me, asking about the iceberg, the tea kettle, etc,. and I explained that it was a letter of resignation (perfectly obvious, I thought) and he said, "Well, let's just consider it a blip on the radar."

That was very nice of him.
And actually very good for me. And perhaps good for students.

Of course, he hadn't remember this.
And probably other people at the dinner were surprised when I managed to reveal that the Chair, who so hated me, would leave faculty meetings in a rage, saying "Fuck you...". He had, actually, a lot of fun in his role...quite a bit of power and a grant outlet for his temperament.
Folks with PhD's don't seem to have as volatile temperaments or at least I haven't met any that do.

Any rate, the guests did laugh when I ended it thanking the former dean for my pension

and my friend, whose birthday party I was attending called me the next day to talk about the remarkable event (very elegant speeches and much high praise and laughter, a gorgeous setting, sparkling everything,) so I gather that I'd acquitted myself adequately, managing to be amusing enough.

But damn, I wish I'd remembered the phrase self-deprecation and to thank the faculty member from another department whose hard work allowed me to survive.....

at any rate, I had my Spanish lesson at Target today...
and am now aided and abetted by a dear heart who encourages me to find more sticks...

Stick Ladies

2011-10-05T15:34:00.000-07:00

So, I went to a day-long workshop at the Essex Art Center in Lawrence with Cathy McLaurin (that could be spelled incorrectly, I never know with spelling.) Actually I took two of her workshops...and would like to take more since they are so far away from anything I ever think about, much less do... It was quite easy to put aside preoccupations after the first ten minutes when I thought -- what am I doing here? I don't have time for this -- and realized that I'd driven all the way out there (without going on highways), paid for the deal and should just flow with it...

If I weren't so deadly wedded to so-called reality, I might have been an artist -- in the sense of making it up from interior promptings instead of picking bits and pieces from what's in front of me as a photographer does.

I hadn't imagined making anything I liked at the workshop, that wasn't a goal, but the stick woman was certainly acceptable. In fact, I like her.

And have started another couple. And been collecting a lot of sticks. Sometimes, especially after the hurricane, I fill the back seat with branches and withered leaves. Actually, I rather want human forms, if abbreviated, instead of bug-like stick creatures, so most of what I pick up isn't entirely useful. (I must say that my daughter was hardly pleased at this new habit...yet another thing her old mother is collecting, another sign of dotage?)

Now, should one of my rules be that the stick has to be the 'correct' form without breaking off bits? I allow myself to attach sticks, tape holding them in place, before I wind the yarn around that joint. That's okay. But what about the problem of a three-legged stick?

Every project has rules devised by the person doing it..nothing is entirely in free form.

One of my rules for my photographs was not cropping. Never cropping. Using the black edge when I printed because then, in those old days, it really meant having used the full frame.

Occasionally, now, I crop. Yesterday I thought about it and cropped the part of the kitchen from the right side of a stick lady photograph because the video camera I'd taken out to record the kittens Krissy had rescued, temporarily living on the back porch. But the game I played for years was -- no cropping. And I still think about it even when the photograph is hardly important.

And I certainly never saw color in the viewfinder of my Leica...I was seeing in shades and space.

Now, when I transfer my digital color photographs to black and white (as I'm doing for a book with recipes that folks are writing in Spanish in the Senior Center), they don't work at all. I know I could have taken a better photograph, meaning with black and white film.

(But I don't want to develop film or work in a darkroom. Besides, my beloved Leica had developed a habit of scratching the negatives unpredictably, a fact I hid from myself rather than solve it. And I still like taking images to keep myself from being bored, so.............I take a vast number of color digital photographs and my poor computer is exhausted from storing them.)

Anyway, when I get over this endless making-of-prints for the Chelsea City Cafe and the Senior Center, around 70 11x17 prints so far, far easier with color and digital prints, but still time consuming, maybe I'll do stick figures and then start on the Lawrence project. Or do stick figures while I work on that project.
On to the next.

It's October, already...

2011-10-03T03:56:00.000-07:00

How is this possible? That it's October? And Clemente will be heading to Tampa soon. In the meantime, he gives me a Spanish lesson on Sunday mornings at the Starbucks in Target near the racetrack. Since I don't really know exactly what that sound system is -- what ll and j and the vowels sound like -- my spelling isn't very good. And he talks very fast and takes out his teeth to eat and it's a foreign language...and Italian would be easier. But it's terrific fun.

I'm learning various impractical things like Yo voi a la (or parra) Florida and por que ella estraba apprendiendo Espagnol con migo. (I've forgotten what this means.)

Gordo is fat. and hija is daughter (pronounced e-ha in English.)

I've hardly been at the track this meet, having spent endless time at the Senior Center, photographing, video taping, taking yoga, learning Spanish in the class where they are learning English. The "Harvest Celebration" will be late this month, the last Wednesday, at the Sr. Center, my photographs, food, visit from "Garden Girl," we hope, who has a show on a cable program. I think that there are around 40 framed photographs, so far. I may reprint and combine a couple, but my obsession is showing as many of the seniors in as many activities as possible which is how I got introduced to Mike at bocce.

(The question is whether I'll join bocce next year...it's so tempting, sitting around in the sun watching, until it's your turn. But in grade school, I know I got in the back of the line, hoping I'd never come up to bat. And this would be as terrible... with someone like Mike wanting to win.)

At any rate, he didn't. Win. His team lost the champsionship by two points. "We lost by two. We lost by two," he said in wonderment. He's almost ninety, from Italy, spent four years in the war on an island off of Greece. "That Mussolini, twenty-seven from my village died, twenty-seven. He was drafting men age 50, with families. Terrible." When he was discharged, after the war, it took a month for him to get back to the village in the Abruzzi mountains, outside of, way outside of, Rome. When he got there, groups of neighbors greeted him. When he got to the house, his mother said, "Michael, you got to marry Maria." "What you mean, I just got back from the war. Let me rest. Who is Maria?" "You know. You just saw her." When he went away, he said, his sister had a friend in the house across from them, a skinny girl. How could he know she was Maria, that beautiful young woman. He didn't recognize her. How could he?

There were no jobs, no food, nothing. But finally he got something in construction. And after a year, he married Maria. His brother in America asked him to come over. He did, but he didn't know what was going to happen, so he left her and their son and daughter. In two years, they came. (In the meantime, he worked hard and went to dance clubs. He's loved to dance.) Finally they moved to Chelsea and he got out of construction and worked in the pharmacy at Mass. General for twenty-seven years.

He's distraught. Depressed. Maria died four or five months ago. He doesn't know what to do without her. He misses her so much. They had a wonderful marriage.

Mike played bocce as a kid, in the streets, with stones. He's very good.

limited

2011-09-22T16:50:00.000-07:00

In my limited way, I'm changing up the images for the Community Garden show by combining two...a great leap in my skill level. Now what I'm wanting to do is change some of the black and white images I've made from the color Senior Center garden photographs to extremely high contrast to get them out of the realm of unsuccessful black and white images transferred from digital color.

I never imagined that I'd be taking color photographs, much less doing all this community work only in color...and that if I wanted to use any of them as black and white for purposes of reproduction in booklets they would look like shit, more or less.

At any rate, the above image is of the little guys that I was watering by cups full that have now grown up into adults which no one harvests. There are a few melons growing larger slowly, lots of spinach, a zuchinni, some beans, marigolds...all waiting for someone. And my video of Aweis talking with the sisterhood at Temple Emmanuel is waiting to be shortened. But I've run out of energy. Not time, just energy.

The good thing is that a fellow, a retired, professional, ballet dancer, offered to help me in some way and I realized that perhaps he'd be willing to frame the photographs -- taking the cheap frames out of packaging, Windexing the glass and hoping that spots won't appear on the images... and he was. So, we've met at the Senior Center where i discovered that he's also totally useful at organizing, setting deadlines and making suggestions that the exhibit needs text because what are these people doing, anyway. Now I've made him my task master so that I can buckle under and fulfill his orders -- another 15 prints to frame by next Thursday.

Actually, I'm way ahead of the game...and the Sr. Center show is almost done, about 37 prints, and the other one at the Chelsea Cafe, about 30 prints is a third done.. I absolutely hate the charettes that the city planners I worked for a hundred years ago seemed to love...the all nighters before an aspect of the plan was due, everyone working feverishly. I'm not good at staying up all night to work, though many people really enjoy the last minute pressure and do their best work during it.

So, in order to fill the slots left in what I want to show I photographed bocce (what a pleasure, a beautiful morning, all these older folks, a few in their nineties, a lot of teasing and laughing), bingo (you might win a dollar), a small class of women who've been talking about poetry on Thursday mornings for years, and a luncheon of folks who, predominantly, speak English -- not as much fun as the previous fiesta I video taped that celebrated the independence days of various Central American countries in early September.

If I wasn't so busy, I think I'd be depressed, but I'm too busy to know....
Getting older is odd...
thank you all...who visit me...and apologies for my poor visiting skills...

It's been so long...

2011-07-31T04:29:00.000-07:00

that I not only forgot how to get into my blog, but wrote this whole damn entry in another blog that I started for a friend with my photographs who never used it, but happens to still reside in my folder.

So, all this has been said -- the reasons why I've not been blogging, but instead making local videos and taking local photographs supported by two small grants that pay for my expenses. And for the last two weeks, I was working with a smart, young woman who just graduated from Tufts, who really knows Final Cut Pro and also explains various technical aspects that I need to know. She speaks in a quiet voice, watches as I write her instructions down, tests me and doesn't make a fuss when it's obvious that I haven't remembered whatever she just taught me. Maybe she's thinking about leading an old horse to water, but perhaps she's just a patient person. No one of her generation would take a second to learn the simple computer tasks she's trying to teach me.

Each day she's uploaded our rough cut onto Youtube and friends have generously watched it and given us feedback. I can't thank them enough for all their time and effort.

As a meditative pleasure I walk a couple of blocks to the local Temple in the early mornings and early evenings, unlock the gate with the key that Aweis gave me, and pour cups of water onto the spinach seedlings that I've gotten him to call the little guys.

If I knew what my last blog was, written so long ago that I have no way of remembering, I'd know if I introduced you to him -- this remarkable Somali Bantu man who learned English while he was in the detention camp in Kenya and came here to become a community organizer for his people, along with having another full time job.

At any rate, he's my hero. Not only because of what he, and so many Somali Bantus, have endured, or because of his remarkable ability to convey something of his story for what will be a local video tape, or because of his gentle, steady way of moving this garden project along, but because he carries two buckets around the block to the spigot on the other side of the Temple, climbs the steps, jumps over a low wall, fills them, hoists them up, climbs up, and carries the water back around so that he can dip cups of water onto the plants. He kept all the purchased and donated vegetables alive during the heat wave. And now I'm adding to his work by having convinced him to transplant many of the seedlings that were tossed as seeds in a bunch rather than planted in a row during that first day of planting when Fatima and her son, and some of us from the Community Garden, got this things started.

The little Spinach guys were calling out to be transplanted and there was a serious need to fill up the third plot, so that's why this folly of transplanting them and of planting more seeds of mustard spinach and chard in two rows that are marked by sticks. To my absolute shock, one of the rows of seeds has already sprouted and most of the little guys have lived.

It turns out that it's necessary that this mother duck that I've become waters them twice a day. I missed yesterday morning and a few died. But I'll go there after I finish this and again this evening. And then I'll try to figure out how to get more water since he left six full buckets which I'll probably use up before he's able to get back on Monday evening after his full time job.

I find this meditative and pleasurable. And am so glad to have a manageable task. I could go to the Community Garden and work on my bed or I could try to make the tiniest inroads on my own yard which is a wreck and a tangle. But I'd much rather just walk to the Temple with my dog and pour cups of water over the little guys.

Aweis has a large goal -- to make this a viable garden for Somali Bantu families. He needs the experience of this first year and then to engage more families in the process.

My goal is to get the third plot to display some visible success because I am interviewing two of the ladies from the Temple this week for my local video about this project. I want them to see some success with the hope that they will want more garden plots in that large, empty space that's seldom used.

I have been teaching Aweis some Americanisms. One is 'happy as a clam' which I am when I'm pouring those cups of water. Another is 'a hard row to hoe' which is easy for him to adopt since he would have been a farmer had he been able to stay in Somalia. And the other is about staging a house if you are trying to sell it. We are staging that garden. We've both bought some additional plants -- tomatoes, peppers and marigolds. And are making an effort with the little spinach guys.

Funny

2011-05-25T15:47:00.001-07:00

As Close to Heaven

2011-05-22T05:28:00.000-07:00

It's only in the past ten or fifteen years that I've gotten back out to Suffolk Downs through the happy event of a friend claiming a Thoroughbred and asking if I'd take a few photographs of her horse, Sassy. It was as if I'd gotten a key to heaven. Since she was intent on taking care of Sassy as much as she could before heading to work, training dogs, I began hanging around, taking photographs and eventually doing interviews on video. I have quite an amazing collection of people talking about their experiences in this most difficult way of living. (Three of them have died.) I video taped Clemente, who tells everyone that I am his personal photographer and have made an X-rated video of him. I still take photographs of him, whenever I can, and must, absolutely must, buckle down to putting together the video with all that work. I'm not that good at editing complex pieces and it would cost 7 or 8 thousand to have it done by the editor I've been working with. I've never been able to afford it and should just continue on with the trailer she made when I hoped to get a grant for the project.

Clemente is a rascal from Puerto Rico who rattles on in a high-pitched voice. I often don't understand him, but K. always gets what he's saying. He was a jockey for many years, riding at tracks all over the country, then an exercise rider when I first met him, and now a hot walker and a groom. He was badly hurt in a fall and didn't stay in the hospital long enough, so he's often in pain, sometimes complaining, endlessly joking. Often I've spent an afternoon at the races, following him from one place to another, as he wanders here and there, taking to this person, to that one, introducing me and laughing, laughing, laughing. For some inexplicable reason, I find his face just fascinating. He's one of the people I'd never tire looking at. And never tire photographing.

I met him through my friend Joe who used him as an exercise rider. Joe told me about one day when Clemente was riding by on a white horse, a very white horse, and he yelled to Joe, "Look at me, a black man on a white horse," and Joe said, "Yeah, just like a fly in a glass of milk." Clemente says he was once white, but he's drunk so much coffee that he's turned dark brown. And he says he has a twin brother, the one locked in the basement, or the one who was in a bad mood yesterday. His family has gold mines, he says, and air planes and he's going to take us on one, to Puerto Rico. And he says Puetro Ricans no lie, no cheat, no do drugs. He's always laughing.

When we first moved up to this god forsaken place, Boston, I used to take K, who was only nine, out to Suffolk Downs. I found it as comforting as I found the Greyhouse bus station...both places that reminded me of the relentlessness of New York as I knew it. K missed NY as much as I did, but she found the track frightening. Too many drunk men. And I soon realized that I couldn't take her with me. I was never interested in the horses, but in the people, and since she wasn't interested in the horses, it was more torture than pleasure for her.

At some point, I got used to my new life, more-or-less, and stopped going out there, though I did take a class from MIT once. A very quiet young woman took the most marvelous photographs by just turning around and photographing those old guys checking their programs, yelling at the races. Back then, the grandstands were crowded on race days and she had a Rolei, a camera that you look down into to focus, and they didn't notice what she was doing. I'd hadn't been able to photograph there since as far as I was concerned, the earth would open up to swallow me if I took pictures of strangers.

K. is quite horrified by the amount of money Clemente bets, but he says he doesn't want to leave anything for anyone to fight over and besides, if he gave his money to someone to save, what would happen if that person died? His money would be gone anyway. For instance, if he gave his money to me, and I died, would I have told K. where I'd hidden it? Well, she says, she'd buy a lot of clothes with it and he laughs, laughs, See? Loose my mon-ee.

We went out to the opening day of the track and to watch the Preakness. Usually Suffolk Downs opens on Derby Day, but the legislature in this state won't allow increased gaming, refuses to let slot machines into the track, or a casino to be built there, watches as all the money goes to the big casinos in neighboring states, pretending that lottery tickets sold by the state aren't gambling, etc., etc., so Suffolk Downs is going to hell in a hand basket with losses and didn't open when it usually does. I don't like chronic gambling any more than I like alcoholism, but obsessive gamblers bet on which rain drop will fall down the window pane faster. And I do like the people who make their livings, such as they are, in horse racing. They work endlessly hard to earn very little, most of them, at least.

This is as close to heaven as I'm going to get. We bet two dollars on four horses to win, not on any of the favorites and not on the one that won the Derby who Clemente said won that race because the jockey is from Puerto Rico and would win this race. Even I knew that would never happen. So, we bet on the long shots and nothing came in even though Astrology, the horse K. chose, came in third. We bet to win. K. said we should have bet on Shackleford, but that's just because the young woman sitting in front of us was telling someone about a horse named after a Russian writer and I looked at the Preakness listing and only found Shackleford, an explorer, and mentioned that to K., but we didn't put two dollars on it.

We had a great time.

I am well behind in blogging and hope to catch up with some photos of the wonderful dinner with Claire Benyon...that was a remarkable treat, meeting a wonderful New Zealander. I learned that good bloggers read faithfully and even read all the comments on the blogs they follow and realized that when I'm capable of keeping up with the blog reading, I never read the comments because, to me, that's like reading other people's mail... obviously I've carried over my scruples into the wrong place. And I learned that I should answer every comment on my own blog... oh, dear, apologies all around...and thanks for reading this!!

Earth Day in Chelsea and lots of other stuff

2011-05-01T16:37:00.000-07:00

Chelsea declared this Saturday as Earth Day and I went along to the parking lot in back of City Hall to get my green tee-shirt and decided to photograph various sites for the Chelsea Collaborative since I don't have the energy for serious, useful work. The most heroic attempt at cleaning and clearing was at this cove, near the Marina that's private... (This is in the fancy area of this small and extremely beleagured little city which is now predominantly Hispanic, Admiral's Hill, with townhouses and condos. There's a nice park where no one is allowed to lay soccer anymore. I used to scoff at anyone who lived here, but now I'm so tired of maintaining my two-family, all the snow, the garden, the roof, the oil tank, blah and blah, that I would, and maybe will, happily trade it for a condo there if I can possibly afford it which means if I can finally take the plastic off the windows because it's warm enough not to need heat and clear up enough to ask a realtor to look at it.)

These reeds were filled with endless debris, even syringes. The black bags are for garbage, nothing that might be salvaged. The white bags are for recycling. This distinction was quite heroic given the circumstances. Folks were actually stopping to try to unscrew and empty the bottles before putting them in the appropriate bag. One man, who is also part of the Community Garden, had been lobbying to get this as a clean-up site in the hope that wild life might be encouraged to re-inhabit it. It's going to take an enormous amount of work, but two hours of the heavy labor of twenty or thirty people did a bit.

One of the benefits of going around to different cleaning areas to photograph is that I got to see Mill Creek, a site that has taken twenty years and probably a lot of money, to recover. A white heron, a gorgeous thing, was standing out in the flowing water. Two plastic bags floating on the reeds hardly disturbed the general restoration of this site. Now there's a small park for kids up the path and an area where hot dogs and non-dogs were served to all of us.

One of the things I told Elsa is that I'm tempted to outline sections in my garden and photograph the before and after. I bought clothes line at the Dollar Store and proceeded to weigh it down with bricks and take the before photographs. Then I dug out some weeds, etc., which truly showed me what an insane idea this is because I went to sleep afterwards. I don't seem to be able to do any gardening, even in small doses. My body does not like it.

The photographs of what I accomplished in the small amount of time I worked will look a lot better than these. I'll probably abandon this project.

Elsa said the idea reminded her of work done by various folks in some previous decade, I don't remember which one. But for me, it's attached to my plan to put string grids across my shelves and then write down where every object came from and what it means to me. I thought that would make a really interesting bit of work -- photographs with extensive text. About twenty years ago. Of course, I would never have shown it anywhere. And I didn't do it because I couldn't get the strings to look like a grid.

This project, passe as it probably is, and impossible as it will be to manage, given the size of my garden and the general mess, probably won't get done, either. But it was fun to think about.

This is the sushi lunch that Elsa art directed. I also have some nice photographs of the empty plates (we ate everything, everything ) and her paying the bill, but enough is enough.

Birthdays

2011-04-27T15:54:00.000-07:00

This particular photograph is out of focus and I thought about just bagging it, but actually it's so sweet and earnest. Elsa is an enthusiastic person, generous and curious, so this really does look like the way she is. I'm interested, also, though more reserved, so this is a rare image that actually shows that I'm quite friendly, when you get to know me, and quite content.

I always remember Elsa's birthday at the end of April, probably because mine is a bit sooner in the month. I spent mine in the community garden, taking photographs and planting onions and barely survived it. Actually I thought my daughter would forget it, but I've become so emotionally deadened, that it wouldn't have bothered me, not like the way it bothered me when my father forgot it, but that was because he was getting so old and losing track of details he'd never lost track of. If Krissy had forgotten it, I don't think I would have minded, but she didn't.

So, when I got an e-mail from Elsa asking whether my birthday had already happened, I said we should have lunch and she said yes and we had lunch on HER (this really deserves capitalizing) birthday! What could have been better. I got to redo my birthday and we had sushi (she says I take the best food pictures, but they are on another camera so you will not get to see how she art directed the photographs of our respective and gorgeous plates of vegetarian sushi) and she took a Polaroid 20x24 of us in her studio.

She is the goddess of this huge camera, and instrumental in lobbying for the continued production of the film and chemicals. And she loves this monsterously large machine which is so expensive to use. But actually fits her very well. I'd prefer to travel with a camera, but she has made a home for the Polaroid, a studio with lots of photographs on the wall and postcards, strobe lights and background paper, and the essence of Elsa's ability to make anyone comfortable with her questions and conversations as she potters.

After I was back in the studio, I remembered that some years ago I took a lot of video footage when Elsa took photographs of us and included Krissy and Bogie....that was one of those many things I do which I love doing and then forget about even though they are actually very precious. What could be more interesting than having taped the whole process as Elsa measures where we're standing, disappears behind the camera, stands with us, talking all the time about something or other.

I love listening to her. She would be an excellent person to accompany someone to a doctor visit, though I don't know if she likes doing this. But she's so pragmatic and matter-of-fact and would say, "Well, that's not good news. But let's look it up and see other ways of handling it (acupuncture and herbs in addition to traditional medicine). And you've had a good life and should get a few more years of it, so make the best of it."

