Sweet Dreams

When you get a great night’s sleep, all seems well in the world. That is the shifting thought playing in my artwork, “Sweet Dreams.”

As adults, we dream of returning to those days when we slept like babies, the biblical promise (Prov 3:24) of following God’s commands. In fact, the very phrase “sweet dreams” derives from that passage. When I was a kid, they were the last words I heard before Mom shut my bedroom door and I drifted off to Never Never Land, where my heart flew on wings and my dreams were born.

At our home, getting eight hours of solid sleep is so rare that when it happens, we find ourselves unable to believe it, and walk around in a total stupor until noon. We look outside to see our trash receptacles dropped three houses down from where they are supposed to be and think, “It’s ok…whatever, no problem.” Even when a hawk, seemingly out of nowhere, swoops in to snatch a bunny right out of my front lawn, I have a feeling that it happened for a reason, it’s all good, and that, well, the world is gonna make it, that life is good. Hey, good sleep does that to you.

Our bedroom, lest I get too personal here, could double as the National Headquarters for Sleep Research, containing a variety of gadgets and devices to bring on the shut-eye. We have a white-noise machine, an air purifier, ear plugs, and a Habbermacker and Shopperypepper Alpha Cooling Blanket used by Nasa in the 1960s. By the time we get all our toys fired up and going, our bedroom sounds something like a Disneyworld ride, complete with a wind tunnel, cannon fire, and a weather system. It’s a blast really, and worth the wait in line.

However, every now and then I have a nightmare. I thrash around in bed trying to outrun some villain in a setting that is vaguely familiar but just out of focus. Yes, I’m catching a glimpse of it right now…There I am! I’m stark naked in an ancient amphitheater lecturing to a laughing crowd of Platos or Hippopotamuses. Bed covers are flying, my arms and legs are thrashing, and I’m shouting out Greek wisdoms in iambic pentameter. My wife wakes up with a shock, and as I regain a semblance of consciousness, I try, vainly, to convince her that I am learning a second language in my spare time. Nightmares in Greek do that to you.

Yes, sleep is a crazy mix of subconscious movies, some dramas, some comedies, some horror. In my artwork titled Sweet Dreams, both worlds appear. Pink prevails and set a warm tone for horizontal patches swinging back and forth in a consoling rhythm, like waves of rapid eye movements. They are made from a kid’s green dinosaur pajamas that sprinkle down the picture plane. Near the bottom, as a landscape of tanks and dinosaurs battle it out, a goofy stuffed animal swoops in to referee and sings everyone to sleep via a music box whose crank you turn yourself.

As the innocent melody sifts through the frame, our memories of childhood surface, and we rest for a moment, a child’s moment, to the tune winding down. We are reminded, perhaps subconsciously, that we can pull the covers up over our heads and roll over for another forty winks. We sleep again, wide awake, and escape for a moment into the Sweet Dreams of wind-up toys and stuffed animals. Art has a way of taking you there, doing that to you. When it’s good, like sweet, sweet sleep, it winds you up and lets you wind down. When it’s great, you never knew what hit you.

In the Midst of Our Drift

Fish aren’t really a pet you get close to. In the dead of winter, I see my forty assorted goldfish and Koi hanging motionless in their 3,400-gallon pool, barely twitching a fin. They drift in the water if they move at all, dormant and paralyzed with cold. I think they look at me as I move around the pond, but I’m not sure they are looking at me. Usually, when they see me they turn the other way. Eye contact is not a strong suit with fish, but my expectations may be a bit high. In the winter, I barely make eye contact myself.

Sometimes a goldfish will wander too close to the edge of the pond where the ice forms faster. They must nod off, because I’ll occasionally find one completely frozen and encased in ice and not come out of it until the pond thaws. Then it takes me all summer to gain their trust so that they will eat out of my hand again. Now they wouldn’t approach me if their life depended on it. All trust has disappeared until the water temp rises in the Spring, and their designer food is handed out again.

During our Midwest winters, people act much the same way. We all take on that catatonic fish stare and have a cast of pale orange because our healthier red blood cells go on vacation. They go south like Snowbirds, where they resurface in Tampa for spring training with the Riskateers Baseball Team. For the blood cells that linger behind, they float in a state of suspended animation between the surface and the bottom, between heat and cold, and barely protected by a wafer-thin oxygen layer.

“Do you want to meet for coffee?” I asked an old friend recently.

“Thanks, no,” he answered, “let’s wait until Spring and get a cookie with it.”

“Oh, do they not have cookies now?” I inquired.

“Yes, they do, but they are all stale,” he said in a hushed whisper, as if he had just come from a funeral march. In his defense, he was in a fog, and the light was just barely managing to squeeze through his eye slits, his deep freeze. He softly repeated “they are all stale,” as he shuffled away with one shoelace untied.

That was the sign. The shoelace.

I watched it trail behind, snaking across the floor. I had a sad feeling come over me. My gut told me that his laces would not become an integral and working part of his shoe again until spring. The shoe was too far south. To bend over and tie it would take great fortitude on his part. He would have to go deep. It would take blind faith. It would mean a decision, a soulful commitment to face his doubts head-on despite his own lazy character. If he could try to bend over, his determination might take the lead, and then, bending over would be worth it. Tying the shoe would be worth it. The effort would result in a knot, and that knot would hold. It would take sheer willpower. His effort would define the knot he tied, and it would be solid and durable.

Winter tests this kind of inner fortitude around here. We are still in the midst of our drift, and we need to be solid. We need to be able to look deep inside ourselves, tie our knots so they hold, clean up our sloppiness. If we do, our character will sit up straight, it will be refreshed, then refresh our faith for the rest of January, February, and roll with momentum into March. Now we need to stoop over, get low, say a prayer. Tie our knots so they hold.

Then one day soon, we will walk outside, make eye contact with our fish, and notice they are moving, they are rising, and the water is stirring.

Achieve Peace of Mind

Let’s set the scene. It’s early January and those brand-new pajamas you’re hibernating in are beginning to smell like a bear. You’ve thrown them in the washing machine and dried them on a hot cycle that shrunk them down to an unwearable size. There’s a light snow falling outside the laundry room window, and as you hold your pj’s in disgust, you catch a glimpse of the juncos and finches happily eating continuously from the bird feeder. Right now, eating continuously sounds like a good idea. Should you chuck the jammies or try to stuff your head through an opening the size of a donut? It’s a moment of truth for the year 2022. What you need is a fresh start even though you just were given a fresh start a week ago. Truth be told, you’re ready for another present, aren’t you?

Well…here’s it is. They aren’t new pajamas, but a list called Achieve Peace of Mind. On the list are ten ways to help you reboot when your proverbial underwear is in a knot. My list is printed on a pocket card I can pull out when I’m fit to be tied and losing the dots on my dice. Check these out:

• Find something bigger than yourself in which to believe
• Cultivate old-fashioned virtues
• Develop healthy boundaries
• Shun suspicion and resentment
• Live in the present and the future, but mostly the present
• Don’t waste time and energy fighting conditions you can’t change
• Cooperate with life
• Refuse to pity yourself
• Stop expecting too much out of yourself and others
• Remember: we are all frail

Reading through these I’m sure you’ll hasten to add your own wisdoms, ones like the Golden Rule, or perhaps a beatitude or verse from the Psalms. However, if you are like me, long verses and lots of words can be confusing when an albatross is flying overhead. I need a few mantras to focus on until that bird has flown the coop.

I’d like to lead with the first one: finding something bigger than myself to believe in. That is the bookend that keeps all the others on the list from falling over. For me, that bigger voice is God and the Holy Spirit, but maybe you need to start elsewhere. I can tell you that when I am in a funk, and nothing seems to be working quite right, that quiet and simple step is the best and the hardest one to lean into. It’s about surrendering, and when you do, the rest of those items on the list for achieving peace of mind will come right over and eat out of your hand.

