Holiday Hampton Place

Here it comes. It’s coming this way. Every year it comes. Closer and closer now. I sense with dread the impending cling and clang and car door, arguments over guest lists, fear of food failure, horror stories dripping in heavy salt and carbohydrates.

The Holiday Season..............is coming.

Way back in the town of my birth, in the MIddle of the World, our family went every Thanksgiving to my grandparents house on Hampton Place. Always impeccably neat and tidy, the house was a curiosity to me because of its faintly old-fashioned decoration and odd collectibles placed about. I liked the clean, white-painted woodwork and the mysterious, knotty-pine lined bedroom upstairs with built-in and oversized drawers.

Grandma Rose oversaw most of the cooking and seemed to stay in the kitchen long after the rest of us were well into our meal. Voices would rise up to cajole her into joining us, which she would eventually do. Years later when Grandma was unable to host this feast our mom took over and maintained this tradition of staying in the kitchen long after the meal began. 

Were prayers or thanks or blessings every given, ideas to the effect of being grateful proffered at the dinner table? Not that I can remember, but a poor memory is one of my strongest features.

I do recall ever so vividly that every single year at meal’s end my Grandpa Saul would grab his old box camera and tell us to face him for a family portrait. He had one of the old-style cameras where one looks down into the viewfinder situated on the camera’s top. His camera had an attached flash. And each year we would wait patiently while Grandpa set up his shot. We waited and waited and then waited some more. Finally, he would push the button on the camera and as surely as the sun would rise the next day, the flash bulb would fail to fire.

Every year we would laugh. Grandpa would try again. Same result. More laughter. 

That’s my favorite holiday memory.

Guest Writer: Poet Edward Grayson

constant dovetail

half plan constant dovetail,

each into another,

baby the furniture is old, the bones

brittle some break

sometime worry for mother

she even older even more frail

than the bridge

imagined spanning a dream

high up on an impossible

ridge where a friend

pulls a slab of beef

out of dark soup, where

rooms interlock and shift dimension

time is cracked, words wander,

meaning may be disguised, 

as in the world of our time,

baby we hold on, we

smile and joke to anchor

our bloody selves to the sky.

whole mind wakes

to another virgin morning,

before coffee is the stretch

from fading dreams towards

sunlight and weather and air

that is felt

completely

alone.

Seconds Pass

So busy that art gets left behind...no time or energy to paint. So busy that writing simple things - like this - gets left out of the day.

So: a simple walk in a state park surrounding a river on a perfect Fall November day when the sky is achingly clear and the temperature hovers in the upper 60’s and an easy breeze carries healing scents all around ya.

Walking with my gal and my head clears. Stepping along over a stagecoach path that once stretched from Cincinnati to Pittsburgh. Many old ghosts simmering nearby.

I climb up a slight hill to hide behind an ancient fallen rock formation whose top is a fertile garden for all sorts of growing things. I’m there to pee, as other hikers don’t really need to be my audience. I look down upon a world of leaves, grasses, sticks and other assorted life forms. In my thoughts I hear the scientist speaking on NPR about theories suggesting that our universe is like a bubble in an infinite stretch of other bubbles. The endless relativity of large and small. These lovely leaves look up at me. Seconds pass. Then I walk away.

Ninth Grade School

My daughter is here with me a bit longer than usual this week, as her mom has left for Portland, Oregon, to visit her sister.

So, I have more time to take in the life of my teenager, a Junior in High School. The school experience so thoroughly takes over her life that everything else becomes peripheral activity. She struggles with Economics. I never took that subject and thank the gods for that.

My Junior year is a blur but my ninth-grade year was an anomaly because the Middletown School system had created an experiment that year - a “Ninth-Grade School” - and I was one of the guinea pigs. Every ninth grader from the surrounding district  went to this one school. They chose the old high-school building, in all its classical splendor, to be the site of this grand adventure.

From the start it became obvious to many of us that those in charge did not have a handle on things, that this new endeavor was fraught with problems, namely major holes in the security and disciplinary systems. As fifteen-year olds are want to do, we naturally exploited this at every opportunity. We snuck out, hid out, wandered about, fibbed, slid around and generally became unruly.