I am very good at going to the doctor with people and always glad to do it. I'm quite non-reactive and useful under those circumstances, but I don't do the afterwards research that she does...and probably am not as comforting because I look so damn forlorn. I was actually extremely happy to be with Elsa, not the least bit worried or fretful, but I look miserable. When she's thinking, her face closes up, but she doesn't look as if it's the end of the world.

Elsa's a grandmother! How can that have happened? I asked her a question like...how could we have gotten so old... and she said, "Well, we weren't hit by a car when we were crossing the street and didn't die of some disease or get in an accident," and I said, "No, I meant how did so much time go by," and she said, "Oh, that's a different question." But how did so much time go by? How is Isaac married and a parent and living in San Francisco? How did Elsa and I get to our ages? The memories are so vivid and seem so recent that it's absolutely peculiar. But that is a different question.

I love Elsa and always feel so much better when I see her. That's a fact. But why haven't I seen her for well over a year? It's that sort of slippage, the not paying attention to those who matter and what's interesting, not making the effort to call, or e-mail, to get together. Every time I see her, I swear that I'll lobby to see her once a month. And then don't. What I liked about those olden days, in New York, when I was scrabbling around, were the long afternoons of just hanging around with a friend, talking. Then I moved up here and met successful people and learned that having a friendship means having lunch every now and then. But now that I'm retired, I could make it mean more than that. Or happen more often. That's one of the benefit, if I'll only take advantage of it.

Butterflies

2011-04-12T05:05:00.000-07:00

All last night, I was lost. Somehow my ex and I were in separate hotel rooms, but when he left, I didn't know where my room was, there was one of those elevators that go round and round, shaking, stopping at half floors, in a castle that's a hotel, where is floor 5 and 1/2, and where is the room, and why are papers torn all over the floor, and my daughter's toys broken, and all that jewelry, and why can't I get to my parents' house in Nova Scotia and, oh, isn't this a fascinating idea, a plastic box with sand and jewelry, just shake it and a new image is revealed, quite beautiful. It was casually put together (held by tape) by a young college girl at the Rosenberg's house, where are Marv and Lilliann? And more, much more of these dreams. It was awful to be asleep.

I wake up exhausted. But I was exhausted yesterday, only revived briefly by the Zumba class.

Last Friday and Saturday, I put together two videos -- one from the community garden and the other of the Fiesta de las Mariposas. Though I know how to edit with Final Cut Express, I don't know how to edit with it and am not entirely sure what I'm doing. So it takes longer. But it takes a long time, anyway. And my body hates sitting. But I couldn't get up. I even lost track of time and was almost late to lunch with a friend, that was followed by tea with another friend.

Graciously, Margaret checks the Mariposa Fiesta video and informs me that the title is incorrect in Spanish and she changes it to Fiesta de las Mariposas. This time I didn't give her editing credit because that was my only mistake. Last time, she got the editor title for Carmen demonstrating how to make butterflies with wire and netting. There was a tiny bit in there about something or other, me and the camera, etc.... Margaret is the important ingredient in these videos with Spanish speakers, but she was also important on Sunday afternoon because the one about the first two days of work in the garden made her happy -- all those folks working, able to see themselves on Chelsea Cable TV, all those kids playing and shoveling.

(One sterling quality about Margaret is that she laughs out loud when she's happy. I almost never laugh out loud. And besides, without Margaret, I wouldn't have gotten in the Senior Citizen Center, video taped the quilting ladies, etc, etc...........)

Now my problem is printing titles on the 7 copies that I made of the Mariposa Fiesta. I'm determined that what I'm now doing about events in Chelsea, (additionally trying to get as much of the oral history as I can) will go into an archive. When I moved here in 1985 and did a photo project with oral histories, there was no place to show the framed photos except at a local branch of a state school. So they've all been dispersed. Fortunately, I found out that the local library does have an archive. Though it's an attractive building, it has no charm for me since you can't walk into the stacks. But at least it has a room where boxes of old photos are store.

The next video that will need Margaret is of the women actually making the butterflies, most of them with recycled paper and glitter that was actually made in America, it's that old. I was very grateful that the women allowed me to tape them. I even taped hanging the butterflies in the large all-purpose room, but my daughter somehow taped over the first half, so all those hard-working ladies have vanished, leaving Carlos on the ladder, hanging butterflies from the ceiling.

What I love about it all is that sometimes the women start singing when they are making butterflies, and some of them dance when they are handing the butterflies to Carlos who dances a little while he's hanging them. Two women even sang unaccompanied solos at the Fiesta. (Spanish and English)

I'm trying to learn bits of Spanish -- oruga = caterpillar. Da Nada. Deficile (that's useful for the exercise classes which really are difficult.

When I was in Tucson, and listening to Nance giving English lessons on the phone or through skipe, I heard lots of laughing. She's another person who laughs a lot. I though about giving similar lessons, but I'm not a good phone person. If a person was actually around me, she or he could at least tell that I'm reasonably friendly in a calm way. But I'm not very conversational and I don't have that wonderful ability to laugh.

Lucky Nance. Lucky Margaret. Lucky Krissy.
Lucky me for different reasons.

quilts

2011-04-02T04:35:00.001-07:00

So, here is the scoop, but not the only reason I haven't been caring for my blog. I seem to have been spinning around since I got back form Tucson, always busy, busy working, making busy work. But here's the first quilt I made after I joined, yes joined, the Empty Spools Quilters on Friday mornings at the Chelsea Senior Center. After making a video about them, hanging around all those weeks, drinking coffee and eating cookies, they invited me to join and make quilts for babies in the Intensive Care Unit of Boston Medical Center. I couldn't resist. I'd fallen in love with these ladies, all of them in their eighties, some in their upper 80's... (I am particularly fond of Helen, a tiny woman with the eye of a hawk, telling me what I've done wrong and insisting that I rip the stitches out. "You don't have to go so fast. Slow down," she says.)

Being with them, I realized that in the past I'd find a way of inserting that I have an inter-racial daughter and wasn't married to her father in conversations when I met a new person. That set up my political and social stance so that I never had to say much more. People, more-or-less, knew what was appropriate to talk about around me. And it wasn't negative racial statements. I haven't done that at the Senior Center, so sometimes I hear, "My mother wanted me to marry anyone, just to get married, as long as he wasn't black, of course." And I don't flinch. These are ladies who've grown up in a poor, close knit community, haven't gone to college (I don't think any of them have), worked in factories, are Catholic and think about going to mass and who has just died, some friend they've known all their lives. In other words, I don't wave my usual political banners, but fly under the radar and am, actually, quite happy there. Except that something I'm doing bothers my back horribly. I leave there at noon on Friday, barely able to walk because my sciatic nerve has kicked in. My daughter says I'm crazy to go somewhere, do something, that makes me feel to rotten afterwards, but I love being there. I just HATE making quilts.

In the olden days, when it made sense to do it because I was too poor to buy many clothes and when cloth and yarn were so cheap, I made wrap-around dresses, long three-tiered skits, Krissy's jumpers and long skirts, and knit sweaters. It no longer costs less to do that than to buy them. It's a luxury to knit yourself a sweater. A simple one costs, maybe, $90 in yarn... But I sewed. And was terrible about finishing anything. I hated to hem, but eventually I got everything done....after much stalling around.

At any rate, I just wanted to make a red quilt, red and red and red. And didn't think at all about how the squares would fit together. It took three of us to find a decent pattern so it looks alright from a distance, not that any mother wrapping her baby in this will ever see it from a distance.

I thought that if I finished a quilt, about 40"x40", I was done. But oh, no, you've got to make a back for it. Naturally there isn't enough cloth to easily find a whole piece that will look decent with the colors of the front, since the cloth is all donated... I was crushed when I had to make my first back...here it is.

Then, damn it all, you've got to cut a batting to put between both of them. And then you have to pin it all nicely so that Mary can sew the quilting...she takes it and whirrs it through the sewing machine. That was once done by hand, women sitting around the frame, finishing a large quilt. Quilting the quilt. Or perhaps they stretched it on a table in the kitchen and sewed alone...but I think that much of quilting had a component of shared work, like raising a barn. So, here are the components of my first quilt which is now waiting for Mary.

All this reminds me of my friend, Marion, who made many quilted photos based on specific, historical patterns when she was getting her Masters. (I was very impressed by her premise.) She has always been interested in women's work and must have read a great deal about the history of quilting, the origin of certain traditional patterns...a long, unrecognized, but important form of creativity, decoration, art. I've always admired her ability to delve into what's behind the surface of what I notice -- oh, a nice quilt on the bed -- and then don't bother to think about. This was long before quilts, like those of the women from Gee's Bend (is this right?) were shown in museums and became high-priced collectors items.

And it reminds me of how often she and I laughed about our projects all those years ago -- those patterns, those damn dresses, that fabulous fabric store on Second Avenue and 5th (?) Street, all that earnest work we did.

This is my second quilt. I knew that I didn't want to sew so many 4" pieces together so I made 5 squares of four inchers...then used for solid 8" pieces and then the larger 16" pieces. When you've sewn together 4 little squares,you have to cut them all down so that they're the same size. I didn't know that...this involves a rotary cutter, a cutting board and a clear, heavy plastic gismo with measurements on it... so for the first quilt, I had to do quite a bit of cutting down.

Yesterday Eileen put together a quilt that I liked, but she didn't. But it doesn't matter to her whether she likes them. She just zips them together. I could't do that, though I haven't been making baby quilts for 31 years like she has. Maybe I'd just work on whatever is available, have the philosophy of using up squares that have been hanging around... Well, anyway, I liked what she'd put together.

So, then I was done with the front and started the back. No easy thing since all the fabric is donated and there aren't necessarily pieces large enough for a back. Therefore the back for the purple quilt was pieced...five strips of fabric that I found by rummaging in the backstairs closet, taking out the big roll of batting, and various plastic boxes, digging around.

But, by the time I got it pieced together and held it up so that Eileen could take this picture, they decided it will work well for the front of a quilt. So, next Friday, I will have to find TWO backs, put batting between them, tape it all down, pin it and I'm done with three quilts...

I should

2011-03-14T18:29:00.000-07:00

write about Japan because that's what's consuming all of us...the thought of so many people dying, of their homes being destroyed, the families with nowhere to live, the boats, cars, trucks tossed as if they were toys, seeing all those image....I was talking with a friend who said, "How lucky we are," and "There's nothing to do but to do the best we can." She's done a lot of community work, political and community building. And that's really all I can do...since there's nothing, absolutely nothing I can do (except, I suppose send a contribution) about all that suffering.

On Friday, two days after I got back from Tucson, the day of the sunami, I went to the Empty Spool Quilters at the senior center, where I've been spending many Friday mornings with these women. They've been making quilts for babies in the I.C.U. at Boston Medical since 1989. There are six left. And now I've joined the group. Angela has already started making the quilt that she's going to donate to the Chelsea Community Garden for fund raising. These squares are just gorgeous...sewn against a 10" square of newspaper so that very small pieces can be patched on.

I have to say that I was exhausted after those three hours. My first quilt is close to having the squares all sewn together...but not close enough. My idea was red, red, pink, purple, all together now. But I realize that it does make sense if there's some planning. My general attitude is Why Plan? And that usually stands me in good stead, but it took three of us twenty minutes to make more sense of my squares than I had thought necessary.

It is work -- quilting. Physical work. Even though they, all of whom are in their eighties, say it's fun, a good way to pass the time, something to do in the evening. But there's a lot of measuring, cutting, bending, pinning and unpinning, sewing, leaning over, cutting, etc. They laughed when I complained since I am a baby.

I did look at houses in Tucson. Though this was on a busy street, there was very little noise to be heard inside. And it was large, interesting. I'm not ready, yet, but part of me could have jumped into this house if only it had air conditioning, rather than evaporative cooling.

Imaging a yard of dirt and cactus. Bare. Sparse. Dull to look at, really, but it would be a great place to live.

First of all, it was eighty degrees for many of the days I was there. And the park near N. and W's house has a lot going on, including drumming that starts at 3 on Sundays. I imagine that most drumming groups are welcoming, as was this group. One lady, banging on some interesting looking metal instrument, was using oxygen and in a wheelchair. Her daughter must have pushed her up for the afternoon. What can be better than a group that's so inclusive?

If I move to Tucson, I'll join this group.

The kitchen manager in Rincon, the local hang-out, restaurant, grocery store, had this tattoo drawn on when she was older, she said. It took her a year to decide exactly what she wanted , but her niece had a book with an illustration of these wolves. And so ... at that point, she had a job, an important job, so she had to have a whole wardrobe of shirts that covered it up.

Older women seem to like it, she told me, when I slobbered over it.

It's far more gorgeous than this photo.

For the first few days I sat in the comfortable chairs at Rincon, eavesdropping. The conversations were mostly about stocks and also about the viscosity of oil in pipelines. One nice, old (maybe six years older than me) fellow had lived in a Buddhist community in L.A. and had a large part of developing a still-successful community garden around there. After that he lived off the grid, but now has moved to Tucson, for health reasons.

And then one morning, by good fortune, a fellow sat down who obviously had planned to drink coffee and read the New York Review of Books. Well, I thought, this is interesting, everyone else is reading about stocks, and was glad that we began talking. And even gladder that he was willing to take out a temporary adoption of me, drive me out to meet a couple who have been restoring an old adobe house -- what a gorgeous place they've been saving for the last nine years and to see the racetrack and where the bats roost during the day.

It turns out that his wife worked with my friend, N., in the line of small world coincidences. And that they live on the other side of the park where folks learn to walk on tight ropes and juggle and drum on weekends and where we went for a walk with his dog, Gillie................ In case anyone is interested in casting this dog in a starring role in a clever dog movie, I have many more photographs........

L.A. and Tucson

2011-02-26T08:20:00.000-08:00

How can you not be delighted walking down the street, seeing buildings painted with signs like this?

And how can you not gulp when you walk out of a craftsmen house and see more such houses lining a street lined with these palms?

So I fell in love with L.A. I said this before...if I had another lifetime or was ten years younger...I would move there, though a friend suggested I have enough time left to make this change. That would mean I'd just stare at signage and those insane palm trees that serve no practical purpose except to amuse me. Glorious.

I have not filled this whole blog with photographs of Jinx, the most glorious dog, who actually slept with me on my last night in L.A. Large, comfortable, his heavy head sometimes resting on my stomach. This is hardly fascinating reading, but it's such a good memory.

We went to an interesting exhibit of work by Fred Lonidier at the CardwellJimmerson gallery...small space, but quite remarkably hung (I hate to use that phrase, but displayed is even worse) exhibit. I found it very interesting in that his work exemplifies the problems of depending on theory/words/text as the basis. And I truly appreciated the tension between esthetic and meaning as I stood reading (sometimes skimming) three of the, what eight or nine?, pieces of "L.A. Public Workers Point to Some Problems..." The problems are commonplace and, to me, very interesting -- low level, probably not well paid workers trying to give decent service-- a librarian, a teacher (young kids), someone who worked in what we called the welfare department. The struggles, cutbacks, lack of material, poor pay, etc., interesting stuff rather densely presented on, let's say, 4x6 panels (I just checked, there were 11 of them and they are 50x33") with small, prosaic black-and-white photos that I didn't even glance at. I just read. Informative and punishing. I liked that impulse though I can't imagine many people standing there, craning their necks, to read it.

Though my "Streets are for Nobody" was hardly in the same critical vein that Lonidier works in -- since I'm a documentary photographer -- I faced a similar problem with excerpted text interviews that I was told were too long, much too long. (I would have preferred text panels the size of Lonidier's!) The portraits were quite prosaic, hardly attention grabbing, since I wanted it clear that these were women who happened to be homeless and not examples of the visual curiosities of a shelter.

Back to L.A....the work that I thought was most successful was "The Health and Safety Game," which combined images taken of a number of people (let's say 5) who had been victims of industrial accidents with text about their physical and legal struggles. This was framed, a bit more graphically seductive (that was hardly his intention in the "L.A Public...") and insightful. Dense. Seriously interesting.

His most recent work, "AZTEC VS A.T.U." was the most graphically interesting with unnecessary bits of design that probably made it more pleasing to someone glancing at that wall from across the gallery...the information was, of course, interesting, political, about a union struggle against a bus company that ended up going bankrupt so no one got anything useful out of the demonstration. (But I found myself fussing about the extraneous bits, and I mean tiny bits, of decoration....shows how cranky a person can become.)

Anyway, it was certainly interesting. I was glad that we went in what was, for L.A., a torrent of rain. I thought of backing out, my usual avoidance tactic, but pulled myself together to be a decent sport -- much to my benefit.

Arriving in Tucson to a dry, flat (in terms of color) landscape is a shock. It's not yet spring so whatever bits of color will sprout from the cacus are not yet visible. This first photograph is at the University of Arizona...

It's probably more realistic to think of the last of my lifetime here with manageable driving and one or two months spent indoors under an air conditioning unit.

We went to an exhibit yesterday, across from that low flat building (the sky was blue!). It was in an old warehouse, hence the photo of the floor which became, to me, an exhibit, an installation, in itself. I loved the floor. Nance loved the paintings and would happily live with one. (I prefer paintings that are chaotic and noisy. These were very quiet.) We both admired the director with his melodious voice, who with his wife, has actually made a business of selling regional work. That seems remarkable.

Today I get to go to a rodeo.................
Excellent

L.A.

2011-02-19T10:36:00.000-08:00

One of the nicest dogs in the world waited for us while I got a latte and bought a small ice cream for S. (cost $10 for both) at a newly opened boutique-coffee shop. When I'm facing a difficult meeting or late in the afternoon or after an exhausting experience, I need a latte.

(I do like Starbucks -- the latte is predictable. If I ask for light foam, I get it rather than a light cup of foam. Some of the staff I know in the Everett store are serious about their commitment to the organization, rely on the health insurance, feel comfortable because they can get a similar job in another city (transferability) and want to become managers. Some, of course, will only work for a few years. So, I haven't been able to work up any hatred against this expensive franchise. I'm even fond of my gold Starbucks card.)

However, buying this coffee, served by a handsome young Italian who didn't entirely understand what I was saying, allowed me a picture of Jinx, just his legs, the better image of his soulful eyes not being included here..and a glimpse of that fine dog sticker attached, along with many stickers, to this bench.

The ice cream was inordinately gorgeous.

After fortification, I met with a young woman to show her some work. Unexpectedly, she had the capability of getting me to talk about it. (As S. said later, she's very smart and there should have been a tape recorder.) Though I can't remember the exact phrasing of the question she asked, the basic idea was for me to define what most interests me. Of course, I am now thinking about that, not having come up with a decent answer at the time.

(My basic attitude is to resist defining even though I scrap around working like mad, obsessed with some vague idea or another, a thread to follow, a cliff to leap off of. What are you doing? Oh, I'm just working. It was very hard to allow myself to work and necessary, for complex reasons, to pretend I wasn't.)

The self-portraits are a very narrow view of my preoccupations, though they display a considerable change, one that I would have thought impossible, in my emotional development since '72-'73. Perhaps they even hint at my social interests, but I'm not sure they reveal enough. At least they show a much broader person that the original set does -- that lovely fruitcake leaning against the white wall in that tenement in a quite dangerous neighborhood, wondering how she was ever going to raise her daughter. My looks were not an asset, I'm now sure, and I thought nothing about them then other than that they caused me considerable trouble.

After our meeting, I tried, in my vague way, to think about what sort of worker I am. In the middle of the night, I came up with a good couple-of-words description. I can't remember it now, though I'm certain it had to do with social instincts. And that the gist of it was borrowed from the title of the book (along with a quarter of a Valium) that got me to LAX -- Scent of the Missing, Love & Partnership with a Search-and-Rescue Dog, by Susannah Charleson.

This morning, the definition of my body of work as search-and-rescue still makes sense, starting with a search for and rescue of myself and then leading on to a search within distressed or somewhat distressed communities/clusters and a rescue of individual stories. I know that I can't actually present an adequate/comprehensive version of their experiences (and certainly not in their native languages), but since these are people who I enjoy and am curious about (women who are or have been homeless, workers in the barn area of a small race track, six eighty-year-old ladies who have made over a thousand quilts for babies in Intensive Care Units since 1989) aren't about to do that and I think their lives are important/significant/, I don't think that the interviews, even filtered through my brain, do any harm and might allow some insight.

So, my curiosity about and comfort within diverse communities that don't have a lot of economic or social privilege defines my work.

Two summers ago, I met a much younger Irish woman, earning a living as a cook for a family and trying her first run at Thoroughbred training/racing, learning the ropes on the backside of Suffolk Downs, getting ready to race her co-owned horse in it's first race. We had a brief conversation while she grazed that horse about the problems we've both found at various parties or gatherings in Boston.

People, she said, seem quite friendly if she says she's done this or this, (hum, yes, that's alright, nod pleasantly), but if she adds that she's done that and that, they look away. She's aware that she suddenly failed the test of class and prestige. We are both highly aware that, in some circumstances, we both appear to have some touch of class, even though our economics and our interests lean a lot more to the marginal.

We commiserated about how comfortable we both felt in the barn area. I like it there because I now have a group of people who talk to me, tell me stories, even though they know that I understand little about taking care of and racing a Thoroughbred.. and I don't have to say much.

She found the same comfort -- the easy banter, the hard-scrable lives, the acceptance of danger, or death (the old guy who fed her horse at night had died of an overdose recently, she told me.)

Anyway, I suppose that all this is leading to the fact that I'd never do a series of portraits or a video about academics (except about Gene Sharp, who I'd never heard of until the NY Times wrote about his influential writing concerning non-violent protests. (No, even though he lives in the next poor town over, I'd never heard of him and he's not, I think, the Marxist influence that enthralled a Vietnamese student some fifteen or twenty years ago.)

And I think that being in an academic setting wasn't particularly good for me since I usually felt that colleagues were weighing each of my hard-won sentences. On the other hand, I was fascinated by the urban student body, often first in their families to go to college. I was curious about how they would solve the problems that assignments set, what ideas they would explore, how they would convey them. I view sets of images as somewhat equivalent to poems, stories and essays, each having a different purpose, exploring different ideas or feelings. And I truly liked watching their explorations.

Enough of this now. I'm in L.A....amazing.

The Sound of snow shovels....

