The Vest

When Susan came to visit, she wanted to meet Mim who is often at the Bagel Bards on Saturday mornings. (That's where I was fortunate enough to meet her, find out about her blog and become blog buddies with the occasional foray into the real world, so to speak...though sometimes I think the blog is a very realish world.)

So, after they chatted and found out how much each likes/buys at thrift stores, Mim took us down the street to the one she visits after the Bards. Another poet, Bert Stern, came along (he does the same thing every Saturday), but he ducked into the basement where the mens clothes are kept. (He had told me about the wonderful pair of expensive pants, probably unworn, he bought there, and the marvelous jacket. Susan buys almost all her quite remarkable clothes in thrift or second hand stores.)

I was horrified by this large room full of things people had worn and given away, coded by color and use. Blue sweaters, yellow, orange, red, green, brown, black. Jackets and blouses and pants. My eye was immediately caught by a boiled jacket, maybe a sea green, that looked just like my aunt Marion would have worn it. I walked around, holding it for a little while, knowing I'd never, ever put it on. I wear the same thing in winter, turtle necks with a vest, blue jeans or black pants. I've gone into supremo decorative mode because I now add a long scarf that hangs down in some inelegant way, but looks colorful. (TJMax has wonderful scarves...and Susan and I went there late in the afternoon and bought scarves.)

Before I left, went back to Au Bon Pain for a sandwich to wait for Susan, she found a vest that she just had to show Mim....I didn't get close enough to fully admire this relic, but I saw enough to realize that it was very old, a long-loved creature that had been mended many times, the toggle fastenings replaced by bits of nylon stocking that had served that function. I took any number of photos of Susan holding it out for Mim to examine, but none were particularly good. Only this one survives.

I thought I was going to write a poem about this experience, but it wasn't close enough to me, really, to do that. I wasn't surprised when Mim told me that she was working on one. She owned it. "I wouldn't buy it," she said, "It has too much of the person still in it."  (Or something like that.)

For the Radish, maybe

Radish, I promised I'd send you a plate or something...so if you want any of these just contact me through my website and I'll send ya one...

They're made with molds, very sketchy (since after years and years of working so hard to perfect prints, I like to make a mess)...some heavy, none perfect...

blah and blah...

Don't feel obliged to want one...

I'll also have others that will appear when I start putting things away from the show....

I think there's one larger bowl in here with the painted dogs...

another dog plate, painted dogs...

anyway, it's for free...

if you want one...

blah and blah....

The guy with the beret is a plate...the artist guys are a small plate and a small bowl...

blah and blah...

cheers...

Sunday mornings, again

My brother called when I started writing this blog, "I don't know what happened. It was like there was an invisible shield in front of the phone on Friday. I just couldn't pick it up." And then he said, "I felt really terrible on Saturday. I'm just recovering today. Friday, all those little kids, eating in shifts."

I said, "I felt like I'd been hit by a truck on Saturday." He said, "Emotionally?" I said, "And physically." "Is it in the DNA?" he said. He's sixteen years older and I've taken myself to a lot of therapy and a good deal of Alanon and I know perfectly well that it's not in the DNA. We say the same thing every holiday, starting with Thanksgiving when I called him this year.

"Must have been something in our childhoods," I say. Of course I don't remember mine before our mother died when I was twelve. Though my father told me that we had meals with Aunt Marion, my mother's sister, and her husband, Roi. (Can you imagine naming a French Canadian child, LeRoi Louis?) and that there was always some squabble between the sisters.

My brother tells me that he got home from the service in 1944. "How old would you have been?" he asks. 

"I was in Paris when Bob called to tell me to tell me that Sophie...." He can't use the word 'died,' but has some euphemism. He was traveling, using an inheritance his grandfather had given him. That was in 1951. He's my half-brother. My mother's son. And he really isn't able to tell me a thing about our mother except that they took the train together to meet my father in New York where he was looking for work. It's almost as if she's been erased from his mind, also, but he'd never admit that.

I tell him that Bob, my father, told me that Auntie Marion used to squeal, "Dickie, no. My chair," when he planted his big feet and leaned back in it, the frail wood shrieking, after those holiday dinners at her house. He doesn't remember that.

He says, "I don't know what happened on Friday," three or four times and laughs about how troubled he was by the dinner down at Lenore's daughter's house with all those great-grandchildren running around. "We ate in shifts." Then he says, "I think I'll write about Friday." He never writes, as far as I know, but it would be interesting to read his thoughts.

Lenore says she had a good time, watching all the little kids run around. 

None of us mention the word Christmas.

I woke up today thinking, "Museum" which really meant, 'I have to get out of here or I'll go nuts."  I used to go to the museum many Sunday mornings, but I've pretty much gotten out of that routine. The exhibit I wanted to see is of the MFA holdings from the dig at Deir el-Bershera, a discovery of what the tomb robbers hadn't taken in Djehutynakht's tomb on March 17, 1915. The wall label said that his name is pronounced je-hooty-knocked. The audio recording sounded more like the German nacht for the last syllable. 

It also remarked on how unrealistic the female votive carriers are compared to the other group in the main room of coffins. The curator even hinted that the craftsman of those four figures had made the choices of an artist, as if the figures are similar to musical notes. 

