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.

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.

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.

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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.

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.

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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.

bullfrog.jpg

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.

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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.

Carving a Deeper Path

Around the lake where our group walks the road almost curled up from the last two weeks of ninety plus heat. The lake itself sits still and exhausted from evaporation, and the ducks are hunkered down in the shade because it is cooler there than in the water. I feel sorry for the high school football players who are withstanding several practices per day. There is almost no amount of the wet stuff you can pour down your throat to offset being encapsulated in full football gear. During practice back in the day, I fainted dead away on the forty-yard line and sat straight up like a cornstalk when they put the smelling salts under my nose. But this kind of humid weather is a time when we protect ourselves with funny hats as wide as a Humvee. Normally, we are more self-conscious, but not so when the sun beats the tacos out of you from all angles.

So, when our BBRR group took our walk today, we sniffed the cooler air like it carried the smell of a freshly baked cookie. Electrolytes were up, the breeze floated through our shirts, and except for the story of a hawk that is threatening to eat a neighbor’s poodle, conversation was light. And speaking of conversation…

One of my favorite parts of this walking club is the way we share dialogue. Normally in a group, it can be sticky when you make your passage between the chit and the chat, or between one subject and another. There is an art to small talk, an art that some people navigate socially better than others. If, for example you are listening to a long-winded person who is explaining the Decline and Fall of Western Civilization, it is difficult to interrupt them without the fear that they may start completely over when you return to the topic, starting with Chapter One: Homo Erectus Man and His Rise to Ambulation. However, in our group, we don’t have to worry about that. We shift lackadaisically around like a herd of grazing sheep, without any goals, itinerary, or past minutes to read back. We interrupt each other, complete each other’s sentences and then, half-hour later, we become Bon Qui Qui and say: “Is that what you had said?”

This is a wonderful retirement luxury I call driftiness. Nothing anyone is doing is anything they have to do. We are now doing things either because we love it or because we feel this is where our service would be best spent. In either case, the driftiness is the ultimate blessing, especially if you have observed the events of last week ranging from catastrophic Hurricane Ida to the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan. Thankfully, we are not held up in a shelter waiting for a ration of bottled water or looking over our shoulder at an oncoming tank. We are relatively safe, reaching out in our own way, be it caring for the elderly, volunteering at a local hospital, or on mission for a recovering alcoholic. Our conversations and our walks may drift, but our hearts are powerfully directed to someone who is worse off than we are.

I hear stories of buying travel campers, of learning a new skill like dancing, of buying a new boat, but for us, those things come and go. They are the embellishments, part of the drifting. The steadiness comes from the more serious talks, those that include the enriching experiences that are carving a deeper path into our days. Author Gordon McDonald calls this the life happening “below the waterline.” As most of us approach our seventies, our bodies don’t have the flashy accoutrements we used to have. We have some worn parts, we have things that need replacing, we have some squeaks, some rustles, some blips and blemishes. But below our waterline, real work is still being done, and we are walking the deeper talk.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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…”

BBRRC - August 2021

In Evansville, Indiana, sixty-five-degree weather in August is almost as unusual as finding Mr. Wonka’s Golden Ticket in your candy bar, so we renewed our walk this BBRR day with an extra punch in our step, and fewer visual humidex roadblocks to our line of sight. It was cool this morning, we had more energy and could see everything better. Yea, that is what I meant to say. Summer humidity here is an index people check as closely as their phone messages. We locals walk outside into an unbreathable soup, and even cool relief of a swimming pool can’t ward off the greenish tint of algae.

As you may know by now, we walk on the grounds of the State Hospital, or as a friend of mine used to call it, the State Horse Pistol. Oh, the Anguish Language. Shuffling along the paths, we have begun to include conversations about such topics as hammer toe, athlete’s foot, orthotics, and shin splints. I’ve decided to put all those issues under one heading called Footburps because Podiatry sounds too much like an excuse, sort of like starting out a sentence with “But I…”. Pretty soon you will talk yourself out of putting one foot in front of the other, and that certainly breaks every rule I know about walking.

Compliments to one of new members: Polly is going back into teaching after retiring for a couple of years. This a not a flighty decision but comes from a soulful desire to make a difference in someone else’s life, to be in the trenches again duking it out with kids. Teaching is not a job you do for the money, and if you are then, in my experience, you probably are not lighting those kids on fire in the classroom. Round of applause from the BBRR club, Polly. We are there for you, ready to pop in as guest speakers, demonstrators, or if needed, give the famous Bender One-Handed Applause (a sort of quiet standing ovation).