2011-02-01T16:37:00.000-08:00

I ran out of oil late one night last week. And the next day the (new) tank (oh, was that expensive, that Christmas present of a leaking oil tank) over $700 worth of oil was delivered. I'd used that much in less than a month. I hate to think about it.

The sound of snow shovels, of the snow blower that the folks across the street bought this year and the occasional plow. It's remarkable. If I felt more comfortable driving in it, I'd be out taking more photographs as they pile up more mounds today. On Sunday, loaders were clearing old piles for the snow predicted today and tomorrow....moving them from the street onto walls. There's no where to put it.

On Saturday I saw an old friend -- well, I'm not sure how friendship is defined if you haven't seen a person for years, but she is responsible for my job at UMass. Somehow, after the MIT contract ran out and I was like a seal begging for any tiny fish to be thrown my way so that I could keep my daughter in a good public school in an expensive neighborhood, I was given her address and sent her several articles I'd written. We met and talked and then she recommended me to teach at UMass and I was hired for a night class of Photo I.

I've always been dependent on hands-from-the-side-of-the-stage like hers. At any rate, she retired early and I'd only seen her once in many years, at a party for the slide curator who had been a student. So, I was completely surprised when she called after New Years and wanted to go to lunch.

She's a painter and video artist and the only woman I know who has had a long marriage with another artist who not only supported her work, but joined forces during their early careers. That happened before I met her, so I missed their performance pieces and exhibits. A couple of years ago, there was an afternoon retrospective of her videos at the Museum of Fine Arts, but for some reason I wasn't able to go. Right now they're working on a website which both say seems like creating an obituary. Though they don't have that New York fame, they've been innovative and productive, as well as recognized and have left their mark in many ways.

But what all this is about -- other than remarking about a marriage and partnership of almost 60 years -- was how happy she looked on Saturday when she showed me the flowers she's painting now. This is a woman whose work has always had a philosophical and intellectual bent with a serious touch of surrealism added to the videos and also in her paintings. I would not have imagined opening the door to their house and finding her so delighted about a little painting of pansies.

She does have comforts -- two cases of mechanical toys that she enjoys looking at and thinking about (she wound up a tin dog who did back flips on the kitchen floor), a table of plants, nicely ordered space -- and is extremely serious and very thoughtful. And she looked so sparkly because of those painting.

Of course I thought -- oh, what can I do to give me such pleasure?

I liked making prints with the butter soft rectangles from the art store that are so easy to cut. My subject is usually some aspect of a fat nude woman, though I've carved images of pill bottles and plants. That's the only activity that might, in any way, match her enthusiasm for and focus on these paintings.

Most work, and this applies equally to hers, has a small percentage of pleasure attached to a great deal of slogging. That bit of pleasure is the seduction, probably. And the slogging is the necessity. But she seemed to be enjoying the demand of 'finding the right color,' as she said, that easy phrase that covers up so much effort.

I've been slogging to put together a video of the Empty Spools Quilters at the Senior Center. I go there on Friday mornings....to video tape, now photograph, and to start a quilt myself. They are spunky women in the eighties who have been doing this since 1989 or 1990, small quilts for babies in Intensive Care. "It's relaxing," they tell me, to put pieces together, "You don't have to think about it." Evidentially there's no right and wrong in their eyes, though I managed to suffer last Friday when I started working on one. I wanted to use red squares, only red squares, or pink, maybe a bit of purple if I had to...having totally ignored the fact that it would belong to a baby...I was gently reminded of my error....

So, I like Friday mornings. A lot. I wish I'd been part of a gathering working on some beneficial project. Maybe a book club could function in the same way, but I particularly like that these women have had this type of goal.

But I suffer over the video. Not that I don't like it. Or that I'm not pleased with the interviews. But besides it being a hell of a lot of work, I'm not trained in Finalcut Express to do fine editing. In the last month or so, working on two rough cuts of different projects, I've managed to loose what i'd

Which leads me to the next problem.

Any videos that are 'my work' are edited by Liz Hesik. I can't afford to have these final edited by her. Are they 'my work'? I've done countless interviews with people who worked for "Spare Change," a newspaper sold by people who are homeless. They were published with photographs I took. I was on the Board, active at the paper, productive. But I never thought those interviews were part of 'my work' though I considered them as part of a wider definition of 'Service' for the university.

I've always been interested in alternative venues, but perhaps adopted the standards of the university which allowed me to include the portraits/interviews with women for "Streets Are For Nobody," as 'my work.... but not consider community work as 'mine.' Curious....

What was also interesting and probably what lead to me thinking about all this is that my benefactor wanted to invite a former student to have lunch with us...I know her, too, an activist in her 'art' and in her actions...she's responsible for any legislative actions and has built up a strong core of art advocates. So, I got to hear what she's doing -- a new job with a grassroots organization as well as her regular job. And when we had a cup of coffee together after lunch, she told me about her experience at school where she felt grounded in the necessity for action, that many of her courses promoted that bent of thinking. I was quite surprised, having thought that much of her direction came from her life before college, from direct social concerns. That talk really got me thinking....

Winter

2011-01-23T12:11:00.000-08:00

The dogs have had a difficult time going out. There's too much salt on sidewalks for them to walk very far without pitiously holding up a foot and protesting. Of course, I only know this by hearsay, since Krissy has walked them since I'm dearly afraid of falling on the ice. She's also shoved a patch and a path so they can go out in back..

More than fifty inches of snow in a little more than a month. It's discouraging, on one level. Friday was another storm and I missed video taping the ladies who have been making quilts for babies in the ICU since 1989. I've finished a rough draft and was certain that I'd get the chance to tape many versions of quilts to cover the interview with Jean, one of the two women who started this venture. She's rarely there, but I got the chance to tape her just before Christmas because she was going out to lunch with the group. Macular degeneration has made it impossible for her to see more than contrasts and large shapes, so she finds it hard to be there where she was the small-detail guardian -- correcting any mistakes and noticing hanging threads from across the room. She was a stitcher for her working life, a job that she felt really good about. I'd bought three packages of cookies (not being able to decide which they would like most even though I know there will be a fuss over so many.)

On the other hand, the snow has been quite remarkable. I wish I could figure out what to 'do' with it. A few years ago, a friend said that she wanted to photograph the last of the knobby drifts and make prints (as in etching, not photography) from those sculptural shapes. I've wanted to photograph a particular set of small evergreen bushes that are planted along a fence, hiding a metal-collection center. They're wrapped in burlap for the winter, sort of like a conceptual piece.

But I haven't found anything really interesting or thought of how to use the mounds of snow. What good is anything if you can't use it? I used to know a financially-exhausted painter who photographed the meals he was invited to...stood above and took a black-and-white images of the full dinner plate. I doubt he ever did anything with that series since he was, basically, a landscape painter though he occasionally painted folks in orchestras. They were rather small, somewhat old fashioned, quite touching if conventional, images.

This is actually a place that i think is remarkably beautiful. There are reeds if you get closer to these two tanks..so it's tanks, reeds, trees, a fence and pavement. It works for me. With the clouds or without. And it was more perfect because of the snow on the trees, but I didn't walk close enough to specialize in that image. This is as good as nature gets. (I'm not overly fascinated by nature and certainly not by photographs of nature even though there are endless reruns on PBS by Art Wolfe (sp?) who treks to distant places to make art. I like to listen to his stories, and particularly liked the program that showed how he and his support group manage a shoot, but I don't find the images interesting at all. I'd prefer drawings.

This is a particularly interesting bridge. My new routine is to walk on the treadmill at Planet Fitness for 35 minutes, drive out to Target, across from the track which is all closed down, and buy a grande latte. That's with the hope that it will keep me going so that I can actually use the evening for work. I hate night. I don't like dark. Or cold. And it takes a lot for me to not waste it by lying around, watching people murder other people on TV. But this plan seems to work, most of the time. The view as I cross the bridge, the latte in the cup holder, as I am close to turning down Revere Beach highway and it's already dark or getting dark since we've passed the solstice and minute-by-minutes it's staying lighter later.

Krissy's birthday. We went out to lunch. She is still as good as she always was, making the absolute best of not being where she wants to be. She's always been a sport...when she was a child, it took her five or six hours to open Christmas presents -- she gave so much attention to each one, small or large, important or seemingly not. And on Halloween, she gave candy to the folks who gave her candy, at least until the year she went with other children and learned she was supposed to keep it all.

I often skip e=mails, don't pay attention to facebook, generally behave in a wretched way so it was extremely bracing to realize that I'd ignored one message from a close person, telling me that she'd gotten sick again. I hope this chastening will work and that I'll pay attention! I have no idea why I'm like this and know that apologies don't work for ignoring an important message. Or for not being in communication enough. There's no explaining this bad habit.....hopefully change is possible.

Does anyone know how to capture one's own blogspots? I tried what a friend suggested (selecting and copying to a folder on the desktop...I couldn't select one entry, etc.) and that didn't work....

Is it possible

2011-01-12T15:16:00.000-08:00

that I'm really courting identity theft through my website? Have times changed so much that my obsession with telling my version of my story is no longer a good idea?

I used to think about how much my grandparents had seen of change and the about how my father had rejoiced over Darwin and Freud, driven a Model-T, gotten a PhD, bought a small black-and-white TV a bit after they came out, got his Ham Radio license when he was in his seventies and built a radio shack in what had once been the TV room in their house in Nova Scotia. He would use morse code to communicate with other radio operators in god knows where.

I recall the heavy black telephone, the operator who asked what number I, a child, wanted and I always wanted Cinnie Baldwin's number since she was my best friend and lived up the street. I doubt my mother spent much time talking on the phone, and imagine that my father rarely used it when he was home from work, but I don't know. I did watch the TV that he bought not that long before she died, watched Gorgeous George jump from the ropes onto his opponent while my grandfather and I sat on the bedraggled couch, a great spectacle of wrestling on that tiny TV. I had a record player, an early super-8 camera, many, many film cameras which I still have, including my beloved Leica. I don't have many CDs of music, but had videos, now DVD's. I own two computers, having long ago moved from the PC, three printers, (one of which I use for DVD labels) one film scanner which probably doesn't work since it's must be incompatible with my new computer since that's the nature of progress and change. I reluctantly bought digital cameras, two point-and-shoots and one slightly better one which I don't like at all.

My work, until I started to do clay pieces, depended on the documentary approach. And on my website, I explain my work, the origins of it. And I probably give too many details. I'll have to ask the wonderful guy who designed the site.

But my m.o. is saying whatever I want to say, not that it's the truth since nothing is really the truth, all point of view and much distortion, conscious or otherwise, no not otherwise, because I do try to convey something of what I've been thinking about, as clearly as I'm capable of doing. (Though I've lost faith in my abilities -- it's winter, there's snow, I'm not teaching any more, all reasons to lose faith.)

And right now I'm working on the very explicit story of a man who was gay bashed in the 80's. He has many, many stories, very vivid, very revealing, startling perhaps. And I've asked him to give them to me so I can put them in a form that can be seen. Video.

What harm am I inadvertently doing him?

The Curiosities of Aging

2010-12-19T18:33:00.000-08:00

I thank you for still reading my blog...I'm very appreciative and quite surprised. Tonight I decided that instead of sitting here, cold, at my dog sleeping on my lap to warm us both, I would read blogs and that's been good.

Night isn't something I like and the fact that it starts at 4:30 is seriously worse. And it's cold. And I'm surprised to be a person who puts plastic on the windows and tries to conserve heat. In the morning it's 55. My bedroom has no radiator. I open the door at night so the heat from the rest of the apartment comes in after having lowered it to the night range.

(The daughter my mother had planned to raise before she died too early would not have to put plastic on the windows. Why does this still matter to the person I've become? Class, economics, one's station in the world, having a PhD against not even having a Master's or knowing whether an apostrophe should be put in there. So interesting, issues of class and social/economic standing in a country which seems to pretend there are no serious class differences....)

And if I come back here in late in the day and have had the heat down to 55, it's cold. And it takes too long to warm up. And I waste the evening. I am quite sure that I can afford to have the heat on more and higher. But there was a strange transition when I bought a little two family house and moved from apartments so hot that I had to have the windows open in winter to a place where I was paying for my own heat and managing all the upkeep. And I notice that everyone I talk to who lives in this little, poor (as in economics) city tries not to start using heat early...and keeps it low... I've bought into this pattern. And damn, oil is expensive!

Recently the fellow who acted as the grounds keeper at our community garden told me that he'd decided I was a bit senile ... because I went to a garden meeting on the wrong day. But then he saw my website and realized that I'm not. I found that extremely funny....

(But it's time to make a laminated card stating the fact that I've never remembered more than five phone numbers at a time, even when I was seventeen, and that I've never, never been able to remember a list of unassociated words. Just tell me a story and see if I can repeat the gist of it in ten minutes.)

And then I had lunch with a friend who I haven't seen in, maybe, thirty years, as in seen to sit and talk and have lunch and get reacquainted with and she said I look terrible! I'd thought I'd finally come into my own with a pleasantly worn, forlorn face (no longer puffed with prednisone so the scars and lines show again) and with interestingly straggly hair. My hair makes me look like a witch,, she said... (LET ME BE CLEAR THAT I DID NOT MIND THIS COMMENT ONE BIT. IT WAS INTERESTING TO HEAR WHAT SOMEONE REALLY THINKS. I LOOK FORWARD TO SEEING HER AGAIN, TO CREATING A REAL FRIENDSHIP...A RENEWAL...)

A quilter I interviewed last Friday was one of the two who started the group around 1989. She has a fast smile, a gravely voice and is perfectly gorgeous, tiny and wrinkled, with beautiful fingers that are delicate and graceful. She's legally blind now, macular degeneration that's progressed until she can only see contrasts and large shapes. When she met me, she leaned down, inches away from my face, but then navigated easily through the room where I interviewed her. She's full of life and, but for this little detail of the eye sight problem, ready to go, happy to have lived in a high rise here in Chelsea for thirty years where her neighbor, a newcomer of twenty years, drops in to ask whether she needs this or that. After starting out making shoes, she worked as a stitcher (for a while she sewed motor cycle jackets, but also purses, shirts, slacks, dresses, you name it), a job she really enjoyed because of the other women working there. (It would be terrible to work all your life at a job you didn't like, she told me.) Briefly she worked in salons, but that involved wearing fancier clothes and taking on airs, so she went back to stitching. Unfortunately, she's given up the quilt group and was only there for the holiday lunch.

How many lasts are there?

2010-12-15T16:42:00.000-08:00

Usually I end the blog by apologizing that I haven't been reading blogs for the last many, many months, much less writing on mine. This time I'm starting this that way for anyone who is still reading what I say...thank you...

I do think about lasts. Was this the last class I will ever teach? When will I buy my last car? Is there another dog in the future or is it too late? When I'm really in bad shape, I think of last hours or last minutes and which is followed quickly by regretting all the time I haven't valued...

But I'm not really in bad shape now...even if it's the season for me to be in bad shape.

The photo was taken by John who was using my camera on the last Tuesday class. I honestly can't imagine how fast this fourteen weeks has gone and was caught entirely by surprise this week. It's as if time is speeding up, but then everyone said that. It was quite a group, such interesting work. I've been trying to write a bit about teaching -- like the student at MIT who was fretting over whether his print should be mounted a sixteenth of an inch this way or that way and asked me so many times that I finally said, "What does it matter in terms of eternity?" and he said, "That's the nicest thing anyone has ever said." (meaning I think, anyone who was teaching him, but it also could have been about all the people who were pushing him.

John, who took the photo, happened to say just what I think during class -- don't think about all that stuff, the perfect division of thirds...(I can't remember the other rules he mentioned because I've never read them...) He was emphasizing the intensity of interesting images, odd, oblique, not carefully fashioned. He also likes to make zines and give them to folks...to friends.

He mentioned a book project I taught as a way of starting a number of classes with because no one does any work during those first two weeks -- a one page fold-book that involves one cut and five folds. I actually found the book he'd made during that class and meant to show it to this group, but I never did.

I used to make Xerox books and send them to friends...just pages folded horizontally or vertically and bound with a pamphlet stitch. That was in the olden days when cutting and pasting were necessary.

Now it's easy to combine words and images and then print digitally with double sided heavy matte Epson paper and have the whole thing spiral bound...we used to dry mount the photographs together to create the back-to-back pages.

I wonder when I will make my last book. I made two this semester, small accordions, one with drawings of scrabbly nude ladies and the other with a photo, both with writing. But I haven't put the covers on.

Once I submitted poems to a fellow in San Francisco who made them into the tiniest books possible which he left around, here and there. I was so delighted when he used one of mine and send me a tiny packet of other books he'd published.

But back to the class...the student from China who had taken classes in critical thinking and is putting what he learned to good use. He's leaving for Philadelphia where he'll get a scholarship and a better education. Imagine being here, all on his own, absorbing such a different way of viewing the world. And the musician who is a scrub nurse who worked diligently on a project, self-motivated, entirely internally directed, all semester. Just what I approve of. And the woman who came into class thinking she couldn't take photographs. And the guy who had been in the army in Kosovo. The two young women who went well beyond their comfort zones on the second projects -- always important in my way of thinking, far more important than accomplishing something that a student already knew how to do. Someone said she felt privileged seeing all the work that had come together. So did I.

The class was meaningful. A punctuation of my week. One I hadn't expected to teach. But I was preoccupied with proving that I've fully recovered and can do my own work...the show of garden photographs, then a video about a garden party in early September. Recently it's been a video about group called Youth Build -- giving seventeen to twenty-four-olds a chance to graduate from high school with a week in classes alternated with a week doing construction work for low income projects. My video isn't finished, but I have a rough cut. While I'm waiting, I started another about a small group of women who have been making quilts at the Senior Citizen Center since 1989. They are quite precious and are carriers of a great deal of Chelsea history, including one story of making sections of armaments in WWII.

2010-12-15T16:27:00.001-08:00

This is thanksgiving...

2010-11-25T08:21:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I phoned a friend. I'd forgotten her birthday even though I bought the present in the summer, thinking that I'd finally do what she does -- pick something up when I see it, not wait until it's needed. But even with the paper bag sitting on a shelf, I forgot to wrap and mail it. (Why is wrapping a package so time consuming? So easy to forget about?)

What, as we joked, is time? It's hard to accept that I can't walk back into that tenement on 5th Street, next to the bodega, upstairs and into that large, roach infested, rent-controlled apartment where Krissy would still be a kid and I'd be scrabbling to raise her. Why is that gone when it's so clear in my mind?

How, as my friend said, could the 20th century be over? Why is it 2010? November? It moves fast and we are, as we both said, lucky to be here -- alive.

Though I have a couple of older women friends who have great prestige and financial assets, that wasn't expected of my generation. I keep forgetting that fact when I compare myself and come up wanting. Suggestions for career choices weren't easily available, the skills needed for advancement weren't easily discovered, the role models were men and there was a considerable stigma against women in various fields. In 1974, I was the first woman to teach in the photo department at MIT, a dubious distinction that I hardly was equipped to handle.

She and I have done well considering where we started in New York, the late sixties and early seventies. I relentlessly imagine that the childhood experiences that have haunted me is a reason for what I consider to be my short comings Her early life was more stable, but then again, she's always been more practical, detail oriented, an enormously hard worker. Whatever way you slice it, we've both taken similar paths and ended up in similar circumstances -- retired! Her university demanded far more committee work than mine did for studio faculty, so I always thought she worked far harder, longer hours, more reports. I imagine she enjoys retirement more than I do. My job wasn't nearly as stressful so I'm actually sorry that I retired. Maybe I worry more about money than she does. Or maybe we worry about different things.

We laughed a lot, answering the same questions we always ask each other. Have you made a big pot of soup yet? (I left my soup pot at a 4th of July gathering two years ago and still haven't retrieved it or bought one. Her's is pretty well worn down and she needs to buy a new one. It's been warm, so she hasn't started her winter food plan. I have, though mine is a crock pot full of sweet potatoes and butternut squash. She's never used a crock pot.) Are you doing your exercises? (She is. I'm not. ) How are the kids? (Blah and blah and blah.)

I was dry-running a pumpkin pie and she was cooking cranberries, the only time we'd both be caught in the kitchen, Thanksgiving. It was enormously comforting to have this long talk while my pie baked -- almost half an hour longer than the recipe called for. Is there something wrong with my stove? Was it because the pie crust was store bought and frozen? Should I have baked it first? I almost called her back to ask advice, since she's a better cook than I am. But I didn't.

happy thanksgiving...

That was last week

2010-11-23T04:41:00.000-08:00

and hopefully it's over!

This image is my attempt to capture the soul of a cat whose only desire is to be loved. I was visiting a friend in Maine who had just had her third operation in the last year, a hip replacement, and needs one more on her knee. Even with that level of pain and using a walker, she still walked faster than I do, though I could have covered more ground.

It was a great pleasure to give her husband a day off so he could do work in the woods and to hang around with her and this cat.

Since I came back, I'm trying to walk more, having again learned that lesson about how important daily exercise is. I joined a local ten dollar gym last month and haven't walked on the treadmill once. I think about going there almost every day, but...

So, I managed that visit nicely, even though I'm not a good traveler. (I got driven up, picked up, what's the fuss, body?)

But for some reason, my body decided to hate me last week starting Tuesday morning and not letting up until Thursday morning (after much Tylenol which usually doesn't work all that well.)

I taught on Tuesday....not too easy since I felt squished. And then on Wednesday, walked with Margaret (who has lived just two blocks away for all these years -- what an asset she would have been since she's marvelously connected with interesting things going on in Chelsea. And, after my first attempt to connect myself, I gave up and just used my tiny two-family as a place to drive away from and back to. At any rate, I've finally met her and am, therefore, more connected to the garden community) to Chelsea Cable TV where we were supposed to talk for five minutes on an English/Spanish program -- about the garden show at the Gallery at the Chelsea City Cafe.

For some reason I don't understand, I couldn't think of a thing to say when the first question was addressed to me. All I could do was turn my head to Margaret, look pathetic and wait until she answered.

I imagined that I can carry anything off, even being on a local TV, something I've not done before, but what the hell happened? How hard could that be?

Why did words allude me?

I sat there and held up photographs.

After that we walked to Dunkin' Donuts....where I begged (asked, but it felt like begging since I couldn't imagine getting to our next appointment at the Senior Citizen Center a block away) her to carry my bag (hardly that heavy, though I felt it weighed sixty pounds) and she told me about a group that has met at the Center for twenty years, making quilts. These women are getting pretty old, but still meeting faithfully once a week.

