a ride through the car wash, a long Sunday

I knew Sunday was going to be a long day, so I decided to take the dogs to the car wash on Saturday as an outing. Bogie isn't entirely pleased that Tulip appeared from nowhere in June. He was used to going everywhere with me and doesn't realize that, in spite of this annoying small dog sticking her nose into everything and barking too much, he still goes whenever and where ever I can take him. But he likes the car wash and I could take him there, at least, since he wasn't going to the opera movie, the poetry reading or to sit in Dunkin' Donuts with my poetry mentor on Sunday.

And I decided to take Happy along, Krissy's dog. She's a slut of a dog and will eat anything and go anywhere except for walks at night. Car was the first word she ever spoke. Three dogs and me, riding through the car wash.

I felt compelled to wash the car because I was picking up a fastidious friend. She has an  elegant sense of design and notices curious details which  makes it interesting to go on outings with her. I always learn something, see something new. Unfortunately, I have the terrible habit of keeping a good bit of clutter in my car and, recently, the outside has been decorated with bird droppings. In the past, she has driven us wherever we went, but now they are down to one car and I've been obliged to drive. (She is a far better driver and knows the best ways to get anywhere, which are never the ways I'm used to going.) 

The first time this task fell to me I was so intimidated that I had the car detailed, inside and out. It looked so surprisingly clean that she asked if I'd gotten a new car. But when I picked her up recently, I hadn't done a thing to improve the appearance of my old-lady-tedious-brown-gray-Toyota and she noticed.

I'm not sure that this excursion to the car wash, which involved a long wait in an angry line of drivers all of whom were anxious to get ahead of me, was worth the trouble. Tulip was so frightened by the noises -- water streams, all those suds, the slapping apparatus and the large buffers -- that she crouched near the brakes, missing the whole spectacle. (I took photos so I could show her later.) And the car was so dirty that there was still debris spotting the front hood after the washing, not that this mattered all that much because splats of bird poop appeared by Sunday morning when I dumped Bogie and Tulip downstairs and went off to see Orfeo, a filmed version from LaScala.

Only the 'feed' to the 'server' wasn't working. "What," another friend said, "there are no reels, no film?" The friend that I'd driven mentioned that in Italy or France, there would have been a general uproar over such a long delay, but this audience sat with patience for the hour it took for those young folks managing the technical details to give up on the whole thing and announce that there was no hope, that this opera would be rescheduled, save our ticket stubs, and we'd be given a free ticket for a different opera in the new series. Our small contingent made hissing noises when a woman stood up, announced herself as a lawyer, and offered to sue this struggling non-profit theatre if our money wasn't refunded instantly. $17!

Since I had a couple of hours, I went to Feet of Clay where I continued on with my small job, photographing the goings-on for the website. I used to clean the glaze room, a thankless job that involved a lot of bending and swearing about why people never bothered to clean up around the glaze bucket they'd used, didn't wipe the wall that they'd splashed. Recently I was supposed to mix slip, but whoever did this last took off with the directions. So someone decided that, since I'm a photographer, I might provide images for the website. On Tuesday night, I took over 100 photos and got 15 decent images. That's not a bad ratio in poor light.

One of the feature poets reading at the monthly Brookline Poetry Reading spoke about the pools of blackness outside of his back door, one of those poetic references that always drives me wild because when I open the door, it's to let the dogs out (I usually walk them) and I see Maria in the kitchen next door, doing the dishes, and Carlos just leaving the room. Their daughters must be in other rooms that I can't see into. 

The Dunkin' Donuts, where I was meeting George, my poetry mentor, is on the other side of the earth, so I left the reading early. This meeting was very important to me. He has very little left-over time, especially now that he's teaching full time. And has been generous enough to read this long poemish thing that I wrote about working for a couple of hours every morning on the racetrack this summer. Last time we met, we reviewed 70 pages. When I got back home, Krissy said, "You just met with George. Aren't you happy?" But I just wanted to go to bed, filled with a strange disappointment that he'd been so encouraging. (Oh, that circle-eyed-monster-dog-0f-my-unconscious that wants to defeat me was furious!)

George knows that I don't like compliments. (Actually, I don't think that he does either because when I tell him how grateful I am for his support, he says the Greek equivalent of 'oh, pshaw.' 

We sat there looking at his suggestions for the last half and talking a bit about this upcoming election for Ted Kennedy's seat in Congress that may, just may, horrors, go to a Republican. 

And instead of working on editing that project, here I am, laboring over this long blog....  distracting myself from practical work...  flying these words out into space.... 

 

 Aren't we humans curious?

   thanks!!!!!

Needs

I've been working hard, writing a poemish thing about being on the backside of a local racetrack early mornings from June until the last sad day in November. It's about 140 pages, and I've gone over it a number of times, written a cast of characters and today I'm going to print it out so I can, hopefully, tell whether I've built them up sufficiently over time. And, this weekend I turned fifty or so digital images into small black-and-white photographs of feed buckets and grain bags and hoof prints in the mud. So, I was sitting at the computer a long time doing that and my body does not like sitting or much of anything else, for that matter. 

On Friday, a nice fellow came over to instal InDesign, a program that would allow me to stream text and insert images. I'd already bought the wrong program, not noticing that it was for PC. This time, I'd thought I was golden, but my attempts to upload it didn't work. And neither did his. It turns out that you need an intel processor (or something like that) to upload it and my computer is too old. So, $50 to him and we'll see if I can return the program.  The fortunate thing is that while he was thinking the problem might be my password and in trying to find that program, I found an old Quark. I like Quark, though the fellow told me all sorts of reasons that I shouldn't. Anyway, now I have Quark that he re-installed.

