2011

2011.
Well, peace on earth and someone leave me a will.
Yeah.
Let’s gather up some sheaves and paint the town red!
I say to thee: don’t mind the economy....after all, we are mostly water.
They say we come from stars after all.

2011.
Global warm my heart, baby.
Let’s all jump on the Peace Train.
Fireworks and nothing works like love.
Oh, yes, it’s a long road to Coronado.

2011.
New Year.
New.
Year.
Hey, baby.
I hear thunder!

Why It's Hard to Laugh During the Holidays

Every year I tell myself that next year I will go away for the holidays. Go where?
Well, who knows? But every year I threaten this....telling the wind all about it.

I’ve been doing this for decades. Many people love the holidays and I say: bless their little hearts. Children love the holidays and I was once one of ‘em. I loved them too then.

Here’s what I did after coming home on Christmas eve from a family get-together: I watched Werner Herzog’s “My Son My Son What Have Ye Done”. It’s about a guy’s descent into madness as he practices the lead part of Orestes in an ancient Greek drama. Orestes kills his mother, and the movie character imitates this and uses his uncle’s sword on his mother.
This is fun holiday fare. Hey, I’m a movie buff.

Some of us in the middle of the world, especially Librans (if you believe that stuff), seek balance. When confronted with too much saccharin sentiment, we (me) reach for the opposite. Hence the Herzog.

Most people don’t respond well to this. It spoils their enjoyment of the endless festivities. They see the one (me) injecting cynicism, black humor, sarcasm, or any other manifestation of “darkness” as a spoiler or a buzz-killer.

I suppose I’ve gotten better - or is it quieter - during this time. When my daughter was young it was a wonderful thrill to witness her excitement, to see her open presents. Now she’s a teenager. Enough said.

So I watch my film alone and when I am with others I smile and enjoy myself.
I feel the love and the happiness that we are alive. Then I go home and get all
snuggly warm in bed and open “The Last Night of the Earth Poems” by Bukowski.

CHRISTMAS

Somebody help me, please. No, on second thought: when it comes to religion there is no help for me. I don’t get it. I’m no atheist. But neither do I believe the prevailing myths.

Perhaps even more than politics, religion brings out the best and worst in people.
The hypocrisy and violence perpetrated in the name of religion is well documented and very much alive all around us. The sincere charity and caring and healing done by religious people is also a reality, past and present.

Tradition is important. However, when tradition blinds one to the present.....then what? What do we do? When tradition causes one to act in ways that directly contradict some of the tenets of that same tradition.....what then?

What would Jesus say if he was alive today? Would he be horrified at the ways he has been turned into a celebrity of faith or used for shallow political advantage?

What is Christmas, exactly? I’ve never quite understood. I still don’t. The obvious crassness of the buying/shopping frenzy is nothing new. But what is it? Jesus was a mystery man. From what I have seen and read, nearly everything known about him is apocryphal. The history of the holiday is as varied as history itself and succeeding generations have changed and altered its significance. The date itself may have to do with the winter solstice or the supposed moment of Jesus’ conception or many other ideas put forth over the centuries.

I do love the lights and the trees and seeing children have fun.

I suppose that Christmas for me is seeing an old and close friend successfully donate one of her kidney’s to her ailing daughter this past weekend.

Christmas is helping a client and now friend - who is fighting breast cancer - hang up some sparkling things last night(including two cherubs I re-painted gold) in her glittering living room, drinking some wine and trying to make her laugh, and steering the conversation away from the side of her that is tinged with old-fashioned racist Republicanism. Christmas, I imagine, is seeing her as a person who is suffering and who needs to enjoy life......as we all do.

Silent Snow

Silent snow.
This year it has come earlier and more frequently than in recent years. It’s not
even the official start of winter yet.
The nincompoops will point to this as a refutation of Global Warming. They always seem to be the least well-informed among us and incapable of even noticing the ways in which the weather has already begun to behave oddly.