Of course I had recovered momentarily, had enough energy to ask the Center Director if I might do a video about that quilt making group. We were there to talk about a garden project starting in May which would involved a small group of seniors if the grant that Margaret spent so much time writing a few weeks ago. It would be a good project, building more high beds in the garden and providing transportation for a group of seniors to shared those spaces. I would do videos (small shows for the Chelsea Cable TV) and photograph them over the season....

But I didn't get much better until Thursday morning, in time for my appointment with my marvelous dental hygienist to talk about what's to be done with one seriously problematic tooth (there are two others that need new crowns, only a few thousand dollars) that will cost between 5 and 7 thousand. We're laughing (though I was hardly in a mood to laugh) because I mentioned taking photographs through whatever ghastly process has to be done...and as soon as I said that, I reminded myself that I wasn't taking photographs of that easy water-pic procedure.

So, this is an instance of photography making me laugh....

I like Lyn a lot, but I HATE TEETH. I hate how much mine have cost over the years, how much trouble they've been, how uneven and homely they are. Oh, I wish florid (spelling?) had been invented earlier...much as I hate the thought of adding even more chemicals to the environment.

Friday I visited my friends Warren and L. (I use L because she's far more private than I am and would probably hate to be paraded around in my blog, much as I have adored her as my ONLY friend here in Chelsea. We met in a taxi fifteen or sixteen years ago -- riding to the airport where I was, with great trepidation, anxiety and Valium, going to visit my daughter in L.A. and she was pulling one of her great pranks by having a ticket in her bag, even though she was ostensibly only seeing her daughter off.

Warren was my book supplier while I was on the island of bed for so long. I almost never read anything except the New Yorker, but for whatever reasons, I was capable of reading, having been slowed down enough to accept that as an interesting option to doing nothing.

Warren sheepishly handed me a tiny piece of paper which I have unfortunately lost so I can't quote it...in neat pencil script, he'd written the difference between muscular and mussels... not having wanted to correct me on my blog...

I hereby give him permission to write corrections~~

Oh, man, am I aware of my spelling problems. I've often had to think of a different way of expressing an idea when I ran into a serious spelling mystery. I am minimally dyslexic, but hardly enough to cause problems and I know my spelling is atrocious. (Is it allude or illude?)

I've been photographing clouds...here's the view from Warren's office on the third floor of their house.

So, that week's over!

And yesterday, Monday, I actually felt good, like a real person.

With fibromyalgia, that's unusual.

I usually feel good enough, not so rotten that I have to ask someone to carry my purse, but good enough. Not as if my body has declared major hatred on me.

I'm glad that week's over.

And that I'm back to blogging.

I assume that I will soon get back to reading blogs.

In the meantime, my apologies.

The only problem I anticipate now is the gloom that overtakes me starting on Thanksgiving. It attacks my half-brother, also, even though he essentially had an entirely different childhood since he's sixteen years older. I have to call him today or tomorrow so we can briefly commiserate before Thursday.
So, my sympathies are with those of you who get the holiday horrors.
Cheers

Apps

2010-11-18T09:53:00.000-08:00

On Tuesday a student brought in some remarkable/beautiful/surprising new images....double exposures, black and white, printed well on good digital paper, square photos with a narrow black matte. I certainly expected that his work would be good, but these were gorgeous, haunting, mysterious. He'd had a hard time getting going and here it is, past the mid-semester point, and here are all these photographs.

It as only after I asked other students to come over and look at them, and they began asking questions that I put the technique together or rather it was handed to me on a plate. He'd said they were taken with his I-phone, only I hadn't noted the I part. And I knew that they were double exposures. But I had absolutely no idea what was giving them such a mysterious quality until someone asked whether there was an app for the technique -- there is. Two photographs are melded together, so after taking the first, he carefully considers the second, takes it, clicks something and the images overlap. Obviously there's a lot of thought put into the taking of them.

What was a complete surprise, though, is that there is another app for the mysterious quality.....and it's called a pinhole app. This doesn't negate the beauty and significance and sureness of his images, but it really puts a point on what used to be done with an oatmeal box, a pinhole and a piece of photographic paper that acted as a negative.

The Garden

2010-11-16T05:46:00.000-08:00

This is the photograph that Madelaine and Muna thought most expresses the idea of a community garden. I hadn't thought about that, because I don't tend to recognize metaphor (what a dope I am), but they are right. The brick and fencing are symbolic of the garden, and also all the tiny, chain-link fenced yards around so many of the small houses. I narrowly escaped having one by choosing wood -- not a good choice since the slats get broken and once graffiti was sprayed on it.

I do like this bottle gourd, one of many that Evelyn grew. I was surprised about the richness provided by these few vines and the one with gourds shaped like bottles that grew on the fence.

I think Madelaine understood that I think these photographs are serviceable, that I'm glad I printed them all and that they've been shown at the Chelsea City Cafe, that the opening and fuss around them brought more applications from prospective gardeners, but that I don't particularly care much about them. They aren't my work, not anything I take with the deadly, unapproving seriousness with which I regard 'my' work. We stood talking at the non-opening (the real one was a month ago) last Saturday.

The images do record a season at the garden and were a fine vehicle for connecting me to an interesting group of people. And I'll do it again next year, because I can do it more easily than most people could. Part of my skill set. And I'll add work at the Senior Center. And make more videos. This has gotten me back into the community work that I wanted to do when I moved to Chelsea in 1985. The long project that I did then, interviews and photographs of a representative, I thought, group of residents in this very small, very poor city (7 and 1/2 people per dwelling, highest rate of occupancy in the Commonwealth), wasn't really shown because there was no place to show it and I regretted that. Just as I'm glad that this one had some real use. It seems odd, difficult, that I'm now 71, just starting to do the community work that I had wanted to do thirty years ago...and there is so much potential for recording things I'm curious about now -- why folks landed in Chelsea.

It doesn't mean that I didn't work hard to print and frame (however cheaply) this work. That's natural. But I have no desire to add them to my endless store of stuff...........

When I moved here, there was no where to show photographs. Not at the library, not in City Hall. Most of the set I took, sometime in the mid-eighties, ended up at an outreach of Bunker Hill Community College and I forgot about them. Years later when I phoned, hoping to retrieve them (they were decent silver prints, nicely framed), I was told they were no where to be found.

Now there are two galleries in Chelsea, though the hours that they are open are limited. And there is a gallery at the Chelsea City Cafe, just a few blocks away from where I live. Josh puts up shows every month or so. Chuck runs the eatery. And we had a remarkable opening there. Lots of gardeners, friends of gardeners and children. It was the best opening that I could have imagined and I hardly had to talk to anyone. Margaret, a woman who lives just blocks away, who I should have met twenty years ago so I could ride on her coat tails and get connected, who did a lot of the detail work for the show and publicity, was a grand hostess, making introductions and spreading graciousness.

My favorite photograph, I have to admit, one of the four or five that I actually like, is of Nesa who will be the garden overseer next season. She's from Bosnia. And she came from a farm, growing all the family food. No one works harder than she does, even though the doctors don't want her to be on her feet for more than four hours a day. "Next year," she'd say. She says that for everything. And she laughs. She's had a lot of tragedy in her life. And suffers from it. And she tries to joke and laugh as much as possible. Sometimes she yells back at Joe, who has been the overseer this year. They both shout at each other, laugh, and smoke like demons.

Misc.

2010-11-08T13:23:00.000-08:00

Today involved fighting with the computer -- to upload files in the order I would like them, to pay for submitting a non-fiction piece. This glorious dog, who I met after I had coffee with Morris, was supposed to be the last entry, but perhaps his bravery has earned him first place. He's tottering onward, as best he can, still capable of bringing happiness to those who have been fortunate to have had his company for many years.

Three of us met for drinks, supposedly, in the decadent and extremely expensive hotel which was made from the Charles Street jail. Mim had read her poetry there a few weeks ago and we'd decided to go back and see what it was like -- on the night before Halloween. The waitresses had to pay for their costumes, something our waitress said didn't bother her since it wasn't expensive, but certainly bothered me. It turns out that the thought of a cocktail, something I haven't had in five or six years, deserted me at the last moment and I had a glass of water as we ate muscles and talked.

There is something ultimately repellant about the place, even though there is a good deal of information on the walls about the award winning conversion of the space. The rooms, Mim said, are $400 a night. Many features of the jail remain, including various doors with bars in the Clink, the cafe that was expecting a big business of young costumed people. The bathroom, where I took my self-portrait, has exposed brick and cement which might or might not be from the original building. The 'yard' has illuminated seating nicely situated on paving stone. When I was there a month ago, the place reminded me of the last days of the Weimar Republic, a strange disconnect from contemporary life and certainly from the past function of the building.

Mim and I took different subways, but I could look across the track and watch her walk along. After her train came, Charlie Chaplin sat on a bench opposite me until mine arrived.

Yesterday I got the chance to video tape someone who had been in that jail, but that experience was just a drop in the bucket to all that happened to him during those rough years. He talked for three hours without drawing breath and would have continued if I hadn't gotten hungry. I can't wait to work with this material and am so grateful for his generosity in talking with me.

I'm feeling vulnerable. For the first time I understood what it means when knees buckle. Mine did last week when I was in Target and I had to hold on to a counter. A nice young woman brought me water. And I recovered, though a residual anxiety remains. I'd asked the doctor when I saw him a month or two ago about why I felt so speedy, but he didn't know. Perhaps I'm just gearing up again, surprised at myself and moving a bit too fast. Hopefully that's the reason, though I don't see how it can explain the feeling of being close to fainting which comes with the thought, "Oh, you're going to faint. That would be awkward."

It's cold and I have to put plastic on the windows.

Body

2010-10-23T07:07:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I sat around with Morris at Au Bon Pain and found at least some words because of his comforting presence. It's always wonderful to talk to a friend, a talk that dissolves into watching. By leaning against the wall, he faced a man who appeared ancient, as pared down as possible, pale face, white beard, worn clothes, who had a tray of food when we sat down and was reading the New York Post by the time we left. It was impossible not to think of him as a character in an Isaac Bachevis (spellling?) Singer story, a wraith of a fellow who might have spent his youth praying. He wore two gold rings on his left hand, and rarely looked up. "He's turned into himself," Morris said. We both longed to know his story.

But the point of this blog is that Morris and Elaine's son is a movement artist, if that's the correct title, and involved in performance and well as in studies and his fiance has her degree in movement therapy. And Morris and I started talking about related topics which brought me to telling him of a blog that the Cuban in London had written about going to a ballet when he was quite a young man, hardly dressed in the manner of the rest of the audience, and hardly possessing the same color skin. The point of it was how he felt as an outsider (an idea that could take me in another interesting direction entirely) and the importance of being at this performance and the way it connects to his view of dance and the body. Now, the Cuban was far more eloquent about this than I'm conveying, but what I gained from reading were a rush of thoughts about my own relationship to dance and the failure it had to thrive, perhaps a cultural failure, but never-the-less a failure.

My mother was the force behind my interpretive dancing lessons taken with Miss Ingalls in a second floor studio she rented on Main Street, perhaps near Jimmy Gureci's Meat Market, where we fluttered around like butterflies holding parachute silk scarves she'd tie died, clambering like bears, hopping like frogs and dancing freely to Satie. My mother would never have permitted me to take ballet lessons, though I must have wanted the strict form, a teacher who told us what to do and scolded us if we didn't do it right, the desirable black leotards (instead of blue) and, holy of holies, toe shoes. We danced barefooted or wore soft brown dance shoes with elastic. I wanted, at the very least, soft black ballet slippers.

But my mother had her ideas, one of which was not using coloring books because they confined you in the lines. Perhaps she didn't think that, but it's what I imagine. No comic books, no Sunday funnies, no Saturday afternoon movies with the other kids and Miss Ingalls Interpretive Dance based, loosely, on Isadora Duncan. (Years later I worked at Abromovitz, Brienes and Cutter (are those names spelled correctly?) in the Corning Glass building, in a windowless room, with a group of architect planners, Bernie and Arthur, and a young Frenchman, Jean Pierre, who designed the models, tiny trees, wee pedestrians, cardboard buildings. He was the nephew of Isadora and Menalcus Duncan and he, Jean Pierre, had been so poor that he always kept a twenty-pound bag of rice around in case his fortunes decreased again. He alsos grew vines from the tops of sweat potatoes. They festooned the columns and supportive strings.)

After she did, subdued hell broke lose in what was left of my family, but eventually I did, sometime in high school, go back to classes (Thursday) with Miss Ingalls. She was horrified when she came to watch a modern dance performance in which I was a sinner (red, sleek leotard like costume) in a saints and sinners something or other that I can hardly imagine. All I remember is a glimpse of that red satin. (I'm still a person who wishes she had a gold tooth and wore spangles instead of turtle necks.)

The upshot of all this is that when I was too sick with ulcerative colitis to start college, and had to move to that one-room studio on Charles Street in the Village with my father who thought he was finally free (both of his second wife and me), I taught dance with her, Ruth Ingalls, on 57th St. By taught, I mean that she paid me a bit and I performed sometimes or demonstrated. The most interesting, important feeling was that the arms rise from lifting the back, pulling up the rib cage and stretching. It was quite a wonderful feeling and I never imagined that I'd entirely lose that lift. "Breathe," she would say because I was already holding my breath, waiting for the next catastrophe to fall. That particular version was the 12-year-older Italian man who I'd run to in order to avoid living with my father who was still often sleeping in the bathtub, the only door that closed in his place. And the Italian had to go the dance classes with me, to watch me. He was small and wirery and had the hardest time stretching even the tiniest bit.

Let's gloss over the rest and finally get me to the first year of college and all the following mishaps. I could have studied with Jean Erdman at Bard, but for some reason I wanted to major in literature and to write. I passed over the possibility of taking her classes entirely (modern dance, pshaw) and took sculpture with Harvey Fite, instead. And other stuff like creative writing which I was no good at. And then blah, and blah, pregnancy, abortion, quitting school, getting married, leaving him, and no concern at all for dancing.

Except when my daughter was born so was the love of watching her run and leap, listening to her stories, dance classes at Henry Street Settlement, etc. Some time in here I took a few Tai Chi classes with Ed Young who also illustrated (present tense probably included) childrens' books. And more importantly, for a while there, I somehow found myself in a company of odd dancers who were free form performers....but I was extremely sick, the result of a long ulcerative colitis attack, and missed the performance I wanted to be so much a part of.

In all that time, except for that brief excursion with this tiny mad company, I did nothing physical except walk. I did like to walk. My back hurt so I stopped wearing clogs which I'd liked to wear. But I still walked.

And time passed, and the gods moved me to Brookline when Krissy was nine, and to another set of problems that moved Krissy along, year by year, until I did take some yoga classes....and then, relatively recently, Chi Gong, and Tai Chi (except that the man I was living with made fun of me every time I started to practice, so I never, ever settled in to knowing the form that I spent so much time and money learning.)

I never understood that my fatigue and aching muscles were from fibromyalgia. They seemed like the product of ordinary neurosis and a life not well lived. And I had long been concerned only with the head, a lesson mis-learned from my father who actually did keep swimming and walking well into his dotage, never gained weight and always seemed comfortable in his body.

I have never been comfortable in mine. I thought I was a head, eyes, detached from the rest of me which is why, I'm sure, I'm seventy-one and truly bending forward, uncomfortable with various aches. And I'm not sure that many white middle-class women of my age were or are. We weren't programmed to achieve or become professionals, nor were we programmed to be relaxed, fit and pliable.

But it's more than that. I was not part of a group, a culture if you will, where the body, as a tool, element of movement, music, was integrated. I can hardly imagine Auntie Marion dancing in the kitchen, much as she loved Balanchine. Dance was to watch in high priced seats, performers at the top of their skills, Maria Tall Chief among them.

These thoughts have been rattling around since I read the Cuban's blog. They were more articulate when I was driving back from visiting with Morris, but I didn't catch them last night, so this is the best I can do before they submerge again.

Wind and Recovery

2010-10-03T08:52:00.000-07:00

Maybe I learned to like weather, wind, heavy rain, storms, from my father. I'm not overly fond of sun, but I do like weather.

When I lived in New York, and even up here in Brookline, I rarely noticed clouds. But now I'm fascinated by them. An they've been quite remarkable lately.

I'm not quite sure why I'm in the midst of this garden show project. Perhaps because I'm able to do it and I wasn't able to do anything for so long. Perhaps I'm exercising, proving that I can function. Building up muscle tone by a quite easy project, a bit expensive, but no details that I have to worry about overly.

I don't consider it 'my' work, a concept that no one will understand who isn't a photographer or a writer. It's a bit like writing a prologue for someone's play, but it's illustrating the seasons of the local community garden and the folks who worked there. And I'm quite fond of a few of the images and I'm half way through putting them in cheap frames from Michaels. The prints are decent, archival, and I'm decorating some of them by writing that no one can read because it's sideways and my handwriting is so risky.

Here's the text that David Rudolph provided...
Ahh the bounty!!! In the shared space of the Community Garden I've learned how to grow from the attention defiity disordered, the control freaks, and thte cool, calm, and disfunctional. Watching worms mate was inspirational, and getting obsessive about collecting every arugala seed pod possible was revealing Christians, jews, hindi, muslims, scientologiests, atheists and agnostics have all shared work in the budding of the community garden this devine summer.

Pretty, damn good text. I wish that I didn't have such a mundane nature. But that is what happened, all curious energy...remarkable...

(In trying to put the blogs I follow on to my first page, I didn't succeed and Ilost my followers...so much for an attempt at progress.)

Dream

2010-09-29T04:57:00.001-07:00

This is the second time I've written a long, long, irreplaceable entry on Tuesday Poem instead of in my blog. Here is the attempt at replacement....

Perhaps he had phoned or just turned up at the door, a black artist, a musician, who wanted to talk except that I hardly knew any of the jazz groups he was talking about and couldn't remember the names of those I knew (except Archie Shepp, lithe and summery, darker than the dream fellow, New York, all those years ago, but I didn't mention him) and so he got bored of talking to an audience who didn't understand his references and besides he really wanted to go to bed with me, but I had no interest in that so I followed him, a long walk in the city, that led to his place, a house where he must have been squatting, no electricity, but an upholstered chair in the living room, windows all around, and his friend who seemed crazy, a young, large white man, and then lots of other guys, who were drugged or crazy and all white, like everyone was using the place as a crash pad so I asked to leave and as we went up the driveway, a man, white, was walking two black dogs, rather large, like English setters, but the wrong color and we knew something was wrong with him, a dangerous look in his perhaps blue eyes, so I went ahead and took shelter up stairs and on a front porch with three older men, perhaps even old, who had to be homeless, all that flesh and baggy clothes, not any interest in protecting me, but I hid between them until a small, brown dog that had been unleashed rushed at me and I grabbed the scruff of his neck and he dangled and snarled and at one point got his teeth into my wrist, but he unlatched and I held him away from me and then, somehow, I was in a room and a woman was walking in the door, looking for the dog her friend, an old lady, had lost, a dog that looked just like the dog I was holding, almost in her face, so I had to quickly make up a name for it, pretending I'd had him/it a long time, my dog, and then I was outside and holding another dog, too, also small and snarling and lighter brown, also by the nap of the neck, wondering if and where I could throw them so that I could get away and then throwing the newer menace onto very lush green grass in a park, sure that he'd come back to attack me, but instead he ran after a small, fluffy, beige dog dragging the leash, and now I had only the first dog to toss away, in a strange area that seemed almost like gray lava, hillocky and dippy with what I hoped was a muddy pond that would mire him down so I could run away as fast as I could which I did as soon as I hurled him, but I am slow, I told the musician who was much faster at escaping, I am too slow and worried that I'm not fast enough since the stone is pitted and difficult to climb, but I do and find stairs leading up to what might be a church with a side door that opens from the top down so that it lies flat at my feet, revealing two other doors that are open so I enter this huge room, high ceilings that I'm sure belongs to a monk who writes at the somber, wide table with a quill pen on it and a set of folded papers that have, I think, drawings on them which I look at briefly as I try to find paper so that I can leave a note, briefly considering whether I should write a prayer, but I don't believe so that's impossible, besides there's no scrap paper only a bed which appears like a gray wool low rectangular tent that I peer into and find a matte, double bed size, half of which is a dog bed, but now lights go on in the other room and I walk to the door and peer in while the artist, musician, crouches by the door behind me, and see three women who must have come back from shopping because they are putting bags on the wood counter in this crowded kitchen. Two are older with gray and yellow and white hair and the other is taller and a bit younger, also with white and yellow hair, short and wispy as was theirs, and I ask for help and they explain that they are artists, but I'm not sure what type because only the younger, taller one says that she is a sculptor because she is so pathetic. I follow them back into the large, dark wood paneled room and watch as one spills miniature replicas of food on a round table and suggests that they have a pretend tea party but I tell them that I've just seen an exhibit or a store front display of curious replicas of everyday homey objects and am trying to tell them about how they might make them -- clay -- when the younger, tall woman repeats that she is a sculptor and is pathetic and the others tsk, tsk, her for a self deprecating remark, as they had done when she said this before, and the alarm clock rings because it is 5:30 and I'm supposed to take Tulip to the groomer by 7.

I am relieved to be away, but exhausted.
It's only after I've written this dream in the Tuesday Poem that I am curious about what would have happened and certain that it explains how I've been feeling for the last three weeks -- speeded up, worried, whirling.

Except that all that work was wasted
and Tulip's groomer had called in sick so she has an appointment tomorrow, but it's for 10 o'clock.

Dream

2010-09-29T04:57:00.000-07:00

Being Well Means

2010-09-17T04:59:00.000-07:00

Being well means working all day at the computer until the ink in the archival printer runs out and then driving out to buy more (they had yellow, cyan, red, but no blue) and then on to M's opening at 5:30 in what I assumed was Arsenal Mall in Watertown without remembering that I could have borrowed the GPS or looking the address up in Google (I hate maps), thinking I remembered how to get there, getting lost and then stopping at IHOP to ask the directions, rain, rain on and off, and then finding Home Depot, etc., driving around the Mall, never finding the gallery, heading back, rain, rain on and off, and stopping at McDonalds (Oh, weakness) for a chicken snack and a dollar sundae (poisonous additives).

Bad for me, but good for Monica, she's already left Suffolk and must be in Kentucky by now, starting yet another chapter in her life. I only saw her ten or fifteen times and I'm sorry about that.

