A YEAR AND A MONTH

 A year ago, we were all novices in COVID PURGATORY. We traded stories about toilet paper shortages and sources for face masks. Many of us learned to use GrubHub, BluBox and  Insta-food delivery services. People with no jobs and cars became “shoppers,” filling up carts of food and delivering to our front steps and porches. We sanitized boxes, bottles and cans before bringing contaminants into our kitchens.  

Along with information, we e-mailed or texted cartoons and videos to our patch of technology friends. Funny, or inspiring — blogs, podcasts and newsletters took on more weight. At the root of all this tech blitz was the message: "I care about you and your state of mind. Have you fallen into the hole of depression? Loneliness? While I can't be with you physically, I'm still thinking about you.” 

A woman I barely knew telephoned me every month or so to “check in.” I was startled at first but I added her to my e-mail blast list. A longtime friend suffered a serious non-Covid illness and was hospitalized for six weeks. Visitors were not allowed at hospitals. I passed along reports to my e-mail list and the list recipients sent back concern and prayers for Laurie, her family and to me, her friend. 

Sincere intention: my household needed information beyond that available from the 6 o’clock news, New York Times, and CDC. Along with vital facts, we needed in-my-kitchen-real-person assurance that we were not alone in the craziness. Or paranoid about the present risks!  We shared what we had with our network. Now we realize how elastic that network became. We are testaments to community building in its purist form.

Building community is what we all crave. It's one of the most compelling reasons for church-going, and social club memberships. It pushes some of us back to our hometowns — those towns or neighborhoods we remember, if we are among the lucky ones, as places of safety. It’s Cheers, the bar where everybody knows your name. 

Now, after one year and one month of Life with Covid, I feel another shift happening. Vaccinations are thankfully widely available. The immediate scare has passed. After a year of abstinence, I can hug my grandchildren — all young adults and fully inoculated. There’s no need to track down sources of paper products or Purill. Like Snow White, hostesses are waking and going to — and giving — small dinner parties again.

The stress of those first weeks of The Troubles (March, 2020) was immense! And I don’t want to get too sappy about “unlocking the love under wartime.” But there was something that happened this year— a physical and emotional vibration, a quivering of those invisible threads that marry us to our universe and to each other. 

The echos are getting fainter — as they must.  But I think I’ll phone my friend. I haven’t heard from her in a couple of months. 

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My 18 year old grandson, Parker, graduates from high school this year and has been recruited to play ice hockey for the Vermont Lumberjacks. He’ll move to Burlington, Vt. in September. He’s thrilled. Is this a good thing?  Why is my stomach in a twist?

PARKER MITCHELL

MY LIFE WITH AMAZON

MY MYSTERY GIFT

 The Amazon truck stopped at our house yesterday. The delivery person didn’t ring the doorbell. He put the box on the bench beside the door, took its picture and drove away. About thirty seconds later, I had an email from Amazon with a message that my delivery was complete. The email included a photograph of the package at my very own doorstep with the message “how was your service?” Thumbs up or thumbs down?

How many responses to this sequence are there? I clicked “thumbs up” naturally. 

Amazon trucks zip in and around our house every week and stop at least once that often at our door. The delivery person never rings the door bell. He never offers my dog a cookie. The regular postman does. I don’t know what the Amazon truck driver looks like. The postman’s name is John. I leave a little something in the mailbox for John at Christmastime. I don’t give the Amazon person anything.

Even before the year of Covid isolation, we were relying on Amazon for easy purchases and quick delivery. I like book stores — but Amazon books are discounted always. Even better, I can opt for used issues — my favorite! I love used books with underlines, highlighted passages and notes in the margins made by previous owners. All that makes me feel like a part of an invisible community of readers — a virtual bookclub. I add my own highlights and notes before passing the books on. I’ve decided to add my name to those books too — discretely on a back blank page. Maybe it’ll initiate a true bookish conversation. 