One of my wife’s favorite mottos is to allow mystery to have a place in your life. It’s very freeing to do this because it allows things to go unanswered for the time being. Allow is the key word here. It works the same way surrender does but sounds a lot less religious. Mystery isn’t the same as mental laziness. Mystery is happening, it’s real, it’s moving and active. Mystery is everywhere. It’s the reason the label you missed on your jammies says 100% cotton and is printed in ancient Polynesian. It’s the reason you are cultivating old fashioned virtues and considering sleeping in your boxers like they did in the old days. You’re feeling more peaceful already…see how that works?

Moment of the Year 2021

There was a pop radio station when I was a kid that posted a top forty list every week. While my brother picked the list up at the grocery store, the list was a staple for every teenager following the folk and rock hits in the sixties, which was every teenager. My brother (Mad Magazine’s twin), poured over that Casey Kasem’s hit list every week, and our radio was kept on a steady hum on December 31st until the countdown reached Number One at midnight.

That countdown got me thinking… What is the moment I’d replay a few minutes before midnight if I were counting down my favorite moments from the year? The likelihood of me counting down anything at that hour is slim to none, as I plan to be sound asleep. But let’s say I did stay up to bring in the new year, what would be the moment I would hear at midnight? Would it be a moment of personal accomplishment, or some purchase that brought temporary happiness? How about a memory of one of those perfect days when everything feels right in the universe? I did have a few of those days last year, but they were fleeting. If I was to pick a memory like picking a song, it would have to be one that is catchy and has good staying power over time – a golden oldie.

For that kind of memory, I turn to my grandkids, and creativity. When those two cross paths, we get hits that just keep on coming. This year, lucky me, there were a lot of those with Cash (4) and Carter (2). There were the spontaneous hugs and I love you’s. There was the impromptu lemonade stand we made together that brought out all the neighbors. Our moments also included many walks in the woods looking for earthworms under logs and talking to owls we couldn’t see. As I remember, we had another moment where the three of us tried to stand on a frisbee at the same time so their dog, Piper, couldn’t run away with it. That one ended with me falling on top of both boys, and two of us crying. Somewhere in the middle of the summer I connected our hands together with rubber bands and we did a crazy collaborative painting whose result was better than any Jackson Pollack you’ll find in a museum. There were morning, noon, and bedtime stories that I made up ala Dr. Suess, including one about an imaginary family called the Slappies. Family members from this story included Pappy Slappy, Mappy Slappy, Gandpappy Slappy and Grandmappy Slappy. The kid’s names ranged from Appy to little Frankie Zappy, and I could go into the names of their pets, but I think you get the idea. I stopped that story when Grandpappy Slappie had to go to the bathroom and ran off to use the cr…well… you get the idea. And tops in the running for Moment of the Year would have to include the Christmas trip we made to the grocery store to buy ingredients for Grinch Pie, a mixture of the most disgusting things humans can put in a pie crust, including one stinky sock, and a jar of mushrooms that looked like slugs.

Wow. Take a breath. That’s a lot of highlighted moments! But when all the lights have dimmed, and the wrapping paper has been put away for another year, I have to vote for the quiet “little while” when the world got a bit brighter for me. It was 70 degrees outside Christmas day, and while we were still dressed in our PJ’s, Cash, Carter, and I took a sleepy walk down the street. We held hands the whole time, stopping now and then to point at the beautiful contrails in the sky, wave at cars that looked at us curiously, and drop rocks down manhole covers. Those moments won’t get a half-million views on U-tube, but on that peaceful walk holding hands, a great hit rose right to the top of the charts for me. It’s one I think we can all hum to, one that I know I’ll play over and over in my head for a long time to come, long after the ball drops to bring in 2022.

Be happy, be safe, thank you lovely readers who read this blog the last year. You made my top forty list. May you feel loved and hold each other’s hands in 2022! As Casey Kasem always said, “Keep your feet on the ground and keep reaching for the stars!”

Pencil Me In... All In

I remember constructing one of my favorite pieces of art, The Dysfunctional Pencil Family, around this time of year, a time of year when the best and worst traits of a family pop up. Like in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, we can wish each other Merry Christmas and turn right around and say Bah Humbug in the same sentence. Internal friction can flow through every little pencil in a family, tall or short, number 2 or number 4, wearing out our points as we put our lines and circles down together.

When I was a kid, I had trouble letting go of small pencils. I was the kind of kid who bonded with the pencil the more I used it, but the more I used it the smaller it got. I got comfortable with it at the same time I was letting go of it. It’s part of the beautiful paradox of life and part of the dysfunction of being part of a pencil family. When I first learned how to use pencils, I would walk around with a worn-out pencil in my hand for hours without being able to make a decision whether to let it go or keep it. I got close to my pencils, and finally, after carrying a useless pencil around, I would silently say goodbye and let it slip out of my hand to the floor in the hallway at school.

The pencils at the bottom of The Dysfunctional Pencil Family came from a big bag of broken pencils I collected from the hallways at the middle school where I taught. It was as if there was a little graveyard of unfinished homework all around me waiting to be finished if only the pencils could find their way home, and they have become kind of a trademark in my work.

I think one of the things that is so beautiful about pencils, and something that we can’t find in humans, is that pencils have an eraser that allows us to scratch away our mistakes. Erasers give us a do-over. They help us put the past behind us. Wouldn’t it be cool if we humans had a built-in eraser, and could just flip each other over and erase the parts we have trouble living with?

For some of us, we do. He is called Jesus. He is our eraser guy, our do-over. He is the guy God gave us at Christmas, a giant pencil of a man, who by his life example showed us how to flip ourselves over, rub out the mistakes and bloopers, and make all our marks new and snowy fresh. That Eraser Guy is always there in our dysfunctional pencil family, and all we have to do (and here’s the rub) is the flipping.

In my drawing pictured here, I tried to depict that same sense of renewal. Everything in the piece is rather happy, but there are some menacing details floating around that hamper the four little family members from relaxing into the white, puffy atmosphere of the handmade paper. High up in one corner there is a big star shedding brightness on their future, but chaos is lurking in a row of broken pencils at the bottom, like a pit of grass spears, which seems to threaten the balance of the stick people family.

I’ve heard it said that all families are dysfunctional to some degree. I was reminded of this one time when a small child walked past my piece and said excitedly, “Look! There’s the Dysfunctional Pencil Family!” It was as if she had found her own family again and was excited to see them no matter how crazy they were. It was also a reminder that we all come from different parts of the hallway and are looking for our way back home.

Back home to Jesus. We get there by putting down our best marks with the broken dysfunctional pencils that we are. We get there by being flipped over by our own families and the world, and then allowing ourselves to be rubbed clean by The Do-Over Man. Sometimes, the rubbing is a bit painful, but the new drawing is flawless.

Mr. Pumpkin's Last Stand: The Interview

We return this week to a familiar and all too often heard storyline. Sitting with us as a guest in the studio today is a figure we have been trying to get on the blog for years. He’s made his way into the stomachs of Americans and forged a path through family gatherings that would have squashed a pumpkin of any lesser character. Without further introduction, I give you Mr. Pumpkin, a gourd from the other side of the patch, carving out this unique, untold, and unprecedented story.

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Interviewer: Welcomed to the blog Mr. Pumpkin, and thank you for agreeing to be interviewed. It’s an honor to have you here today.

Mr. Pumpkin: It’s a pleasure being here.

Interviewer: If you don’t mind, I’d like to jump right into the fray. We understand you’ve got some issues you’d like to get off your plate, is that correct?

Mr. Pumpkin: Yes…yes, I do. I feel you took a couple of bites out of us pumpkins last week in your blog that were not fair. The things you wrote about were offensive to me, and frankly to the whole Pumpkin Nation. We pumpkins have a long history of blending in, and there’s been an insidious movement to change us, to make us have more of a presence.