Now I'm able to take Bogie for a walk with Karl and Rosie.
Victorys......

Many thanks for the comments on the poem about Lee Miller. I was visiting my friend Sally who was then a scholar at the Getty and saw the Lee Miller show. Needless-to-say, I was transfixed by the inappropriateness of this image, positioned near photographs that she'd taken during the war and off the camps.

Tuesday Poem, Lee Miller, Hitler's Personal Residence, 1945, by Melissa Shook

2010-09-13T05:45:00.000-07:00

Lee Miller, Hitler's Personal Residence, 1945,
Photograph by David Scherman

Taking into account a childhood in Poughkeepsie,

high fashion modeling,
the throat Man Ray savored, his jealousy,

her Egyptian husband, sun-warmed breasts
and luncheons with the surrealists,

Picture this vivacious artist, collaborator, inspiration,

portrait photographer, war correspondent

Slipping off her shirt in the bedroom where Hitler once
stood naked,

Folding it onto the woven rush seat of the stocky chair
where he sat or draped his robe,

Lowering her flesh toward the porcelain surface he had
lain against,

Lifting and bending her arm to touch a washcloth
to her chin, echoing the gesture,

On the sculpted nude female on his dresser, perhaps
having turned it toward the camera,

For this portrait taken on the day, the very day,
she's photographed the liberation of Dachau.

A poem from "Magritte's Rider," a chapbook published by www.puddinghouse.com

Choices

2010-09-12T06:30:00.000-07:00

Because I didn't go out to see Monica on the backside this morning, I printed the May images about the Chelsea Community Garden. Visiting Monica would have meant walking from the car, maybe raking the shedrow, walking back to the car, stopping at Starbucks in Target for an Arnold Palmer. Staying here meant thinking about how few images I could use for May -- it not being a too exciting month for growing -- and sizing and printing them.

It's difficult to make choices. Last year I could have done it all. I love seeing Monica and haven't been there for about two weeks and soon she'll be gone....like the traveling circus. The backside changes location from Suffolk Downs to another backside of a different racetrack.

I know that a lot of people are motivated/galvanated (galvanized, really, but why not galvanated) by doing things at the last moment. I'm not even sure when this little, local show will be, but on Monday I'm going to the Chelsea Community Access something-or-other to talk about doing a slide show for community cable with the photographs I've taken in the garden since May. I'm not in love with the images, but they're useful...and it's quite wonderful being able to be part of such a happening. All those tomatoes! And the squash that grew from the seeds that Parker sent from L.A.

This morning I tried to pick out just a few photographs that would show the most about the bare state of the garden allotments and the work that was going on. And I hoped that they'd be fairly decent images. The good thing is that when I took Bogie to the groomer (not the face, please, not the face, just the body. Tulip now has a spider money head on top of a large caterpillar body. I can't have two dogs looking like that) I bought a package of frames at Michaels and got a discount coupon, 50% off, usable this week. So I can buy the fames and this whole extra project will cost less than $100. That's good.

I think that doing useful images is about the same as teaching. Which is not the same as doing ones own work, but all part of the package.

Must Be Well

2010-09-11T07:33:00.001-07:00

I must be well because yesterday I found myself in the car, my mind speeding, on the way to deliver tomatoes from the garden to a friend in Paneras and then on to the Computer Loft in Allston, hoping that my problem of why the Epson archival printer wasn't working would be solved. What had happened in all this endless attempt to end up close to the same point I'd been when the G-4 crapped out after 10 years of valient service. I was manic, too speedy by half, with a feeling I haven't had in ages -- being wired for sound. I almost turned around because the speed of thought and worry seemed dangerous.

But I got to the Computer Loft, saw Alex (who was putting on his backpack to leave the shop, oh, and alas) who had been on vacation in the Bahamas for the Labor Day week...I had to sit and wait, hoping that he'd find time for me, and, not to waste time and to finish something I hadn't had time to do, I took out the two sheets of e-mails that M. had sent me earlier in the week.

The best, very best, most perfect, were two quotes from Beckett --

1. Now we must chose, said Mercier
Between what? said Camier
Ruin and collapse, said Mercier
Could we not somehow combine them? said Camier

and

2. Moran has been told that his boss, one Youdi, has
remarked that life is a thing of beauty and joy
forever. Moran puzzled, tentatively asks his infor-
mant, "Do you think he meant human life?"

I can't tell you how much reading these helped. I'm not an out-loud smiler, but I smiled. Comforted.

Alex did find time for me, checked to see whether the driver had been loaded. It had. Probably the problem was something I'd done. I could, he said, if I had trouble, contact them by web and they would take over my computer and see what was happening. "You can even watch while they move around inside it." How is this possible?

It was. My printer didn't work. I contacted Service via the web, some pleasant fellow moved around inside my computer and put the name of the Epson someplace (it had already appeared to be there, but it wasn't) and the damn thing works now and I can get ahead with printing a show for the Chelsea City Cafe about the Chelsea Community Garden. An I-took-it-on-crazily-and-expensively-and-voluntarily-fool-that-I-always-am-project.

When I lived with L. I taped drawing paper to a wall of his grand front stairway and traced the shadows of the leaves as they moved across it. I made countless drawings like that and truly learned that the earth does revolve around the sun. I'd intended them as a wall for an installation of one of the clay pieces that's now stored in the attic in the endless boxes.

A Version of Every Day and Dogs

2010-09-08T10:29:00.000-07:00

I had to stop myself from calling L .last night to ask if I could take her class on drawing or printmaking. I just longed to do something else, something new..................

But I am doing something new -- a video of JS telling very complex, often painful stories, that are eventually redemptive. And I've taken endless digital photographs of him at AuBonPain...maybe 500 photographs, none of which he will like. On Monday I tried to take some that I think he will suit his needs (the subject usually has completely a completely different idea of what he should/does look like than the photographer...some photographers never try to please the subject...others do commercial work and spent their own time trying to make the client happy....in this case, I am beholden to him for his stories and must make the effort to give him a few images that would be important to him).

This photograph was taken when he was talking and he certainly won't like it...I love the setting, though I was using the point-and-shoot, rather than the new Canon, G11, and so most of these images were soft, out of focus. That was a disappointment, but again these images are all a crapshoot. He talks and I snap, not looking at the image I'm taking because then I'd break eye contact. I want them as an overlay, too use as images over the video so that it's not just a talking-head, or so that it's a talking head with other photo taking heads over it. In class yesterday someone mentioned that he uses the digital camera set on black and white. What a good idea. I can just change the images in Photoshop, though that's not quite the same thing, not the same intent. I'll play a bit with whether they look better in color or....my old and preferred friend, black and white. I can't imagine ever liking color much.

Though I'm aware that he won't like the many, quick shots I've taken, I do like them...he has beautiful skin, very blue eyes and I love the expressiveness of his face as he talks. I think a few wrinkles by his eyes add an important quality. And in some of the photographs he looks like a young kid, that burst of energy.

I'm very rarely impressed by photographs, though I really do like the ideas behind them. What I like about teaching is
watching students as they try to work out a concept, a thought, an emotion through a series of photographs. Some times sequences really can convey a cohesive mood or thought, as images a young man from Nepal took last semester. They were about a journey - death - to an afterlife. Some of them were painfully expressive by themselves. Others served a purpose and since the intention was clear, they were useful.

I do like words, stories with photographs. I would find it hard to write in the blog without images, but that doesn't mean I care that much about them individually. But I've always loved the taking of photographs and I just love photographing Greta who is a most delicious puppy, now 4 months that a pleassant young couple adopted. I'm not often drawn to dogs, except to photograph (though I found another great dog in this park near Starbucks, FattieMattie), but I find Greta remarkable to look at and to touch. It's as if her coloring is melting.

We'd gone for a walk in the park near Targets where Cindy appeared. She's owned by a fourteen-year-old whose father drives every morning from where he lives in Sommerville, I think, to Everett so that he can walk the dog. His daughter is at that age where she just doesn't taake her out enough and besides he really loves the dog who is fortunately a smaller version of an Eskimo dog. At one point he put her up in the crotch of a tree so that she'd pose for me. Perhaps I should have used one of those photographs, but I prefer not knowing what I'm doing with the point-and-shoot, holding it at dog level and being surprised by the shots I might get. That seems like a pleasant game that I enjoy playing.

Happy is well designed for co-dependency on my daughter, her eyes plead, she nuzzles closely, she waits patiently. As she did this morning when Krissy went into Target for a few items, came out having been charged too much for one and went in again to get her money back. This is not the sort of narrative that I was talking about in class yesterday. I meant something far more imaginative and curious, something interesting, ideally done in black and white. But it amused me to take the photographs and the one thing about digital is that it's remarkably easy to deal with.

FOR SOME REASON THAT I DON'T UNDERSTAND, I CAN'T RESPOND UNDER COMMENTS...IT ASKS ME TO CHOSE SOMETHING OR OTHER, THEN THERE'S NOTHING TO CHOSE, AND IT REFUSES TO LET ME THANK THOSE WHO READ AND COMMENT...I AM THANKING YOU!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Tuesday Poem, "Story-teller Vine, Rega," Melissa Shook

2010-09-07T04:42:00.000-07:00

Story-teller Vine, Rega

Woven twine stretches back-and-forth inside a small case
in the Museum's African section.
From it hang thin rawhide strings on which are tied:
worn, frayed bits of cloth; dried

grass bound by grass; a miniature bow laced with string;
three dried berrries on a tiny branch;
a few twigs; a paper wrapper; a tiny branch
coverd with thorns;

a piece of crumpled paper (writing bled dry); the bone
of a small animal; a block of wood
and notched stick;
and an advertisement printd on red.

Underneath, the label says "only the instructor can read"
the meaning of these objects to teach
the children of the tribe.

From my twine string hang
the puckered pink scar into my uterus; red plaid baby
shoes; a cluster of keys worthy of
a prison guard; the toy camera carved from wood;

a sunflower with an impossibly large brown center
populated by tiny black bugs;
red swimming goggles; a family album, images
fluttered to the ground; and a sack of co-mingled ashes.

Stories only I remember.

This was published in a chapbook that's available at www.puddinghouse.com

Finally Back

2010-09-04T08:19:00.001-07:00

When Sally was here and we walked the dogs near Starbucks, she took this picture of me at one of my favorite places -- under the Orange Line tracks where there's always different graffiti. I look like a happy five-year-old, but a good looking, healthy one, for which I thank her very much!

So, here I am, back, almost turned back into a normally functioning person. Not quite, but almost. Recently in the Times, there was an article on "Keeping Old Bodies Strong," in which Andew Pollack said,

"In addition, geriatric specialists, in particular, are now trying to establish the age-related loss of muscles as a medical condition under the name of sarcopenia, from the Greek for loss of flesh. Simply put, sarcopeenia is to muscle what osteoporosis is to bone."

It's a very interesting article, more scientific and medically driven than what Jane Brody might have written about the need to exercise often, with stress on the aerobic along with weight bearing exercises that build muscle. It was a timely piece to read because, though I don't imagine my colon is entirely calm yet, I'm most aware that I'm physically much weaker than I was last summer when I could water buckets on the track. When I go out there now, and help Monica spread shavings in a stall and then rake the shedrow, I definitely feel it....and usually lie down afterwards. It's a matter of building up, not with the ferocity with which I tackled walking once I'd been warned about the drop off of energy after finishing the last bit of prednisone. But, never-the-less building up.

It's hard for me to accep the slow process of it all. I'm so type A, alas. But maybe I learned that lesson by the punishment my body inflicted after I walked too much, too soon, too up hill, after lying down for two months. The point of all this is to absorb an idea that's very hard for me -- exercise has to be part of daily life as does stretching. I just didn't get this early on, having decided that daily life was about thinking and perhaps doing a bit of something creative, taking pictures maybe. I ignored physical exercise as easily as I did doing the dishes, making the bed and vacuuming.

To my suprise, and to do a favor for a friend, I will be teaching one class this fall....I said yes instantly because I've been dreaming about how to get my job back. Now I don't have to dream that anymore and can go on trying to figure out where to buy the child Krissy clothes in my dreams...At night I worry terribly about that and when I wake up, I can't remember where I bought them when she was a real child.... I know my mother shopped in Macy's and Lord & Taylors, classy department stores that I could never afford. Where on earth did I shop? My dream self would certainly like to solve that problem.

The job offer came in nicely just after a downpour of expenses. One was the loss of my G-4, ten years old, just in its prime, I thought, but evidentally equivalent to an unhealthy geriatric state. Because my programs -- Finalcut Pro and Photoshop -- are old, and I have many, many files that depend on them, I am now using my laptop as the main computer and have bought a refurbished MacPro which I will eventually get up the courage to use. My goal was to finish printing eight months of daily 2008-2009 self-portraits before having to upgrade to a new Photoshop program. I doubted how much flexibility my learning curve has at this moment and preferred to put off finding out for a while.

And then there are the teeth, four of them, the most expensive of which will be $5,000 for a post implant, blah and blah. How is that possible?

It rained and the roof leaked. It's much harder to put that off than it is the teeth ... so on the three hottest days last week, three men worked on replacing it and finished before the hurricane. (Now I know how to pronounce that in Spanish.) A bit more has to be done, but it's slightly cooler.

A few weeks ago, Smith and Krissy drove me to Portland to visit Jeannie and another high school friend, Helen. Jeannie and her husband, Kilt, have a Schnauzer named Zeus. I was obsessed with getting a photograph of him because his face has such interesting coloring and texture. It looks like a mask. I didn't suceed, though I almost drove him nuts. Obviously seeing Jeannie and Hellen was far more important than the dog, but I was, never-the-less, fascinated by him.

To my astonishment, K. & C. also picked me up. On the way back, we stopped at Salisbury Beach, a tatty old place on the ocean which I've always liked. We shared a butterscotch soft ice cream sundae which was like heaven I thought. (My stomach thought not.) And I dragged them into one of the amusement/game spots where I could take lots of oddment photos.

Though I'm back at blogging, nothing is the same. My spot doesn't looke the same, my familiar blogs don't appear neatly on the side so that I can read them first. There's no listing for bold or italics and no yellow warning when I've mispelled a word. Oh, that's a big loss!

I'm hoping, after this initial plunge, that I'll find everyone who I lost and feel confident about blogging. My best wishes!

Oh, Dear...

2010-08-19T05:19:00.000-07:00

There of levels of news...........the first being that my old, beloved G4 received a death notice yesterday because Apple doesn't any longer make parts. This is hard to deal with in the short term and the long term. My photos are captive on it, so I don't have any for this entry and what's an entry without images?

The bigger problems is that my programs that run Photoshop and Finalcut Pro are old and not supported by any newish computer. I've rejected the idea of a new IMAC, having been warned against the shiny screen. The mini, which seemed like a solution for a while, won't run something or other that I need. It's possible to get a refurbished MAC that will tolerate some of the programs I need. They have two possibilities, but it's still all up for grabs, though an informed, informative fellow spent an hour thinking about possibilities and looking up how compatible programs are for me at the Computer Loft in Allston. My needs are minimal, but specific. It's very, very confusing and will take quite a bit of time to figure out. My learning curve is questionable so I'm trying to minimize what I have to learn.... and what I have to buy.

This news comes on top of having had my teeth cleaned an hour earlier. The hygenist, a woman who has managed my teeth for 20 years, finally got a dentist into the room, luckily someone who isn't excessively charming and isn't condescending. This mild fellow, who looked like he might have once played football, used a phrase like nural pathways which I found comforting. But I have four teeth that need work. The only one I'd let him talk about was the worst. After his description -- place a post, periodontal work, a fake tooth, four months waiting for the bone to build around the post, all for around $5,000 -- I considered walking in front of a bus.

My father reached the point where he refused to darken the door of a dentist, but actually I don't think that's a good idea. My problem is figuring out how to pay for this now that I've cleverly given up my part-time teaching. Dental insurance is almost insulting in the amount it covers. Perhaps the problem is going to high grade Boston dentists who charge three times the amount insurance will pay for, but there you go.

At this point, I'm only dealing with the worst, most expensive tooth. By dealing with I mean, thinking about....not acting on.

But it's a cool morning. I took Tulip, AKA Turnip, to the groomer at 7 (here is the description of the picture I took before handing her over .... imagine this small thing that looks sort of like a beige tinged with darker brown, a bit of black here and there, fur throwrug with bangs that cover her eyes, a black nose and a double bottom row of tiny teeth....) and have two hours to sit here in Panera listening to a young cop talking about his potential heart problems that will ruin his career, and the level of pain that he has along with shortness of breath, sleeplessness and a lot of other plaguing symptoms.

Yesterday I mucked out a stall at the track, progress in my physical regime of rebuilding myself. The good news is that the doctor agreed that I'm 80-90% better. That is good news.

The Mugs and Greta

2010-08-09T16:18:00.000-07:00

Sally came to visit and somehow I got her into my bad habit of going to Starbucks in the morning, getting a stamped receipt and returning in the late afternoon for a cold $2.00 drink, any choice. I am going broke over this offer, enjoying it thoroughly and happy to have an accomplice.

One Starbucks is near a complex that has a fine park and often has Greta, a 4 month old Dachshund that this couple got off line from somewhere -- like Tennessee. I've gone nuts for Greta who is quite docile and extremely beautiful.

Tulip, my big idea because Bogie is ten and I thought Krissy was leaving for NY and had no idea I'd get sick as a dog, came from a site in Georgia and she has been no end of trouble. I know that I should have taken her to the training classes that a good friend offered me, but it reminded me too much of when my ex and I got Bogie and took him to endless training so that he became a therapy dog. So, I didn't put the energy into training her and besides, Krissy can't stand it when a dog is kept behind a gate in the kitchen, etc., so whatever work I tried to do, she undid with some sly comment about my cruelty.

However, when I got sick, Krissy and Chris relieved me and Bogie of her company which was a very good thing. She scared the bejesus out of Bogie just by looking at him, and more especially lying in wait on the bed, about to spring as he stood cowering in the doorway. I just couldn't manage this when I couldn't manage anything. Krissy refers to Tulip as Melissa's dog and I pretend not to hear her. I have not yet taken her back and Bogie is very relieved. In fact, I have named her Turnip. Chris doesn't think she's too smart and both of them think she'd be a perfect dog for someone in an office because she makes a big show of a brief greeting and then retires under a desk, sleeping happily. She does like car rides and walks. Sally calls her Polyester which leads to the name of Carpet.

At any rate, Tulip fell in love with Greta, racing like mad with her. after her, over her. It was lovely to see her in an element in which she shone because of Greta's charming presence. Happy on the other hand would have easily taken off her head if she could have and Bogie, not given to much display, growled if she got close. I have a new camera, Canon G11, and couldn't stop photographing the goings-on which provoked me into trying to import them and sizing them for this blog...so, thanks to Greta, I advanced myself slowly into knowing a bit more how this camera operates. Now I have to figure out how to get RAW images.

I am distracting myself with this because Sally took a look at my attic, let out a gasp and then informed me of the damage I am doing by having negatives and archival prints in all that heat. I should have known this, she said, before we started to strategize how to get them downstairs into a room that is, at least cooler. I am actually beyond embarrassment about the clutter, the endless boxes and too tired to have much distress about the damage I might have done to my work.

But Krissy is determined to help me cart them down here and turn my bedroom into a storage room. We can't do all this before Wednesday night when Sally returns, but can at least make a bit of a show. When I told Krissy what Sally said about how careless (read destructive) it is to have not protected my work, she said, "Well, you've done a number of destructive things about it over the years," meaning stuff I didn't follow through with or rejected or walked away from in my casual, sometimes high principled, nuts-o way.

Sally also convinced me, after she got my mourning about not teaching run-through, that learning to teach ESL at this point is counter productive.

It probably would be.

She took a wonderful photograph of me to prove how much weller I am which I will put on the next blog. Right now I can't unlock the webloc.

It's been a wonderful visit -- beach, garden, restaurants, nighttime at Revere Beach, tasks set for the future. We'll go rowing on Wednesday when she comes back for the night and next morning before flying out.

Mourning

2010-08-05T09:11:00.000-07:00

A friend said that it's alright, as in normal, to mourn for a job. And I am. It was always the right place for me, even though there were times when I wasn't the right person for the department. But the students were so interesting -- often first in their families to go to college, or immigrants who had or hadn't entirely learned this language or foreign students who were in an entirely new and sometimes very strange culture.

It was perfect for my shy nature because I was in the role of instructor, taking care of a group, like a sheepdog, circling around, hoping to nip a bit at the heels to provoke more work, working harder, thinking more, trying to provide a congenial environment so that they would all talk with each other, exchange ideas.

I liked that urban university much more than I had like teaching at MIT where everyone was fiercely overachieving. Failure was not an option. And, though I hate to admit it, failure is something to learn from.

Anyway, it's over. I left on principle, regretfully. Very regretfully. The courses I'd been so comfortable teaching, darkroom work, now incorporated digital imagery with which I'm not familiar enough to feel comfortable especially without enough equipment. Oh, it was a rational decision. Made from my high horse and with lots of philosophical stuff thrown in. And now, of course, my dreams, night time dreams and early morning thoughts, are about getting back there. This is, I gather, part of the mourning.

So, the next issue is what I'll do with the next ten years. I think I was there, trying to think about that before the ulcerative colitis slapped me down. But enough of this.

Romeo is quite a fine rabbit who belongs to Sammy's daughter. He is from Peru and has the stalls down from Monica's so I get to talk to him. In his country, he says, he'd have a cigarette now and then, after dinner or some occasion like that, but once he got here, he was smoking three packs a day. "They put something in them. You need that cigarette. You really need it. I didn't need it in my country." He was working three jobs, or sometimes one job that took 14 hours a day because help was so hard to find. He made good money, but he paid out so much in taxes that it was crazy. He was overworking, exhausted and smoking. But his daughter said, "Papa, I smell smoke on your clothes. Why are you smoking? I want you to live." So, he quit, no patches, no lozenges, no gum. He quit. He's still convinced that tobacco companies put something extra in cigarettes to make people so dependent and desperate.

My computer has started fussing, just after I'd printed two months of the 2008-2009 daily self-portrait series. And the monitor went pink and the images went blue. And I never know how to solve these problems. The last thing I want is a new computer (expensive!) if it doesn't work exactly the way this one does...Right now I do not want the learning curve of learning upgraded programs. But we don't always get what we want, it says here in fine print.

