Fire

On a hot Saturday in August in the year 1967, I was with my dad at his new wife's house. This was never pleasant - anyone who’s had to share a parent soon after a divorce with that parent’s love-interest will attest to the oddness and uncomfortableness of it.

I don’t recall what was going on that afternoon, but I do recall other adults in the house and my father taking a phone call. He got off the phone and started to cry while quickly moving into the bathroom and shutting the door. The adults were whispering and talking low and us kids had no clue what was afoot.

Then, word starting spreading around the living room and hallway of the small ranch house. There was a huge fire. A three-alarm fire that was consuming my dad’s paper plant, the business he owned with his father and which had recently been expanding and doing quite well.

I remember going outside and looking to the northwest with my sister and soon to be step-brother. A huge plume of dark smoke rose on the horizon and seeing that smoke, immediately after hearing the bad news, brought a surreal doubleness to the experience. It was bearing witness to my father getting news of a life-altering tragedy and almost simultaneously seeing that accident progress. Unfortunately, he was way under-insured.

I had never seen my father cry before. That was weird for this son. Whether by training or DNA or television or whatever, guys didn’t cry except under extreme duress. I still rarely do. I knew when I saw him expose himself to this emotion, that something horrific must have occured and so it was that hot summer afternoon when I was thirteen years old.

Adjunctomania

A couple of years after moving to Cincinnati, I applied to graduate school at a local university. It was free. i was poor.

At that time the painting studios were in an old garage barn. Hastily built cubicles separated each budding artist.

One professor loved everything I did, which was of little use. Another wanted only to talk about non-art-related stuff...
similarly un-useful. The head guy blasted me for using too much color and scared me away from color for years hence. Fantastic.

The Senior Seminar consisted of looking at art and chatting. Nothing aimed at preparing us practically for the real world outside
of our little art barn was ever mentioned: e.g. how to write a resume, how to prepare for interviews, how to put a portfolio together. Little did I know that, once I started applying for jobs, each application would be competing with 4-600 other
applications. Fun.

I would continue to teach as an adjunct professor for eleven years. This job is the academic equivalent of the "sweat shop".
You work as hard or harder than full professors for about 1/4 the pay and no benefits and no job security. I entered this world at the forefront of the movement to replace retiring faculty with adjuncts and use the money instead for fancy new architecture, landscaping, and glossy mailers intended to raise more money for more fancy new architecture and landscaping. Hallelujah.

The World Within

Most mornings I read the New York TImes online. Today an editorial caught my eye and my imagination. Titled “A Universe of Us”, it referred to a recent paper in Nature by a team of researchers led by Jeffrey Gordon. He’s a microbiologist at Washington University. I know nothing about microbiology....but Washington U. is my alma mater. Go science!

The editorial notes that most of us are scarcely aware of the estimated 10 trillion individual cells that make up our bodies or the more than 100 trillion bacteria that inhabit each of us in a benign fashion. “Whatever else we are,” the editorial states, “we are also a complex ecosystem, a habitat.”.

Mr. Gordon’s team has written about a ‘viral identity’ that each of us possesses. Viral DNA that is “highly stable and highly distinct, even among closely related humans.”. The virome is the large community of benign viruses within us, part of the “microbiotic universe that makes us healthy.".

Mr. Gordon refers to individual human beings as “a genetic landscape.”.

It is all much greater than we can ever imagine.

Out of the Frozen Past

Out comes the old box of photos, for whatever reason, on a hot and humid Saturday.

I look around in there. So many faces without names. They are relatives unknown to me, their photographs mixed in with all of those I know well.
My eyes get misty for a second and I don’t know why.

There is Great-Grandma Schneider in the back row. To her left is Great-Grandpa Max, who died before I was born (The source of my baldness perhaps?). To her right, their two daughters: Mae, standing next to her, and Rose. Grandma Rose stands next to my beloved Grandpa Saul. Aunt Mae married into money. Grandma Rose did not. But Grandpa Saul always had very cool Buicks. One had the seats covered with clear plastic, the same strange vinyl that my grandparents had actually covered their living room couch with. Possibly this was a result of having lived through the Great Depression....I don’t know. They certainly wanted to protect their investments.

When Grandpa Saul died, no one wanted his Buick LeSabre, so, of course, I took it. The thing was about thirty feet long and ten feet wide and had velour seats. It was like driving around in your living room.

Grandma Schnieider had a very thick accent and I remember one time when my brother was ill, she concocted some kind of remedy. It looked like thick urine and had tiny seeds floating in it. I was a kid - it seemed weird and exotic and, thankfully, I wasn’t the one who had to take it.

Sleep Chamber

Sleep is wonderfully weird. Is it our best glimpse into Death or simply a
way-station for the brain on its path into a new day?

