In Twilight Regalia

We’ve been sort of surround-ING rather than surrounded last weekend.  There’s a girl from my work from Morocco (she’s been one of our garage booth attendants) who got dumped by a boyfriend two weeks before she was having his baby.  Needless to say we’re going to go after HIS wages…. 

She had her little daughter early Saturday morning.  Nadine.

So I went to the hospital twice to visit.  She’s kind of in shock, rather than being in the happy mom mode.  It’s really a strange situation… She has no family here yet, her mom is coming in a couple weeks.  She has no money left  hardly at all (thank god she had insurance from her job) since she paid it out to co-payments for specialists in prenatal care (she developed diabetes during the pregnancy –which they say recedes afterwards somewhat) and she’s going to have to move to some other place (probably Section 8 housing) since she’ll no longer have rent money coming in anymore, within like, a month.  It’s insane. I’ve never met anyone in this much of a trap.

A bunch of us gave her money and baby things, but oy vey she’s going to need so much more, and she just doesn’t seem to realize how much this will actually change her life.   She had found out she was pregnant at about 2 months 3 weeks and had asked if he wanted it, if they were really going to do this, should she have an abortion?  She would if he didn’t want it.  He had said yes, they would have it and he kept saying yes…. until the 2 weeks before.  Coward I guess.  We’ll deal with him later.

Weird thing is, I’ve seen her with the baby and she’s having trouble adjusting.  She will adjust, but …. she’s not the mom type.  
Anyway after seeing her in the hospital, I needed a rest.  So we cleaned the entire house, ironed 15 pounds of laundry, and bought 200 bucks worth of groceries.  

I sacked out. 
I think I feel particularly weird because everyone on the planet who is NOT supposed to be having babies is having them, and I’m…… not. 

But then I think how sacked out I really am and I think, Maybe I really COULDN’T.  Maybe I would have dropped of psychological exhaustion, physical lack of stamina, who knows.  Maybe I would have been out of control with frustration.  I don’t know.  And I think that’s the problem, is that I DON’T know.  If I just KNEW that I was no good I could leave it alone.   

A few days later.

I went to see her at her run down old 70s apartment she currently has (where she can’t fit her mother if she comes — she needs to move) and found exactly this:
One double bed with good bedding
one nightstand
one table lamp
one chest of drawers
one loveseat
and one yellow cushioned chair serving as a bookshelf.
There were the baby bassinet we got her and the car seat/pram thing, and the coffeetable that belongs to the roommate that lives in the bedroom, while she lives in the living room with cross traffic.  (When someone at the babyshower had asked if she had painted the baby’s room, I cringed. I had guessed it would be more like this.)

The apartment was like…. I mean… college students would at least have bought posters.  There was NOTHING.  

She went to a Dr.’s appointment for the baby in a few days, but instead of being proactive (which Moslem girls have little clue of how to do) and figuring out how to get a pram onto the bus, she just took the baby in her arms in a blanket.

 About two hours later waiting for the bus home, she began to worry she might actually drop her out of muscle fatigue.
So  I found and bought her a sling carrier the next day and made her pay the 20 bucks for it, fearing my help would become expected. I’d already given her a large bunch of money for her shower gift.

I’m almost afraid to get too close to her.  Next I’ll be taking her to get groceries.  Oh man.  I really don’t want to get started. 

Every application we told her get for government help gets handed over to this Dad-type friend of the family guy (he’s Egyptian) who’s been bailing her out and giving her money which ostensibly she’ll pay back one day.  Since his wife died last year we’re wondering if this is some perverse attempt at an early courtship or something….

He’s also said he hopes to find a cheap but functional car for her.  I think maybe I’m more afraid of her after she gets a car than before.  This girl can’t figure out when a guy she’s slept with is lying — are we sure we want to trust her with gauging intentions of other drivers?  on a freeway?  And then there’s the car itself….. she hasn’t even demonstrated an interest in deciphering a convertible carseat/pram thingy. 

Maybe all the suffering is not from our being so bad, so evil, so premeditatedly calculatingly human. But rather that we’re just fundamentally out of sync with clarity, reason and sanctity. We’re just really messy, thoughtless bumblers through this foggy misty race. And a promise of love in an insecure position after a couple years in a foreign country? Oh come on. You’d sell out completely for that. Anyone would.

Welcome to the world little Nadine. You are going to bring your new mother the most love she’s had in a while. Make sure she knows it.