But the Amazon thing has gotten out of hand. Now when we can’t find something at the grocery store, we “Amazon it.” Instead of one or two packs of dry onion soup mix, I have two dozen. (There is no “use by” date for dry onion soup mix. Somebody is putting these packets into a shipping box. I’m paying shipping fees so I may as well make the order worthwhile. How often do I use dry onion soup mix you ask? Maybe twice a year.)

Obviously, there are some flaws in all this plan. Storage for one. And carried to extremes — as though ordering a dozen dry flavor packs isn’t extreme? —I’m contributing to the demise of my local economy. 

So my next step: I fill a box for the Penfield Food Pantry. Numbers of families in need of food have doubled this year. More children are going hungry. These people are in crisis. I pack cans of tuna, boxes of dry pasta, unopened rolls of toilet paper…and a half dozen packs of dry onion soup mix.

About yesterday’s delivery: a book “THE MADMAN’S LIBRARY: The Strangest Books, Manuscripts and Other Literary Curiosities From History.”  It has beautiful illustrations. It looks interesting. But I didn’t order it. Nothing inside the box or on the label indicates who sent it. 

Did  you? I’d like to thank you. If I can ever catch the Amazon delivery man, I’ll ask him how to track down this mystery gift.

KLARA AND THE SUN.....a review

A wild turkey

 A wild turkey strutted past my bedroom window this morning. Or was it a turkey buzzard? I didn’t get a good look at its face.  As “birds” go, both got the ugly end of the stick.

I’ve never seen turkeys fly much beyond a few feet from ground to bush. How could they with those huge bodies? In fact, their proportions are totally out of whack — wings not nearly big enough to support their heft  — evolution engineering gone to lunch when “turkeys” popped up on the to-do list.

Evolution — what an old fashioned concept! Today, Bob at a turkey farm, breeds birds for big breasts. Think of that as you sit around the Thanksgiving table. Bob has no aesthetic requirements. Nobody asks the female turkeys.

Kazuo Ishiguro is one of my favorite authors. I read “Never Let Me Go” in 2005 when it was first published. It’s about “human farms,” cloned people propagated for the purpose of organ harvesting. 

Is that idea really so far out there? News stories pop up occasionally about parents, facing death of a beloved child, becoming pregnant for the purpose of creating a close donor match — a sibling who might save the life of child #1. 

Already the very poor in some areas of the world “sell” their own (or somebody else’s!) organs…a kidney here, an eye there. Nearly every part of a corpse from a fatal accident is transplantable —  kidneys, hearts, lungs even faces — to needy recipients. I carry a “donor card” to allow my body parts to be harvested, but I’m not sure that mine are worthy. At my age, the parts are pretty well worn out! 

Most of us believe that every human is unique. But when a human becomes a mixture of parts from others, what then? Is animal and even human evolution now in the hands of scientists in a lab? Certainly I can change the look of nearly every inch of my exterior with plastic surgery. So if my thyroid (for example) doesn’t work hard enough to keep me thin, can I sign up for a new one from a younger, thinner version? And if no donor, how about a “pretend one,” mechanically built and  transplanted along with my new knees, new shoulders, new hips? I’m in my mid 70s. I want to be young and pain free. So build a new me. But am I still “me?” 

Enter Ishiguro again. His new novel, “Klara and the Sun” asks questions that are just as sticky. Parents in this not-so-far-in-the-future-unnamed place, decide if their children will be “uplifted,” genetically boosted to give them a leg up intellectually. The exact process is never discussed. It’s risky. Children die sometimes.  It’s a worry.

What is created, of course, is a caste system. Those uplifted go to university and theoretically, enjoy the good life. Those left “natural” are destined for menial labor. Josie, the main human character in the book, is a 14 year old girl who is among the “uplifted.”

(And before we go much further, don’t we already have something like this? Haven’t we convinced nearly every kid — and their parents — in America that college is an absolute MUST for even the most modest aspirations?)

Uplifted children somehow need help socially. Artificial friends are purchased for them. Klara is an AF, something between a robot and a life-sized doll. They run on a solar powered battery and are programed with artificial intelligence.