Bed time is loved and it is feared. Anyone who has experienced Insomnia - put me on the list - will tell you how it can increasingly feed into an expanding dread of the whole night-time-sleeping experience. We often worsen things with alcoholic drink, or sugary snacks or exercise....all things that hinder the onset of sleep. Drugs for sleep come with many strings attached, not the least of which is a chemical hangover.

The private bedroom is the Sleep Chamber. It takes on our personality and it becomes a kind of vaguely unique setting for this unavoidable realm into which we must go on a daily basis. It is the stage on which we experience the extraordinary and metaphysical imaginings of the mind as it seemingly resets and rests and repositions itself for the future. It also appears to take stock of the past in ways that usually baffle and befuddle us and leave us wondering just what in the world these dreams are about.

The social and sexual side of the bedroom is another matter entirely. Sleep, that nightly bit of sweet lunacy, is something we all share, like eating and pissing.
I love the Sleep Chamber. It’s a private Club House wrapped in the universal womb. It is a place to wander without leaving; think and learn, with or without words to read. It’s a place to make decisions or just worry, pray somehow or make love or death or even nothing at all.

Buildings & Things #1

I told my clients that I would water their plants the first week they were away, since I had the key to their penthouse condo. I was starting work on a mural - getting the base painting done while they were cruising in Arctic waters.
They have a good view of Cincinnati from across the river. You can see the Roebling Bridge in the midst of a paint job (designed by the same John A. Roebling who went on to do the Brooklyn Bridge).

The Ohio River looks bored and muddy. The new tall building going up is getting a strange crown on top that they are calling a tiara. Perhaps Christo and Jeanne-Claude can wrap it in white taffeta for the unveiling.

I started watering the fake plants until I realized my error. They are situated on the edge of the balcony, on the other side of the railing. They are fake. Well, they fooled me. Fake plants like fake architecture can often do the trick they are intended for.

I have a thought about good architecture: it seems to me that a great building still remains great even when it is filthy. It does not require constant washing.

Downtown

When I look at photos of Cincinnati in the early 20th-Century, I see a downtown that somehow looks larger, more vibrant and exhilarating than it does today. It looks European and more homogenous. How can this be, with so much “renewal” and “rebuilding” and “modernization”? Part of the answer may have to do with the sense of scale and ability to see the totality. Today we see pieces, parts of a puzzle. We like things slightly off-kilter and undefinable.

So much of Cincinnati’s architectural past has been torn down, especially the theaters. This seems to be true of many American cities. A rush to modernize or simple stupidity has trumped understanding of the value of treasuring important elements of our past and embracing them within the present. Many important buildings were saved of course but many were not. The present river front is a hideous mess: two enormous stadiums and an arena crammed tightly together with other buildings. Only the riverside park system is able to relieve this eyesore that could have been something truly remarkable. But in Cincinnati - to its credit -
the parks are the equal to those in any city anywhere.

The Jazz Drummer

When I was nine, my dad went away. As if overnight - he was suddenly gone. We would henceforth see him on alternate weekends. It was odd and disorienting and, in those days, not so common.

We all have our stories. Every family has its tales of ordinariness, weirdness, terror, tragedy, hilarity, joy, illness, love, hate, new birth and new death.

Phil came into our lives , along with two daughters, when I was eleven. He and my mom were married the next year. That word, "step-", came into our vocabulary. Phil was a true original and a veteran of Korea. He had lied about his age to get into the Army, around the age that most of us just begin to drive. And when he drove us kids around, he would tap rhythms on the steering wheel with the rings he wore on both hands. I was astounded at how good his little steering-wheel drum patterns were. In my secret dreams, I wished that Phil could be re-born as a jazz drummer. He loved the big bands and we shared a huge appreciation for Sinatra. When he died we had no funeral, only a memorial family get-together at my sister's house. She had sweetly put out some albums of photographs for all of us to look through. I thumbed through one of them and as I looked at the bottom of one page I was completely shocked to see one particular photo: it was a black and white shot of an Army jazz band and sitting there playing drums.......was Phil. He had never told us. Never talked about it.

The White Bird

As a child we came to Cincinnati infrequently and when we did it was a fairly big deal. Ordinarily, we went so that my mother could shop, an activity she always loved and I always loathed. But coming to Cincinnati often meant going to the restaurant in Shillito’s department store downtown. I assume that people still dressed less casually than today, but I don’t remember being overly dressed up. My only surviving memory of that is of the white covered dish that my turkey with mashed potatoes and gravy arrived in. The ceramic lid was shaped like a hen or a chicken or possibly a turkey. To me it was a marvelous and mysterious contrivance. I recall lifting that bird-lid for the first time, releasing aromatic steam and a marvelous sight that was always pleasing to this young boy. This treat made the shopping tolerable and for some reason that white, ceramic bird lingers in my battered memory to this day.