quilts

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

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

 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.

 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....

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

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

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?