As if to celebrate her triumphant return to teaching, Polly took the outside lane as we turned off our usual route and walked a half-mile down Vann Avenue, which is to say we took our lives in our own hands. In Evansville, drivers seem to go out of their way to merge into the lane next to the sidewalk (where we were walking) just for the sheer fun of watching your eyes dilate and the part in your hair disappear. We did make it back to the hospital lake alive, but my PTSD blocked any memory of what was said before or after, and I had nightmares of Yellow Cabs falling out of the sky onto my head. Coincidentally, one of our walkers noticed a bottle of whiskey that had been thrown out of a passing vehicle, evidence of some poor soul’s desperate attempt to multitask while driving.

I prefer my minister’s method: He has a wonderful habit of picking up street trash on his thrice weekly wake-up run around his neighborhood. Recently, early one morning as he hit his stride, he ran past a discarded empty vodka bottle along the road and responding to the nudge of the Holy Spirit, scooped it up for disposal at the end of his jog. As he rounded the corner towards home, a neighbor out enjoying her morning coffee, spotted the bottle in his hand, and yelled: “Hittin’ the juice a little early today, aren’t you pastor?”

No one in our group drinks and walks, and no one picked up the booze bottle on our BBRR jaunt today either. I’m kind of glad. Footburp: I’ve been through that baptism, and it ain’t pretty. I’ll stick to putting one foot in front of the other and see where it takes me.

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

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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.

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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!

The World According to Hornets

It’s the middle of summer and the insects at my house have taken over. I’ve got a ground level attack from porky black ants and praying mantises, and spiders casting webs as long as my arm across every chasm. One web I discovered covered my entire pond, a feat I believe was only accomplished by an arachnid architect who understood weight bearing parabolas and structural integrity. Suffice to say it was amazingly complex and tangled web that was woven, just out of reach of the mouthy koi underneath.

Dominating the air space, however, are my NOT favorite insect—hornets—but only because I’ve been stung several times and it hurts like the dickens. I have a healthy respect for them as they pack a powerful bite and fly and hover erratically, depending on how angry they are. A few summers ago, for example, I was trimming one of my large cypress bushes, and had the good sense to put on some heavy gloves before starting that job. I must have stirred up the proverbial hornet’s nest because I looked down at my gloved hand to witness a hornet furiously trying to get its stinger through my leather glove. My immediate thought was to swipe it away, but I suddenly realized that if it was going to bite me, it would have done so by then, and I might just as well watch it vainly try to burrow into hand.

Over the years I saved the various size hornets nests I’ve found. Sometimes I find them cleverly tucked away in a corner of a gutter, and sometimes they are hanging by a thread out in the open, but the oddest one is the nest I find every year inside our back doorbell. It is one of those old-fashioned doorbells that rings when you pull the string, but no one coming to our back door ever rings it because it looks too decorative to have any real function. On the rare occasion when we do pull the string, the reverberations must, to the hornet, be equivalent to having a jet airliner take off in your living room because a hornet shoots out like a F-14 on a battleship. In any case, I can’t take the doorbell apart to clean out the hornet’s nest without risk being stung, but we can’t get in the door either. So, every summer I make this special bag device that traps the insect, and our entranceway returns to normal.

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Now the hornets have returned in the menacing swirls of The World According to Hornets, where one can almost hear their warning buzzes. Each brown oval includes a nest and outlines an imaginary boundary a hornet once occupied. My intention was to subtly offset the paper nests with my own handmade sheet of paper, contrasting the way we as humans do things and the way nature does things. My design is united by a few simple colors but complicated by the many little worlds each swirl represents, each orbiting and creating their own buzz. I thought about drawing some of my favorite little characters here and there, or collaging in some real bugs, but I opted to leave the nests to stand on their own, supported only by the grainy spiral patterns of flight, evidence that hornets were once here.

Is this picture a hornet ghost town? Have they have escaped the crazy life full of ugly political signage, privacy fences, fake deers, and cars double-parked on lawns? Here inside this art, there are no more hornets left, no sounds or activity. Only their nests are left as evidence to nature’s neat but intricate, simple, and intelligent world.

Cash: Then and Now

Our house of the last fourteen years came with a blessing and a curse called a koi pond. Within the first week, the curse part was working overtime, in that we discovered that the pond was being run by an ancient sump pump. The pond was murky, green with algae, having been built in an area of our yard that was the worst possible location: full sun.

We ordered a new pump; I installed it and hoped the pond would start moving the water and the algae would go away. The next morning, when I came out to see how the pond was doing, I noticed the water had changed colors from a pea soup color to a weird orangish hue. I thought this was a weird color to see in a pond, and even weirder that the orange-ness was shifting about, almost like the water was moving beneath the surface. That shiftiness turned out to be three hundred goldfish which over years of neglect, had been left to breed and were now creating an almost solid orange environment.