Interviewer: Are you saying my comments are part of some longer history of prejudice?

Mr. Pumpkin: Yes, one that I believe probably started underground, with tuberous roots going very deep. For many generations we survived by the skin of our teeth.

Interviewer: Whoa, that’s quite a mouthful there. Care to elaborate?

Mr. Pumpkin: First, let’s get something straight. All pumpkins are created equal. We all may have different faces, true, but pumpkins are more than the sum of our parts. We never wanted to stand out in the mix of things, be the cream of the crop, or any of that. We just wanted our inalienable right to a slice of the great American dream pie. We’ve been accused of “blending in”, BUT we are not without spice. We got fiber, us pumpkins. And we’re edgy. You want edges? I’ll show you some edges!

Interviewer: I see. You are saying there is no accounting for tastes.

Mr. Pumpkin: Yes, and in your essay, you made us sound average at best...

Interviewer: …like something astronauts suck out of a toothpaste tube when they are in space.

Mr. Pumpkin: THERE! There! You did it again! And what’s with the interstellar space reference? We aren’t weightless blobs just floating around!

Interviewer: Don’t you think you are being a bit dramatic? Remember, you ARE served LAST at the table. You seem to be upset that we have portrayed you as nothing more than roughage.

Mr. Pumpkin: Your words, not mine. May I remind you, sir, that we are served up on a SEPARATE plate, not in the mix with the other dishes. What does that tell you? It tells me that we have secured a critical place at The Big Meal. Yea, that’s right. I’m talking turkey here, and Lord knows they’ve had their troubles too. But when you take a bite out of our character, it’s not only our integrity and decency you’re attacking but our pumpkin-hood.

Interviewer: (silence)

Mr. Pumpkin: And vitamins? Don’t get me started…and may I add I’ve got a lot of celery and zucchini buddies that feel as strongly as I do. I even got a call from a distant cousin, a watermelon friend of mine, who suffered years of abuse at the poor handling of this issue by the press.

Interviewer: Well, if you can’t stand the heat… perhaps it’s time you get out of the kitchen. Have you thought about retirement, or another line of work? Perhaps some volunteer work at your local shelter for carbohydrates…

Mr. Pumpkin: What?! Ridiculous! And be demoted to pumpkin YOGURT, or worse, part of some wildlife seed mixture? Jack-o-Lantern’s your uncle! Not gonna happen, no sir! Not in this lifetime! I say, give me a can of whip cream or give me death! Ask not what your pumpkin can do for you, but what you can do for your pumpkin! You must become the pumpkin you want to see in the world! The only thing we have to fear, is canned pulp itself…(fading).

Interviewer: Those words sound vaguely familiar. Are you sure you didn’t lift those from the Pumpkin-opedia? hmmm, I think…(yawn)…it’s time for my nap…

Quotes from Mr. Pumpkin

One of the best things about pumpkin season is watching these viny fruits decay after some spooky face has been carved into them. If you haven’t thrown out your smelly pumpkin sitting on the front porch yet, chances are the facial features you so painstakingly carved have collapsed into the middle, leaving some hideous facsimile of the original. Given that the themes of horror and frightfulness are popular at Halloween, your pumpkin’s face may now look even better than when you carved it.

It amazes me how much mileage we get out of the pumpkin during its one month visit every year. We stack them around hay and scarecrows to make our house entrances feel like fall, or we bake the flat seeds and pile enough salt on them to create a hypertensive nightmare. I admire the creative vampire freaks that scoop out the scariest part of the pumpkin, the orange slimy pulp, and put it in Halloween jars labelled “Frankenstein’s brains.”

However, when it is time for dessert, I can’t wrap my taste buds around a triangle of pumpkin pie unless it is hosed down with a mountain of whip cream and a huge dollop of vanilla ice cream. That is because pumpkin tastes like nothing to me. Neutral. I can’t even describe how nothing it is, and that is saying a lot for a writer. I would rather finish off my Thanksgiving meal with a small bowl of gravy than eat pumpkin. While dinner sees me loading up on carbs like mashed potatoes, dressing, and broccoli casserole, I believe I am holding my taste buds hostage to yet another helping of vague, odorless comfort food when pumpkin pie tries to bring closure on another holiday meal.

I try to eat a piece every year. It’s my salute to good manners and neighborly hospitality, but secretly, I feel I am subjecting my taste buds to cruel and unusual punishment, like solitary confinement. They sit in my mouth all day long, poor isolated little buds with nothing to look forward to, nothing stimulating and no hope for contact with the outside world of flavor. In fact, I begin to feel their pain as soon as they see that fork of pumpkin coming down the pie hole. It’s a food crime I tell you, and it ought to be reported.

Quotes from Mr. Pumpkin
Collage on handmade paper

That is why I have compiled for you some quotes from one recovering pumpkin, Mr. Pumpkin, who underwent year after year of sadness, loneliness, and public embarrassment and humiliation. Silenced into submission by voracious and rampant holiday consumption, this pumpkin wasn’t going to sit on the edge and take it anymore. No, siree. No more sitting by the side dishes. Mr. Pumpkin’s time has come, and he is laying it all out on the table.

Relax in your favorite armchair but hold on to your arms. Grab a pumpkin spice latte and hear the incredible story of one furious pumpkin. He is not holding back anything. Will his quotes blow the pumpkin lid off our limited set of emotions, our tired and wrinkled ways of looking at things? That’s the cliffhanger, folks. He’s revealing it all in my next eye-opening exclusive interview. Stay tuned for my next blog, the sequel to Quotes from Mr. Pumpkin.

This Cat Knows His Hats

A long time ago when Barney and Betty Rubble still roamed the earth, I put together a piece called “The Birthday Party.” I was trying to figure out what to do with the handmade pieces of paper I had begun making – experimenting with different media and pushing the frontiers of new ideas. Since painting is expedient and direct, I quickly brushed out some areas to see how the paper and paint held up together. One of those quickies yielded two awkward characters dressed in tall conical and comical hats on their heads. A birthday party was born.

And another one is on the way as my father turns 99 years old today!

I have a love of hats, and the more ridiculous they look on me, the better. When I’m drawing characters in my pieces, I must guard against putting a hat on every one of them. It is as natural as dirt for me. There is nothing better than a hat to immediately give character and dominance to any adventure. Everything else about your wardrobe may be normal, but if you put a hat on, you will become a caricature of yourself! If you add a reggae song to the mix, you’ll be jammin’, I guar-an-darn-tee ya.

My own dependency on hats came from my dad who has worn dozens of different ones in his life, both literally and figuratively, and claims he is responsible for the invention of a hat that could have made him a million bucks if he would have patented it back in the 1950s. (At his advanced age, some of his stories are a bit suspect to me, but this one sound plausible, so I’ll share it). He came up with this hat idea quite by accident on the golf course when he routinely lost his stash of golf tees because there was no place to store them. With a bit of help from his wife Lois’ seamstress, he came up with a bucket hat lined with tee loops along the top perimeter, the perfect holster for a dozen of ready-to-pick tees, which soon made him the envy of every golfer this side of the Flintstone National Golf Course, just a boulder toss from Pebble Beach.

Just today when I went over to check on him, he opened the door to greet me with a chef’s hat on. He did not seem to be aware that he had the hat on, and I was afraid to ask him if he knew it was on his head. If he had forgotten it was on, I was afraid he might not know who he was if I brought the hat to his attention, and if he did know it was on, I was afraid he might withdraw into a character I did not recognize. Either way, I did not think it would go well, and decided it was better to let the hat issue ride. I figure when you get to be 99 years old, you’ve earned the right to let people think you are crazy, even if you are.