Our gym teacher was a genial, skinny fellow who happened to have a stutter and who had been my gym teach at elementary school. He was nearly ineffectual as a disciplinarian and so paid the price for his meekness.

During one lecture on “Health” issues, certain students silently and intermittently tossed pennies to the front of the room. Reaching a climax of irritation and anger, he raised his voice (such as it was), stutteringly telling us to cease or else and at the exact nano-second after he stopped...a penny landed with a clink at his feet.

Other guys found out during the year that I had especially good handwriting and could write in many styles. Of course I gave in to their requests for parental notes excusing them for running amok somewhere other than school. During the last week of classes, I had to go into the gym teacher's office for something. I stood next to his desk as he opened a large drawer and there, at the bottom, was a pile of parent notes......most of them mine.

Deer

I came home today after working very hard, tired and sore, yet inspired enough by the beautiful weather to mix a drink and sit out on the screened-in porch.

There in the back yard were two young deer.

I’ve seen this sight before, but this afternoon it was particularly sweet and engaging. I quietly sat and watched them scrounging for morsels.

This ain’t New York City....but it is in the city. I live on a busy four-lane road across from a college. Not so long ago it would be almost unimaginable to see deer roaming around this yard. But their habitats have been so vastly destroyed for housing development that seeing them today was no surprise.

But it was still a lovely moment to take part in.

ISRAEL

My oldest friend Danny is passionate about Israel and most importantly the ways in which the media misrepresents the situation there. I’ve always been more concerned about my land of birth and especially the way that compassion has become a dirty word in some quarters in the U.S. - most notably amongst so-called Christians.

I asked Danny months ago to send me links to articles he’s reading about Israel. Many of them come from the Jerusalem Post. Many reflect a society in turmoil, unsure of how to proceed, with a burgeoning faction that wants conciliation as opposed to those who see hypocrisy and lies on the pro -Palestinian side mostly ignored by worldwide media. He sent a link to a documentary that reveals Palestinians faking attacks by Jewish military...handy ambulances showing up to pick up “injured” Palestinians who are shown later to have been acting. He sends links to articles showing how most Palestinians and Arabs want Israel destroyed, links to articles speaking to how the world seems to blame Israel for hostilities but mostly ignores the relentless rocket and mortar attacks from Palestinian groups.

I look at this map and I see a tiny nation, a homeland for the Jewish people, surrounded by so many larger and hostile nations.

Danny reminds me that the Arab nations have the power and wealth to help the Palestinian people but over decades have chosen to leave them hanging in the balance, a useful propaganda tool against Israel.

I had a dream the other night where I was in some German town and at the end of the dream I was with my sister and I said to her something like “just imagine if we had lived here then....”. And we both started to cry and I woke up with tear-stained eyes.

Hesse

When I was my daughter’s age - 16 - I was enthralled by the writings of Hermann Hesse. Stories of life-altering travels, internal exploration, philosophical and Romantic pondering...the forces of nature always present as sources of awe and wisdom.

I have thought recently of re-visiting these books but haven’t for fear that I might be disappointed. Their romanticism would likely no longer have the eloquent soul-moving reverberation it once had. I have not even shared them with my daughter, thinking they might be too much of another time.

I’m not a total cynic. But so many thoughts left by so many long-passed people now ring truer than ever...at this point in my journey. Life is short. The grass is always greener on the other side. Those who ignore history are condemned to repeat it. On and on. The world looks ever grimmer even as so many truly magnificent, gracious, inspiring and life-renewing events continue to occur.

We haven’t changed all that much - we humans. The Death of this and that is always announced. Like Painting. But humans live and die and time passes and so pass the things people want to do. Totalitarianism is the attempt to stop this process and we see how well that works. Entropy prevails. Death and Birth prevail.

Empires come and go and the present decline of the American empire reflects the same dramas as empires past. Greed, selfishness, jealousy, hypocrisy, lack of empathy and self-control - it spins forever on.

Maybe I should re-visit one of those wrinkled old books.