I had a good day. A really unexpectedly good day. And I’m continuing it for a few days…. after I get rid of the indigestion.
For some reason everyone knew it was my birthday this year. And I really didn’t think about it at all (I hadn’t celebrated birthdays for most of my life and still don’t put a lot of stock in it. After all, what kind of thinking person would really evaluate themselves by how many times their planet rolled around the sun? )

It started out with a kiss goodbye for my husband who woke up right out of sleep and said Happy Birthday Honey! before his eyes had even fully opened. Then when I walked into work, my attorney (my WOMAN attorney, of course!) waved immediately and had this ENORMOUS smile and sang out HAPPY BIRTHDAY! and I was like oh my! I hadn’t known she even knew. Oh that’s right, I guess I put everyone’s birthdays on the calendar…

She gave me (along with my other attorney — who I think put money in but forgot otherwise) an enormous box of BELGIAN cream chocolates. HOW DID SHE KNOW??. The woman has class, obviously.

Then there were brownies, the chewy good kind, from my nextdoorsikeh, who has been on a baking frenzy lately. Brownies! Breakfast of champions!…. of…. something. They all know I’m a chocoholic.

Then I got a card, and later in the day a phone call telling me I had FLOWERS in the lobby. From the guy who flubbed Christmas! Woohoo. Nice ones, purples, blues, and some deep pinks. He paid attention! No yellows. No oranges. He knew!

Went to a nice sushi buffet dinner, had some outrageous birthday cake, and got my present — a brand new tiny sleek camera/video combination I had wanted. Now for the learning curve. It took me a while to locate the memory card slot…. But it’s GRAND.

What did I do to deserve all this???

Oh yeah. I whined a lot.

MY GAWD!! HOLY CRAP!!!

No no no, I mean NOT AT ALL holy crap!

The show at the El Rey on Tuesday night was, I kid you not, the most amazing show of command and energy I have seen in …. geez…. I’m trying to think…. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone do this kind of thing quite like them. The lead singer/keyboardist Paul Meany and drummer Darren King must have lost about 3 pounds each just from sheer physical bashing, running, sweating buckets, leaping high onto keyboards, taiko-like drum breaks with the whole band turning to percussion, and just plain working the stage like true stars. I don’t think I’ve ever in my life seen a band work so physically hard. The energy level was set at a full 10 from their first number of the night, and went up to 11 some where in the middle, and went back down to 10 at the end. I tell you, these guys WORK for a living.

What is absolutely refreshing is that these guys are true musicians. Their music is introspective and spiritual as far as the lyrics go, a sort of personal approach to their faith, which you can take religiously, or leave it at being personal. The point is, that angle of the music is for them, themselves, and you can take it or leave it as you find it. I love that about them. Their faith is not brought into the mix in any other way. They make these lyrics because — that’s who they are, take it or leave it. The music itself is what they love, do, live in, and utterly rule at.

If you’ve never heard them, I’d say Paul Meany is a Sting=like (some specify Police-like) intensity, and when Darren King comes out and duct-tapes his ear=protectors to his head (he has a 2nd floor tom placed up high right next to his ears, as well as a serious kit), you realize that seriously RAWKING OUT IS WHAT THEY DO onstage. (They still flew off his head about midway through the night, and a few drumsticks went flinging as well.)

Watching Paul sing is to be happily in his spell. This is a guy that is not particularly eye candy in any way, especially when soaking wet, but he is so commanding that you immediately feel devoted — he has immense presence, and a sincerity and love of his fans that’s very evident.

Watching Darren drum is like watching a boxer in the 9th round. “!!!!” BRING IT ON. RAWRRR!!

Greg Hill and Roy Mitchell-Crdenas (huh? Crd?) have percussion and keyboard duty as well as their own shimmering guitar and bass, and they have their own, perhaps less huge, but powerfully solid, auras. Excellent, and integral parts.

Offstage, in recording, they have graceful, tasteful airy electronics and interesting toys in their quieter moments, and seriously grand awesome fullness of sound when at full tilt. They also are blessed with good friends who have obvious long-time recording savvy and have made a luscious, wet, West-Coast sound bunch of recordings for them, that represent well what they intend.

If you get a chance to go see them, even in the next town over, sell your damn clothes. GO!!!

One icy winter morning when I was in third grade in Mrs. Graper’s class, my best friend Ruthie came over to me talking about something I couldn’t make out, and it sounded like a kitty and a car were involved.

Ruthie was the product of a union of two of the homeliest people I had ever seen, a pair which my mother had lowered her voice about once in private to me, telling me I must not make fun of these people, but they really had what she called “a poor blood line” as their problem; all their children had serious problems like they did. Their eldest, Alberta, had gotten a pinched whiney voice, very nasal, and had continuous problems with her adnoids or sinuses. She had glasses just like her mother’s coke-bottle round ones that blew eyes up big as a fish’s. Her mother’s solemn Norwegian face with those strange glass globe eyes had scolded us about not questioning the Lord’s intentions for ourselves on at least one occasion. We were not to complain, ever, nor say anything against God.