Silent snow.
I do love snow but I hate to drive my car in it.
One cannot deny its beauty, softness, strangeness and the wonderful way that it
dulls colors and creates a seemingly monochromatic environment.

I always loved Pieter Brueghel’s Hunters in the Snow.
It is a perfect image of a snowy winter world.
We haven’t changed. Humans haven’t changed. Brueghel captured our follies and misdeeds and loves and joys and labors and laziness and cruelty.
He did this in the sixteenth-century.

Silent snow.
Students wait for the bus as they do everyday. I peer down on them from across the street.
Their dark forms against the white ground recall Brueghel’s masterpiece. I wonder who they are, where they live, who their friends and family and loves are. Most, but not all, are quite young. They are on a quest. They are
hunters in their own right.
Hunting is in our DNA.
Not always....for food.

Jan & Joe

Jan: Why do men have so much trouble with commitment?

Joe: Who has trouble?



Jan: A lot of men do!

Joe: How many is “a lot”?

Jan: Are you trying to irritate me?

Joe: No. I just think it’s an unfair question. You can’t simply lump men together
into this big blob.

Jan: I never said that men are a blob.

Joe: Why can’t women accept their age?

Jan: What!?

Joe: See? It’s annoying to be lumped together with countless others.

Jan: I was just saying that a lot of men find it difficult to commit to one person
and they have the wandering eye.

Joe: You never look at other men?

Jan: Sometimes.

Joe: See!?

Jan: I look at Chanel handbags but I don’t pursue the purchase of one.

Joe: I’m quite faithful my dear.

Jan: I know you are.

MUSIC

I learned guitar from my brother who was four years older than me. I traded a trumpet for my first guitar. I must have been about fourteen. I had been taking piano lessons since I was eleven but this was a truly golden era in the evolution of rock-and-roll and I was all for it.

One time I auditioned at a local bar, in the middle of the world in Middletown, Ohio. It was called Dana’s. I was shy, insecure and had a lousy voice. Other than that I had a lot going for me. I played some Neil Young songs and a rarely played Rolling Stones song called “No Expectations”.

During the second song, I remember seeing the owner, Dana, presumably the one who was supposed to be listening to my audition, walk outside. He remained there for the rest of my short set. I finished, packed up and left and that was that.

I have continued to compose and play music for over forty years now. One discards illusions about where and when and how and why and how much.......as the years pile on. It’s enough to do something that you love. My fifteen-year-old daughter has introduced me to an entirely new generation of musicians who make wonderful recordings, full of life and poetry and love - far from the bland, annoying realm of popular radio and, especially, away from the incessant repetition of once good or even great songs now turned sour from endless playing day after day, decade after decade and mutated into the wretched “Classic Rock”.

Music, like painting, is a search, a dance, a walk uphill, a struggle with better angels. It is art and art slips easily out of the grasp of those who would rigidly define and limit its possibilities.

Infrastructure

Many of us endure and/or complain about the constant roadwork that surrounds us when we endeavor to bridge two separate locations in our motor vehicles. It’s frustrating to us because we have become accustomed to speed and efficiency in all aspects of our lives. We’re impatient. We hate the delays.

The road pictured above was worked on for many, many months. A new bridge was constructed farther down the hill. Yet - like many roads I have noticed lately - it has been revisited by the road crews. The newly paved black top has been dug up, the orange cones set in place again, the heavy equipment hauled back into place. Is this a problem stemming from the age of the pipes underneath? Is it poor workmanship? Who knows? The temperature is now about 50 degrees colder than it was when these guys finished last month. It doesn’t look like too much fun out there.

Way back in the twentieth century I owned a house for a few years, here in Cincinnati. The antiquated sewer system beneath the street my house sat on was dug up and repaired three years in a row. Completely black topped and then torn up again. We in the neighborhood started an annual picnic in August that we named Sewerfest. It seemed better to find humor in the situation rather than defeat and despair.

