A fine edge, a jag

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The maids are long gone who dusted the porcelain and fluffed the down. Bone-white pressed linens on pillows and perpetual shine on mahogany are visions of the past. A few of my grandmother’s things are here on windowsills and in corners, some broken—the Staffordshire cow and calf with a horn missing, a gap in a piece of trim on the Hepplewhite, the lip of the Baccarat decanter chipped, a threadbare velvet ribbon streaming down like a wilted vine from the needlepoint stool where a fine 19th century bustled lady picks flowers in accumulated dust. It is no longer fashionable to be counted among the 1%, though courting fashion has little to do with why we live here on this piece of land, with no hired help, and time-worn buildings.

Here they are, lovely whatsits transported from a fine house, yet belonging in this old farmhouse with us, though I do not love them well enough. In my way, I kiss them all—the crystal arcs on the hip of the decanter, rising like a tide in waves along the sand, one by one. Such a fine edge on each scallop—perfect ellipses, lip upon lip, then the smooth neck, and finally the jag where someone (maybe a servant) banged it on the mouth with the stopper or a glass, and perhaps cognac bled to the floor. I love her, that maidservant, and the lady who yelled at her too.

Somebody loves us all, Elizabeth Bishop said. What a privilege. See how someone planted the trees—to stand, long-necked, perpetually being, shading—and simply and dotingly witnessed.

 Mr. Baccarat decanter with a broken lip seems to watch

the maple sap buckets on the trees

and wonder how much of that elixir has accumulated overnight 

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"Freedom from Want": Thanksgiving and grandmothers

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What I want is not the turkey on the platter, which seems too big for the spot where Grandma is placing it. And how is she carrying it anyway? My weak wrists would never make it, and the turkey would crash onto the floor. I’d let Grandpa carry it and smile sweetly, basking in the oohs and ahs.

What I want is Grandma herself. And Grandpa. How kind and cuddly they look.

The song associated with Thanksgiving is “Over the River and Through the Woods” which continues with “. . . to Grandmother’s house we go.” I never did such a thing. The only time I went to a grandparent’s house was at the time of Grandma Olive’s death and funeral, in Bayonne, New Jersey, when I was four. I played with toy cars in the steep driveway of my grandmother’s home on the bay. That’s what I remember.

When childhood friends said their grandma died, I thought, big deal. I had no heart pocket for such a relationship.

Grandpa Reuben is the only grandparent I remember, and he was not my mom’s biological dad. He was Grandma Olive’s second husband, who happened to be the cousin of her first, my mom’s dad Sidney. Olive didn’t have to change her last name when she married Reuben. I met Grandpa Reuben twice and was in love with him, the way a girl is in love with her grandpa. He was posh in suits but intensely kind.

Is there a word for being a grandchild orphan?

It is an odd and empty feeling not to have met my grandparents. But it is even odder now to contemplate that my grandparents did not meet all of their grandchildren. Dad’s dad was 70 when he was born; he fought in the Civil War in 1865; he died when Dad was 9. Dad’s mom died in the ‘50s before I was born, the last of eight kids. Mom’s biological dad Sidney was divorced from Grandma Olive and far away when we kids came along. Grandma Olive died when I was four; maybe she held me, I don’t remember. Then there was Grandpa Reuben, a fine substitute, but once on his jostling knees and once after his stroke in a wheelchair is it for memories.

Now, I’m going to be a grandma. When I first found out our daughter was pregnant, I thought I would need advice for my new role, since I had no grandparent memories to speak of. But guess what, there seems to be a heart pocket (think cargo pants) for this relationship after all. Strangely enough, while I’m loving my unborn grandson, it's almost like I'm sitting on my own lap, feeling loved.

Note about the painting: "Freedom from Want" was one of four "propaganda" posters by Norman Rockwell inspired by Theodore Roosevelt's speech to Congress January 6, 1941, urging the country to enter World War II. Read more here.