There was whiney voiced Alberta, the eldest; the youngest, Frances, who seemed to have been blessed with some good luck, had golden hair and a normal face. Hopefully she was healthy. But Ruthie, my warmest, most fun friend, was the middle child who came out with the shortest straw. She was born with a cleft pallette, a hole in her face which had been mended on the outside somewhat satisfactorily, but with a split in the roof of her mouth that had no possible repair in those metal and leather days. She too had the coke bottle glasses, and her coloring was chalky over her strange gaunt bone structure. She didn’t seem very coordinated either, her skinny limbs awkward and energetic, graceless, but exuberant as any child’s. Even at my age of eight, I wondered while looking at her run if she was going to last — she seemed so frail. But by her very spirit, she was intent on being a normal happy child, and I liked her immensely. Run she did, and head first into everything, jumped rope with abandon, and was always coveting my attention when around her sisters.

She was a fighter, and I liked that. She had a temper on occasion, she had stuff to say; she just couldn’t always be understood. Her speech was a real problem, and even after hospital visits and speech pathologists, she was hard to make out. I usually could make most of it out, since we were together a lot, and what I couldn’t make out, Alberta usually could translate.

But early on that cold day, she was unintelligible. We were taking off our winter coats before our wooden open lockers, and she tugged on me, turned me around, and said, NO!. Kitty got hit by a car!.

I looked sad, and said, oh, that’s too bad, but still she was frustrated further and flung her arms up and louder sound wheezed out, KIDDY GOHD HHID BY A KHHAR. Again I didn’t understand her face, puzzled as I went to my desk, and she still looked so upset, like I didn’t get it.

Our teacher called us to attention once we got to our desks and in a hushed voice told us that one of our classmates had been hit. It was Kenny from third row who’d been hit. I felt my stomach sink. And then it sank again. Not just for the weirdness of death, for the strangeness of never seeing a familiar face again in our classroom, for the inexplicability of it all, but for Ruthie. She had tried so hard to tell me. And I hadn’t understood. In a situation of real urgency, I had not been able to be with her, my good friend. I suddenly felt all of it, and her separation, and I think that was the first time I felt true selfless remorse for the injustices dealt others. The sheer unfairness of it made me taste my first bitter sting of unplaceable anger. I saw Ruthie and her little sharp awkward boned fists pounding on a door with no sound emerging.

In 1989 as a college student, and so attuned to things Chinese, my Chinese boyfriend by my side, I watched the Tiannanmen square demonstrations in fear and wonder. I saw China’s young people trying something so daring and so unprecedented — just simple freedom of speech to address changes that had to occur for life to improve for thousands. I feared and hoped for them.

And my friends and I saw through fuzzy footage one lone man, the next day, in the daylight, just going on his way across a street somewhere with shopping bags in his hands, suddenly stop a row of tanks and demand the tank driver come out and tell him what he was doing. What was this tank doing rolling into his town? Just what was going on? Why were they rolling tanks into his town? What right had they? He stood defiantly in front it. They tried going around him and he repositioned himself in front of them. He argued and climbed up on top and knocked on the hatch and demanded they come out and talk to him. He demanded they make some restitution for their actions. He had no idea that videotape of foreign journalists was rolling. It almost seemed to me that he must have been an older man, not a student, because he did not approach the tank like a young demonstrator with waiving fist and slogan. This was just a citizen, and one full of righteous indignation, demanding the truth, and almost scolding these troops like a father for having been cowed into plowing along over their own people so thoughtlessly. What were they thinking?!?

It was a moment unlike anything else to me because it registered the sting of dread as well as the righteous nobility of its gesture. We all knew at once, by the rough arms of soldiers, by censorship, by death, by vaporized questions, by secret police in some future attempt at second life, by nonrecognition at the doors of neighbors, by any means, that indignant, honest fighter of a man would most likely be put behind the silent door. I saw a red wisp of Ruthie again that day. And I was a continent of courtrooms and cloakrooms away.

Recently, a journalist again visited China, this time to talk to the rich children of the elite in the University which now runs without bloodbaths or unrest, but with green grass and ivy. He held up the picture we had seen around the world of the angry man holding up a line of tanks. Four students held the picture in their hands. One of them recognized it must be with regard to the events in 1989. But it appeared none of them had seen it. Or if they had, none of them would admit with the slightest flutter of an eyelash any inkling of knowledge. I saw this strange mute group of young adults, shaking their heads politely. A parade scene? I don’t know what context this is in, they said. The cokebottle glasses, a quiet condemnation by vacuum, flashed on their unstirred faces. Behind this door even memory could be rewritten.