Anyway, again apologies for my laxness at reading other blogs...

and thanks to whoever reads this...

Remarkable

2010-07-24T08:33:00.000-07:00

Joyce has always been the most remarkable woman. I met her when Krissy was six or seven, when her children were enough older so that Orson could take her after school and Roma would be around, too. (That's over thirty-five years ago.) When I picked Krissy up, Joyce would tell me stories as we sat in the narrow living room. She was working as a teacher's aid, often catering for events at the church and taking care of a few kids after school. And she had a clear inclination to help anyone, especially immigrant friends from Guyana and the other islands.

She always had a suggestion of some way of solving a problem. And a story about who she'd just met, what so-and-so said, what some child had needed that day and the way she'd attended to that need, how much this cost or that cost, meaning the incredible bargain she found. She had stark white hair, pulled up in a bun and the most incredible face, intimidating and beautiful. I was always slightly afraid of her since she was so much more sure of herself. I didn't know that she was almost twenty years older, but even if I'd been closer to her age, I have never had enough temperament to match the boldness of Joycie.

Now she's almost ninety, still living in her tiny apartment in Greenwich Village, helped by some very good folks that Orson has arranged to come in for her care. Both Roma and Orson have done a remarkable job of providing support to their determined mother, someone who always supported everyone else and didn't need any help, thank you very much. And people still stop by to see her, to tell her what's been happening in their lives, to get advice. When I first met her, the apartment door was always open. It still is.

I hadn't known that she was in the hospital recently, since I'm not good at following the facebook feeds! So here I was complaining about how long it's taken me to get back to some sense of myself, not knowing anything about the problems Joyce had just had. But, even though she's not been out of the hospital that long, she was very much her self -- giving me advice about something or other, laughing at a wonderful, harrowing, exhausting, hair-raising story that Jim's dinner guest told, enjoying the dinner that Orson, one of the best cooks in the world, made since her appetite has come back now that she's here, happily reading the New York Post that the guy who lives in the upstairs apartment gave her when he got back from work. (The additional bit of flavor was that Roma was visiting, also. Though she's also beautiful and imposing, she doesn't have that touch of the aboriginal indian in her face that Joyce inherited and is far more mellow than her mother was at the same age.)

Joyce truly is remarkable.

And so was the branch of leaves that I found on the ground when Krissy and I were walking the dogs near Starbucks.

And so is JoJo (it could be JoeJoe, that seems a little more fitting), this Palimino that I spotted on the walking machine
last summer and fell in love with. He's the only horse I've ever taken a fancy to, for sheer beauty. During this meet, Monica has her horse in stalls near JoeJoe's owners so I've gotten to look at him up close and ask questions.

You can't tell from the photograph that he's the color of butterscotch when he's not wet, with an elegant pale mane and tail. And that he works as a pony, so it's possible to see him leading a Thoroughbred out onto the track before a race.

So.... I learned that he's ten, that his owner got him after her other pony, who she'd had for sixteen years, had to be put down. JoeJoe was bought at auction because, she thinks, he must have worked out poorly (to high spirited, perhaps dumping someone off) as a dressage horse (I don't remember the exact name of the type of work he did before, but it involved carting folks around on top of him and performing in some way that she thought he didn't like), but he's excellent as long he's working. If he doesn't go out, pony some horses for training in the morning and on the four afternoons that the Thoroughbreds race, he gets a bit antsy. (I thought she meant annoyed and cranky...) As long as he's working, his energy is getting burned up and he has a decent disposition.

Anyway, how could I be so lucky as to get close to JoeJoe? My heart throb.

Whatever he's like, he's gorgeous.

Tuesday Poem, "Men," by Bert Stern

2010-07-20T11:04:00.000-07:00

Men

Kenny's bad boy's across the street,

washing his car, a black Camarro

with V8 engine, white letter

tires, and Holly carbs,

just like his dad's.

Sundays, they both drive out

to car shows, but my show's

just out the window, where the cars

lie dreaming like black cats.

Around here, people are

their cars, even the heap

another father and son lie under

in their driveway chop shop

next door to Kenny's.

As for Angie, the kid

washing his Camarro, I know

his dirty little secrets. I saw him

on the avenue yesterday, outside

his car, laid back against the burnished

hood, telling a brown-skinned girl

to get in. Instead, she tossed

her black hair and walked away,

he still yelling as she moved

fast down the street, already

half a block away. For a moment

he froze in wrathful astonishment,

then, like a flash, his u-turn

trails stink of burnt rubber.

I saw him catch her, drag her in

almost before she could scream,

and they're off to where I don't

want to think about.

I know there's karma somewhere,

but across the street, as Angie wipes

a chamois over the car's flanks, his face

is open and innocent as a child's.

Watching him, I shake my head.

Maybe he'll get better as years

press down on him. Or maybe,

just now, he's touched as I am

by the clear sky of Mary's blue

hanging over us, as if to soothe

our frayed angers and heal

the bruised heart of the girl,

naked, defenseless against us.

by Bert Stern

from his book, Steerage

published by Ibbetson Street Press

Bert is Milligan Professor Emeritus at Wabash College and chief editor, retired, at Hilton Publishing. He and his wife, Tam Lin Neville, co-edit a small press that publishes books by poets over sixty. He also teaches at a program in Boston for people on probation.

He has a long list of credits, reviews and poems which have been published. His critical study, Wallace Stevens: Art of Uncertainty, was published by the University of Michigan Press in 1965.

Steerage, his first book of poems, may be purchased from Ibbetson Press.

In my most vague and peculiar way, I've been trying, without doing much of anything, to get in contact with Bert Stern. Of course, a friend had left his e-mail in my e-mail box a month ago, but I didn't notice. Finally, I did it and he's given me permission to use his work which I will do for the next few weeks on Tuesday Poem.

Bert is a most charming and gregarious man, often to be found at the Bagel Bard's meeting place at Au Bon Pain in Somerville on Saturday mornings. I hope to see him there this week.

I was Queen of the Maypole

2010-07-18T17:55:00.001-07:00

A hundred years ago, I used to watch the Sid Caesar Show with my father. Once Imogen Coca (is that the correct spelling?) had a skit in which she was Queen of the Maypole, but the Maypole walked away from her. It was wonderfully funny in the way that she could be, wandering off by herself, looking around in surprise that no one had followed her, mugging slightly in bewilderment.

A week and I half ago, I went to the first Thursday night drumming session. There's the rock on which two men sat, drumming. Three of us sat on chairs, drumming. I had borrowed Don's drum since it was actually my first time -- if you don't count the ten minutes that I tried and got enthusiastic about a new adventure during the Chelsea Art Walk.

And it was quite wonderful. Don keeps time in a very clear way, quite easy to follow if you don't start thinking of anything else. It is definitely a test of staying in the moment. Hit the center with your palm, the sides with your fingers. The two hours went quickly as the water turned to silver, the sky grew dark. There were no mosquitoes.

I went back this week, somewhat reluctantly because it's been enervatingly hot. But no one was there. Maybe next week.

For the past two nights I've gone for a walk with Chris and the dogs, the first time in four months that I've gone back to that nice area near Starbucks. Tulip (who should be called Turnip) chases the subway as it races along the track behind a fence. As soon as she sees it, she takes off.

Bogie likes to swim as an excuse for drinking water, paddling around a bit with his mouth open, swallowing.

Happy, whose portrait is not here, chases squirrels, staring up into the tree in wonderment that it yet again got away from her.

I'm exhausted after the walks, take aspirin and wonder why my body hurts so much. But it's either noodling around in the water (too hard to park near Revere on weekends) or the new adventure of going back to old walks. Onward....

looking for the Maypole.

Tongue Tied

2010-07-16T08:03:00.001-07:00

I've been tongue tied recently, and have hardly remembered this blog that I loved writing on. I don't use that word love casually because it was such a pleasure to have no sense of pressure, little self-censorship, while writing it. I was just happy with story-telling.

I'm now like a bug on her back, unable to turn herself over. Maybe I'm just back to my normal self after having been so sick and just glad to be alive. (But my normal self 'loved' writing on the blog.) Maybe it's a dip of depression after getting off Prednisone. And definitely the mood is increased because it's been so dreadfully hot, day-after-day, with 90 degrees and high humidity. Yesterday was the one day when it's been below 80, but another heat wave is expected for the next four days.

When Krissy was little, she spent the summers with her grandparents, Bob and Mari, in Nova Scotia. The hottest day might have been seventy, much cooler in the shade. My father considered it a perfect place to live except for June when the black flies struck. A man hardly given to complain about anything, he hated those black flies whose bites gave him large, painful welts, and grumbled his way to the car, well covered by clothing, or stayed inside until the infestation subsided.

Their house overlooked St. Margaret's Bay and the beach was just a short walk away. When Krissy played at the edge of the water, she quickly turned blue. My father never minded the cold, since his goal was to swim slowly, placidly, assumedly happily, a long time along the shore. That was his favored form of exercise, though he often took walks. I never saw Mari swim in that cold water which took me at least half an hour to creep into, slowly accustoming myself.

One year Krissy found a dilapidated dolly on the beach that she took back to the house and fussed with, bandaging it, putting it to bed under blankets. I got yet another notion for a project -- photographing the recreation of this event to make a childrens' book (I honestly don't know whether there's an apostrophe there. Am I imagining many children possessing it?) And they dutifully enacted the story while I hopped around, taking pictures. As was/is my usual way I forgot about having made this grand plan (that I had no idea how to carry out) and did nothing with the photographs until a few years ago when I scanned them and put them into a short video with an overlapping, differing voice-over of Krissy and I talking about her grandparents. (That's sort of interesting and is on my website. I actually like it, though I haven't lifted my fingers to get it shown anywhere.)

I used to swim a mile and a half a week at the YMCA in Melrose until I sprained my ankle after the freak April 1st snowstorm. Since then I've thought about joining the Y again and swimming in the summer, something I've never managed to do.

But this year I went paddling in the small outdoor pool in a friend's apartment complex. And it was so wonderful to be in there, my body felt so pleasant to be in, that it gave me the energy to take myself to Revere Beach which is hardly any drive at all. I even bought a blue noodle, 99 cents, Christmas Tree Shop, and beach chairs. I just paddling around in there, floating and watching families play with their children near me, not yet really swimming, but perfectly cheerful with a great sense of freedom.

Yesterday I heard a PBS program, scientists talking, suggesting that it's possible that the extended heat wave on the east coast will become normal weather in the future. I happen to think that the theory of global warming is correct, though I'm uncertain whether this is a symptom of it. Our carelessness with natural resources on this planet seem unimaginable and some consequence seems predictable.

Tuesday Poem, LITTLE MIRACLE IN LAKELAND, Melissa Green

2010-07-12T17:17:00.000-07:00

LITTLE MIRACLE IN LAKELAND

Clouds and mist enshroud Lake Morton,

shawling cypresses knee-deep in shallows,

leaving a silver beaded net in the palm trees' hair.

We sit on a dewy bench, my sister and I,

immobilized by five excitable ibis

wading near us. A Little Blue Heron

hunches and shakes itself.

A lone pelican stares and looks away.

Black and white Muscovy ducks are laughing,

wattle-red wens mottling their faces.

A homely wood stork with its punk cut

can't look at us at all. A Great White Heron

tweezes a spiny fish, holds it, snaps

its pincer beak, holds it, snaps it

to a final soft swallow. Cruciform,

an anhinga stands on a rock to dry its wings.

Out on the water, two white swans gossip

and a black swan hurries its cygnets to school.

We barely breathe. After twenty-five years,

we sit calmly, without guilt or envy or injury.

Suddenly from the First United Methodist Church

behind us, a joyous carillon begins. The larger birds

hunker awkwardly and fly out of the left-hand frame.

The surface of the lake is all commotion and bright wings:

the smaller startled birds are paddling into a flotilla

led by the swans, and even the water is coming in

in rhyming pinions. The ducks are bobbing their rumps

in time to the bells, and ruffling wings keep landing,

swimming into place, filling the water in a vee formation,

and migrating birds keep swimming for the other shore

as though they'd been called.

I wondered then which

was more astonishing -- the way the clouds rolled up

the scrim of mist from the proscenium and the birds

pulled down the sun, uncurling to the rhythm of the bells

its brightening watered silk behind them -- or my sister and I,

our holding hands, as though we'd always done it.

by Melissa Green

I'm sorry that I was so slow in responding to Mary McCallum's wonderful request for a poem from Melissa Green. Our time differences were about half an hour off....but here, at least, is the poem.........from her book, Daphne in Mourning, soon to be published by the Pen & Anvil Press.

Her first book of poems, The Squanicook Eclogues, won the Norma Farber Award from the Poetry Society of America 1989 and the Lavan Younger Poets Prize from the Academy of American Poets. Recently it was reissued by the Pen & Anvil Press. A second book of poems, Fifty-Two, was published by Arrowsmith Press in 2007. Color is the Suffering of Light: A Memoir was published by W.W. Norton & Co, 1995.

(I'm glad to have had a chance to present this particular poem about reconciliation (and perhaps forgiveness.) For me, typing it was a way of moving more deeply into the images, a privilege for me that unfortunately offers the chance that I haven't caught all my inevitable mistakes. They are mine, not Melissa Green's.)

Convalescence

2010-07-02T10:26:00.001-07:00

Mim understood perfectly, perhaps instinctively, that I was bewildered by all the possibilities of sandwiches that we might order in the little take-out shop that she likes so much. I almost ordered what she had, but she was intent on making at least a few of the chalk-board choices clear to me, reading the ingredients in the turkey sandwich, mentioning the chicken, tomato, lettuce, mozzarella and spicy mayonnaise that was listed near the top on the right side, too difficult to read myself. I had fastened my hope on a vegetable something that was printed in larger letters, closer to the bottom, easier to read.

But the chicken sandwich she described sounded good. And it was. And so was talking with her.

It hadn't dawned on me that since I'm capable of driving to Davis Square in Somerville, a very big step in this wretched process called convalescence, that I'd be a bit vague about other demands of going out to lunch with a friend. But I didn't have to cover that up or be embarrassed about how long it's taking to be returned to something like the self I was four months ago.

What maxims, those wretched sets of words that come unwanted into your mind at odd moments, had she learned as a child, I wondered. Was her mind cluttered with - a stitch in time saves nine; you can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear; if it was a snake, it would have bit you; if wishes were horses, then beggars would ride; it's a long row to hoe? My list is mid-western, most of them born of farm work. There are others -- keep your chin up along with that inevitable stiff upper lip and carrying the world on your shoulders. I even concocted some Biblical notion of hiding one's light under a barrel from something I must have overheard.

In the last couple of days, Bogie and I went out to Revere Beach for a rice pudding, the only item I find edible on the menu at Santorini's where Krissy, Chris and I had gone for dinner the night before.

That wouldn't have been my choice of restaurants, though I'd been there with my friend, Joe, the last meal we had together. He particularly liked it because the owners once rented small apartments to folks come from the track and he'd lived in everyone of them, enjoying the breeze from the beach. He'd wanted to take me there so that I could tell his son that he wanted his ashes scattered across from the restaurant since it meant so much to him, a task that I was never able to accomplish since it would have been intrusive in the sad circumstances after his death last fall.

So, I knew that there wasn't really any food that I like on their very complicated menu -- fried this, fried that. But Krissy and Chris had eaten calimari (sp?) there when a friend visited from L.A. and so it seemed like a good idea -- hot night, beach across the street.

I couldn't figure out what to order, so I depended on advice from the counter lady who swore that the hot turkey with green peppers and onions was to die for. She didn't exactly say 'to die for,' but that's what it tasted like before it had the decency to take itself off into the garbage and I ate a little of Krissy's rice pudding, which convinced me that there was something edible on the menu.

When I first joined the Community Garden in Chelsea, I wasn't well enough to do any of the work, so Krissy took over, planted everything from seed. After two or three weeks, I realized that we could get a second plot that I had enough energy to fuss with. It happens to be booby trapped with an insistent weed that sprouts from the tiniest bit of root left in the soil when you try to dig it out. It wraps itself around them, clinging onto the tomato plants and the zucchini that I planted from seeds that Parker sent.

Krissy is totally possessive about the garden she started and resists my suggestions. Even if I bring out the fact that my beloved grandfather gave me various important gardening hints and that I got my girl scout garden badge (just before my mother died), she wants to learn it all by herself. She's delighted that all the carrot seeds she planted grew, content with a line of green fringe. The concept of 'thinning' them out is not something that she'll consider.

I think we are both surprised by the green beans on the bush beans (she doesn't like green beans and I don't care for them all that much, but they grow quickly and produce nicely!!!). She's delighted that cilantro from seed actually grew. We don't know when onions and garlic are ready to be picked. The lettuce I chose must have been chickory, terrible. The peas were planted too late, but it's fun to watch them reach for the next level of string.

Tuesday Poem, Patience

2010-06-29T09:23:00.001-07:00

Patience

I can't sleep.

People chatter, dogs bark

The world blurs into the distance

Darkness walled in by stone

Beaten by voices, over and over

With fire and ashes nearby

I want to speak

My voice disappears, my strength vanishes

All right! It doesn't matter!

This world dislikes being spoken to, I don't care

The river water turns to ice

And life is life no longer

I do again what I did before

Close my ears, close my eyes

And wait for the calm that has to come.

by Chairil Anwar, Translated by Burton Raffel and Nurdin Salam

Anwar, an Indonesian poet, was born on July 26, 1922 and died on April 29, 1949.

In writing about his work, James S Holmes says --

"In his later years, at any rate, Anwar took his poetry like his life, where he found it: in anthologies or on the waterfront made little differences. And to the last he was overflowing with schemes and projects. In April, 1949, he told a friend that he wanted to go to Macassar, across the Java Sea on the island of Celebes, to note down sea chanties from the Buginese sailors. He had plans to translate Garcia Lorca. And he was thinking about the possibility of a trip to India and Europe."

In some way, this book came into my hands years ago. It's disappeared and reappeared a number of times, including last week when it took leave of me for a few days after I was so happy to have found it's splattered self while I was doing the systematic read-and-dismiss of books on my shelves during my vacation on the island of bed.

Now I'm not entirely certain why his work appealed to me,(though I know why this particular poem was so relevant to my brooding thoughts which did not include any vision of the calm that had to come) but it did. As did the work of Denise Levertov. And much, much later, toward recent years, the poems of Raymond Carver.

Tuesday Poem, Patience

2010-06-29T09:23:00.000-07:00

The Badge

2010-06-24T14:09:00.000-07:00

I hope I'm equal to the badge. I got it on Tuesday and soon, hopefully, I'll be able to help Monica with small tasks. Right now, all the walking to her barn and then to see friends I haven't talked to in months was slightly, a little more than slightly, more than I could manage without losing the next day to back and leg problems. But it was well worth it.

And there's a goat on the other side of her shedrow, quite friendly, very fat, more gorgeous than Goatie who often slept in different stalls in the barn that Pam Angevine, a trainer, was in four or five years ago. He would prance and butt. This nameless goat pranced a tiny bit, but seemed fairly amenable to my presence.

I'd like to have a goat and some chickens. As my grandmother said, "If wishes were horses, then beggars would ride. Actually, the badge, which allows me access to the backside of the local racetrack, is my prize possession....I guess dogs and a daughter aren't possessions, so you know what I mean. It allows me to eaves drop and converse. So, I got to talk with Monica who is my adopted daughter (though the paper work hasn't gone through and her mother would put up a big fuss), saw a lovely 10-week old Boxer puppy that Timmy Kirby, a taciturn trainer whose father had the Thoroughbred training business before him, had given his son for his 13th birthday, sweet square face, soft fawn fur. And got to wave to Ronnie Prince, an exercise rider, and talk with Jim Greene, "Well, well, wait long enough and look what drags along..." (who with Shirley Edwards started the 8th Pole for health care and substance abuse problems on the backside) about the possibilities for slot machines which will improve the economic conditions at the track, something that folks have been waiting for, often hand-to-mouth, for the last six or seven years.

I feel embarrassed that I have amassed so much material about the goings on with the folks on the backside, interviews I was allowed to make, photographs I was given permission to take, permission slips that everyone signed. Hopefully the guilt about this will start to push me along. That would be a good project for the next year. Guilt has to be useful for something...

Right now I've just been trying to get some semblance of my life back. Chris moved my bed back into the tiny bedroom that has no heat in the winter, the couch back here in the workroom, a little of the clutter managed, the bathroom floor washed. Now comes the kitchen. And then the management of much, much more clutter. But I don't care all that much. I'd just like to be writing again.

"Blue Latitudes" was so fascinating that I slowed down toward the end of it, surprised and disappointed when I got to the last page. I couldn't have imagined caring about Captain Cook or a youngish (forty-something) writer following the course of his expedition with a rather often drunken Australian friend (I would have imagined being turned off by massive, endless descriptions of drinking in Australia, and almost every where else Cook landed, since I think too much about the children of these drunks (if they have them), the damaged livers, the waste of money, but I found a streak of acceptance in my cold soul and enjoyed his fascinating writing, as detailed about the hazards Cook's men faced, as were the descriptions of the folks he met along the way, his observations about the inevitable devastations that early European explorers brought to cultures they deemed inferior.

I liked the writing of Tony Horwitz so much that I bought several other books on Amazon. com, one cost a penny plus postage.

Though I'd tossed out all my Feynman books before in one move or another, I've just bought replacements. This one doesn't add much except a longer story about his first wife which is admittedly very touching. I'm glad to have it, though reading it was like gobbling dark chocolate.

I'm trying not to be cranky that I'm not walking well yet...... crankiness is a waste of time. A friend, who read the blog, agreed that I really don't have the energy to teach that six week class this summer. I was grateful that he weighed in on what is a very hard decision. Giving up. Giving in. Not accepting the challenge. But if I'm truthful, he's right. I don't even have enough energy for my own work to matter very much. Even my frustration is dulled.

Not Quite Me?

2010-06-18T11:40:00.000-07:00

I am not quite me and am not even sure that I have enough energy to hope to become me again, but maybe that's because the end of prednisone brings it's own problems. Neither of my doctors know much about that, but if you look on line, it's pretty clear that being on it has fewer pitfalls (including the possibility of being effected mentally in a way that was, for me, a glorious high) than getting off it. The list of list of things to watch for once you're weaned off it is unpleasantly long.