What’s funny to me is that my dad never cooked anything in his life (hat or no hat) until he was 95 and his wife of sixty years passed. This fact has not stopped him from taking on the character of a master chef or any other role, like the real ones he has taken on with the Optimist Club, the Wartime Museum, and the Senior Olympics. Not too long ago at 90 years old, he donned his speedos and swim cap, and lined up to swim the individual medley, an event that requires a swimmer to do a lap of each of four different strokes (try doing the butterfly sometime!). Possibly due to the pressures of competition, eight of the twelve contestants defaulted before their heat, leaving my dad in the final heat of only four swimmers, three of whom would earn a medal at the National Senior Olympics. When he amazed himself by coming in third and earned the Bronze Medal, he climbed out of the pool and exclaimed, “Well, it just goes to show, that if you live long enough, you’re going to get a medal in something.”

And so you have, Dad. Hats off to you, and Happy Birthday!

Of Course I Blogged Today!

November 1 is National Author’s Day. That means it is a great day to auth.

I don’t profess to be breaking new ground in the literary world, but I enjoy and respect the process of writing. If I have a writing story, it is of me standing next to mom usually while she finished putting on her make-up, a red pen in her hand, circling the mistakes on my school papers with little reverence to the time I had spent on them. Her top guideline for writing was to edit ruthlessly. On my essay attempts there were underlined misspellings, arrows arcing across the page indicating paragraphs that needed moving, and other corrections that made me fidget. Eventually, my mother would hand back my paper, smile and simply say, “Go try again.” She was not being punitive, or callous, pushy or discouraging. She was merely trying to instill in me an appreciation for a skill that I would be using a lot in the future. Every draft I brought back for her to edit resulted in writing that had more clarity than the copy before it, and by the end of the ordeal, I held in my hands something I was proud to turn in to my teachers at school.

When I wrote copy for newspapers years later, things got a little more serious. I had to get the who, what, where, and when in the first paragraph or the editor would toss the article back to me. I mean toss literarily as those were the days before we sent things via computers. If I had any grammatical mistakes the copy editor would hand the article back to me to correct. If there were any miscommunications, or the article was not going to help sell newspapers, the publisher would hand it back. By the time I had rewritten the article two or three times, I began to apply my mom’s second rule of writing. You can either do it right or do it over. So, I began to channel my inner mom by doing the article right the first time and editing ruthlessly.

The writing component of my career may come as a surprise to some of you looking at my artist website. Artists generally do not invest their time in writing but in the design of their art. Most visual artists simply do not want to spend time or have the time to develop the discipline and rhythm that writing requires. Many of the artists I knew in grad school paid someone else to write their thesis for them. Even still, their theses often went unfinished because the artists could not give their ghost writer enough words or ideas to work with. Writing is work and requires a lot of exhausting thinking, straining and sorting out.

I was recently reading the history of Paul McCartney’s creation of the song Eleanor Rigby. The inspiration for his song began initially when McCartney was playing around on the piano, but much of the tune came from other sources too. If you read the entire story of how the song came about you realize he was open to others’ input, and then used his own filter to decide which parts to put in and which to leave out. Words for the song jockeyed for position, verses switched here and there, a phone book came into play, and drop-by musicians added their two-cents worth. Many tiny decisions, and a ton of elbow grease later, Eleanor Rigby came into its own, having been filtered through various processes that made perfect sense to McCartney.

I have always considered the writing piece of my “person-cloud” as important as any other aspect of my artistic system. It polishes my brain in a way that the visual arts do not. While I spend considerable time freely moving back and forth amongst my artworks in progress, writing does not have the same fluidity for me. The process is more like a three day drizzle than a blizzard. Occasionally, when things are flowing easily, and the words are rolling off my fingers, the writing takes on a power all its own. In those moments I let the sky open and saturate the playing field.

But those times are few and far between, and so is National Author’s Day. It is a reminder not just to honor our great writers, but also to go out there and auth – put some words together even if they sound odd and clumsy. Maybe even send your favorite writer an encouraging card, or better yet, write something with an author and call it a holiday.

Bench Warmers Are the Real Players in a Garden

Not everything an artist makes ends up in a frame, a gallery, or in a show.

No matter how hard I work at the creative process, I sometimes get an intuitive feeling I’m going in the wrong direction or that what I’m working on is not going to show much progress as a finished piece. Often there is one little part, a “nice passage,” that is worth salvaging while the rest of the work falls to the wayside. It’s sad when I come to the realization that all the work I’ve done is not adding up to anything, but I get through that by tucking those remnants into my garden between the rocks and untrimmed hedges. Slowly, they decay and fall apart, eventually dying of natural causes. I’m happy to let nature do that work for me, and to stop denying what was an inevitable death and put my energy towards something new.

Since I’ve never been the type of gardener who plops down commercial nick-knacks in my outdoor spaces, my leftovers take the place of things I notice in other people’s gardens like lawn globes, fluorescent mosquito catchers and herds of ceramic bunnies. I don’t have anything against those ornaments, but when I ran into one commercial plaque the other day, I felt Mother Nature blush a little. Inscribed on a garden decoration plaque, unceremoniously stuck in the dirt, was this wisdom:

“AN EYE FOR AN EYE,” SAID THE POTATO.

I know that nugget of wisdom was supposed to be witty and lighten my day, but it did not, nor did it make me feel in awe of the beauty that surrounded me. I certainly did not feel closer to potato plants, or desire to take an extra moment of silence. Frankly, all I wanted to do was find that outspoken potato and chop it up into an omelet.

A ritual of mine that does give me some peace is to take a pilgrimage to the banks of the Ohio River once a year. I get up before the sun on a warm spring morning, grab my favorite Mocha-Lotta-Java, and head down to forage for driftwood I can use to make a bench. Some years I come back home with dull wood that ends up in the firepit, and other years I come back with some unique finds, but every year I make one bench. A couple springs ago I found a part of a broken staircase that I reconfigured into the bench pictured here. That bench and the others I make from driftwood are sturdy and serve their purpose well, but not perfect works of woodworking craftsmanship. I know just enough about carpentry to get myself in trouble and hold the bragging rights to drilling a hole right through my thumb. I thought for a moment about piercing that hole with a ring or something decorative but heard the call of the potato and decided against it.

When I sit on one of my finished benches in my garden, I’m sometimes reminded of those moments when my former basketball coach used me as a so-called “bench warmer.” That is the phrase we kids used when a coach thought you were good enough to be on the team, but not good enough to play in the actual game. If our team was ahead by fifty-seven points and there was no way the other team could come back and win, the coach would send me in.

Now, I’m not waiting for any voice to tell me to get in the game. My benches are for anyone, and you can play in the Garden Game any time you like. The benches I make are for any players, the ones on the team called Everyone’s Welcome. They are the folks ready to play, but also happy to look out at the garden from their bench seat and say, “You know, I think I may just sit this one out.”

Elementary, My Dear Dr. Stick O'Head

Athletic shoes nowadays are so bright they slap you in the face like a flounder. We grew up with Converse, the one-stop shoe for all things athletic. Really, they were nothing more than some heavy canvas glued on a slab of rubber, but they worked for everything. I loved my Converse shoes and would get a new pair at the start of every school year. I loved the box they came in even better though and carted the box off to school to use for storing my art supplies.

The art projects we did in elementary school were pretty standard fare, but for me, the insides of my art box was the art project, marked up with a rich patina of broken crayon pieces, half chewed globs of Bazooka gum, and a hate note from Becki Svorctisvetti, a mean little blonde who once punched me in the stomach. Fortunately, Becki left my school shortly after her arrival when her dad changed careers and became an organ deliverer in another city. That bit about her dad could have been a rumor, and as kids we never knew if those “organs” he was delivering were for medical experiments, transplants, or perhaps something more sinister. Becki was odd in so many ways, and so, in the dark recesses of our minds, we thought that one of his deliveries, like a nebulous internal organ, might show up in our science class for dissection.