Thank You Life

Four days home and I am still struggling to climb back on top of the old beast of burden, namely the things I’m obliged to do out of responsibility and survival. After the first two-week vacation in twenty years, I remain relaxed and somewhat more absent-minded than usual.

The perfect vacations are the ones without specifics, timetables, or the necessity of meeting someone’s expectations. This sojourn was a gem. Myself and my companion. Sitting, reading, walking on the beach or in the pine forest, sipping wine while painting on the porch, lying in bed with the cool lake breezes cradling the room.

Leisure time is time to reflect, zone out, sleep, dream, ponder or not. It is a time to re-experience innocence within the broad parameters of nature and the human visitation.

Thank you life.

Two Weeks

The European idea of at least a month of vacation every year seems to me eminently sensible. Of course, who the hell can afford that. Not me. Those “active” vacations - scheduled daily to the hilt...with lots of things to do, places to see, people to talk with - are anathema to me. I can’t think of anything less like a vacation. I conjure up notions of rest, reflection, timelessness (at least being able to not care about time), quiet joy.

Now twenty years since I had a two-week vacation - lots of 5 or 7 day journeys but not more - I leave in the morning for two weeks in a cottage on Lake Michigan. It sits behind a tree-lined quiet lane right on the beach. Best of all I traded labor with my friends who own it in exchange for rent. There is no TV and no internet, no computer, no dvd player. Hallelujah.

I take books, camera, lots of paints and things to paint on, and my cheap guitar. My gal and I are also taking along some pleasant wine, enough to last.

This is a blessing and a thrill and brother I aim to enjoy it.

A Moment in Time

Two weeks ago I returned from my brother’s home in South Carolina with the family slides - missing for possibly fifteen years and only recently found to be stored in box of my nephew’s stuff. I still have not managed to put them in some order and get them transferred to digital disc. Some of them are faded or turned a reddish hue that suggests long ago times.

I don’t even own a projector so I randomly draw one from the small green box and hold it up to a spotlight. There, magically before my eyes, is a scene at the dining room table in the house I grew up in. My mother sits at the center, looking almost girlish in her thirty-something style. She looks so damn young! At the left her sister Marlene sits with a casually raised arm holding a cigarette. Everyone smoked then.

My grandpa Saul stands behind them in the living room casually listening in on the conversation. His easy and elegant style is drawn from a time before my generation changed all the rules about casual dress. Amazingly, I have to imagine that he must have been then about the age that I am now. I don’t know the date of this photograph.

To the right my Great-grandma Schneider holds court, making her points more strident by that expressive wave of her arms. I can hear her thick Polish accent and, more likely than not, an account of something with which she disapproves.

A moment in time. 

DS

I give thanks to this televised entertainment show - The Daily Show - and to John Stewart and his comrades for providing relief, remedy, comfort and laughs in lieu of the steady stream of corruption, greed, arrogance, stupidity and narrow-mindedness that passes for much of what we call Congress in these here United States in the year 2011.

PARIS

My daughter’s in Paris with her friend’s family and thanks to the digital realm I have received short but sweet messages from her. She loves the city and especially Montmartre. 

I can’t help but remember my last journey to Europe and to Paris. It was 1990 and I managed to get a travel scholarship from the University of Cincinnati to aid me in researching my thesis as a graduate Art History student. The thesis - never completed - was The Artist in Old Age/Titian and Picasso. Paris was beautiful of course, but at night, shimmering in lights along the Seine, it was no place to be alone. One needs a loved one near by in a romantic setting like that.

My Chloe is only sixteen and here she is basking in European culture.The history there is overwhelming, yet a visit to the Picasso museum clings to my memory most vividly. Situated in a very old hotel, a completely non-museum-like place, it is comfortable and different. It is also the place where I was able to see a number of his very late works for the first time. The greatest painter ever, he never misses, rarely disappoints and is forever an endless universe of ideas.

Certainly, the Louvre cannot be missed. The cool, tightly wound canvasses of Poussin reveal their wonderful mystery and design when seen in such abundance. The glass pyramid was a new addition when I arrived. Stepping off the escalator that lowers visitors to the entrance area, I saw I.M. Pei with a group of people and I imagined his excitement even as I questioned his creation.