I don't want to remain this person who would prefer to lie in bed, reading. And finds the idea of blogging, much less completing this attempt, very foreign, almost impossible. The old me loved to blog and found it quite easy to patch words together. Now I'm struggling for a decent sentence. But this is NOT complaint, but observation of a long process of becoming sick and recovering.

This week I forced myself to get up at what was once my normal time, 6am, rather than sleep until 9, preferably 11. And I started working on the computer, the first work I've done since the middle of February, editing an insane poem I'd written about my experience last summer, working on the backside of the local racetrack, washing water buckets and making up the feed for 3-5 horses. It's a piece I love, but right now I'm not sure that the love is justified. At any rate, I decided to change it into a prose poem, only 109 pages. (Insert gales of laughter here at the audacity of this no-body thinking she would write a something of that length and have a hope of anyone reading it...) But at least I was working!!!!!!!!!!! And for that, I was grateful as I can be in this dull state of mind.

This week, I managed 4 days during which I was up, often out, functioning for 12 hours. Tottering a bit, but not lying on the bed. On the 5th day, that bed looked awfully good and I understood that it was longing for me and obliged its need.

But things have been happening anyway. My friend Susan edited the poems that will appear in a chapbook and told me not to fret terribly that I didn't know how to spell Klimpt (is that the right spelling?) and Gauguin. (Oh, misery!) Who knows when the chapbook will appear. It was accepted over a year ago, but at least it's now copy edited!

Another friend scolded me mightily for not telling him that there are some of my daily self-portraits (1972-73)up in a current show in the Museum of Modern Art in NY. I knew about it because Susan, bless her heart, called me up to tell me that she'd seen my name in the review in the Times. (Evidentially you can see the images on the MOMA website, though I'm not going to look them up right now. MOMA bought some work, and I'd donated other images, some time around 1973.)

I've never been too excited by things like this, though as two friends pointed out, THIS IS REALLY IMPORTANT and WEREN'T YOU LUCKY TO BE MENTIONED when there are a 100 (I'm not sure if this is true, but maybe it is) women photographers in the show. And I am lucky. I will ask the friend who scolded me and told me to make some use of this opportunity what to do.

But now that I've edited the poetry into a prose poem, I'm at a loss, drained. What can I do except read and go to the movies, an easy drive that I can manage. (Observation, NOT complaint. It's remarkable to be able to drive and to be at the movies again!)

So, I've seen "Exit Through the Gift Shop," a film that I believe was edited by Banksy. It certainly tweaks the art market very cleverly. Unfortunately, a lot of the footage was taken by a Frenchman (if any of the narrative is true) who swirled his video camera around with terrible casualness. Both Krissy and I felt sick because of the sloshy quality (I closed my eyes for much of the film, but still know that I liked the premise a lot).

I saw the Air Doll by myself. Usually I'm sort of fruity about ideas like having a central character be a sex-doll, but everyone was so tragically (and somewhat realistically) alone that I found this Japanese film very touching, as well as quite beautiful. (The actress who portrayed the doll was remarkably poignant.)

I wouldn't have been unhappy if I hadn't seen The Secret in their Eyes, except that the male actor has a remarkable face that I could have looked at for hours.

"The Outlaw Sea" awakened me to a broader level of disaster -- pirates on the open sea and the ecological catastrophe of ship-breaking on the shores of India.

The essays of Jeremy Bernstein were pretty interesting to read after Richard Feynman, though I certainly didn't really understand them.

I couldn't bear to read more than the first quarter of "Eleni," a well-researched book about the murder of Nicholas Gage's mother in the Second World War, her sacrifice to save her children.

I was annoyed by Donald Hall's book of poems, though the first few pages provoked some interesting early memories and thoughts about my own writing.

All of the books have been borrowed from my supplier, Warren. (Some day I will go to the library again. When?) Now Krissy is borrowing books from him since she fell in love the M. K. Fischer and "A Year in Provence" that he'd lent me.

Oh, well, we'll see what happens. I think I have to face that I won't be able to teach the six week, three morning, summer Photo I class that begins in mid-July. That means I'm entirely done with teaching.

Hummmm. What next?

Tuesday Poem, Unaccountably, walking

2010-06-14T13:37:00.000-07:00

Unaccountably, walking

past a portly museum guard,
up wide steps, noticing a small, polished penis
(uncircumcised) on a glistening white marble statue,
I am transported, a wood table with attached benches,
seated opposite Bobbie, shriveled, gray,
knit cap pulled over wisps, stubble
mustache, faded flannel and soiled pea coat.

If she talked, she said, "I was a kid. Alone
in the wagon. Waiting for my uncle. The horse shied.
The cart tipped. All the fruit spilled."
Sometimes she shifted a word here, Watertown
or market, added an angry father there, but the gist was
being alone, a child, the fruit spilling.
"It was not my fault."

Bend forward, shuffling a worn deck, laying the seven-card
solitaire pyramid, she muttered softly.
But if the Queen of Hearts appeared in that first dealing,
the set-up of the game, she began a loud,
uncontrollable incantation against the one, the evil one,
who laid a curse on her.

Every evening Bobbie accepted a bar of soap, folded towel
and the striped pajamas
shelter staff kept especially for her. Undressing behind
curtains, no one saw her wizened form, sagging
breasts, dark nipples, shriveled penis, dried sack.

Nothing about the gleaming Bacchus, carved in 1863
by William Witmore Storey, American,
should have reminded me of the old Armenian,
homeless hermaphrodite.

In a month or two, this should be published in a chapbook, "Magritte's Rider," by www.puddinghouse.com.

For more than twelve years, while I was teaching, my relaxation was working the occasional 3-11 shift in the woman's unit of a local shelter. It was a remarkable experience for which I was very grateful. Now my relaxation is going to the backside of the racetrack which gives me remarkable stories for which I am very grateful.

I apologize profusely for not having kept up my end of the blog-bargain, but hopefully I'm back to doing that, looking forward to reading all the poems and my usual cast of blog-character's entries.

Perfectly Reasonable Deviations

2010-06-04T06:02:00.000-07:00

I have tried not to buy more books since I plan to move in the next few years and my task is unloading, not acquiring. But I found myself on Amazon, buying three of Feynman's books, second hand, partly because of this quote -

"One of the first interesting experiences I had in this project at Princeton was meeting great men. I had never met very many great men before. But there was an education committee that had to try to help us along, and help us ultimately decide which way we were going to separate the uranium. This committee had men like Compton and Tolman and Smyth and Urey and Rabe and Oppenheimer on it. I would sit in because I understood the theory of how our process of separating isotopes worked, and so they'd ask me questions and talk about it. In these discussions one man would make a point. Then Compton, for example, would explain a different point of view. He would say it should be this (italics) way, and he was perfectly right. Another guy would say, well, maybe, but there's this other possibility we have to consider against it. So everybody is disagreeing, all around the table. I am surprised and disturbed that Compton doesn't repeat and emphasize his point. Finally at the end, Tolman, who's the chairman, would say, "Well, having heard all the arguments, I guess it's true that Compton's argument is the best of all, and now we have to go ahead."

It was such a shock to me to see that a committee of men could present a whole lot of ideas, each one thinking of a new fact, while remembering what the other fella said, so that, at the end, the decision is made as to which idea as the best -- summing it all up without having to say it three times. These were very great men indeed.

Page 109, Richard P. Feynman, Adventures of a Curious Character, with Ralph Leighton.

(My appreciation puts aside all question of women not having been players in this particular setting, of nuclear warfare as well as of oil spills, environmental hazards, the state of our economy, greed on Wall Street, etc., and just concentrates on a meeting during which no one has to repeat himself to have been heard.)

and one more quote -- In physics the truth is rarely perfectly clear, and that is certainly universally the case in human affairs. What is not surrounded by uncertainty cannot be the truth." from the introduction to "Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Track," a beautiful collection of Feynman's letters edited by his daughter.

While I dislike the word truth, in this context, I really appreciate it. Oddly, the quote reminded me of my struggle for tenure during which a tenured friend from Woman's Studies carefully removed any hint of reasonable doubt from the text I had written about my teaching, scholarship and service. I knew she was right and that one is not allowed to express even an ordinary amount of self-deprecation or reflective musings in presenting oneself to any of the committees, but I just hated to submit to this cleaning up. However, I needed the job.

We had our first cookout which Krissy and Chris managed. My friend, Monica, a Thoroughbred trainer who has returned for this season at Suffolk, brought over Mariska who is just a year and a half and the most delicious little girl! And then the next day, Monica ran a horse in the 5th and we went out to see the race (she knew the horse wouldn't do well) and I finally got to see Clemente again. While I've always prided myself on understanding folks whose native language isn't English, Krissy is far better at understanding his fantastic stories, I'm sad to say. He's the most charming fellow....and, as usual, snuck up behind me, grabbed my neck and I screamed. He gets a great kick out of this.

I figured out how to deal with physical therapy. I just lie and tell her whatever she wants to hear. But I am better and if it weren't for having done too many of the prescribed exercises I'd be back where I was four or five weeks ago, walking a bit faster. But what the hell.... One more dose of prednisone tomorrow and we'll see how the body does on its own. And when I get up to speed. I'm dreaming again, after a long reprieve that must have been due to the illness so all night I try to find a job, try to get back to teaching or accepted somewhere else and wake up worrying, slightly depressed... But we live in hope.........

Tuesday Poem, "Parting from the Winter Stove

2010-05-31T17:46:00.000-07:00

"Parting from the Winter Stove

(A.D. 822)

On the fifth day after the rise of Spring,

Everywhere the season's gracious attitudes!

The white sun gradually lengthening its course,

The blue-grey clouds hanging as though they would fall:

The last icicle breaking into splinters of jade:

The new stems marshalling red sprouts.

The things I meet are all full of gladness;

It is not only I who love the Spring.

To welcome the flowers I stand in the back garden;

To enjoy the sunlight I sit under the front eaves.

Yet still in my heart there lingers one regret;

Soon I shall part with the flame of my red stove!

By Po Chu-I, 772, Born on the 20th of first month to 846, Dies in the eighth month.

Another from "Chinese Poems" translated by Arthur Waley, a very old paperback that's lost it's spine, the pages wanting to scatter.

Four Steps Forward, Three Back

2010-05-29T16:00:00.000-07:00

A week ago yesterday, when I saw the physical therapist, she upped my exercises, put me on the stationary bike at no traction (I could only last six minutes) and said, "Don't lie down, don't lie down, don't lie down."

When I went to see the special, first time since right after I got out of the hospital, I had to admit that I truly hadn't realized how sick I was. And he agreed. I seem to be doing well, though he assured me that another colonoscopy would still show inflammation. The prednisone, now down to 5mg for two weeks and then I'm free of that, will be supported for another six months by Asacol which I've been taking all along. I see him in another three months. And, "Oh, by the way," he said, "don't take what the physical therapist says too seriously." The message was, "You were very sick." I asked if my mind will be back in another month and he couldn't assure me that it will. It all takes time, I gather.

And, after that I had four good days! Walking slowly but without pain. (And lying down when I needed to.) Unfortunately, I did the exercises given to be by the physical therapist. I had been doing them every other day, but thought --- what the hell, I'm feeling good. I should (oh, there is the should that has so poorly guided my life) do them every night. The 4th night, I had an instinct that I shouldn't do them, but I was watching "Biggest Looser," a program that Krissy watches and that causes her to cry. Well, if they are forcing myself, I should, also, I decided, even though it didn't seem to pleasant to lie there, lifting my left leg up and down.

Since I can NEVER tell if I've injured something until the next day, I didn't know that I wouldn't be able to walk for the next three days without pain and the cane, having transferred the misery to the other buttock.

Naturally, this Friday, as in yesterday, the physical therapist said that she couldn't do much for it but put on heat, ice and some electrical stem because this new injury would need to be evaluated again and she'd need another prescription. (She did a bit of evaluating and it's clearly muscular.) I do understand -- she can't just go poking around if a doctor hasn't seen me, etc. But I could have cried. This time the three days was too tedious. The pain is hardly anything to write home about, but my spirit was a bit broken and I actually felt cranky.

She said that I should cut down the exercises, every two or three days, and don't do this and don't do that one, and don't lie down.

I am better today (at least from noon on, before that it was tough-and-go) probably from the ice, heat and electrical stem. But only slightly. However, I should be walking more easily by tomorrow.

I haven't put up my Tuesday Poem, read any blogs, done much of anything but lie here for three days and a half days....

Krissy has a great knack with Craigs List. Amazingly, if you look at the photo of her, you will see a cat carrier in which Mr. White, who she'd been feeding, is happily in here. A capable woman, a cat lover, came, picked that bedraggled old thing with green eyes up by the scruff of the neck, gave it a shake and it immediately fell in love with her and stopped trying to scratch. It folded itself neatly into the carrier and waited patiently until she drove it away. I am in awe of Krissy's ability and glad that she was right, that somebody would be willing to come to the backyard and take that cat away so we could go outside without getting the terrors and wearing boots.

The most interesting book, even though I hardly understood it, that I've read is by Steven Pinker. Fortunately, my supplier, Warren, had an extra so that he's given it to me and I can reread it, underlying certain sections and still not understanding it because grammar is something I picked up by ear. I find it unnatural to follow his very interesting logic.

I've been reading a lot of books that I can't follow, like two by Richard Feynman's, but they are so full of his remarkable spirit, the stubborn clarity of his mind, the curiosity, that I hardly mind that I don't understand the physicals. The Oliver Sachs book about his trip with a group were hunting for fungii in Mexico was equally baffling because I don't know the anything about this distinctive preoccupation (though I love to read things I don't understand and applaud that so many of us are involved in esoteric, specialized preoccupations that we find commonplace). I'm not particularly fond of Sachs, though I once thought I was. He just can't compare in the department of moral clarity that Feynman occupies (pardon me for saying this.) I liked the memoir by Hildegard Knef more than the one by Jill Kerr Conway which made me envious for the confidence I never had when I entered college. (I don't know how to delete the second image of it...but again, what the hell.)

I did get back to editing a very long poemish thing that I wrote that summer, which seems quite strange and remarkable. And hope to get back to reading blogs. And to walking.................................

Three Month on the Island of Indolence

2010-05-20T05:40:00.000-07:00

I think that what had given me a bit of spark, or at least enough to last for a couple of days and lodge itself in my subconscious is that my cane and I reluctantly went to the opening day of Suffolk Downs (coinciding with the Preakness). I would have rather stayed in bed reading, but being at the track has consumed me for the last five years and I could almost remember that feeling. Besides Krissy really wanted to go. She gets a great kick out of (cliche?) betting $2 on some horse that I think has a chance because I know the trainer's history.

My leg hurt, I could hardly remember the names of the people I knew, I didn't get the rush of joy that I always have when I'm at the races, but somewhere, down in my core, I was dimly happy to be there.

Opening Day is always crowded. By mid-week, a few people will be there, the old die hards. But it was nice to see a large group of people on this 75th Anniversary of an institution that was once of important to Boston and the presence of many families, out enjoying this pleasant day and nicer to see that ride, Ronnie Prince, who you can just glimpse riding a pony in this photograph. I've known him five years or so. He's one of the folks I video taped and interviewed, a good exercise rider whose getting to be in his late fifties.

Having once again proved that I'm totally ignorant of the simplest and most practical details of life, I was actually surprised with Julie told me that lying down all the time after you've started physical therapy is counter productive if you've provoked your muscles by walking too much (honestly, walking two hours a day, up hills, are you kidding me? When you've been lying down for two months?). "I'm supposed to be up all day?" I didn't say, though I sadly registered the information.

She reminded me of my beloved auto mechanic (who had six children, I think) who chided me after I left my car overnight in his lot with the hazard lights blinking because I couldn't find the button to turn them off, "You are teaching at MIT and you can't figure out this small problem?" And he was right. There's a missing part of my brain, the part that says, "Take it easy" and "Go slow" and "Get up, damn it, don't just lie there."

My next physical therapy appointment is Friday and I can't say that I've done spectacularly well in the staying up department, though I had one day in which I spent five hours of feeling like my self, the self I remember from three months ago. That self worked on the computer for quite a while (Oh, actually, the computer and me, revising, working again!) and walked without the cane and without pain, even if slowly. But she had disappeared by the next day, perhaps because I'd done too much. Or perhaps because the call of reading Richard Feynman's letters was too great. I'd read most of his other books several times when I was in Nova Scotia visiting my parents. Of course, I didn't understand them, my father did, but I couldn't help but fall in love with his exuberant curiosity and enormous intelligence, his love of lock picking and bongo playing, his prankster nature combined with his no-nonsense approach to fame that strangely dovetailed with self-confidence.

I did get up to go to the dental hygienist yesterday. She's fussed over my teeth since her children were quite young and used to stop by the office on their way home from school. I always liked to make my appointments late in the day so that I'd get to see them and overhear those parent/child conversations about what needed to be done later in the afternoon. Since she poked at my teeth three months ago, she helped her son move to his first real job after college, driving all the way to Ohio with his things. She was just a tad sad to see him go. I was quite pleased that the prednisone had, in some ways, helped the gums, which is not to say that there wasn't some damage done by my having gotten so weak, the electrolytes so out of balance, etc., etc. At least she promised me that she wouldn't go into any damage detail. I got a free pass for that session.

And then we went to Feet of Clay so I can take a leave-of-absence. I've just been paying the monthly fee while I lie here on this island of indolence. I'm not yet ready to start driving, since I've manage to put my right leg out of commission in such a clever way. And when I am back in the driver's seat, the car will head to Suffolk Downs and the barn area. On Saturday, I was reminded of all the work that I have piled up....lots of video interviews of folks who work on the backside, and transcriptions from then that need to resolve in a book proposal. I have six months to a year of work to do with all that material if I can just get myself moving again. My brain has been extremely slow. And now without the prednisone rush that I got in the middle of the night for many, many weeks, I don't even have the illusion that quick, efficient thinking is possible. Of course, in the middle of the night, when I sprang awake and alive, I just lay there absorbing fascinating Public Broadcasting Programs or reading, so it didn't do me a bit of good in terms of my work...but it was such a nice feeling. Now that I'm down to 10mg a day, that's gone.

I think there will be one more session at the Victoria when I am driven out to finish my grades on Sunday. But then this pleasure will be over. Actually I don't like, have never liked, spending money on restaurants. It seems like such a waste. But I have to admit it's been a very good investment, both for my pleasure of eating and the company of Krissy and Chris who both love to eat out.

Last night I fell asleep early, as has become usual, and woke up in time to see this strange English man on Letterman. He was quite scuzzy looking, definitely shady, too anxious and eager, not all that attractive though I usually like men with very long hair, talking too fast with disconnected sentences (though he had quite a remarkable shirt and tie on). Russel. (Damn, how do you spell that?) It took a while to face that this was Russel Brand, whose book I had read and praised on my blog. And I did like the parts of it that dealt with his perfectly wretched childhood and his father's porn watching obsession that infected his boy at the earliest age. The Cuban in London made some salient comments about what his character really is, but I'd never gotten a glimpse of the person. I'm sorry that I did. In this case, Cuban, you were right, though I still thought parts of the book rang true, hard as that is to believe after seeing a bit of his persona.

Again, I'm very behind on blog reading. I hope to catch up soon and not lie there reading about the brain and early childhood language formation.

Tuesday Poem, "Caught on Memory, Art Students' League, 1957"

2010-05-17T18:37:00.000-07:00

Caught on Memory, Art Students' League, 1957

A blind salmon swimming

after my older brother,

I pluck a name from the catalogue.

George Grosz. I know enough

to know he's famous,

but not for what. And from Germany,

soon to repatriate. Gill hooked. First

day of class, stationed by the door,

newsprint pad propped against easel,

I gasp as the male nude strikes

two-minute poses. Legs wide, calf muscles

taut, arms stretched overhead.

Leaning left, fingers spread.

My charcoal breaks.

Five poses, ten, warm-up

for a long study

of his lean buttocks, the black

stool on which he rests one heel.

A group clusters, teacher hidden,

words inaudible, then swarms

as he moves to another

drawing, coming closer until

the small man, arm lifted to correct

foreshortening, thick marks on a timid sketch,

is revealed. He catches my eyes,

stares, unblinking.

It's hours

before he looks away

and I grab my tablet, leave

the room, never to return.

This was published in an extremely small journal called "Purple Patch" in London. The editor just Xeroxes whatever he's accepted and shoves it in rather haphazardly.

I've always been fond of finding subversive or radical, very unconventional, places to send poems. My first work was published in "Struggle," a small radical journal that I've always liked. That editor sometimes sends me notes written in the most beautiful handwriting. He's true to his philosophy, a blue-collar worker who supports his political ideals. I quite admire him, Tim Hall.

Tuesday Poem, "A Little Love"

2010-05-12T06:18:00.000-07:00

A Little Love

Tell me you can manage without love

When you fling yourself into the barbed wire of life.

Tell me you can manage without love

When you stake out the stations of Calvary.

Tell me you can manage without love

When you bite on the green fruit of experience.

Tell me you can manage without love

When you celebrate eternal glories,

Or tell the beads of joy, of smiles.

Tell me that, tell me all that,

And I will tell you what your misery weighs.

A. Kanie (1952)

From the book, "French African Verse" with English translations by John Reed and Clive Wake

published by Heinemann, London, Ibadan, Nairobi

This is from a collection that a friend gave me when he sorted his books before moving to another condo. I particularly responded the two poems by A. Kanie which were included. I am not a grand fan of metaphors since they are so easy for me to step over and dodge around as I read and because I'm so plain spoken, but I found this piece and his other poem about racism clear enough to me to understand and deeply appreciate.

Anoma Kanie, Ivory Coast, published Les eaux du Comoe, Editions du Miroir, Paris, 1952.

(I'm not able to include the proper accents on the e's in Comoe or Editions.)

Oh, Oh, Oh, Ouch

2010-05-07T04:14:00.001-07:00

I hadn't really known J. in high school, though her cousin, who lived a couple of blocks from me, was my best friend -- he was as shy as I was, but neither of us could hang up from our long nightly phone calls. The most beautiful night I've experienced was when we'd walked down hill to the beach, came upon the shore dotted with phosphorescence, twinkling and starish. He left for Harvard a year before I graduated from high school.

But a couple of years ago, near the time of our 50th reunion, J. came into Boston on the way to visit her son and grandson in London and we met at a hotel near the airport, had dinner and had a chance to talk. When she arranged a small gathering of folks from that reunion not all that long ago, I went up to Portland, kicking and screaming with nervousness, and had a marvelous, informative and quite curative time.