America’s infrastructure is aging and crumbling and, like the aging and crumbling empire that we seem Hell-bent on becoming, all signs point to increasing numbers of road-blocks, closed lanes, heavy machinery, traffic delays. The car has changed our social reality over the last century and now it lumbers on as a convenient but out-dated mode of transportation and one that increasingly makes
the trade-off much less easy to take.

fall

the first snow fall
it’s no longer fall
i hope she doesn’t fall
when she walks her dog

the flakes fall
and my memories fall
and the wishes fall
like ice crystals

time for lunch
and coffee

it’s really winter

again

Photos Recovered

Some time early in this decade my dad gave me a box of old photos that had belonged to his father. Grandpa Grund was a distant figure to me. We never saw much of him. He was built like an ox and had a big, raspy voice. He had moved his family to Ohio from Des Moines, Iowa, to be part of the scrap business. Armco steel was a mighty venture then, headquartered in Middletown. Grandma Grund died when I was very young.

Armco, like my grandfather, is no more. Similarly the relatives and their friends who populate these magnificent photographs are no longer around. The era of American manufacturing might is mostly gone as is the world made visible in these faded images. I am struck by how well everyone is dressed, even in casual situations. Other than my grandparents I don’t know who anyone is. I have asked my dad to sit with me soon and identify as many of them as he can.

A few years ago I put many of the photos in the box into an album. I took the album to my studio and later it disappeared. For over two years I could not find this album of photos. Just last week I uncovered it at the bottom of a stack, like an archeological find. There is an elegance, a restraint, an innocence, perhaps, that I see in these people that is largely unseen today. We are too used to the camera, too filled with information and experiences to be as uncalculating as these folks. Too much can be made of this I know - people haven’t changed all that much throughout history. But there is something memorable and a touch wistful in looking through this album.

I see my grandparents looking very young and in love. Grandma Grund wears my favorite hair style. In another photo I see two women sitting on a man’s lap and I develop an instant crush on the beautiful young woman at the right. They are all strangers. All passed away. Gone from present time but able to stir emotions through aging images that gather new mystery and meaning by virtue of their survival into the future.

JAN & JOE

Joe: Hey, I’ve got a great title for a country song.

Jan: What is it?

Joe: I Broke Her Heart So She Broke My Arm”.

Jan: That’s so dumb. Truly stupid.

Joe: I think it’s great! I’ve got another one, too.

Jan: Forget it.

Joe: “Love Kills and Yours is Murder”.

Jan: Have you seen the Times?

Joe: Who reads newspapers anymore?

Jan: I do. I thought you still did.

Joe: How’d you like that second one?

Jan: Forget the Times...where’s the wine opener?

JAN & JOE

Jan: Do you ever imagine what we must look like to ants?
Think about a knat that’s perched on your hair and looking down at the ground.

Joe: I have better things to think about.

Jan: Like what?

Joe: Like, what if an asteroid slammed into our planet right as I was about
to be awarded the Nobel Prize. That would be just my luck.

Jan: That’s ridiculous.

Joe: Why? It could happen!

Jan: You could win the friggin’ Nobel Prize? Hah! That’s good!

Joe: Just before the moment when that prestigious prize is about to be turned over to me, everything is swept away in a
gargantuan firestorm.

Jan: Oh, that’s a happy thought. But back to what I started out saying. The relative scale of things in the universe is freaky. And
without gravity none of this could exist. Yet we can't even see it or define it exactly.

Joe: “...the force that attracts a body towards the center of the earth, or toward
any other physical body having mass.”. Defined in the Oxford Dictionary.

Jan: Aren’t you clever... looking that up. Still, they can only call it a force. They don’t know what it is.

Joe: It’s what makes it possible to drink beer.

Jan: I often look down around my feet and imagine that my eyes are hundreds of feet up. It reminds me of when I was little,
playing with tiny toys outside in the grass and dirt. That small little patch of earth became an enormous world to me, so
much larger in my imagination than it was in real life.

Joe: I’m going into the kitchen to play with gravity.

Conundrum

Do we all reach a point in our lives where the fragility of life, the temporal evanescence of it, the delicate way in which the whole of living becomes a tenuous rather than an ongoing affair....is there a point where all of our searching resembles a quandary?