I particularly liked the fragmented wood from one of the coffins.

Sunday morning, again

My brother called while I was putting up this post. He said, "I don't know what came over me on Friday. It was like a wall between me and the phone. And Saturday, I just couldn't move. I'm a little better today." He says something more or less like this every year. We both do. I told him that I felt like I'd been run over by a truck on Saturday. He said, "Emotionally?" I said, "Emotionally and physically."

He said, "It was all those little kids running around. Eating in shifts. Luckily Mathew (that's Lenore's grandson) poured gave me two glasses of Scotch. That helped."

It wasn't all the little great-grandchildren running around. Or the dinner in shifts. "Is it in the DNA?" Well, I've had a lot of therapy, so no, I don't think it's in the DNA.


I don't remember my mother who died when I was twelve. Or the dinners at Aunt Marion's house before then. He does. He came back from the Army in 1944, so probably, we sat at the same table until 1951. Or maybe not. He was off in Europe when our mother was dying. My father called him in Paris where he was spending some of the inheritance from his grandfather. During this phone call, I got a hint of how much of a shock that phone call had been. "I didn't know." No one knew. Not even my mother's sister. That was then, when cancer was a word not spoken. I reassure him that no one knew,  no one. "Not even Marion?"

Sunday mornings at the MFA, again

The Day After

When Susan was in Paris, she sent me this post card. She loves to travel and had seen the Louise Bourgeois exhibition. I put the card up on the ice box, not because I believed in the statement, but because Susan sent it. I've never considered myself an artist. But I do a lot of work. And I have to say that recently work saved my sanity.

I haven't totally collapsed over a holiday season that still, still, even though I'm seventy, has nasty tentacles in me. I worked like the devil. I'd finished a long, long, long, long poemish thing about the track and am stuck waiting for my mentor to look at it (dog help him). So I wasn't doing a thing until I remember all this writing I'd worked on with all seriousness, started in 1994, and started going over that. That gave me a pleasant 200 something pages distraction, to work on, at Starbucks, sitting at a table until my laptop went black with no power. That taught me to take along the power cord so I could sit and work. 

Even on Christmas day. When I was interrupted by a couple of folks I know. One is a big talker, a pleasant fellow almost my age who works at the library here in town. When I said I had to go to the bathroom, I had a slight stomach ache, he told me how gallbladder attacks start, a pretty severe stomach ache followed a few days later by a backache. "I don't want to scare you or anything." He was going to have dinner with friends. 

Then the man who finally has finished retaking all of his boards in English, something he'd already finished in China, came in. I used to talk briefly to him when he took a break from reading and making notes. Now he's at the point of waiting for his residency, maybe in Boston, maybe not. He was going with his wife and four-year-old-daughter (after he had a cup of coffee, went to the lab for just ten minutes, maybe,) to a large gathering of colleagues. In China, he said, Christmas is just for children. He was, as usual, gracious and cheerful.

I was making chicken soup, having changed the menu after Chris ate spoiled sausage and temporarily ruined his stomach. But I'd left my soup pot at a 4th of July party, and was making it in a crockpot so it took two days. I hate to leave it on overnight and the chicken was frozen. I also was making bread which I hoped would be lighter than the brick-like loaves I made last week. It was. I didn't forget putting the oil in and didn't let it rise for hours and hours.

I had actually taken the dogs out in the morning, something I haven't done since it snowed because I'm hideously afraid of falling on the ice. And I took my camera along so I'd have something to do in this season of work compulsion.

My favorite image is of the wiring on the archway that temporarily leads into the apartment building down the street. Of course, I rather like the cow and the little Jesus in the snow (no longer on the sidewalks.)

Krissy also enjoys Christmas. I got her a coat (she wore it to work in New York the week before) and bought her Committed on Amazon. So it's not the presents. It's just her general good holiday spirits. When she was little, it took her all day to open presents. She'd sit on the floor, looking at the packages, picking one, opening it carefully, exclaiming over a box of crayons as long as she'd fuss over something larger. Even socks got a lot of attention, so this took a long time while I lay on the couch (by the time this memory occurs, we had a couch, not a mattress on the floor), eating chocolates and reading a mystery. She was the same at Halloween, carrying around a little bag of candy that I'd given her. We'd stop at stores on St. Marks Place and the clerk would lean over and drop candy in her bag and she'd take something out of it and hand it to him. It wasn't until she had Halloween with other kids at the artist co-op, Westbeth, that she learned that you're supposed to keep it all. The good thing, though, is that she never much liked candy. I ate most of it.

We'd planned to go to a movie. The man who had the gallbladder operation told me he'd seen the George Clooney movie and recommended it. We were leaning toward Avatar, but he sniffed his nose at science fiction and then mentioned that he thought Sherlock was opening yesterday. 

We decided on Sherlock even though Krissy didn't much care to see it. She loves Basil Rathbone, the original Sherlock. But Chris and I prevailed. It was fabulous, if you can get over how transgressive this Sherlock is, Robert Downey, Jr. Every pore quivers. And there's a fabulous boxing scene. 