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Poem: Endless

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my mom

 

Endless

Fingering the past and its memories
like beads of stone

or bone, like the ivory necklace
of your mother’s you wore,

its carved spheres, milky with river
filigrees, soapy soft,

lotioned almost
like your face skin before bed

oh pressing mine, kissing me good night on my
adolescent pillow

where I was growing, thrumming into myself
drawing pictures of women’s bodies

the way I wanted mine to be
under

forbidden bone, outlawed tusk
engraved for a beautiful woman

to wear upon her neck
hanging down on her bosom

circling, rotating, revolving
in the endless orbit of a life

Listen to a podcast of this poem here.

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Quick winter project: re-covering work as play

"The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves."   ~ Carl Jung

"Procrastination makes easy things hard, hard things harder."

~ Mason Cooley

I love this chair that I adopted and then neglected. Now I'm gonna play with it.

I bought it fifteen years ago at a garage sale of a prominent businessman for $20. It is hand-carved, and although it is not meant for comfortable sitting, I like how it looks. It could be pretty old, I haven't had an appraiser look at it. I found fabric at Calico Corners to re-cover the seat, since I didn't particularly care for the colors and pattern of the one it had. The distressed-look linen I bought conjures Louisa May Alcott or Jane Austen. Drool. For years the chair has served a fine purpose as a "bookshelf" in the bedroom, with the fabric I bought lying on the seat under the books, well protected. A chair that you don't sit on much, because it might be more for decor than function, is called an occasional chair. This one could be called a never chair.

When we rearranged the living room recently and took out the bulky dining table we almost never used, I remembered the bookshelf occasional chair. Transporting it from a dark corner of the bedroom to the warm light of the occasional room, minus the books, renewed my interest in re-covering the chair.

This was a fast, easy project (about an hour). Quite silly that it took me fifteen years to get to this and enjoy the chair. Note to self: Play with the things you love now, don't put it off.

I took the ribbon trim off the edge of the seat, exposing the staples. I didn't need to take the fabric off; I just put the new fabric right on top.

I made a muslin pattern first, then cut the linen following it. While I cut the muslin I was thinking about the muslin dresses Jane and Elizabeth Bennet wore in Pride & Prejudice. Wouldn't I have loved to be one of the Bennet sisters . . . one of the elder sisters. I also thought about the younger sisters remaking hats with new trims. I felt connected with all those Bennet girls -- re-using, recycling, remaking.

Don helped me with the staple gun, stapling the new fabric onto the wood base, because I lack wrist strength (carpal tunnel). Then I re-attached the trim with a glue gun.

Here sits the occasional chair in the corner with a Paris pen & ink, 200-year-old poetry books from my dad's collection, and a few things I inherited from Grandma Olive, herself a very good re-user and re-maker -- a re-creator): Cupid lamp, lyre table, tea box, oriental carpet, and Navajo rug.

This has been a nice Sunday activity, and it gave me something to blog about. (I know, I always have such a hard time coming up with something, don't I? Pshaw!)

And as Mr. Darcy said to Miss Elizabeth Bennet:

"Think only of the past as its remembrance gives you pleasure."

A great many things from the past give me pleasure!

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Family (H)art

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Come in, come in, just follow the crowds (hehe). I hope you don’t mind if I indulge myself. I have created a gallery of visual art by members of my family. It’s my gift to me mostly, an acknowledgement of the love of growing up with Art as a recurring character in our family tree. It’s long, but you can be grateful that every single member of my family is not represented. In total we number 70 living souls, if I count correctly (math is not my strongest subject), but I am only including the visual artists, several of whom have passed on. I'm sharing 15 artists in all. I am defining visual art narrowly, as what you can hang on a wall (except for one exception, one of Lesley’s). Please click on the images if you’d like to see the details enlarged. I’ll start from oldest to youngest, except me. I’ll be last, but it doesn’t mean I’m saving the best for it. I’m just trying to be polite. Of course just look at pictures if you don't want to read all the information about the artists. I wouldn't blame you one bit, I know you're busy. This is documentation for my family and me as much as anything.