It wasn’t that long ago that life expectancy was half of what it is today. That we live much longer these days is something I find comforting. We are endlessly worried about the various diseases and environmental poisons that surround us yet somehow most of us manage to make it well beyond the average life span of recent human history.

Getting older is a conundrum.

We relax in the face of the familiar but we know all too well that any day might be our last. We have no more idea of what lies beyond death than we do of the concepts of our religions that tell us that life continues on. It is all a matter of faith. In the scheme of things, we are neither tiny nor enormous. Size seems more and more relative. We are unique. Each and every one of us. This idea comforts me in a way that the silly storybook notion of Heaven never has. Even as a child I found this Heaven concept a bit of a stretch.

Old age brings so many wonderful surprises but also the diminishment of the body, the thing by which we have defined ourselves to the world since birth.
We know that people look at us and see an older person but inside us this doesn’t square with our looking outwards through our eyes. Our looking upon the world remains essentially the same as it has always been. This discrepancy - between the essential continuity of perception and the way in which we are perceived at this point in time - creates a new frontier for us, a new world that we slowly stumble into. It would be easy to be saddened by this, to seek the Fountain of Youth and whatever stuff gives us the appearance of continued youth. So many fall into this trap. But there is something richer, more profound, more rewarding, that seems to be around for those of us who want to be who we are - not who we think we should be.

SOUP

What to do here in the middle of the world when work is slow
and the rainy, cold, November weather has kicked in?



What to do when yer aging body holds you hostage in response to that
extra glass of red wine the night before?

What to do on a gloomy day when any number of humans would be perfectly
within their rights to despair and fret about things as they are?

Here’s what to do:
make some homemade soup.

Parent Camp

My daughter started Kindergarten about ten years ago.
We wanted to send her to a very good “magnet” school and at that time the procedure involved getting up early and waiting for an announcement specifying which location among several would be the place to sign up your child.
It was a bizarre game of musical chairs played out with anxious parents, one of them usually out roaming in a car waiting for the word from their partner that told them where to go.
Once the location was announced, parents would make a mad rush to get there in time to be among the limited number of accepted applicants.

If this sound like utter madness.....that may be because it is.

Now, the destination is made clear in advance. Some measure of sanity has triumphed, I suppose.

But now parents camp out - rain or shine or heat or cold - for days. These photos above were taken on a Saturday morning. Most of these people had been here since Thursday. The sign-up time? Monday night at 11PM.

As the rest of the advanced world passes the U.S. by in graduation rates, test scores, and overall measures of the quality of public education, this kind of nonsense - having to camp out for days to get your kid in a good school - stands out as yet another testament to a government that has turned its primary aspirations towards enriching the already wealthy among us.

nature walk

Ah.....a walk in the woods. I belong to a "nature center" that is one of my favorite places here in the middle of the world.
A quiet walk in the woods is a tonic for what ails ya.
Especially late in the day in the Fall - the very best of the best.

Re: Roosevelt

I mistakenly wrote that Roosevelt Junior High School had been demolished.
It seems that I jumped the gun: it is only in the process of being demolished.

This photo I stole from the Middletown Journal appears to show my ninth-grade science teacher. At least it appears to be him -
forty years on.
He was a tough guy. My friend Sam and I were whispering to each other during a test but Mr. Peters apparently only saw Sam's mouth moving. He strode slowly over, John Wayne style, and casually crinkled up Sam's test in his large hands, smashed it into a little ball - all without losing his stride.

I think Sam failed that test.

Roosevelt

Yesterday I saw someone’s posting on the internet that my old junior high school building - Roosevelt Jr. High - has been torn down. This was in Middletown, my childhood home in the middle of the world. The place I escaped from as soon as I graduated High School.

I was a bit sad when my elementary school - Wilson Elementary - was demolished some years ago to build a new school in its place. My elementary school memories are like a Hallmark Greeting Card, sweet and gauzy and laced with happy sentimentality.