So, I was delighted when she was staying at the same hotel this Wednesday and we had time to talk again. By this time, I had gone to the doctor because I was squealing with pain. Finally, with the help of smart, practical friends, I had figured out that my precipitous walking, knowing no bounds, constantly pushing myself longer and longer and uphill at that, had caused the damage. My first question to the doctor was whether he had a sense of humor. "Yes." But I have to say that he found it hard to laugh at what I've done to myself (even though I find it very funny), telling me that it's unprofessional to make fun of a person who was such a dope that she'd not factored in that she'd been lying down two months, then began walking like a maniac. The upshot was that I left there with a prescription to physical therapy and instructions to buy a cane.

I had planned to drive myself to meet J., but with orders not to drive, much less to walk, I got dropped off around 4:00 and picked up at 9 something. With my cane. We were quiet a pair because J's recent operation to mend the continual pain in her back didn't fix the problems, so she's in the holding pattern, waiting for a diagnosis about what will happen next that might alleviate her constant discomfort. She can stand and walk, more-or-less, though lying down is painful. I can lie down and stand, if I can get up, but not walk. But we could talk for 5 hours, non-stop.

She has a marvelous way of calmly analyzing difficult situations she has faced. I could ask her any question I wanted and she would quietly discussing it. We time-traveled from the time her mother gave her "The Story Didn't Bring You" when she was ten or so, young enough to laugh with her best friend about all those strange things that would happen. (No, her mother didn't discuss the book with her, but at least J's nervousness about this information would be shared with someone else. And well before the fact. Whereas my father handed me the book on the fateful day there was blood in my pajama bottoms. My mother was in the hospital for a last ditch experimental treatment. He told me to read it, then went off to work, but of course I didn't. And I lied to the pediatrician when she asked if I had. I gather that the book was the talisman of that era, a way of informing girls about the unspoken.)

And after drifting into lots of other directions, we discussed strategies for pain management. A number of years ago I went to a pain clinic to deal with fibromyalgia and learned a number of techniques, one of which is using relaxation tapes. Pooling management strategies of our specific discomforts started in the restaurant under the guise of just having something to drink and lingered on to the least offensive meal in the restaurant.

I had an appointment with the physical therapist the next day and she was getting up at 4am in the hope that the airport in London was open, in spite of new volcanic eruptions.

Since, in spite of my careful attempt to manage where the pictures would land in the blog, they are as out-of-order as I am right now. So the white cat is Krissy's new project. I hadn't noticed when he appeared in the yard about the time that Parker visited, assuming that she was merely feeding one of the old strays that have lived outside in this neighborhood for years, through hard, hard winters. But this is a new creature that she's sure lived in an old lady's apartment a couple of blocks away, in a building that was condemned not that long ago. And she's determined to find a home for him and puts out food near the back porch even though she now has to wear boots and long pants when she goes outside because he's taken to biting. She's put an ad on Craig's List, certain that people who rescue feral or abandoned cats will come and get it. (Actually, someone is coming tomorrow to get Mr. White, she hopes, so there's probably an answer to her particular problem of hardly being able to go out to the garden.)

She's a determined rescuer, having started with Paco a puppy found in a dumpster in a Hollywood studio, going on to Happy, found on a street in L.A., to Ella, her favorite dog, sick with cancer when she was found, incontinent for the three years that she lived, the most beloved.

I got to photograph the cat because I had the compulsive urge to clip some ivy when I got back from the physical therapist where I'd been told, to my great relief, that the problem with my back is just muscular, caused, you guessed it, by having started to walk to far, and up hills, no less, after my muscles had become too weak to hold up the pelvic area that attaches to the hip bones. Even if I'd had strong core muscles they would have been useless by then. So, I was given exercises to build up strength, told to use heat and cold treatments, not to use the cane inside and got one of those wonderful electrical stem treatments that put me in such a state that I truly believed I could bend to work in the garden! A little.

I have joined the community garden in Chelsea, though I'm even less able to work in it than I thought I would be by now. But Krissy has been helping me, walking over to till and plant seeds almost every morning. I hope she might be able to get a plot, but it's great that she'd sharing mine now, doing so much work there.

A couple of days ago, VesperSparrow e-mailed me, "I know you don't like fussing, but has something happened?" Clever Lady. What had happened is the result of my bull-head determination. But her inquiry reminded me of a story that my father once told about when I had started to crawl and came up against a swinging door that I was determined to get through. He must have been sitting there, probably in the kitchen of a house they'd rented before buying the house my mother loved so much on Litchfield Road. He said I crawled up to it, push at the door, only to have it come back and hit me every time I tried. The implication, though I don't remember his exact words, was that I wasn't going to stop trying, no matter how many times I got banged around. That's just the sort of dilemma that amused him. Since my father almost never talked about the years before my mother died when I was twelve, this story must have illustrated how pigheaded, his term for me, for what I've always been.

On Monday, I was back at square one with Krissy accompanying me up to class where she commandeered a student, "Will you walk her downstairs after class?" So, at 4:00, there I was, being taken along by this marvelous extrovert who mentioned that she's getting married on August. T. was born in the South and has that charming ability to engage the crankiest person. Her grandmother had 20 children, twins and triplets, and T. fully expected to have ten using the same method. But she only had three separates, girls, the youngest of whom started college last fall. Somehow, between the Photo I that I taught and she took last summer, she met a man (also interested in the arts, who talks and laughs), whose wife died three years ago, leaving him to raise the youngest of their seven children who was then fifteen. So, T. will have her ten children in not that long. After I knocked into a wall, she took my arm, so I was literally 'walked,' embarrassed and humbled at my tottering and T's holding onto my arm, but thoroughly enjoying the terrific story.

We have one more dinner at the Victoria after my last class on Monday!

W. has become my supplier of books, since I've pretty well gone through my shelves. The first one that he lent was the massive M.F.K. Fisher that included 4 or five books, the most charming of which was "Gastronomical Me." I've never been interested in food or in cooking, but I have to say, there are good writers. Krissy returns what I've read and he send over another four or five.

Relaxation tapes do help! Now I have to keep playing them. The only good thing I have to say about my learning curve is that after my last bout in physical therapy, two summers ago, I did the prescribed back exercises almost every night until the point I got this colitis attack in February. So I had learned something, lacking in common sense as I happen to be.

There's hope.

Tuesday Poem, "The Real Story"

2010-05-05T06:02:00.000-07:00

The Real Story

"I could never have slept

with him," you say

from three thousand miles.

"I'm not

criticizing but you

must have

hated yourself

to do it."

How can I tell her

what her father once was:

gifted, elegant,

pale brown skin,

that occasional smile.

I walked past him

through swinging doors

carrying heavy trays,

princess of faculty dining.

I remembered

who took coffee

with milk

and who drank tea;

he was prince of all the rest,

tables of students,

the waiters he commanded

with a nod.

He sat aloof but

in control.

You tell me, "He's bald

and old and ugly

of character.

He was gone before he went."

I want to

persuade you he was once

so fascinating

I never imagined

he'd even

talk to me.

from "The Real Story," a chapbook, www.finishinglinepress.com

Two and a Half Months on the Island of Bed

2010-04-30T14:14:00.001-07:00

I have begun to think of this last two and a half months as resting on an island -- everything I need is nearby -- water, juice, the dogs, books, a notebook, pen, napkins and kleenex, a kitchen towel to protect my clothes from spillage when I eat. At night I wrap myself in a lavender (not the best color, but so comfortable) quilt on top of the bed and sleep until I wake up, then watch PBS or read, then maybe sleep again.

Recently I've lost the marvelous zing that characterized my middle of the nights since I started getting prednisone in the hospital. I've decreased the dose, two weeks-by-two-weeks from 60mg to 20, so that's probably why. I hate to admit that I miss it because that bit of personality that appeared so startlingly at 1am, or maybe 3, was closer to my real, remembered self.

Two nights ago, "Hamlet," a filmed production from London, was repeated sometime very late. I'd watched most of it the previous afternoon, but wanted very badly to see it again, since I've never been really read or thought about Shakespeare (in spite of one college class, so many years ago, that I never noticed.) And there it was, in my precious high-time, only there I was, flat, dull and eager to fall asleep again.

The bed still beckons me during the day. Right now I seem tied to it most of the time whether it's because of the change in medication or because when I started to walk, fifteen days ago, I thought that going up hills was the best way to strengthen, not having considered what lying down for two months does to a person. So, as is characteristic, I did too much and probably got to the piraformis muscle which is never, never fun.

Chris and Krissy still drive me to work, only now he's taking the big dig and then the expressway. I get to go over the Zakim bridge which is truly gorgeous though I would never drive on that highway myself, being phobic. Often I shut my eyes or mutter things like, "The right lane is a very good place to be. The right lane is really nice." But I can tell how much I've calmed down since I first drove with Chris.

On the way back from my class (where they dropped me conveniently and retrieved me after three hours), we stop at the Victoria Diner, where I order steak tips. I never imagined eating beef, but I am. Which reminds me of a woman I knew who said, "Never say never." I'd been photographing in a Catholic church in Roxbury, a predominantly black congregation and an Irish priest, for a project about the old elevated Orange Line trolley that ran from Jamaica Plain down into Boston, set to be torn down within the year.

I'd decided to photograph and interview people who lived along that stretch and managed to spend a good bit of time with most of them -- a doctor from Healthcare for the Homeless, the daughter of my friend from Guyana who moved to Boston, the art librarian at the university, and the never-say-never nun, a Sister of St. Joseph, who took me to various folks that she visited in Via Victoria and became a good friend. She lived in a pleasant house with four or five bedrooms shared with others from her community. We often had lunch in that sunny kitchen. Was it there or somewhere else that I met another woman who was talking about her rather unpleasant position in a cloister, and I must have said, "But I thought everyone is equal." and she said, "Oh, yes, everyone is equal, but some are more equal that others." I loved that simple phrase. (What was odd, wonderful, is that folks in that church group accepted that I am an agnostic, just allowed me to be me.) Of course, the images with their transcribed text, difficult and complicated and very satisfactory to make, got lost in some bureaucratic shuffle.

But as my daughter said, when she was a little girl, and I'd just gotten out of the hospital for an infected toe nail (give me a break) and got back to the apartment to see her and found that there was no heat, no hot water and that the cats had torn down the Christmas tree, "You can't have everything." (She's right and we went to stay with a friend and her son in their loft....)

Last Sunday, when I was feeling better than I am now, I decided to test out driving. I knew perfectly well that I'm not capable of normal Boston driving, but thought I could manage to get to Winthrop to have tea with the vespersparrow. I hadn't seen her in probably three months, or at least close to it. And knew that there's very little traffic on that route which actually takes me past the barn area of the racetrack. My car can do it in its sleep....

I won't say that I was entirely secure or that I would have been happy driving with me. My reflexes are slow and one has to drive with great defensiveness here. I'm not sure where this city is on the scale of bad drivers, but it's very high on the list. A lot of extremely impatient people drive way above the speed limit in town, run red lights, honk if you're the slightest bit slow, cut you off in a minute, turn right on the light just in front of you when it's your right-of-way. Etc.

I brought her the muffins I'd made with the recipe from my Panera friend, but there were only two for each of us. I could have eaten seven, with that lovely honey.

Tulip and I weren't entirely sure about the drive. She's been reading up on the traffic rules, but wasn't all that helpful, except for her earnest interest in the trip.

I still, even though I've gotten even slower and it hurts to walk, make my way down to Ping at Marketbasket where he (or Peter) make the inari with avocado and shrimp. I convinced a friend, K., to have lunch with me there which was particularly nice. He got his form of treats and I ate my usual, very pleasant fare.

I apologize for being behind on reading blogs, most especially the Cuban in London, whose site I read, but too hurriedly, but will read again, along with the next two installments. And I'm behind on Tuesday Poems, but I'll catch up.

Perhaps this wasn't the best week because I finalized my decisions to stop teaching as of this fall, even though I'm scheduled for a class. It's very hard to give up a career that meant so much to me, especially since my pension is very modest. The decision was hard, not because I'm sick, but because I've worked since I was 14 and define myself in that way. But I'd gotten to a point where I would be happier bagging groceries in a supermarket (I've never done that before!) than I was working in someone else's photo program, much as I like the person who slid into my positio personally. Obviously this was hard, perhaps a reason for fatigue, but I think it's a combination of physical factors. But who knows? Only the Shadow. I e-mailed that attachment containing my letter on Sunday.

In class on Monday, we had a critique that started at 1:15 and ended at 3:30. It involved me thinking and talking about student work, encouraging them to talk, making sure it was clear that I might voice an opinion, but it's only an opinion, not meant to sway a decision and talking about the problems with the printer not being calibrated to the computer screen or visa versa, and that you can't use 16x20 paper ($3 a sheet) without sacrificing a piece for test strips, and that it's necessary to chose satin or matt paper for digital prints, etc. By the end, most everyone seemed fried, but I was major-league gone and decided to leave early. I never do that. But as I walked to the bathroom, I thought, "I was in the hospital, 6 or 7 weeks ago, near to needing a transfusion. Who am I kidding?"

I'm kidding myself, not believing that being 71 (ouch, ouch, ouch, ahhhhhhhh) is different than being 57 or 42. I would not have been this sick at those ages. But, I think, look who I was last summer, in the barns every morning, washing water buckets, mixing feed, walking a lot, the illusion that I had built myself up considerably. And I had, even if I now walk an uneven line and imagine the police assuming I'm some drunk carrying her two bags of groceries back from the market!

Many thanks...

Tuesday Poem, Flowers and Moonlight on the Spring River

2010-04-28T06:30:00.000-07:00

Flowers and Moonlight on the Spring River

The evening river is level and motionless --

The spring colours just open to their full.

Suddenly a wave carries the moon away

And the tidal water comes with its freight of stars.

By Yang-Ti, Emperor of the Sui Dynassty from 605-617

(Chinese Poems, edited by Arthur Waley)

My Father's Shoes

2010-04-24T05:36:00.001-07:00

When my father was in his early eighties, he and my stepmother, Mari, still packed up the VW camper and made the long drive from Queensland, Nova Scotia, down to Mobile, Alabama. I know that my father hated going because he could never appreciate this narrowly religious, very proper relative, cousin Hilda But they were committed because Mari had promised that if Hilda would let my father's aged mother live with her for a few years, they would take care of Hilda, later.

By the time they visited on this particular trip down the coast, it had been clear to me, to all their friends, that Mari's memory, which has always been scatty, was getting progressively worse. And it was probable that she was developing alzheimers, though my father patiently answered her questions as often as she repeated them, never hinting that anything might be wrong. His silence was hard to breach. So I was surprised when he brought this subject up.

Probably Mari was sweeping the stairs, or the front sidewalk, when he said something like, "I've been thinking, I wasn't sure what to do, but I've finally solved the problem. I decided that I will outlive Mari and, therefore, will be able to take care of her." He smiled happily. By then he resembled a Halloween pumpkin, with his front teeth blackened by his determination never to visit a dentist again.

I naturally didn't remind him that he might, possibly, in spite of his will power, die before she did, because he was so pleased with himself for having come up with a solution to a problem he must have been mulling over for a couple of years.

Anyway, things continued on. They kept driving to Alabama every year until he was eighty-four and had an aneurysm soon after their return trip. They had continued visiting cousin Hilda because Mari had made that promise a year or two after they married in 1958 or so. My father's mother, by then very frail and confined mostly to her room, was living with them. Mari had a quite uncharacteristic bout of what she must have considered selfishness - the desire to establish her married life without the burden of caring for an elderly person. I can imagine how long it took her to realize this, to broach the subject with my father (who would have been just delighted to have his mother out of the house. He had related a dream about her that he had around that time, that she was a tiny doll, wrapped in a handkerchief, left on a straight chair downstairs, and he'd been worried that my half-brother (my mother's son) would sit on her.)

They were both in their mid-fifties. This was Mari's first marriage and her family had to agree to take on the responsibility of her invalid mother, a woman she'd cared for most of her life, starting in her childhood in a mining town in Iowa. Her parents were Slovakian immigrants, and Mari, the oldest child, raised all the younger kids, also. When she was old enough to start teaching school, she rode a horse to get to the village and then came back for weekends.

Once the family moved to Bridgeport, Connecticut, and all the others married and had families, Mari still lived at home. By then, she'd worked at General Electric as an executive secretary for many years and become inspired to get her Master's in something that I'm going to call secretarial courses for want of a better title and had begun teaching in that program at the University of Bridgeport.

Then, she met my father. He would often tell of that day when she visited the International Statistical Bureau where he'd written probability reports for years (except during that dangerous time when he quit his job, sold the house my mother had cherished, married his second wife, started a business, failed utterly at everything except drinking large tumblers of scotch which caused him to be even more silent that he might have been).

That day, while he sat in his office, the door closed, he heard footsteps in the hall and recognized them to be Mari's.

Now, this has to be impossible because he'd only met her once years before, not that long after my mother died. I think he'd offered to take her to lunch then, but she had a date with someone to go to a baseball game. Oh, if only she hadn't, my teenage years would have been very different!

But here he was, six or seven years later, on the verge of divorcing that second wife, hearing footsteps that he knew were Mari's. This is the remarkable. My passive father had to open his door and go out into the hallway to greet her.

She had only stopped by, briefly, to show the secretaries photographs of her sister's children, since Margaret had worked there some years earlier.

Anyway, it was fate. They did have lunch together. Who knows how many martinis he drank, but she hardly minded since her father drank a prodigious amount also. And so their courtship started.

(Another story that amused my father was about the first time he met her father. Naturally he arrived for this important event with an unopened bottle in a paper bag. He and the 'old man' sat at a table in the kitchen with two empty glasses on it. My father reached down, took out his bottle, opened it, and poured them a drink.

After they finished that, her father got up, went to the cupboard, got out his bottle, walked to the table, poured them a drink, put the bottle back in the cupboard, sat down and they drank that. Then, of course, my father reached down to his bottle (I'm sure it was on the floor by his chair, because that seems more ceremonial) and poured them another. And then, as you will guess, his father got up from his chair, got his bottle, poured, put it back, etc. On and on, through the long evening.

What he really liked about it all was the stubborn way the old man put his bottle back every time. And, of course, like many alcoholics, he loved any story about drinking foibles.

So, anyway, the sun rose and set on my father from Mari's point of view. From his, she was his best wife (who knows what life was like with my mother before she got cancer, but those four years were certainly hard.) And so they got married when I was eighteen or nineteen, the damage already done for me, but an extraordinary thirty years ahead for them.

They had nothing in common. She doted family, he was deeply suspicious of anyone who might be called a relative, though he learned, bless his hard heart, to appreciate hers. He read constantly and thought about mathematics and physics, and had no need to talk to her about his intellectual life. She told him everything about her day, and complained if the bus driver was impolite. "I'm going to write a letter to that company," and she did. He listened, though he would never have complained about anything. She cooked. He ate, though he liked cold left overs for breakfast and always took what was sitting on the front of the refrigerator shelf, not caring much to hunt around.

One of her grandest achievements was getting him to write a book about probabilities, how she did this is quite beyond me, after she got him to teach a course at the same university where she worked. This lead to his being offered a position at Dalhousie University in Halifax. He was already past retirement age when they moved up there and became landed immigrants and he started teaching in the Master's Program.

It would probably have been better for Mari, a serious extrovert who loved company, if they'd lived in the city, but he chose an isolated house overlooking St. Margaret's Bay about a forty-five minutes drive from his work. They purchased the place, built as a summer retreat for a large family, with everything in tact -- the fake Persian rugs, the old couch and three living room chairs, single beds for the two downstairs guest rooms and all the cots upstairs in the open dormitory. The plates, cups and saucers remained just where the previous family had put them, in an ungainly glass incased contraption in the living room.

My parents possessions, paintings that my father and mother had bought, an etching of a whale that my brother had made, a perfectly hideous plaster nude self-portrait I did in college, overlaid it all, as did the double bed, a platform with a thin mattress, in their bedroom (so very different from the dark, cumbersome dresser draws from the other family.)

They had a nice life, even after he had the aneurysm, until he had a stroke when he was eighty-seven. This presented problems because when he was in the hospital, Social Services noticed that the nurses had pinned a notice to Mari's dress, "Return to third floor" because she couldn't find her way back from the bathroom. And they refused to let him go home after rehab unless he had daily help, someone to cook and clean. For a man who never expressed anger, he had quite a tussle with his rage that an agency had control over his life, that he couldn't manage by himself.

But, that passed and a cheerful housekeeper came in everyday, he even got to like her and lend her books, Mari learned her name and liked chatting, and life rolled along for almost three years

until he had another stroke (too long a story) and Mari was left, not knowing where the old man who sat in the chair across from her in the living room had gone

and her sister, Margaret, put Mari in the nursing home near her

and I had to clean out the house which is what this blog is all about.

For years, my daughter, Krissy, had been urging her grandpa to get grandma to clean out the dormitory that had gradually become filled with piles of old newspapers tied with string that Mari just couldn't part with, plastic bags of old clothes and sheets so worn that they were unusable, electric coffee pots that didn't work. But he wasn't about to have a fuss trying to get her to do it.

It took five or six people, working all day and well into the evening, for a week, and a dumpster in the driveway, to undo the debris she'd left.

And then we looked at the basement, his domain, and were shocked to find so many old chairs that he'd been planning to cane, all those bottles left from the attempts to make wine, almost as much clutter as she'd collected.

It took a long time to look through everything, to haul and drag, push and shove, clean and sweep. But out things went.

Until I came to my father's shoes.

For many years he'd bought all his clothes second hand from Frenchie's, a dealer down the road who had piles of old clothes, probably some donated down in the States. He liked the cardigans he bought, thought the second hand pants were perfectly fine. Maybe he bought his shoes there, too, a pair of sneakers that for some incomprensible reason embodied him to me.

They were him, molded, worn, tired. And I wanted to take them along with the boxes of books that had been my mother's, the family Bibles that belonged to my grandmother and revealed to me, for the first time, the exact date that my mother had died, May 31, 1951, the cups that grandma had promised to Krissy. But I didn't.

The shoes I wore when I was working at the track early mornings last summer began to remind me of my father's shoes, molded by all the water I spilled on them, by the dust and dirt ground in.

But they aren't my father's shoes.