My daughter’s in Paris and tomorrow taking a night train to Amsterdam. I am happy that she is seeing another part of this amazing planet and getting a chance to add to her awareness that the United States is not the center of the world.

Christmas in July

Anyone who works with art materials knows that they are expensive and keep getting more and more expensive. As bad as it is to shop for groceries (defribrillators should be stationed in every aisle) going into an art supply store is an exercise in sheer terror.

So it was with extraordinary glee that I listened as my sister-in-law offered me free art supplies during my recent visit. The supplies were leftovers from a store she had opened in another town and had to close. She pulled four large, plastic boxes from underneath a bed and we carried them into her dining room.

“Take one of each” she announced. And so I sat at the table like a child at the greatest birthday party ever, carefully rummaging through tubes of paint, brushes, bottles of medium, boxes of charcoal. Everyone else was in the next room. I was alone with my glittering field of riches, happy as I could possibly be.

Shelley’s generosity was enormous and for an artist, especially one as financially challenged as this one, being given free art materials was/is an infusion of life-blood, a gift of the magical stuff that allows ideas and imaginings to become visually present.

Thank you.

Southern Voyage

Only two hours ago I returned from a voyage to South Carolina to see my brother and sister-in-law. I travelled in air-conditioned comfort thanks to my sister and her comfy car and we went with our father and his companion....it was her idea.

This is a place with churches on every block it seems and yellow pine trees all over the place. My sister-in-law Shelley’s family is deeply rooted in this land - easily traced back to the seventeenth century. Her father died recently and we travelled to his house, built in 1915 by family and the place she and my brother aim to move before too long. A sense of history and southern culture surround one there, things reaching out to you from long ago, some of them withered and barely able to whisper their presence. The house is covered floor to walls to ceiling in yellow pine. I walked through it like a visitor to a museum, awed and amused and welcomed.

My father has early Alzheimer’s and certain questions came forth again and again. It was no big deal to repeat the answer to “Where did you go to college?”.

We were in a comfortable realm, spoiled by two wonderful hosts, fed like the world might end tomorrow. We welcomed “Happy Hour” like true vacationers and did little or nothing with joy and exuberance.


A visit to the original family homestead revealed the remains of a once-proud house now barely standing. Who knows what secrets remain behind those weather-beaten walls, tales of a world where slaves were kept and survival meant something unfathomable to us driving in for a quick look?

The draw of Shelley’s family history is what gave this visit its richness and curiosity and sense of exploration, more than the local sights. I envy that kind of family history documented and present in surroundings. I have no idea what towns my relatives come from, only the countries: Germany, Russia, Lithuania (perhaps), Poland. No specifics. No one seems to know. I suppose that since I am well intrenched in middle age, these things have come to be of greater importance than ever before. Maybe it is time to find some answers.

Pinot for Charlie

I’m working on a difficult job in a large expensive home - a faux green lacquer wall finish in a dining room. The pressure is on to make it work. My hand hurts because I am aging and my body has had enough. I put on the gray primer with only a brush, as I and my assistant will do for the entire job. Brushing, brushing, all day brushing.

The clients fortunately are lovely people, appreciative, patient and friendly.

I strike up a conversation with the man of the house about wine. I know from working for these folks a decade ago that John is crazy about wine. I let him know that I have re-discovered wine this year, found that it no longer makes me sleepy. I have started to understand the subtlety, nuance, variety, mysteriousness of wine. We talk for a while about it and I hit him up for information gleaned from his many years as an aficionado.

Minutes before I am ready to leave, he walks in and hands me a bottle of my favorite kind of wine: pinot noir. He says that this one is his favorite and mentions that it is a tad beyond the price range we had been discussing (below $20.00). I am thunderstruck and suggest that perhaps I should save it. “No,” he says, “ you should drink it this weekend. Life is too short.” And so I did. And it was ethereal, balanced, smooth, wonderful. It played itself out on the center of the tongue, grape flavors below and spices above. Magnificent gift.