I also had creepy thoughts that Becki was out for me, and that a leftover liver or body part might show up unexpectedly in my crayon box, so I would open my art box very slowly when art class began. Art boxes still have that effect on me to this day, and as much as I like to use them occasionally in my art, I get a little pit in my spleen (right where Becki hit me) every time I think about using part of a shoe box in my art. However, our art teacher, Miss Flareside, loved those shoe boxes, and she took great pains to organize them for us on a long wall she shared with the science room, covered with a huge Periodic Table. Since the science teacher, Mr. Tamperville, was so territorial, he resented having those art boxes in his space at all and insisted that they be arranged according to the order of the elements on his billboard-size chart.

My box was initially assigned to the element Berkelium, the one most closely aligned alphabetically with my last name. However, when Becki left school to assist her father delivering hearts that were still pumping, a new boy arrived whose last name was Berkelium. Of all things! The very elemental space that was assigned to house my art box belonged to a real person, Donny Berkelium, and he got my art space! Apparently, when they eradicated plutonium in 1949 by bombarding it with Americium, Donny Berkelium’s grandfather pulled the switch in the nuclear fission laboratory, and in celebration changed his name from Bercowitz to Berkelium. As a result of Donny usurping my space on the periodic table, I was subsequently assigned the empty and lifeless space for Argon, a gaseous element that has no outstanding characteristics at all.

I was devastated. Nobody in the whole school wanted Argon, especially me. To add insult to injury, Argon was a gas, and thus occupied a space nine feet up on the towering Periodic Table wall. Argon was so high up, in fact, that for someone like myself that was barely cracking the four feet mark, my art box was downright dangerous to retrieve. And embarrassing.

I only tried to get that box down one time, and it literally scarred me for life. I snuck to the back of the room long after everyone else was working on their popsicle stick pumpkins and when my diminutive stature would not be so evident. Carefully, I arranged the remaining boxes as a set of steps that I could use to reach up and snag my Argon art box. Just as I had my box in hand however, one of the boxes underneath started wobbling and I had to reach up to steady myself on the horizontal support pole, right above Krypton, and in grabbing it, brought the entire periodic table down on top of me.

I can tell you those elements do not mix very well, and when they fell on top of one another, they created another nuclear reaction, later named the Manhattan Project, between our art teacher Miss Flareside and Mr. Tamperville.

Now you may understand why I invented the good Dr. Stick O’Head, one of the characters that pops up now and again in my art. He is the mad scientist, the crazy inventor with only one eye, working in his darkly lit laboratory during the lightning storm in every scary movie you ever watched as a kid. The little guy inside my art box (that dark secretive Argon box that came tumbling down from the Periodic Table) is still busy creating things. He is still there with the crayon bits and chunks of dried glue, spelunking around, making Frankensteins out of leftovers, pouring one test tube into the other, and keeping an eye out for Becki’s return.

One Man's Treasure

Everyone has a junk drawer somewhere. I’ve just put frames around mine and called it art.

Back when I was still in artistic diapers I read a story about Joseph Cornell, the eccentric loner who made mysterious idiosyncratic shadow boxes. You might enjoy looking at his work. At first, Cornell started out making them for his brother who was confined to a wheelchair, but as time went on, the assemblages and boxes encompassed tiny worlds that seemed on the verge of explaining secrets to the universe. Looking inside one of his wooden boxes is like going to a yard sale on a different planet. There are good finds everywhere, and nostalgic bits of magic for those who looks inside. When I look at Cornell’s work I always wonder, “Where did he find this stuff?”

In some of my readings on his life, I read an article about a couple of famous artists (Rauschenberg among them) who went to visit his studio when Cornell was old. Down in his basement studio, he had shelves filled with jars of marbles, shoe boxes of butterfly wings, metal spirals from broken clocks, iridescent wallpaper samples, pictures of exotic parrots, and many other collections of what might be for us just more visible residue, but for Cornell became a doorway to his private spaces of memorabilia.

As an artist, I learned a lot by reading about his accumulations. First, I learned that it’s important to look at great art in books to “edumacate” yourself, but there is nothing that replaces looking at the piece closely in a museum. When I saw my first Joseph Cornell in a museum I observed the intensity behind his well-crafted wooden boxes, dovetailed and stained within an inch of their surrealistic lives. I also noticed how every object, regardless of how unexceptional it first looked, was exceptional in some detail. I was also drawn into his illusory compositions which through his deftness with texture, magnetized my view and kept me captive. I was instantly a fan.

I also learned another valuable lesson. If you are going to be an artist that deals in assemblage, collages, or “combines,” you must cultivate your collections. In fact, when you are going to do anything creative, whether it be cooking or candlestick making, you must become an astute connoisseur of your ingredients, picking, choosing, and discarding discriminately. At my home, I have six shelves where all my street finds go so I can pick the best one for the right spot when the right artwork needs it. They range from odd instruments to broken bottles to odd-shaped sticks. They are the flotsam and jetsam washed up along my daily paths. Some fit in a piece of art better than others, but the collecting is part of the work I do that connects me to my craft. Many times, the act of collecting is only a few minor adjustments away from being the finished piece.

I once had a neighbor who had five of everything. Just a look around his shop told me he had brought the same screwdriver and can of WD40 every time he went to “the Walmarts.” His garage was a chaotic jumble of purposelessness, with a doctorate in junk and a minor in messy. When I went over there, he could never find anything because he was living in a Ground Hog’s Day of Repeated Purchases. I can safely say that I’ve had nightmares that ended better than his garage. I think you get the picture. Still, as I looked around each time I visited, I began to realize I was standing with the ghost of Joseph Cornell. I wasn’t in a nightmare at all. I was watching Cornell’s ghost walk through the walls and into my art. All I had to do was open the junk drawer and let him in.

This Van May Not Be Down by the River, But I’d Live in It

My wife and I recently attended a writing conference in San Diego, a city characterized by its incredibly stable climate. We were never cold when we were there, nor did we break a sweat, unless you want to count the mile-long, cardiovascular nightmare of a hill we tried to climb on our bikes. When the fire engine burn in my quads left and my body pumped a little blood back up to my eyes, the view on top was stunning and we paused to take in the Pacific, the mountains, and the desert simultaneously. We stayed at Bob Goff’s retreat center but tried to layer our work with some play at some of the typical sight-seeing activities around the area. Vacations can make you need a vacation if you don’t realize you are human and need to eat now and then. So, we stopped everything we were doing one day, took stock and narrowed our exhausting list of restaurant possibilities to a committed stop at Hodad’s, the iconic Ocean Beach hamburger joint started in 1969 which has by consensus the best burgers in the known universe.

That is quite a claim to fame, considering that burgers are one of those items you can find on every restaurant menu, regardless of the cuisine. To further my point, I once ate at an off-beat diner called Momma Toos that specialized in Vegan/Fusion Vietnamese dishes. I didn’t get that description either. However, I did noticed HAMBURGER printed boldly like a boss at the bottom of the menu, just below #12 TANGY ROOT MOSS WITH PARK BENCH SLIVERS, advertised in a lethal-looking and unsuitable typeface. I realized at that moment that the ubiquitous hamburger is one of the anchors holding our country together. In fact, history has it that the burger was probably even present when our founding fathers argued over who got to sign off on our energy enriching high-protein Declaration of Independence.

As my wife and I pulled up a wall and took our place in line outside Hodads, we relaxed into the people stream flowing either towards or away from the ocean. Due to Covid, Hodads and other restaurants have spilled out into the streets in the form of makeshift porches and forced both pedestrian and auto traffic to maneuver into the leftover lanes. It’s a tight squeeze for the wide range of motorcyclists, neon clad surfers, superfluous beatniks, and cart-pushing homeless finding their way along Ocean Beach. Inching slowly forward in line, we were at risk of overdosing on the smell of fried everything, and we were tempted to dip our fingers into the mammoth shakes that whipped passed us. Thankfully, I was distracted by a glimpse of a school aged child reading a novel. Her clean, patient silhouette, sandwiched between her parents, stood out from the graffiti laden surfboards propped up everywhere, and from the billions of kids now at large, gone missing on their shiny new cells.