Once we got to the credits, which are gorgeous, Krissy said, "Richie directed this? Why didn't you tell me?" She'd liked it anyway. But this made it even better. Chris has never read Sherlock Holmes or seen any of the movies, so he had no idea of all the references to stories that were stuck cleverly into this fast paced movie. 

When I took the picture of us in the lobby, waiting for the movie to start, Chris said that it looks like the house manager was very kind and let us out for the day. 

Today I woke up feeling as if a truck had run over me.

And I have to get to the real problem that I've been avoiding. Twenty pages of galleys for my first chapbook which, oddly enough, I haven't been eager to look at and send back. I'm really good at the work stuff, enjoy it, can do endless revisions, fussings around, but something in me balks at the next part... getting it out there. But, unless I fall on black ice (I'd originally written idea instead of ice, a nice message from that monster dog in my unconscious...black ideas) and break my arm before I can make the corrections, it will get out there, in it's very limited form. But out, nevertheless.

Let Sleeping Dogs Lie

I realize that my recent blogs have been a bit heavy duty, as if I'm berating myself for who I was. But it's been leading somewhere. Part is the curiosity of what might have happened if I had become an art major, an offer to become one surely suggested by Harvey Fite since his were the only studio classes I took at Bard. 

I loved being in that studio, windows on two sides, one of which was just at leg level so I could watch people walking by on their way to the other studios in the Quonset huts below. I can't recall what Harvey Fite looked like, only his assurance that a master Italian craftsman could throw plaster so carefully that not a splot would escape and all the shims would be carefully, perfectly covered. I liked working there, alone, the way the light came in, the way the clay felt and smelled.

And what would have happened had I been able to listen to Donald Finkel and think about plot and motive? What if I'd learned about the arc of a story?  We did talk, most interestingly, about how the costume of non-conformity, maybe a cloak, an outlandish outfit, long hair and a beard, functioned as a disguise, making most people turn away and not look under the surface, not even notice the face. This was before the Hippies, after the Beats, and we each understood what we were talking about -- invisibility.

But thinking about the choices I might have made, had I been capable, is  not what I was working toward in these last blogs. They lead to my picking up a project that I started in 1994, something I worked like the devil on, scrabbling over those words, thinking as hard as I could about the amorphousness I was trying to describe. I'd worked hard, given up, and forgotten about all that work. But somehow, this blogging allowed -- what? Some vague searching around, some collecting of thoughts, that moved me forward.

I don't really understand why this blogging business has become so interesting. How I can float words out into space, not really caring if anyone reads them, but also caring? Not worrying if I've said the wrong thing, but then worrying a bit? It's useful, meditative to write. And I write more easily than I talk, so it's a pleasure. Fun. 

 And it's extremely interesting to read other blogs. Taking that twenty minutes in the morning to check around and see who is doing what on the blogs that I follow. Trying to think of something to say that isn't stupid, but more just seeing what's up, what's been posted, what photo or drawing or thought. Curious. A vague community. An illusion. Something to give importance to in the pattern of the day, but not too much.

What my last couple of posts have done is push me back into writing I'd forgotten about. I was waiting until my poetry mentor, a good, overworked friend, possibly has time to read what I wrote about the track this summer. Something he won't get to until after Christmas. So, I stopped working on anything. Read mysteries (something I do when I'm depressed,) Laurie Colwin on cooking, a book on New York by E.B. White which takes about half an hour to devour and is beautifully thought-out. I found out about the books from Maureen Corrigan on NPR, some Christmas list she'd compiled of bests. 

My new crime has been ordering poetry books from Amazon, but my saving grace has been ordering non-fiction books from the library. 

Somehow I've been able to almost ignore Christmas. I have no sense of impending doom, the way I usually do. Krissy bought a tree, set it in a bucket because we threw away the stand when I last moved, covered it with white lights. The snow is dreadful since I'm so afraid of falling that I let her and Smith do all the dog walking.

Today I drove Joe to a restaurant he likes across from the water at Revere Beach. He told me to tell his son that this is where he wants his ashes scattered since he spent so much time here, just looking, relaxing. Years ago he used to live upstairs when a woman had a rooming house and rented out three or four units. He stayed in all of them at one point or another. But she's died and now Santorini's restaurant is there, in what was once a house. He and his friend often go there in the summer. His friend's in a wheelchair, diabetes. "Once they cut a little piece off you, they keep cutting. Bad." The dog comes along and sits in a chair while they eat.

Joe ate an egg sandwich. I had two eggs over and whole wheat toast that had a phenomenal amount of butter on them. But they tasted like ambrosia. Until afterwards. We talked about horses, and a little about Philippe, how Joe would never walk behind a horse, how he kept his left hand on the haunch if he was near the back, how a horse can rear unexpectedly, how Philippe was going to take that one out to exercise, he'd just been given a leg up onto it, the horse reared, fell over backward, on Philippe, crushed him. They'd known each other for years. 

Joe wanted something at Walmart, so we went there and he picked out a small battery operated car for a four-year-old who will be at his friends' Christmas dinner. He never had many toys himself and it really mattered to him to get this gift for the boy.