Since that time, we have managed to correct the Ph, cart off the excess fish, get the waterfall to work and seen everything from fox to blue heron make regular visits, all this is in the heart of an urban setting. However, one of the most frequent visitors to the pond is my grandson Cash, who loves to feed the fish and unearth whatever might be lurking between the rocks and tall irises around the watery edges. While flipping through the many pictures we have taken of him at the pond, I abruptly had a remembrance of a drawing I did, over fifty years prior, of a child kneeling similar to one of the photos we had taken.

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Both the photo and the drawing are shown here for comparison. A bit eerie, isn’t it? The actual drawing still hangs in a prominent place in my dad’s work-out room. Who would know that over fifty years later, I would have a grandson poised just like the drawing, complete with a fish net!

The colored pencil drawing, executed when I was eleven or twelve, was part of an advertisement on the back of a National Geographic magazine that caught my attention. I remember having a lot of trouble managing the background by blending the colored pencils. At that age, I did not understand that things in the foreground are in focus, and that my background was not going to look realistic because it would be out of focus. That is what happens, of course to things that are further away, but I did not have that knowledge then.

Yesterday, just as we were posting these dual pictures, I looked up to see Cash standing in the pond. Now, here at the Bender’s we have a strict rule about four-year-old’s getting into a pond. We put his clothes in the dryer and put him in a five-minute time-out, wrapped in a towel in the warm sun. Glancing over at him in his lawn chair, I tried to keep a stern grandpa face, the one that says, “I’m serious about this rule.” Still, I had to laugh inside, knowing that there was a boy just like him in a picture in a frame that has been kneeling by the water’s edge for over fifty years, perfectly safe, carefully picking through what discoveries he might find in his tiny fish net.

He is learning about nature on a level lost to most of us, peering with intense curiosity at the mysteries pond life may reveal. I am learning that time moves forward, and that God’s hand is in every detail, down to the last mark of a colored pencil.

Bright Blue “Birthday” Music

Emily, my daughter, has a birthday this weekend. She is a mom of two, a nurturing wife, and has three jobs, but these roles do not define her. It is her attitude, her daily walk and character that really turns a spotlight on her many accomplishments. In honor of her birthday, I thought this would be a good time to shed some light on our dual painting performance many years ago when she was only eight, a snippet of which you can find here.

To give a little background, our performance involved painting while the Evansville Philharmonic played “Bright Blue Music,” a contemporary and exuberant run through a rainbow of sounds composed by Michael Torke. If you have never heard the entire song, it is worth the twelve-minute ride and will leave you catching your artistic breath with its wild highs and lows.

Initially, I was called into a meeting with some of this town’s most reputable artistic sponsors and personalities. I can tell you I was a bit intimidated sitting at the table, wondering why I had been called in. Given that my art is a bit “out there” for this area, I assumed I had made created something that crossed some forbidden boundaries, and I had been called into be admonished.

Rather than be scolded for “over-expressing” myself, I was invited to participate in a new event with the philharmonic called the “Color Symphony,” I once-a-year tradition in which kids are invited to participate in the orchestra’s music in ways that might inspire them to produce future works of art of their own. My reaction to the invitation was to tell the panel that I thought they had picked the wrong guy for the job. I had no stage experience, I told them and thought their idea would be better served picking an actor, rather than artist, who could be more flamboyant and effervescing. Lucky for me and for Emily, my opinion was rejected.

Over the span of the next couple for months, I devised a way to paint with Emily where we both could work together and cover a huge canvas to the syncopated rhythms of the philharmonic’s“Bright Blue Music.” Emily was young, so I took some time to teach her to listen to the music’s soft parts, the crescendos, and silences. We practiced by drawing on long sheets of paper, speeding up and slowing down to the music and using colors that reflected the energy we heard as it changed in the song.

By the night of the performance, Emily and I knew every note.

As a nod to the found objects I use in my art, I had gathered old unusable instruments to hide in the orchestra. At predetermined intervals, Emily, dressed in her overalls, disappeared among the musicians, and returned to place the instruments on pegs on the huge gestural painting. Slowly, ebbing and flowing with the entire orchestra behind us, we kept pace with the imaginary colors we” heard,” and the sounds we “saw,” dipping our brushes into bucket after bucket of color. It was as if the spectrum flowed magically out of the song and filled the stadium. In that audience were hundreds of kids watching Emily, more excited than envious, dreaming of paintings they would create in their own future imaginative symphonies.

However, it was not the conductor who signaled the final note. At the end of the song, that master stroke went to Emily who placed the conductor’s baton on the painting as one last long note of an oboe faded. The music, so bright and so blue, shone over a little painter, my daughter, that day. Nowadays, Emily spends more time cleaning up after her two sons’ art, but somewhere in the background, I can still hear the bright music playing.