Yesterday

Yesterday a student came up with a packet of color photographs. His first project was a rather formal study of vegetables and fruit, sliced, against a plain background. Recently he took photographs when he and his wife went to visit her parent's large home in Connecticut. I urged him to print more than he'd chosen and he seems pleased with that, or as pleased as he'll allow. He has only a week to do a last project, almost everyone has dragged feet on this. And he wondered if he could do anything with these photos .... that he has on a disk, snapshot from Iraq, 2006, when he was there are a Marine in the reserves. Some were of gorgeous children, posing, others were of wrecked armored cars, bullet holes. One was of a captive with his automatic rifle. I didn't look at more than twenty or thirty in what must have been at least 150 images.

Another student did a long project on his time there, photographs of the equipment he still has stored, reproductions of the bracelets from his dead friends and photographs of him ready for combat, along with images of the person he is now, going to school, studying criminal justice. Each photograph was labeled with a fine-point magic marker which further clarified just when friends had died or that he was leaving for class. During critique other students argued whether he should pair the photographs about Iraq with those of his daily life now. They seemed to ignore the transitional group of images that tied the two sides of his experience together, but all were impressed with his work. He says that some days he can print for 4 hours, sometimes only 45 minutes. I've asked if I can show him to the Vet who runs the Joiner Center for the Study of War and Social Consequences, a poet, Kevin Bowen, but he had a hard enough time showing the work to a group he knows.

When he was starting the project, and I'd seen a bit of the work, I showed him the Dishwasher's blog since it seemed relevant to who he wants to be, the work he wants to do. And he sat there, scrolling down, reading the entries. Then I showed him Ontheverge, or On the Verge, to prove that the Dishwasher has a fine wife and life can be hard, but good. He wrote down the names of both blogs.....

A student in the 9 o'clock class, who is from Tibet, thinks that homeless men just say they are vets to get more sympathy. He said this to his friend, the one from Napal, who believed that the guy he photographed and talked to for so long was really a vet. I said that many vets end up homeless, but he wasn't very convinced.

Sometimes I get to talk with other faculty, like Taylor Stoehr who I just met. They tell me stories of students...as interesting as mine....it's been far more interesting, I think, to teach at a urban university, work with students whose parents probably haven't gone to college, or who are immigrants. Though teaching at MIT was far more prestigious, it was much too easy. Everyone was already programmed for success.

But I'm in despair about these classes. If I'd stayed around, not retired, I would have tried to keep the new kids on the block from cutting each class by 40 minutes, time I need so I'm not just working with the better students, so I could do more to help the ones struggling. I was programmed to two hours and twenty-minutes, had adjusted my skills to that amount of time. Now I feel like a failure and am, compared to what I used to be able to do.

But, as the Dishwasher would say, Nemaste.

I have tried today

--to talk to the student whose last project consisted of photographs of toys that she'd arranged to symbolize a wedding after not reading the handout about my horror of grading which I have partly solved by putting weight on how much effort a person has made toward conveying a difficult or complex idea, weight given even if it's a failure because risk is so important. Her friend, who knew nothing about using filters to improve the contrast of a print,  something I've mentioned a good deal and which is clearly explained in the data guide, at least went to visit two friends to take photographs that mostly failed because the light was too poor.

-- to tell the guy from Nepal who is going to be an accountant that he'd done a remarkable job having spent eight hours with a man who was homeless, but now has a room that he hates to stay in because he'd rather be on the street, having taken pictures of him, tape recorded his story, photographed two other people. He's hard to convince because nothing is good enough for him

nor is it good enough for Wong who is a biology major who took narrative photographs of his cousin who was posing as someone who just lost his  job, change of setting, of clothing, interesting angles, even the use of another cousin to simulate a person Wong calls a hobo, though I informed him that we use the term homeless person, and he'd probably read the word hobo which was generally used during the depression. Wong took a dry run set of perfectly fine images for someone doing a second project in Photo I, but it wasn't good enough.

And I've tried to stay ahead of the sciatic nerve problems which are obviously recurring as I've noticed in the last few weeks

and on top of the knots in Bogie's hair since he's going to the groomer on Friday and I hate it when Sarah has to cut his hair radically and I feel like a rat

and ignore the fact that it's finally cold and I'm terrified of falling on ice and I just got a $400 oil bill.

Thinking

I was thinking about how my fingers brushed the bowls of the plastic spoons in the bin when I was taking one for my yogurt parfait and that no one would know that I'd touched them and probably, in the back of my mind, were the images from the commercial showing all the wiggly, colorful germs developing on anything that actor-child touched.

And then, walking back through the library on the 8th floor, I looked at the bookshelves which I've never done even though I've walked through it almost countless times (I suppose I could count them...23 years x's 3, two semesters, 14 weeks, plus 5 years x's 2...mostly two semesters, 14 weeks,) and never, once, noticed the names of any books.