The point of all this is that while I was at the computer on Sunday, I must have turned oddly and pulled out a muscle in my ribcage. At the same time, I had a repeating odd pain in my fat stomach, lower right. When things like this happen, my body goes into hyper alert [reason: my mother died when I was twelve. No one except my father was aware of the seriousness of her illness. Lesson learned -- watch out, be alert, monitor every tiny signal. You never know what's happening.] and I thought I might be dying. I've done this many times, so I know to pace around, because if you're standing up, there's less likelihood of dying. Etc. After some time, I decided I wasn't dying.

It was cleanathon day at Feet of Clay, 11-2. And I planned to be there at ten so L. and I could get the job we always do. But the line at Starbucks was very long, I needed my latte, I was late, we didn't get to do what I wanted to do, but we were washing boards and I told L. about my flirt with fear of death. And she told me that she's been having pains for two years, been looked at and poked at, some odd symptoms, etc. "We're at that age. The question is have you done everything you need to do." Or anyway, it was a phrase like that. She's a Buddhist and I knew she'd done a program about aging, death and has considered just what she has to get finished. And she's pretty well done with what she needs to do. "I could die. I'm finished." 

Well, L. isn't finished. She's about to move to New Mexico and start a new life. She's the most traveling seventy-year-old I know. No matter what pain she has from a cranky body, she's full of energy. But I knew what she means.

And I also know THAT I HAVE FIVE MORE LARGE PROJECTS, thank you, that I NEED to get done. I'm extremely glad that I didn't have to go to the hospital yesterday for the heart attack (yes, that's what I imagined) and that I was able to work for all those hours (even if it was difficult to take a deep breath) and that I am going to print out the text today so that I can work on the track piece.

Yesterday, I talked to Joe, my friend who is a Cuban Thoroughbred trainer, and seriously ill. We're going to breakfast at the Bagel Bin on Wednesday. He told me that his friend, Philippe, maybe sixty-seven, born in Argentina, mother was Sicilian, still exercising riding in the morning, making a living in a business where an ambulance must be present at all times if any horses and riders are on the track -- early morning training and racing, died after being thrown. He died a day or so ago.  Just weeks ago. I just talked to him in the track kitchen, about his son who is working at Walmart in Maine, a job that Philippe thought makes too little money, living with his girlfriend. Oh, Philippe, I'm sorry.

Listening

I listen to three people about my work. George is words. Susan is words and everything else. Sally is everything else, though if I could get her to read the words (and I have, long laborious drafts of long laborious, very important work that I've never done a thing with ((Susan got hooked into reading it, also))), she would be words.

So, when Susan said, "No more plates. The blobs are far more interesting." I listened. I need information from these three people. I like their advice. (I also like to know if someone/a friend or colleague is annoyed or angry, I think those discussions are important and interesting.)

I concentrated on the blobs after she said this. They are actually called, "For No Earthly Reason." And I think they are extremely interesting, even beautiful. They are clay with a copper oxide on the outside, glazed inside. But they are yet another installation that sits in boxes upstairs. I thought I had enough boxes with photographs, books with negatives, but no, here I am, seventy, and I've been amassing more and more boxes with clays stuff in them for the last four years.

But it's holiday time. And there's another sale at Feet of Clay, the studio where I work in Brookline. And the voice of the devil called me into making more plates with dogs on them. I'd taken a couple of months off from working with clay because being at the track, working there in the mornings was so much more important. But, in order to be in the show, in order to try to sell what I made a year or so ago in the plate department, I had to go back there and do something. So, it's been dog plates. 

I had work in a holiday sale just as the economy tanked. And sold very little. (Being in the sale involves paying real money to get in it, doing six points of somewhat work like sending out invitations ((my daughter does this for me since my body rebels)) or wrapping what's sold, setting up your display and taking it down the instant the minute of the show is over.) 

I don't imagine I'll sell much of anything this year, partly because the work there is generally practical -- nice looking plates, cups, casseroles. It's utilitarian and my work isn't. And mine is messy, built in molds with the seams showing pleasantly on the underside. 

My first time around, I made a lot of plates with nude ladies on them, a favorite subject. (When I grew up, there was a large oil paintings of a nude woman lying on a couch and a water color of her in a similar form hanging on the living room. They were done by George Constant, a Greek painter who my parents knew, and they were of his wife. I've always fancied nudes and have done many such self-portraits and lead workshop on the nude, in the nude.) 

And some of the plates had words and drawings, like a bearded man who liked like he was in the dumps with the label, 'I am not depressed' over his head. None of those sold though a few cat and dog bowls went.

At any rate, I've only made seven or eight new bowls, all with dogs, and a couple of small plates this month.

Anyway, enough of bowls and plates (like Susan said), I'm going back to the nude lady figures, an installation (in boxes) of 1,000 small clay figures that would be accompanied by a small grid of a black-and-white photographs of a nude female torso pushed this way and that as if she's clay. And I'm going to work on some odd little figures, nude figures with hands and legs that move, sort of. So, I start working on those soon. The cleanathon is on Sunday, then set-up for the show, and a lull in active work making on the part of most people. But I'll make some figures. They're small. They have no use whatsoever. And they're not plates.