Seated street level at our table, the single cheeseburger (with everything on it) I ordered was so picturesque I could only stare at it. It was kind of like being paralyzed by a tsunami that is about ready to kill you with cholesterol. However, this sandwich was just too beautiful for me to fret about my LDL. As it turned out, I didn’t have to because I couldn’t get my mouth around it anyway until I removed the top three inches of onions, which gave me just enough time to take a huge breath before being swept under bite by bite. One of the benefits of this purely sumptuous moment was that it allowed me to completely ignore the (homeless?) dog stretched out under _my_ table. I’m working overtime to stay safe, sanitizing my sanitation wipes, so I don’t quite get the hygienic portion of this all-inclusive dog thing. Dogs are allowed everywhere in San Diego and are only outnumbered by the sun burnt locals that have morphed into one continuous tattoo. Strangely, most of the dogs were wearing some sort of SPF sun wear while their owners looked just inches away from being naked, and probably would have been more comfortable if they were.

It seems the entire history of this little hamburger joint, indeed the whole Ocean Beach area, could be summed up by looking at the tiny signature Hodads VW bus parked out front for the last sixty years. Thousands of surfing labels cover every square inch of the van from bumper to bumper and are quite likely holding it together. The van is a constantly changing collage – a symbol for an area whose culture is tied to the ocean. While allowing generation after generation to pass by and put their stamp on it, the bus still withstands the regular assault and barrage of salty labels. The wheels on this VW may not be going ‘round and ‘round any longer, but every time a sticker is placed on this constantly changing sculpture, it gets a little bit stronger.

You Complete Me

A couple of years ago, I began to hear the unmistakable sound of a bullfrog by our pond. Its deep blurpulous call resonated across the yard in threes and fours, and then went silent before starting up again. It was private messaging a prospective mate. I can’t speak for females, but I can hardly imagine attracting a soul mate making noises like that. To each bullfrog his own.

One time our cat Chloe came across the leggy frog getting a suntan in my garden. When she tried to nab it, the frog made a record-breaking leap headlong into the safety of the drink. I marveled at its Olympic jump and lightning-fast escape underwater, but our cat sulked around all day because it missed a meal.

Sadly, winter was not so kind to our bullfrog, and I found it floating upside down in my spring pond clean, revealing its unusual, camouflage patterned underbelly. It was at that point that the artist side of me kicked in, so I scooped it out and laid it out on a rock to bake in the sun. While dead frogs are not included in conversation you want to have at the dinner table, I put it at the top of the list for teachable moments with my grandson, Cash. Over the course of a week, we watched our frog shrivel up into a frog mummy, observing details like the huge gill openings that allow it to breathe underwater and the rows of tiny sharp teeth it uses to hold onto its prey.

It was great fodder for “bro time”, as Cash calls it, and we discussed various four-year-old plans for our dried frog including running over it with the car, putting it in a blender, and eating it in front of his grandmother, Gigi. They all sounded like loads of fun to me, but all of them were voted down for the simple reason that none of them included an ounce of kindness, which is apparently something I’m supposed to be teaching as a Grandpa (Popeye). I was also reminded that when the bullfrog was alive, he was a good friend of mine, just like the song says. I get that, but bro time counts for something, so we opted to just paint it black, the only oil-based paint color I had around. Paint it we did – gills, teeth and all, and set it out to find a new home in my studio as it dried.

Fast forward a week.

As I was cataloging pieces for an update on my website, I came across an unfinished piece where I had used a black oil stick to draw a sort of loose calligraphic framework. I was never really satisfied with the work and had put it down, where over the years it had sunk deeper and deeper into the unfinished pile. However, brought out into the light, the awkwardly posed black bullfrog formed an immediate attraction to calligraphic writing. If this wasn’t love at first sight, then I’m an egg. These two were a match made in artistic heaven, and I daresay since I got them together, I have not heard a peep or a croak from either one of them. To insist I heard the bullfrog say, “You complete me!” would be silly, but let’s just say that together they appear to be getting along swimmingly in their new garden.

The Fork in the Road

I love analogies, and the analogies I use in conversation border on the ridiculous most of the time. If I say “That’s like…” one more time my wife says she’s going to stick a fork in my eye.

Still, one of the images that might best describe my work comes from a snapshot often seen in the middle of traffic, so I will indulge you with yet another comparison.

I have noticed out in the middle of busy intersections, there is usually a small area that is untouched by advancing cars and trucks, either those going straight or ones turning. In that small zone one can find all kinds of metal fragments, bolts, plastic from headlights, parts of bumpers that have been cast off when the physical forces of acceleration or inertia left them behind. This residue creates a kind of automotive collage, orphaned car pieces that could not hold on any longer.

These accumulated piles can be found in busy crossing in the city, and when I see them, I like to think they are lost colonies of Undercarriage People, cast offs from a society that no longer needs them along for the ride. They had tried to hang onto their situation but were not cared for properly. They were ignored living in their private hell on wheels. Where they once held everything together, they have felt their grip on reality slowly loosening, slipping away. For them, there was no looking back, no turning around, and they had nothing to lose. They were the migrant bearings, the driftless tailpipes, the down-and-out gas caps who were willing to take a risk, to make a break and give the world the slip. So, whatever happens when they make a jump for it, casting themselves out into the middle of the intersection, it will be for the hope of a better life away from the clamor of rush hour noise and exhaust. During a moment of sheer willpower, they trusted in something beyond the gray pavement passing underneath them and wretched themselves loose, flinging themselves to the freedom that awaited them, into the No-Man’s-Land of vagrant car parts.

This is an example of the kind of image I see when I think of my own art. I see snippets of life floating by, collages really, that bespeak a narrative where spontaneity, improvisation, and chance are the main characters and take precedent over intellect, materials, or my technical ability. They become part of the visual diary I keep of found objects, rejected scraps, and abstract marks. They are all in relationship to one another, analogies, trying to get along with one another without getting a fork stuck in their eye. My process is one of constant comparison, and in that sense, each final piece tells its own story separate from any other piece I make.

From an unknown author I glean this passage: “We become who we are through the conflicts and disadvantages we prefer rather that the more comfortable alternatives.”

I could choose a more comfortable alternative to my process, one that would involve easier conflicts or disadvantages, one that is immediately pleasing to the eye and one that requires little effort from the viewer. It would also be a process that would make for easier artistic decisions. I prefer the less comfortable alternatives (child-like scribbles, odd objects, blemishes, and the like) because they give credence to the small, seemingly insignificant pileups, the still moments available in the middle of life’s delightful but swarming intersections.

Make a Pot and Find Your Center

Ceramics and I did not get off to a very good start. My first exposure to working in clay was at college where the chair of the department was also the clay department head. He wore a long white surgical coat that made me feel like I needed to schedule my yearly physical exam when I was around him. He was never happy with me finishing a major in one year, and generally discouraged me from taking any more art at all, unless of course, it was ceramics. These conversations did not rest well with me, so I avoided the specter of his white coat, and went about my artistic bid’ness.

Where I went to school, the potters were relegated to the basement of an old gym building and surfaced to civilization caked with clay and looking like they had been living on Twinkies for weeks. They were their own breed, and so dedicated to their craft that we rarely saw them in any other art classes. However, they did show up for Art History tests and the rest of us gave them plenty of space because they smelled like they had just crawled out of a cave, and given their basement situation, they had. Evolution had developed their basement skills to a fine art, so to speak, so they were used to firing kilns all night, drinking copious amount of coffee, and hanging from the ceiling like bats, but in other classes they went straight to the back seats where they could catch up on their Zs in glaze-stained overalls while slides of Robert Arneson danced in their heads. (We did not talk about sugar-plums when I was in school, just Ramen noodles.)