A friend of mine is thinking of writing a book about being eighty. (He looks like he's sixty.) I suggested a blog since they're so interesting, but they don't have the permanence of a book. That's a good thing, probably. But the guy at Panera, who I haven't seen in too long, lent me his book on WordPress for dummies because that program allows you to feed pre-written material into the blog. But then I'd think about what I'm saying. And thinking isn't necessarily good.

Revere and Chuck Swartz

Today I went to the Bagel Bin on Shirley Avenue in Revere with Chuck. He picked me up when my car had a flat tire. That made it impossible to take my dogs to walk with his dogs, but it lead to another really interesting walk, looking at a neighborhood he'd known so well.

There wasn't anyone he knew when we ate breakfast, though I thought there might be. And he thought the food was good, though he really loves to go to a diner in Lynn that has all the old diner fittings and a staff that goes with the place and is under a railroad track. I imagine it's listed in Chow Hound where he finds many interesting places to try.

Because my dogs weren't waiting in the car, we got to walk Stoney and Onyx up the street while he told me about the old neighborhood. He remembers so many details that I have already forgotten, and I took so many photographs in my trying to remember, that it's impossible to show much of anything here, but I loved the attempt of listening on this almost sleeting day.

This wasn't the Temple that he went to. There was another down the block. They are both abandoned now. 

And almost all of the stores have changed radically. You'd never know that one of the first Stop and Shops was on Shirley Avenue. Or that the street was tree lined, that the houses were well-kept and that this was a desirable area.

Or that the path beyond the wire gate leads to stairs that he loved to walk down when he was quite little. Or that the alleyway he's walking down leads to a backyard where he and his friends used to play. It's right behind what was once a pool hall where some people played pool for money, but he didn't. And that there were card games in back and a pinball machine. The fellow in the backyard was angry that we were trespassing, wanted to know why I was taking photographs. His father has owned that dreadfully maintained building for thirty years. Chuck's friends lived there sixty years ago, (Actually I don't think it was quite that long ago) he told this fellow who had no sense of humor or perspective and a lot of derelict cars in the back.

There is the empty building where Kosher food was made, the soups purchased in supermarkets. And what is now a beauty salon  was a kosher meat market. The yellow slide is where the best deli was. And the gates over the window of a woman's store is where a hotel once operated. There was a chicken market, chickens picked and killed, up toward the beginning of Shirley Avenue.

I think what was most interesting is how vibrant those days sounded.... kids living close to each other, a tight community, predominantly Jewish, who all knew each other, a source of a sounding board and sense of identity outside of the Temple or the family. Chuck doesn't have the same kind of bad feelings about that neighborhood that I have about mine -- a sense of isolation, maybe three other kids my age living with three or four long blocks, Cinnie Baldwin, David Newton and Howie Grace. Chuck still knows people from Shirley Avenue. Someone from Revere lives on his block in Brookline, having made it out, just as Chuck did, invested in family and in giving children better schooling than they might have had if each still lived in Revere, more opportunities.

I asked him if he had bad memories from those days and he laughed and said something like, "A couple, like when I got beat up."

Chuck's grandfather, a Russian immigrant, helped build three three-deckers just off Shirley Avenue, buildings that went up in spectacular flames twenty or so years ago. When he told his mother about the fire, that's when she told him about his grandfather who died when she was twelve.




When they moved to a better neighborhood, he still kept going back to Shirley Avenue because his friends were there.

Most buildings, he thought, were built in the 1910's, 20's, though the building where he and Linda got a mortgage for their first house was built in the fifties.

I don't know anything about architecture and remember walking around Cambridge with Linda while she identified of houses for me, told me when they were built.

Chuck and I did this walk years ago, when their daughter Anna was little, and I took pictures then. I wish I remembered all the details from that walk fifteen or so years ago and had hope that I'd remember them from today. But I won't, even with photographs. I can just think about the quality of childhoods, the changes inevitable in neighborhoods and the passage of time.

Who Could Resist?

After her last visit, Susan suggested that Krissy and Smith start doing stand up a la Nichols and May. 
I, of course, would not be part of it, though I'd like to stand in the wings....a figure of rectitude.
I am afraid that Susan and I will have to write the script which wouldn't be all that hard. I've already thought up quite a few scenes.
Yesterday they got me to take photographs for a little animated video he is making so that they can show it next Tuesday night over in Sommerville. It involved a glorious white wig for Krissy, very red lipstick, an apron. He wore glasses and a tie. There was a teddy bear, my car, the couch and many, many images taken with my Lumix, me saying, "Stop. Wait" etc., photographs he imported into his computer and worked on in photoshop so that they now look somewhat surrealistic and like paintings.  

Krissy and I made a couple of videos when this once-a-month-what-do-you-have-as-a-short-video was a happening in Brookline. One of mine got in the best of 2008. That was a treat....  I dragged Lorna and Warren over to see it, just like it was a big event. Fun.

Not A Good Steward

I have to admit that I was glad that Bacall was going outside. Her litter box smells worse than any litter box I've ever smelled. and it had been in the hall since Tulip arrived in late June. And I hoped she'd begin to use the great outdoors. And, besides, she longed to go out.