Not so Roosevelt.
I went from a good elementary school in a relatively safe, unified environment, in the midst of a fairly safe middle-class neighborhood, to a large melting pot of kids from all over the place.
I befriended guys we called “hoods” in those days and some Saturdays in seventh grade - after morning basketball games at Roosevelt - we’d go shoplifting downtown. Small stuff like belts.
One of those guys is dead, one I know went to prison years ago for counterfeiting or some such thing.

Fights after school were a common occurrence.
My one and only school fight came after I defended my buddies at lunch from verbal assaults delivered by a ninth grader. We were seventh graders. He told me to meet him after school and, of course, I had no choice but to honor that.
He was much taller than me and his first punch knocked off my glasses. That was a major coup for him seeing as how I was terribly nearsighted. I landed a couple of punches that did little damage.
A parent of a friend stopped his car next to us on the street and yelled at us to stop.
He drove off and naturally we started brawling again.
The tall ninth grader threw a right punch that landed squarely on my mouth. Less than a week earlier my teeth had been branded with braces, the wires not yet attached.
This punch slammed my skin into the metal, shredding the skin. Blood poured forth.
I refused to give up, but the same father of a friend came by and stopped the fight.
I was a mess.

I won’t miss that damned school.

Political No show

What is the significance of the midterm election yesterday?
Not much.
No one who really reads in some detail about what the issues are and the solutions offered by various candidates - will find any solace or consternation in the ridiculous nonsense that passes for governance in the U.S. today. No, serious followers of politics might find themselves perplexed, disappointed, or downright depressed by the simplistic and skewed baloney, malarky, hypocrisy,
looniness, deception, stupidity.......that was the money-stuffed campaign season.

For me it has become a big shrug. I am delighted if anything comes out of Washington actually intended to assist ordinary Americans who struggle with a system ridiculously skewed in favor of the rich and powerful.

Here are my candidates for President, Vice-President and Treasury Secretary:
Bill Moyers, David Brooks and Paul Krugmann.

While I’m at it, I should add Curly Howard for Secretary of State.

Oh yeah, he’s dead.

AUTUMN

I was born in October and it remains my favorite month.

On the cusp of winter, the temperatures cool and humidity drops enough to make the outside a wonderful place to be. The angle of the sun’s rays changes so that the late afternoon light becomes more reddish, and this melds perfectly with the change in leaf colors. Deeply saturated hues in the earth-colored palette begin to glow in ways unseen at any other time of year. Within the late arriving rays of a fall day, near the purple shadows of autumn, it is as if Rembrandt’s magic light has exploded into the larger physical world.

Maybe because we know that winter is soon to be upon us, the fall season contains the sweet ingredient of wistfulness, of the awareness of time slipping quickly by. That heightens the importance of appreciating and enjoying the momentary, the present, the small gifts of an ever-changing reality.

ELECTRONICS

As I write this on my computer keyboard, I think back to a time - not so long ago - when I wrote on a typewriter. Computers had not yet reached the masses. Cell phones did not exist.

As easy as it is to lament the loss of privacy (cell phones) and the deluge of information (computers/Internet) that new technologies have brought into being over the last three or four decades, it is just as easy to find pleasurable things to say about these machines.

The yin and yang of existence applies to everything, it seems, large or small.

Every time my teenage daughter is out for the evening, I am thankful that she has a cell phone.

Writing on the computer is easier and quieter than the “typer” (to use Bukowski’s phrase). The Internet is a wonder of human knowledge, curiosity, nonsense, and minutiae. Software programs like iPhoto and Garageband allow me to work with photos and music in ways unimaginable a few decades before.

We all pay a price for this of course. As an artist I am all too aware of the cheapening and dilution of certain aesthetic experiences that have been part of the worlds of painting and sculpture for centuries. Some of the intimacy, the seriousness, the erudition, the magic (for lack of a better word) has been lost in the ever-swelling tidal wave of electronically transmitted words and images that surrounds us now.