As a whole, we art majors hung pretty tight, but the potters drifted in and out of their own weather system. They also communicated using terms like flaking, extrusion, and rupture, terms I only used if I had an onset of acne. But I also had other misgivings about the ceramic majors. If I wanted to have a conversation with one of them, I had to catch them when they weren’t throwing, weren’t glazing, weren’t stacking a kiln, weren’t trimming, weren’t slaking, and weren’t sleeping in class. I did try to date a ceramic-type gal one quarter, but I always felt strangely underdressed when I visited her in her CO²-ladden basement studio and thought I would be more attractive if I rolled around on the floor until I was covered with silica dust. When I began to be mistaken for Pig Pen from the Peanuts cartoon strip, I realized our breakup was inevitable and for the better. One more odd tidbit, a rumor that still bothers me to this very day, and the final straw that kept me away from ceramics: I had heard that male ceramists never wear underwear because it was just too blinking hot around the kiln. I began to wonder if taking a ceramics course might cause me to be overtaken with the desire to rip off my undies, and that seems like a dangerous stage of childhood development I did not want to revisit.

However, many years later, about the time I started teaching art in the public schools, I got fired up about ceramics and participated in two summer ceramic workshops—with my underwear on, by the way. I learned a barrage of new terms, many of which begin with an “s”, such as slab, slip, and slurry. I fell into the ceramic groove by taking naps on the wedging table and was officially christened into the clay Hall of Fame when I mistakenly inhaled too much silica dust and had to spend an evening getting oxygen in the ER.

Then when I began teaching ceramics myself at a local middle school, I began to use my newfound skill of throwing on the wheel to decompress from the hecticness of teaching. Throwing on the wheel became a total escape. Once I got the clay on the wheel and began the centering process, I found the mesmerizing spin took my mind to a new head space where I could let go of my crazies. Drawing, painting, or any art form can be that way, but the quiet focus of the clay was transformative. Then I began to understand why all those college mudslingers stayed in the basement making their fantastic vessels. They knew how to find their quiet, centered moments on the wheel. They put their weight behind their wedging, found out how to become still and get all their pots in a row.

At ceramic shows, I cringe when I hear people whispering about the high prices of the clay works on display, knowing how many hours it takes to come up with a refined clay vessel. When one adds up the hours preparing the clay, throwing, and trimming the piece, and firing (usually twice) the vessel, the hourly rate for finished pieces is abysmally low, like about fifty cents an hour. I love a good bargain as much as anybody else, but I “garan-darn-tee ya” that rate beats any deal you’ll find at your local Bargain Basement.

You can read about my artist statement regarding my clay works here. Coincidentally, the pieces pictured here are now stored in my basement. What goes around, comes around.

Living on Borrowed Time

In suburban America, front yards are on full display, but the backyard is a retreat meant mostly for the homeowner. Visitors will use the front yard as a start to a more formal entrance, but in the end, we homeowners retreat to the back, where we can filter out our “cultural urban differences.” That is a euphemistic phrase for barking dogs, run down cars parked on lawns, the latest political signage, horrible parenting methods, drifting cigarette smoke, and nut-sedge so tall it has gone to seed.

In our backyard, we are protected by the magnificent arching drapery of our mature black gum tree, whose branches are almost two feet around and spread out one hundred feet in every direction. When I look up at our tree from my porch, I see a structured guide, a canopy where every limb is like a chapter delineating my garden below. It is like looking at one of those perfect outlines for a term paper with Roman numerals, the ideal model for flawless organization. So enveloping are its branches and encompassing its contour, that living near it almost feels like living in a treehouse.

Our backyard tree is not the type of gum one usually finds in southwestern Indiana. It is a plant in the tupelo family and finds a more comfortable home in the deep south growing in swampy water where its suckers sprout in the humidity to form an undergrowth of saplings. Unlike real gum trees around the Midwest, black gums do not rain gumballs, those woody brown golf spheres that look like miniature medieval weapons and proliferate like Carter’s liver pills.

Up until a couple of years ago a gardener could not find and plant a black gum tree through a nursery purchase. It had to be inherited and grow wild, which is how ours begun some sixty years ago. They are available now through the science of hormonal stimulants, and in my opinion are one of the best tree choices if you want a stunning fall display of color. Long serrated leaves ranging from yellows to purples to deep reds dominate the landscape when Halloween beckons, and aside from a two-week period in June when the allergy-loaded pollen drifts down in clumps, our gum tree sits anchored like an entire forest unto itself, enveloping a field of liriope we planted underneath. The local blue heron that needs a long runway to reach our pond has had to be content with fly-by appearances and now avoids our pond altogether. Our koi appreciate that.

Back in ’08 when a storm left two inches of ice over southern Indiana and Kentucky, the weight of the ice took out the top branches and bent the others down so far they almost touched our driveway. With frigid conditions and no power, we waited the storm out, listening to what sounded like gunfire outside as branches around the neighborhood popped and snapped and crashed to the ground, and one tree after another became disabled. Miraculously, our tree lifted itself up as the ice melted, and resumed some form of self-rehabilitation.

Since that time, its health has been on a slippery slope, even without the weight of ice. With no leader branch taking over the top, and repeated trimmings to keep branches off our house, our tree has been trying to survive on the growth of new suckers. In other words, it has nowhere to stretch out and grow in a manner consistent with its nature and will probably need to be harvested within two to three years, baring a miracle.

Cutting down this tree will be a tough pill to swallow for us when it forms the focal point for our garden landscape. Our black gum has always reached out in every direction and provided the stage for every performance when we walk out our back door. Woodpeckers—downy, red-headed and piliated—all dip in and out to lap up insects, while dozens of songbirds make their rounds. Their songs cheer the air and provide a layer of calm, noiseless noise now popularly known as white noise. Even a shy pair of mourning doves, normally early risers, hang out all day in the lower branches and make small talk until they become too self-conscious.

Deep in the recesses of our backyard lies an ancient septic tank, positioned like some UFO in Area 51. It is difficult to believe that such a potentially toxic container could be hidden in such a peaceful environment. Arborists, master gardeners, and city officials have visited and ruled out the possibility that chemicals are leaching out of the tank and slowly killing our tree. According to the experts there are no girdling roots, no insects damage and nothing that would signal that the tree should be dying. We are left to accept this fact about our tree: that all living things perish at some point, and to embrace the mystery of this death event as part of life’s cycle. Still, I am having a difficult time imagining the visual I will have peering out from the third bay of the garage, my art studio, without seeing the protective arms of our black gum, Nyssa sylvatica. When it is gone, and the stump ground down, our tree will no longer reach out to invite all that is natural into my workspace, nor provide the phenomenon of an energetic conduit to my art.

I once read an essay about climate change and global warming that posed a bewildering simple question: Do you know what it is like to have a cold? Well, of course you do, right? It’s that punky feeling we all have felt from sneezing, puffy eyes, a runny nose, and a low-grade fever. That, the essay stated, is exactly how the earth feels all the time. Our precious Earth is heating up, and it is sick and tired of being sick and tired. Could it be that our tree is dying from a century-old cold caught from the Earth as it gasps for a shallow breath of ozone?

For the last half hour, I have been perched under our gum tree’s huge umbrella. A lone crow in the top branches has demanded my attention with its full range of clicks, rattles, and flashy ca-caws. Despite the intrusion, it is a reminder to me that we are to embrace the interruptions life throws our way, and that all things work together, even when what is happening makes us mournful and we suffer a loss. I am saddened every time I look up through our gum and see mostly open sky instead of leaves. However, I am also reminded that the mystery of the ‘08 ice storm has purpose, and trust that Mother Nature’s give and take will bring new life out of this death. My garden will eventually adjust to the loss also and restore in me the hope that nature is resilient and clever, opportunistic but fair.