DISCLAIMER: I took photographs of many of these images, or the artists did, so there might be glare, or distortions. Blur your eyes when necessary.

Welcome, won’t you come in? Would you like an audio guide? They’re only $5. Or you can leave your photo ID. (I don’t really have an audio guide, I was just kidding.)

Corn, by Grandma Elizabeth

1 Grandma Elizabeth  b. 1870 d. 1957. My dad’s mother was 47 when Dad was born (and his dad, also a minister, was 70 when Dad was born and fought in the Civil War!), and I do not know if I met her. She died in Charlottesville, Virginia less than a year after I arrived. When my older siblings knew her, she was deaf and used an ear horn to hear. I know little else. Were we ever surprised when Dad was dying gently on a hospice bed in his dining room in 1995, and someone found this corn painting of Grandma’s in the attic. We had never seen nor heard of it, or that she was an artist. Lucky me, it’s hanging on the wall in our bedroom. (We don't have a formal dining room, where it would be more appropriate.) Sorry about the glare and distortion, I tried to photoshop it out and just couldn't get all of it.

2 Grandma Olive  b. 1891 d. 1960. I’ve posted about Grandma Olive, my mom’s mother, many times at this blog. I have no memory of her, she died when I was 3 or 4. After graduating from the Art Institute in Chicago, Olive was a professional artist/designer/illustrator in the 1920s and 30s. She designed clothes for Vogue and wallpaper for Thibaut. Her pen and ink drawings illustrated World Book encyclopedias and newspaper ads. You know that curious little sepia girl studying life from my sidebar? It’s one of hers, from a page in World Book, below. In this gallery I’ve also included a cabinet she painted that now lives in our family room. Mom said her mother used to go tromping on the streets of NYC looking for dilapidated bargains and would bring them home and doll them up. Below is also her cover illustration for the Bayonne Times (she resided in Bayonne, New Jersey) when the NY Holland Tunnel opened – the world’s first vehicular tunnel.

Illustration in World Book Encyclopedia, Grandma Olive

The "bastard" cabinet (so-called by an antiques dealer
who said it mixed many styles)
that Grandma Olive rescued and painted

Cover and detail in the Bayonne Times, on the event

of the opening of the Holland Tunnel, by Grandma Olive

3 Uncle Jimmie  b. 1906 d. 1994. My dad’s 10-year-older brother. The subject of a poem I posted. Uncle Jimmie had his own printing company, and he used to send us calendars at Christmas with prints from his carved woodblocks. Woodblock prints require a long, arduous and painstaking process, with a different block carved for each color, leaving the rest of the design uncarved and left for another block, then having to align everything perfectly.

Woodblock prints, by Uncle Jimmie 

4 Mom  b. 1916 d. 1997. Though my mom was a musical artist (pianist, choir director and composer), not so much a visual one, I’m including sheet music from an operetta she wrote based on Alice in Wonderland, which I only just learned about from my niece Shari, herself a splendid pianist, who inherited her grandma's handwritten sheet music. It has Mom's maiden name on it, but I have no idea when she wrote it. I think the flourishes of musical note flags are lyrically and visually beautiful. I sat by my mom on the piano bench as a toddler while she composed, watching her play a phrase, then transcribe the notes onto staff paper, painstakingly, one phrase at a time. Eventually I started pounding out melodies after hearing them repeated so often, surprising everyone. Too bad I didn't turn into a prodigy.

My mom's composition of the operetta, Adventures of Alice in Wonderland, never published

5 Dad  b. 1917 d. 1995. The image of him at right is the day he pronounced Don and me Husband & Wife. In his early days as a minister, my father supplemented his income with signs he painted. He was a fine pen and ink artist as well and created his own bookplate, below. Engravers duplicated the image on his and Mom's gravestone. Hart was his name, but it was also an animal (another word for deer) in a beautiful Psalm verse that represented his heart for God: As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after Thee, oh God.  ~ Psalm 42:1.

Dad's pen and ink bookplate.