There is also the sense at present that a new global society is taking shape before our eyes. We become more aware of how much suffering exists everywhere but also how much we all have to share and how many opportunities exist to better ourselves and our world. Greed, violence and power-mongering still rule on the blue ball - but at least the electronics are available for all...........for now.

Plastic Grapes

I still have one of my first-ever oil paintings - done when I must have been about twelve or thirteen....unless my memory fails me, which would not be too unusual.
It’s painted on cheap canvas board. The subject is a banal still-life, self-consciously set up on piece of thin wood panelling. This panelling also appears as the background. My stepfather Phil had built two bedrooms in the basement of our house and he finished the walls with sheets of this wood panelling.

The lamp was an oil lamp which I remember clearly. There is the stylized coaster holder from Israel. The grapes were most likely plastic. The wine glass was a needed touch of green. And, of course, no respectable still-life that includes a wine glass and grapes could exist without the chianti-basket-bottle! The dark fabric adds an element of theatricality to the whole silly procedure.

My weak memory allows for little familiarity with the making of this thing. What strikes me is the attention to detail. I do remember painting the facets of the lamp globe reflecting the flame within. Like many students of painting, I was lost in the trees unmindful of the forest. I was certainly no Caravaggio.

I’m glad to have this old still life because I have always struggled between Classicism and Expressionism, to use two common terms. The worlds that these two ideas embody roughly frame the clash between analytical observation and freely-embraced intuition. Modernism rose out of the friction inherent in this duality and I have embraced many of the tenets of the Modernist movement. Finding the balance between the two is in my DNA and forms the basis for my art. That said, I feel today nearly as clueless as I was when I carefully finished this bad painting. The largest difference now, I suppose, is that what was once laborious is now nearly effortless and what my young self thought to be reality has since exploded into the ten thousand things.

3 AM

3AM is tonight’s middle-of-the night arising here in the middle of the world.

For a long time it seemed to be always 3:33AM.

Age brings the call of the bathroom during sleep hours and with that the possibility that sleepiness will not be waiting for me once I get back in bed. Reading, writing, getting a glass of water.....the mundane things one does to fill that void are many. Sometimes they work, sometimes not, and two hours spent restlessly awake is not unusual.

Sleep is its own universe of biorhythms, sounds (interruptions or lack of them), dreaming, movement. So many things help or inhibit sleep. Sleeping completely through the night is an anomaly for me.

It’s sprinkling outside. The occasional swish of car tires arcs through the relative silence in this room. Rain, any rain, in the midst of near-drought conditions, is welcome. I have an old clock radio that plays “natural” sounds. I always choose the constant rain sound.

So far tonight, however, it hasn’t helped.

Poem From An Unfinished Song

At Once the Sweet Sound of a Lovely Day

At the back of the house we’ve stashed a treasure
Next to the painted flower box
Thanks for the drink I love your porch.

This has been a very strange year I said
The weather is distorted should I sit
In this purple chair?

Upstairs her brother talked endlessly
into his cell phone without caring
who heard his words or was bothered by them.

At once the sweet sound of a lovely day
Washed over everything within our reach
Thanks for the drink I really hear you.

MOLAR

Yesterday my dentist yanked a large, cracked, infected, dead molar out of my gums. It was a big one, second to last on the upper right side.

Like many good citizens, I really hate going to the dentist. I have had zillions of fillings in my life. Three gold crowns. Braces. And now that my body is on the road to ruin the old fillings are falling out and within the last six months three of my teeth have had large chunks of them break off.

It is an unsettling and weird experience when a piece of a tooth cracks off. However, nothing could prepare me for the completely surreal encounter with tooth extraction. I had to have two extra shots during the procedure to beef up my numbness. Then some pushing. And then a long couple of pulls and that was that. It is a strange thing.

Afterwards comes hours of bleeding. It is one thing to have a bleeding wound somewhere on one’s body. It is an annoyance but nothing like having blood spew forth into the mouth. Now - taste - is part of the fun. Blood tastes odd.