So, I did call her when she didn't come back. Often. From the back porch. But not going all around the neighborhood shouting her name. And I didn't worry enough. I seem to have become dulled. It's harder and harder to find enough energy to worry a lot.

But I was glad when she called out when I was walking the dogs on Thanksgiving night. And that she walked ahead of us back to the house. And that she drank lots of water. And that she could eat. And now, except for the right side of her mouth which will never recover, she's recovered in the last week. She eats dry food along with wet, she stretches, her tail is occasionally almost as high as it was and she looks about the same if you don't look too closely. And she won't ever be an outdoor cat again. (I am not even that unhappy about her pooping behind the bathtub....Krissy cleaned it up when I couldn't reach it....and maybe she knows the new place for her litter box.)
Tulip's quite a fine little dog, and what would a person expect rescuing her over the internet? I wanted a dog with hair, rather than fur. And she looked sufficiently peculiar, tongue lolling. But I didn't know that one of her areas of trauma would be the tangles, that she'd bite if I tried to cut her bangs. And she's not much better when I try to cut out other knots that appear here and there, not so close to her face. She'll need to go to a vet who will prescribe some sedative and then to a groomer who will work on a flattened dog. I just don't have the energy for that right now. But Tulip doesn't seem to mind the visual obstruction.

Tulip is not like Bogie, the consummate gentleman who would never poop in the house unless he was terribly sick and I wasn't home. Tulip is perfectly capable of peeing and pooping if she needs to, if I haven't responded to her tiny signal, but I may have that under control since she now gets walked three times a day. The time change did her in, or did me in.
Bogie needs a grooming. And we were on our way. But yesterday it rained early. And my power steering has begun to act up if I drive through puddles. Chris has taken the car to the shop twice, but they can't find out what it is unless it actually happens when it's on the lot. I was smart enough to decide how stupid it would be to drive a car that doesn't turn a corner when it doesn't want to after it refused to turn into the bank parking lot. Next Friday for the groomer. What to do about the car...... The place I've been going to, run by an incredibly pleasant, super talkative guy, costs me $1,300 just to walk into it. I can't keep going there.

Thoughts arising from "Steerage," by Bert Stern

I am slowly reading Bert Stern's book of poems and thinking. 

How can I get past --

                                  ....        "My mother

    who wanted not to be born grew up

    married, was my mother, suffered.

    All suffered to bring me here to this room

    where I write, bigger than the house

    my mother was born in."

That is from "Lotty is Born" in Part 1: Changing Places

The implicit weight of all that suffering and sacrifice, or the gift of family and birth, to the man writing that stanza, is, for me, loaded with images of steerage that I've seen, with what I've read about these struggles to start a new life after sacrificing the old one, being driven from the old one, the hopes embedded. But Bert's words not only convey push me toward thinking about those painful historical facts,

they make me think about why I'm here in this room, writing, why I feel cut off from that past and family while he carries them with him.

I can only imagine that my German grandmother, a dressmaker from a family of teachers, pushed her meek husband, a sculptor of religious statuary, to immigrant here in the late 1900's because she thought she could advance herself. Though they had five children, the family story was always about Antonia convincing bankers, in spite of her garbled English, to lend her money so that she could buy rooming houses in Chicago.     Money. Advancement.

Though somewhere in the attic I have stored pages of information about my father's forebear's meanderings from one state to another, farmers, perhaps tradesmen, I can only imagine that they immigrated here, much earlier, because of opportunity. But the only story from that side of the family that influences me is that he got his PdD in math at a young age, without much effort.   Education.

I assume that I was an accident, not an unhappy one, after twelve years of my parent's marriage. My mother already had a sixteen-year-old son. And then she died, when I was twelve.   Disconnection.

Perhaps one of Bert's primary goals was to convey the sorrow, the hope, of his mother's hard birth, her voyage, strength of character and desire for family. But I thank him for  an uncomfortable prod into thinking about who I'm carrying 

and I thank him for "Driving Home from Elizabethtown"

"At the top of Spruce Hill,

just before the highway

plunges into the valley,

the wide sweep of mountains

gathers me in to its shadow

and silence, holds me,

until I am ready to fall

with the turnings of poplar

and oak. Through the windshield,

even the thin rain that takes on

gold light from the sun in its falling

is fuel for the burning."

(I hope he won't mind my reproducing this...) but this piece got past my aversion to descriptive work, any descriptive words in poems, paragraphs in stories, in articles. I skip over description, not caring the least bit about wide sweeps of mountains or poplars or gold light. It's all too tedious, as far as I'm concerned, but I came across this poem and stopped.  It surprised me.... and haunted me. And I am glad for it.

The irony is that when Bert generously gave me his book, he inscribed something which I hadn't read until long after I'd started reading the poems and come across his poplars and gold. He had quoted from this poem. Odd, I thought, that I had come upon it by myself, in spite of my innate resistance.