The crux of the story:  Klara identifies “God” and bargains with “God” for the life of Josie. So…life and death. Bartering with God. A human response that probably everyone of us has exercised. Is this a learned response? Where does it come from? Are humans just “built” this way? 

But Klara isn’t human. What distinguishes a human? a soul? where does it reside? in the transplanted heart? brain? some nebulous aura? And what about love? Love is the answer. So Klara, a robot, loves Josie enough to ….? Uh-oh…We are in tall weeds here!  In our quest for eternal life, how far will we go? And who gets to decide?

Ishiguro uses the simplest language — easy sentences, elementary vocabulary. But he smacks us around pretty good with the issues.

The turkey walked away behind the pine trees. I didn’t see it again.  A little later when we came into the kitchen, a pheasant was on the patio. Fifty years ago, pheasants were everywhere but I’ve only seen one or two wild since. Pretty birds. Good proportions. Nice feathers. 

QUILTS - TODAY, ALWAYS

Artist: Rosie Lee Tompkins

 

Every few years, art critics, museum curators, designers and collectors “discover” quilts. It’s the damnedest thing! I’ve watched this EUREKA for most of my 70 plus years. 

But quilters never go away. They’re always around somewhere, hunched over quilt frames  with their neighbors (women usually) laughing about the latest antics of their kids, husbands and dogs. And methodically pushing with those thimbled fingers - down and back up - the needle holding cotton thread, making tiny stitches that weld together the textile layers that comprise a quilt. 

Community. Sorority. Creativity. The very purist example of socialism: “we’ll take turns….do your quilt…then Mary’s…then…You need a little more blue checkered gingham? Here…take some of mine.” Shared labor equally divided.

I know about quilters. My mom was one. Setting up a quilt frame was a Fall rite just as putting away the sundresses and dragging out the winter coats. I could quilt before I could read. And I knew the “rules.”

 

1. Make sure the fabric is clean first
2. Don’t mix fabrics..keep together by weight, weave, etc. 
3. Quilt stitches must be equal and in neat patterns, generally following the “maps” established by the piecing patterns
4. Piecing corners must meet exactly 

Very strict. Very European. Quilters were graded by how closely they followed the rules. Mom was an expert quilter. She would be flabbergasted by the quilts now hanging on museum walls made by descendants of slaves.

The Gee’s Bend quilt ladies  — and African American quilt making artists that followed — set the art world on its ear! Never mind perfecting precision corners, straight lines, and matching squares. Their quilts are voices of freedom made foldable.  

Rosie Lee Tompkins’ quilts incorporate cotton double knits, rayon, polyester, wool, cotton t-shirts, and silk neckties. And usually in one glorious soup of narration. The Gee’s Bend ladies combined old jean denim and corduroy. No perfect 90 degree corners. My mother and her quilting friends must be spinning in their graves to hear such trash.

But I am convinced that she would look at these objects and return to look again and again, and wonder about the freedom, the spontaneous choices. “Why didn’t we think…? Why didn’t we see…? Why were we so tightly controlled?” She and her friends would gasp at the beauty and fall in love with these quilts just as I have.

(There will always be a place in the quilt iconography for traditional quilt-making, just as there is room in art history for portraiture and landscapes. But the emphasis is different. One branch stresses the craft — the other, the art.) 

Last week, quilt artist and historian Carolyn Mazloomi (originally trained as an aerospace engineer, Dr. Mazloomi now lectures about quilt making art throughout the world) received $50,000 and was named a United States Artist Fellow. She donated the $50K to the Women of Color Quilters Network.  

The February, 2021, NY Times Style issue pictured this season’s high fashion wearable designs using traditional quilt patchwork. In another magazine reporting on style, a journalist wrote “while it may conjure up thoughts of the elderly, sewing scrap fabric together, this is not your grandmother’s quilt.” The writer needs some serious lessons in quilts. (Also an editor that points out agism and sexism when it shows up on the page!)