With that in mind, I observe the guardian tree of our backyard slowly weakening into a mere skeleton of what it was before. It has not asked one thing from me except acknowledgement of the beauty and protection it shared willingly as if a member of our family. If we accept the idea that nature is resilient and will always bounce back under adversity, it is because of the raw strength it has displayed over eons of adversity. While our splendid black gum tree is a symbol for what life offers if we will stretch out our arms in solidarity, even love may save the world after all, but it may have to come from different arms when those of this tree are gone and no longer wrapped around our backyard in a giant hug.

A Particular Promenade Purposely and Prominently Parading

Everyone loves a parade. When I was a kid, my hometown had lots of them, which I watched from my Dad’s ninth story office window. It was part of what made the city part connected to the rural part.

My wife and I recently saw a ball game in Cincinnati, and the downtown was amazing—clean, resplendent with gardens and blooming flowers. We heard few honking horns if any, and people actually stopped and talked to us for no particular reason. Them's my type of folk! There were at least two different concerts going on by the riverfront, one Soul and one Celtic, and if you stood in the middle ground and listened to both at the same time you might have thought you were at a Next-Gen Fifth Dimension concert with Joan Bias as the lead singer. After a couple of days watching the urban friendliness, I felt like I was part of the urban renewal program, sort of like the witness protection program for parade lovers. I leapt into the street with my real identity, wearing a funny hat, toting a ridiculously opalescent balloon, and waving at little kids, petting Dobermans, and chewing gum I picked off banisters just like Elf.

Parades are, in themselves, a unique form of entertainment. In no other venue or activity do people form a line and promenade down the street to advertise their allegiance to anything from boom boxes (Willimantic, Connecticut) to underwear (a tiny unmentionable town in Ohio). Apparently in America, anyone can start a parade, just like a lemonade stand, without fear of imprisonment, or social distancing.

The piece you are looking at here, (title, top), was worked on over the span of three years. I kept adding and subtracting from it, trying to acquaint myself with what it was about. The use of alliteration aids us in getting through the long title, and despite the use of trash, poorly drawn stick figures and haphazard marks, the result is still a carefully constructed design. For example, you’ll notice that there is movement stepwise up from the left corner, and the same kind of movement going up from the right corner. Together, the two imaginary paths cross thereby forcing your eye to move up and down in the picture even though the main characters are happily and parading horizontally and purposely on the bottom deckled edge.

Good design is a lot like a good parade: they both easily transport us to the land of make-believe. Consider this quote from one of my favorite comedians, Jerry Seinfeld, taken from an episode of Comedians and Cars Getting Coffee:

Even if you are doing something that looks fun, there is still a serious process underneath it that is driving the craft. So, even though I am cracking jokes, I am fine tuning them with my timing, my choice of words, my delivery.

Thankfully, you do not have to drive to Cincinnati or get coffee with Jerry to be a part of my particular parade. Just purposely pull up a sidewalk, put on your particular go-to hat and watch the performance. Somewhere in the middle, where the black X hits the starfish, hit your urban pause button. You may hear the Fifth Dimension singing “Up, up and away, my beautiful, my beautiful balloon…”

Mama, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up and Be Artists

Looking at this picture, you can see where I’m going with this.

The photo, circa spring of 1976, is me. After dropping out of a pre-med program in college and taking a semester off to live in Idaho and work as a housekeeper at the Sun Valley Lodge, I returned to campus, a la the lone gunslinger outlaw pictured above. Did you hear about that guy, the one who had been out on the prairie stamping cattle, eating beans and smoking peyote? Well, that wasn’t me, that was some of my other college acquaintances. Me, I never saw any cattle out west when I was there. I survived on a lot of PB&J sandwiches, not beans, and thought peyote was a topping for cheese tacos.

Now mind you, I wasn’t quite as mean as I look in the picture. I carried jokes, not guns, like this all-time favorite of mine:

Did you hear the story about the three-legged dog who walked into Dodge City? He stopped in the middle of the street, showed his holsters, and announced, “I’m looking for the man who shot my paw.” Moseying right along…

When I returned to campus, I realized I wasn’t in Kansas anymore, or Idaho. I was back in school, supposedly having sewed all my wild oats and ready to buckle down and get some work done in my newly acquired major. Truth is, I was lost. I had little art background, had only a small portfolio of doodles to show for myself. It was a wild ride, and my art arsenal was not strong. But it was enough to initiate the desire to apply to graduate school, and jump in lock, stock and barrel. There, after a couple more years of experimenting and searching, I headed out into the sunset, past the one-horse towns, just me and the wide-open prairie.

If you are young and beginning your career, and you know you want to be in the arts or be an artist, then I think I’ve had enough time in the saddle to make a couple of suggestions. Perhaps they’ll help you dodge an Idaho or two.

3 Pointers from a Former Art Outlaw:

1. Develop a habit of working in the studio, making pieces to hone your craft. Put in the time, do the work. Don’t wait for inspiration. There is no substitute for good ol’ fashioned hard work.
2. Decide who you want to be on your team. Art is a tough career, and you are going to need smart, sensible, kind people who believe in you and are in your corner. Find them.
3. Don’t confuse achievement with enrichment. Many times, the things we must do as artists will not result in anything material, but we do them anyway to authenticate who we are as both contributing artists and humble human beings.

Giddyup and Happy Trails!

I’ll Take a Side Order of Titles, Please

One of the pleasures I get creating a new piece of art is coming up with titles. People love my titles. It is the truth. I sometimes get more comments on a title than I do the actual piece. I think that is because, to some degree, everyone knows something about their own language and the words they use, even if they aren’t avid readers or great spellers. Funny words, play on words, and sounds that are almost words, are all part of our daily interactions with others. We misspeak, fail to speak, interrupt, and studder through our conversations until something like what we want to say dribbles out and becomes part of the conversation landfill. When I was making pieces that had a more serious tone, coming up with a title was frankly a chore and, in the end, usually felt unnecessary. Avoiding that added ambivalence, many artists title their works in numerical series, or on the back of the canvas or print, or not at all.

Back in the day when my art was making a lot of jumps and starts, I knew I was going to discover a visual form, some process, that allowed me the freedom to play with words, both in my work and in my titles. If you go to my web site, you can scan through the titles and see I have plenty of fun with them. Even if sometimes they don’t make sense, the word combinations form comical sounds that fit into the spirit of the piece and add another level of participation. On that note, some of my titles are more narrative; some are silly and nonsensical.

One piece that might serve as a good example is Inuit Crosses the Bearing Straight. Here we find a tiny blobbish figure, somewhat ungainly in appearance, trying to tightrope walk across a thin line. He bears no resemblance to any kind of Native American Indian as the name implies, but it is the nation’s name, Inuit, (into it, intuitive, I knew it) that conjures up all kinds of poetic possibilities. The figure is making his way across, “bearing straight ahead.” And what other way would he go? Backwards, towards Russia? If he falls off the line, the confusing scribbles below foretells all kinds of ruination. To me, the funny part of this drawing is that this little scribble person, walks a line of responsibility. He may be a liaison between two continental areas holding them together, some sort of hired explorer/diplomat that balances the divide between nations, or between abstraction and realism, between pea soup and sea poop.

And here’s ‘nother thing. When I come up with a title, I must be careful not to spoil the piece by trying too hard to explain it through the title. That can insult the viewer’s intelligence like a bad line in a movie. Every work of art stirs a cognitive response from the viewer, a response the artist has no control over. Titles must be evocative, interesting, simple, and at least in my mind, entertaining. It’s tricky to do all those things, but I have a lot of fun trying.

When I used a school lunch tray in No Matter How Good or Bad You Are, Just Pant, I purposely misspelled “paint,” because, to me, you are going to say paint anyway, whether I spell it right or not. However, the student I had that inspired this title did not like art at all, but finally concluded that no matter who you are, no matter how good or bad you art at art, you should just paint anyway. True, but he misspelled paint, and wrote “pant.” Breathe, he was saying, just breathe. Relax, order a large side of titles, and enjoy the meal!