Mom and Dad's grave stone, with Dad's art work
(that's the headstone of my childhood Dr. Garlock behind)

6 Boots, aka Ginnie  My sister.

I grew up watching Bootsie draw. She drew this girl very early, in high school I think. Now she uses Soul Girl as her avatar at In Soul, her blog, after I suggested it, since it so perfectly represents her spirit. She is also an inspired photographer, and I am including a photo of windmills, one of her favorite symbols. She lives near Amsterdam with her wife Astrid, where they are legally married. (When oh when will we catch up in the U.S.?) I like that both these images are about wind. Her blog is In Soul and her photoblog is Hart & Soul, where she unfolds her beautiful eye and insights into life.

Soul Girl, by Ginnie

Windmills, by Ginnie

7 Bennett  My brother, who passed away in 1996.

I’ve blogged about Bennett a lot. I think there is no one who has shaped my world view more than he did, eight years my senior. He loved to shoot rustic scenes in Nova Scotia and New England. He shot this Greek Orthodox priest in Greece in the 1970s. (Do you think they were related?) Bennett died before the advent of digital photography, and I think he would have loved it, though he also had his own dark room and loved to spend hours deep into the night developing prints. I have no way of knowing if this print I photographed was one he was happy with, since he discarded so many out of perfectionism. My photo of it also does not do it justice, and one of these days we’ll need to scan it or its negative (I think one of my nephews Paul or Todd, see below, might have Ben’s negatives). This photo, which he made a very large print of, won grand prize at a photography show, and was breathtaking. I have also included the poster he used to advertise his work. The grasshopper was his “avatar.” (Again, sorry for the glare on that one.)

Greek Orthodox priest, by Bennett

Bennett's photography show poster

8 John My brother.

John and Bennett are in the photo at right at the Acropolis in 1970 -- John is on the left; click to see their handsome faces better. John is my closest sibling in age, four years my senior. We spent many hours at the kitchen table sketching, and I was always amazed at his abilities. Strange story of synchronicity: As I was preparing this post last weekend, Don found the following charcoal John did of our dad in our barn in my dad’s things, quite by accident, accompanied by the touching poem. In a quick phone call to John he told me he believes he created them together sometime in his teens. I'll type out the poem here, because it touches me and expresses something of my own sense of things growing up.

You were tall and I was small—

I gazed wide-eyed at your legs and feet.

You’d hear the ring, then answer the call

and head off down the street.

(I tried, when you walked,

to follow along, but your steps were hard to reach).

And it seemed to me you never talked,

except to pun or preach.

Your silent side was good for me;

it helped me grow inside.

I watched and listened, and I could see

the heart you couldn’t hide.

I remember well one hurtful day

how you loved me in your quiet way.

You stood at my door with tears in your eyes;

your heart reached for mine with pain-laden sighs.

When I was liddle I watched you diddle—always on your knee;

You were tall and I was small, but I knew it was just for me,

‘cause after awhile—

you’d smile.

~ John

charcoal of Dad, poem to Dad, by John

9 Todd  My nephew – my sister Nancy’s son.

Todd is a web and graphic designer, among many other things. The first image, titled “Esther,” is a pen and ink drawing he created in high school. Todd has also started a photography business doing photo shoots with models (his web site is here). The second image of Margaret was shot during a photo session at our farm.

Esther, by Todd

Margaret, by Todd, shot at our farm

10 Paul  My nephew -- my brother Jim’s son.

Paul's four kids are often his photo subjects. Paul provides design for software professionally and is also quite successful selling his photos at iStock on the side. (His best seller? A hospital emergency sign.) I fell in love with these two portraits of his kids Lydia, Eli, Aden and Clara, when he posted them at his flickr photostream, taken at our family cottage about a month ago. In fact, these images were what got me inspired to do this family gallery. They remind me of a cut-out silhouette we had done at Knott’s Berry Farm when Lesley was little (right).