My sister’s dog Charlie died today. Charlie was huge - a golden-doodle, I think - and more like a person than a dog, as sweet as could be. He went everywhere with she and her husband. He died on the way to the animal hospital. Only four years old. Perhaps blogging about wine is superficial in the wake of their loss. But I am thinking that it is the wonderful, beautiful, mysterious and profound things in this life that wake us up and cut deep into our selves. Passion comes in many shapes and sizes. Bless you Charlie.

HOPE?

Before the last presidential election Obama spoke here in my favorite park, on a brilliantly clear day. The air was filled with excitement and the energy of citizens united behind a man we all believed offered a clear way out of the quagmire and relentless bleakness of the Bush Administration. 

Three years later many of my more liberal compatriots are extremely disappointed in Obama and some have even abandoned all Hope in him. Others point out that he has always been a moderate and has not changed at all.

I have believed for a long time that the Presidency has become bloated and over-stuffed with significance that is belied by reality and the truth that the office is hindered by so many compromises and promises made during the campaign, so beholden to power and wealth...that real limits exist there. Add to this the fact that much of the American public is so spoiled and obsessed with getting their way that they cannot even stop to check out the facts and take the time needed to form considered opinions.

On top of all of this is the media monster that reflects a zillion eyes upon ourselves constantly and pumps up certain things to gin up interest or ratings or excitement. The President is evaluated by the minute and is damned if he does and certainly damned if he does not.

I also have been disappointed.

But I reflect back on my trip to Washington to an enormous anti-war/anti-Bush rally that was downplayed by the monstrous media but there - on the ground of the mall - was an amazing confluence of concern, patriotism, and wildness, Sean Penn and Tim Roberts speaking across a sea of faces.

I remind myself of the Bush Administration that operated like Mubarak’s Egypt or of other even more sinister cabals....pushing the ideological line over any other concerns, regardless of result, regardless of the damage.

Obama, for all his faults, remains a better choice.

THE NIGHT

I have started reading Elie Wiesel’s Night after so many years of avoiding it.

As a teenager in Sunday school I was shown many horrific films about the Holocaust. The scope and depth of its evil was and is always something unimaginable and incomprehensible. Years later I watched Shoah and then I think I could no longer bring myself to experience any documentary forms about this cosmic tragedy.

I became friends with someone several decades ago whose parents were both caught up in the rise of Nazism. Her mother was from a well-to-do family whose wealth was stolen from them before their eyes. Both she and my friend’s  father

managed to pay their way out of the ensuing nightmare, since this was in the early years. They refused to speak German henceforth. I knew them both slightly but never broached the subject. Over the years I would meet others with relatives 

caught up in the horror of the time. One listens.

The stories about children are the hardest to hear, not only because I am a father. They belie any understanding of humanity and lead one to question the very existence of our species. How are we capable of such atrocities? We know that such things continue into our own time. But not on such an organized, mechanical, programmed, logical framework, as was the Holocaust. A Republican friend of mine was shocked to hear from me recently that George W. Bush’s grandfather did business with the Nazis. So did IBM and other American interests. One can always plead ignorance or look the other way. America is in the process of morphing into a Capitalist Democracy, where millions may have their very livelihoods  sacrificed to maintain the survival of major corporations. Our leaders plead ignorance or look the other way.

At least they are not throwing babies into fires.

Complete Nothingness

One day the electric goes off and the next day a check comes quickly. One day the world is crisp and clear and cool and the next day the smog bites deep into the throat and the obnoxious driver in the other lane seems menacing and evil.

No one knows what’s really up. Please don’t try to tell me you know someone who does. Philosophize or dramatize or lionize all ya want, in the end it is moments that matter, present moments in the right now.

Why are we so tough on each other? So critical, so full of judgment and jury and meanness? Who the Hell knows? Not me.

And why do some embrace the Positive as if life was so simplistic. I know people who will not hear a word of negativity, they throw up a guard, resist....any of it.

The clouds of negativity are always there. Like neutrons or entropy or spilled soup. Hey, it’s OK. Bad things happen. But the little toys are there silent in the holy shadows, still with emptiness and the finite joy of complete nothingness.