 And if fashion designers think they’ve hit on something new this year, they apparently never listened to Dolly Parton’s “Coat of Many Colors?” 

THE OWL

 An owl must live in the trees at the edge of our woods. I hear it who-ing every evening right before the channel 10 lady airs tomorrow’s weather forecast. She, (the news lady, not the owl), along with sharing her predictions for climate shifts, unknowingly announces our dinner. At my house, we are like Pavlov’s dogs, conditioned to respond to recurring signals: garbage truck = breakfast, noon whistle = lunch, weather lady = dinner.

 

Without those landmarks, would we starve? Surely not! We must retain some prehistoric mechanism, some native response to hunger, regardless of the time of day. But I am not so certain. 

The year of quarantine has deepened the ruts of living at our house. My routine varies so slightly that each day is an echo of the one before it and a prediction of the one to come. 

This is the worrisome part: I’m beginning to like that rut. It’s as comfortable as the thin tee-shirt that I sleep in. I know there are other nighties in the drawer but I reach for the same pale pink shirt with the long sleeves that need folding up twice to keep out of toothpaste, the one with a vest pocket that usually holds a slightly used tissue. The tissue invariably goes through the wash with the shirt and resurrects in shreds marking the entire laundry load and showering paper dander all over the black tile floor.

We humans are social animals; our survival depends on sharing, and I always believed myself to be a “people person.” Get me to a dinner party, a performance, an event. I can usually bluff my way through a crowd of strangers, sometimes convincing them and myself that it’s all good, that I find them intoxicatingly interesting, that we share fundamental facts upon which we can enjoy conversation and humor. 

But I wonder if these skills must be exercised, like our stomach muscles, doing social sit ups to keep the smile intact and the brain cogs whirring? If we see no one for weeks, months, years, do we become mute, indifferent to the quirks and tics of fellow travelers? 

Are we in danger of becoming social novices? A Covid casualty of a different kind?

I have a friend who keeps making new clothes for herself. She’s a fine knitter and seamstress and throughout the “Year of the Troubles,” she’s maintained her sanity by working at frenzy focus on this new wardrobe.  I smile at her obsession. Her life “pre-Covid” was one of modest social engagement. Judging by the trousseau she continues to construct, anyone might guess that she’s about to launch on a major travel season! 

Within the next several months, her life may resume something labeled “normal.” Likely, it will mean an occasional dinner out, a monthly evening with friends, a movie, a haircut appointment. What about all those new sweaters? the skirts of many colors? Even before their final pressing, are they destined for Goodwill? Second Hand Rose? There are worse ways to mark this year. 

As I sat at the table today, I caught sight of wide white wings sailing through the trees at the edge of the woods. I think it was the owl. I’ve never seen an owl in flight at my house. It was worth the wait. 

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The white lilies are from Trader Joe's...the best $9 I've spent in months!

BILL STEWART REMEMBERED

 When Peter was little, he took everything apart — old toasters, radios, television sets. He  was obsessed with how things worked so it was no surprise that when he grew up, he became a mechanical engineer. 

Some kids are like Peter — born with an obsession that never leaves them.  I’m betting that Bill Stewart was one of those kids. I’ll bet his pockets were perpetually full of “treasures” — shiny rocks, shards of bone and shells, pieces of twine and odd bottle caps. Throughout his life, Bill remained fascinated with obscure, funny, quirky objects of human life — mechanical toys, plastic G.I.Joes, doll parts and shop tools.  All those things and a million other bits appeared in his art — sculpture that bristled with texture and pattern. And co-incidentally, formed a unique narrative of life stretched throughout the 20th and into the 21st Century.

No-one casually meeting Bill Stewart would ever have pegged him as an intellectual and certainly not an artist. He could talk sports as easily as contemporary painting; loved sailing as much as visiting museums. He was rarely without a baseball cap on his head and hardly ever missed Saturday morning breakfast with “the guys” in the local diner, the-flannel-shirt-overall-Carhart crowd. Growing up, Bill was part of an average, middle class American, mid-western family -- none with any particular interest in the arts. He entered college with no clear career goals. 