Clara and Aden, by Paul

Lydia, Eli, Clara and Aden, by Paul, at our cottage

11 Mark My nephew -- Ginnie/Bootsie’s son.

Mark shot this spontaneous family portrait of us on the frozen lake over New Year’s one year. That’s our family cottage on the hill in the upper left of the photo. Mark is a computer programmer and also studied photography at the Maine Photographic Workshops. I’m trying to remember why we were smiling so geekily in this photo, I think we had just been skating around and slipping on the sliding ice like spazzes. We’ve paused for Mark and are holding on to each other for dear life. Oh! I just noticed . . . that scarf hugging Lesley's head is one of the only things I've ever knitted.

Family Portrait, by Mark

12 Rachel My niece – my brother John’s daughter.

Rachel lives in Utah with her husband Swede and is dying to have her own studio to create art again. She teaches English and math to special needs students in middle school. I just love this acrylic Paris painting, her own version of Starry Night. Don't Swede and Rachel look like they were just tango-ing?

Paris, by Rachel

13 Lesley   My daughter.

Lesley went to art school in Detroit (College for Creative Studies), earning a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Interior Design, and a minor in Fibers. I have some gorgeous wearable art she has made. When she has time and energy after working very hard as a commercial interior designer in NYC, she knits, makes beautiful jewelry and creates re-styled clothes from vintage. I have included her charcoal self-portrait from art school, an interesting technique of covering the paper/canvas with charcoal then rubbing out the drawing with an eraser. Below that is a photo of a retail space she spent about 18 months designing with her boss at Spin Design where she still works, including the design of custom furnishings. I am especially fond of the gold mesh chandelier "sheaths." It is the Swiss watchmaker Audemars Piguet’s newly opened flagship store on 57th Street in NYC. I think the least expensive watch they sell is about $10,000, so please do browse -- you might bump into Arnold Schwarzenegger or Meryl Streep, who are AP customers. I like the juxtaposition of Lesley’s bohemian art school self and the posh watch store.

Self, by Lesley

Audemars Piguet flagship store, designed by Spin Design (by Lesley and her boss)

14 Peter   My son. 

Like my mom, Peter is a remarkable musician (guitarist, arranger). But he is also an artist and amateur photographer. This painting is one he did in Advanced Placement Studio Art in high school, in the manner of Peter Max. The photograph below that is one he shot in Hilo, Hawaii. Peter continually inspires me with his photographs and also excels at videography. (The photo of Peter and me is from a few years ago.)

Purty Gerty, by Peter

Hilo puddle, by Peter

15 Me My self.

I can draw some, but I don’t apply discipline or practice, so just sketching something once or twice a year means I haven’t developed my skills. The sketches span decades: a young man in a magazine while I studied abroad, Hal Holbrook as Mark Twain a couple of years back, an imagined girl 20 years ago, and a drawing for a Christmas card around that same time. If this is not your first visit to this blog, you know I love to take photos. The first photograph below is probably a favorite of mine, shot early one morning in October 2006, when I went out on Horseshoe Lake where our family cottage is, in Lesley’s kayak, with my little point and shoot Olympus. I watched the moon set and the sun rise in that two hour float. If you look very closely, you can see geese on the water at the left. The next photo is the same lake, same morning, the sun rising in fog, just about 30 minutes later. It may look silent, but dozens of geese were honking (like vuvuzelas). It is a strange feeling to hear something so loud and close, that is invisible.

Sketches, by me

two photos of Horseshoe Lake

top: moon setting -- can you see the geese in the mist at the left near the horizon?

bottom: 30 minutes later, sunrise

by me

Well, that's it! Thank you very much for visiting my family gallery today. I know it was long. Bravo for getting down to here. You can put your audio guide thingie over there by the door before you leave. Now the sun is up, and I hope you found some visual pleasure in the comfort of your chair.

There is more artistic talent in my family, including Nelson who designs kitchens, Susan who plays piano like a goddess, Nancy who decorates houses that should be in magazines, Jim who has skilled craftsman hands, and their many children, and their children, who are fragrant with artistic talent as well.

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