Today the gaping hole in my mouth reminds of how human I am, yet there is little comfort in that. Instead, I imagine an ear or my nose falling off. I see scenes from the Jeff Goldblum version of The Fly in my mind’s eye.....him pulling out his nails and other body parts slipping off during his transformation to human/fly hybrid.

My tongue slips unwittingly back into the black dental hole as I begin to feel the stirrings of a human/geezer hybrid.

Grandma Rose

Grandma Rose exists firmly in my memory. I remember her distinct way of speaking, the sights and smells of her kitchen, how she stuttered while going through all of our names till reaching the right one when we were doing something wrong. She was quiet and reserved and never one to display broad emotions. She never learned to drive.......the “machine”, as my Grandpa always called whatever Buick he owned at the time.

Grandma was first married in the 1920’s to Abe Goldzwig. Abe went swimming at the YMCA with his father-in-law, my Great-Grandfather Max Schneider (who died before I was born) and somehow......some way: he drowned. Then, according to an old custom that I know nothing about, his brother Saul stepped in and offered to marry my grandmother. Saul was my grandpa.

I have few photographs of Grandma Goldzwig. One I re-discovered recently shows her walking in front of a garage, probably at their home in Miamisburg, Ohio. She is very well dressed and turns to the camera as if caught off guard.

In another photo she appears inside the store she owned with my grandpa, Fashion Dress Shop, also in Miamisburg. This photograph is dated - June, 1969 -
and she is dressed in an old-fashioned costume for some sort of town hoopla. I look at the image and think of the devastating history taking place in this country that year and I also think of how often Grandma looked this way in photos. Not exactly ill-at-ease but still slightly uncomfortable with the attention being placed on her, a bit stiff and unwilling to yield anything of her inner self.

Once, when my grandpa was in the hospital undergoing serious surgery for stomach cancer, my brother and I kept my grandma company at her house. Our family doctor had confided to me that grandpa’s chances were not good, so I was worried and also concerned for grandma’s well-being. I remember sitting with her at the kitchen table, listening as she unrolled a whole host of interesting stories from the past. She came alive as she recalled people and events from long-ago times. For me the best stories were about a distant cousin known as Red. He was someone completely unknown to me. Grandma’s words painted a vague portrait of a real character, someone who gambled and travelled around, involved in who-knows-what kind of shenanigans. He was my kind of guy - and - best of all........he was my relative.

Grandpa survived the surgery and went on to live for another decade. Grandma did not - she died before him with Alzheimer’s.

HUMANS

When I think about humans - which happens often, since I am human - the foremost notion about our species that comes to mind is this: there are too many of us.

I know that vast areas of this planet are “uninhabited” and that is fine by me. But we tend to congregate together and thus our presence on Earth tends primarily towards concentrated population zones. With the ever-advancing speed of technological innovation, comes more and more STUFF. We have become a species that loves the things we make and we surround ourselves with so many things that we allow the waste and destruction that accompanies their creation and use to remain largely outside of our consciousness. Not just the pollution that is already altering the climate globally, but also the more mundane junk that multiplies everywhere. We buy a simple doo-dad at the store and think nothing of the complicated plastic container that holds it and as we toss this plastic object into the waste can no one shudders. I do this countless times a week and I realize how ridiculous it is. One tries to be thoughtful....but the stuff keeps coming and piling up and the landfill is the new collective unconscious of the consumer society.

Most of believe we are special - humans, that is. We gaze at the extraordinary images sent to us from the Hubble telescope, images of entire galaxies reduced to lovely little swirls in a mind-boggling panoply of countless such galaxies, and then many of us wonder if we are the only inhabited planet in the universe. The utter silliness of this is on the order of the nincompoops who visit the Creation Museum and buy the snake oil package for what it is.

A wonderful object, it seems to me, is a thing of preciousness to which we may become attached in a reciprocal and meaningful relationship. Place twenty objects alongside this first object and you have reduced its specialness somewhat. The collector would disagree with this but that is a different case.

My friends in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles might disagree that there are two many humans around. But even here in the middle of the world, the change has become dramatically apparent. We seem to be everywhere.