That changed when he stepped into the art department, particularly the ceramic studio. There, he was free to knit together various strings of interest and talent: working with his hands, spatial perceptions, weird sociological observations and setting, working toward and meeting specific self-made goals. The Master’s Degree in Art gave him a key to lifetime security teaching at S.U.N.Y. Brockport. He and Bonnie raised three sons in that nearly idyllic rural setting. Bonnie taught english in the regional middle school. 

A review of his art over near-fifty years of work illustrates Bill’s exploration of ideas, techniques and interests. At its core are a few unchanging basics: 

1. Always sculptural and figurative (Bill had little interest in functional pottery and to my knowledge never did any work at all on a potter’s wheel.)  
2. Obsession with texture. 
3. A unique visual language. Only a few other artists — recently labeled “Outsiders” — share a similar vocabulary. 
4. Shining through always, a sly sense of humor.

The academic art community never quite knew what to make of Bill or his art. He simply didn’t fit the categories. The work was purely sculpture (fine art?)  but hand built of clay, (craft?)  It was easy to underestimate the seriousness of Bill's art. Living and working on the east coast may have further been to his disadvantage — the Funk and Ashcan Art Movements on the west coast seem most similar to Bill’s visual playbook and could have offered him more support and intellectual recognition.

But those of us who knew him, loved the core of the man and recognized the originality of the work. His fans always looked forward to the next curveball that Bill was forever throwing in our direction. He didn’t disappoint. 

Bill Stewart died December 30, 2020

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See major pieces by Bill Stewart installed in Rochester, New York, at Monroe County Airport, Grove Place Neighborhood (Selden Street)

and Memorial Art Gallery. 

One of the last major sculptures Bill Stewart finished now installed at Memorial Art Gallery.

 Bill Stewart at his home with "Socks", 2019

THE EYE SURGERY TANGO

 I got an eye job.  I didn’t know I needed one. I wasn’t even sure what that was. I view all surgery as questionable and facial surgery as mostly vanity unless you were born like Sylvester Stallone with a tilting head and permanent lip snarl — the result of “assisted birth” by a doctor too aggressive with forceps. 

None of that happened to me. I merely reached mid-70s and my eye lids gave up trying to stay all the way up. I thought I was just tired. Or maybe sick of the world anyway so why would I want to see the whole disgusting scene?

But there I was, in the Office of Torture —the annual eye exam. No place that I can think of attacks my self-confidence quite as acutely. The assistant begins “which is clearer” and I immediately begin melting into the chair…”Please, please, please don’t call on me today. I didn’t prepare! I meant to read the assignment but the dog threw up and I needed wine.”

Not only is A not one bit clearer than B but I can’t tell the difference! And then I totally give up and admit that the entire wall is a blur. Just let me out of here and I promise I’ll never drive again! 

But Madame Hilda says “well, just guess.” That’s when I tell her that I’m sorry but I can’t read the Greek alphabet. Hilda is not amused. She leaves in a huff “I’ll call the doctor in now.” 

Uh-oh! Now I’ve done it. I have eye cancer!!! 

A “Field Vision Test” was next. It was more fun than the “A or B” routine. You sit in a chair and click when you see a little light appearing anywhere on the screen. The lights dart around like lighting bugs and before too long I was just clicking the damned remote figuring what the hell — guess work got me through school — it could work again.

I failed.

So here I am two weeks after surgery.  I visited the eye surgeon last week. He said “I’m surprised you can see anything with those cataracts.” This came as complete news to me but it explains a lot…like why I see three moons…why my neighborhood is full of sparkles…why night time driving is a lot like “Close Encounters of a Third Kind.” My entire universe has become one giant Star Wars episode. I guess I’ll have the cataracts removed in February or March but in a way, I’ll miss all the sparkles. Who doesn't like sparkles?