But I have known for some time now what to expect.

One could villify so many chamber-holders in our lives, they come in all races, religions, sexes, even private torturers. But I heard something last week, and again today like sound.

Hot shouts in the street come every day in my country. In my lifetime nothing may not be double-thought, all forums were allowed to be vaulted as God, turned inside out and dropped flat in the boredom of overkill. We grow callous in my country to the slightest repetition of a plea for help, but we even find ourselves singing with the constant pounding car commercials or the trumpet charges of stadium games. It’s always been so for me, for us, here, because we were not born cleft, but with whole mouths, stuffed with food, and no tanks had men in them with cokebottle glasses. I thought.

But last week I saw the flags driving around in circles on so many cars. Scarlet on the top, blue, and then orange. I had never seen them before. Who is this flag? Downtown they were lining the avenue with their cars. Men with dark hair and large strong faces. Girls and old women with eyes ringed with a delicate darkness. I had seen them all before, and still I did not place them as a race. I saw on my television that night old sepia reels of corpses and mass genocide, it was their story, but it was not who I thought it was for. 6 million, 6 million, I began in my mind. But it was not that figure, it was not them. It was a race I had never even known was persecuted.

How could I have gone my entire free educated well traveled life, and never been told of the Armenians? I came to understand the contradictions I had heard of them all in a rush like wind out of a tunnel. It came together of shards of sound in my memory, tinkling to the floor only now. The way they had been accused of being so harsh on others, the way one Armenian man I had known had fled Russia, the way they were disliked without reason, the way they were considered almost an impenetrable brotherhood, and yet I had not known WHY.

I have been the one with my history rewritten, it’s me so blank before the camera.

Then they showed me today what happened after 1915 at the bloodied hands of the Ottoman turks, at the hands of the Europeans who were too busy splitting spoils of war to pay heed, in the midst of the unheeded reports of American and German diplomats, all those people who had been a country called Anatolia, and what became of it.

I had never even heard a tale of it. Not one. Not in my classes, or travels, or news, or people. I kept saying to myself, How could that be? How much of a controlled peasant am I now? They got me, Mr. Chomsky. I don’t even know how they did it. How could they?

I did not feel foolish to know so late, because I knew there might be many more things, all at once, that were being breached apart at last. What else could we not know? What more was there? I know their flag now when I see it. I know their eyes now when I see them.

Today’s long drive home I wound in and around the buses, a huge train of them, carrying the thousands in white shirts, waving only American flags, at our Hispanic-descent Mayor’s request. So many. So very many of the short brown people in white shirts, our field pickers, our stuffed-animal sewers, our nannies, our housekeepers, our car-washers, our contract haulers, our diggers, our piecework assemblers, our builders, our grill cooks, our taxi drivers, our gardeners, all together in one ambling cloud, saying: We built you. We beautified you. We fed you. We clothed you. We raised you.

They have never been my close ones, they have never been ones I had entrusted things to, my circle had always swung away, they have never come into my odd experience of a nonmenial mental cage. But some of them starved just like that. Some of them did die coming here on long marches in the desert. Some suffocated in vans. Hunger, glitter, longing, any number of them gave up what little they had for that hint of something that could become. Some of them had little choice. Some of them gave up everything. Some of them still have next to nothing. Some of them work like slaves, dreading their secrets will be released.

I have not thought nor wanted to look this direction, perhaps I was not paying attention, perhaps it just was never closer. They are not clean, they are careless, they don’t learn our language, all those things you hear.

As I drive through an intersection at a crawl, someone in the interview on the radio shouts against these dark-eyed people, how they will ruin our economy, how they will take what they need of us and send it to Mexico or Bolivia or El Salvador or Peru, and they will escalate to violence if they can.

I look at them on the bus benches. This part of the march is finished, some will go back now. It began hours ago.

I do not SEE any violence.

I see grandmas in aprons, abelitas, high school hopefuls, fathers with toddlers on their shoulders, and so many many young sons — can they have a good life? Will they go for the money only and fail in the ghettos? What do you see in there? I see mothers, aunties, young girls with arms around each other without a trace of anything trendy or sexual, and there’s a girl in a Mexican skirt, and for an instant I see — Irish. In shawls, in dirty boots laced up high, the only ones they own. In long skirts, with animals and bundles and children with dirty faces. How we hated them.

And somewhere, skinny and fierce in the back, see my Ruthie, standing with angry eyes and shaking my shoulders to listen.

Alright. Say it again. Perhaps this time, I will understand.

My latest attempt at socialization has completely failed. I was convinced initially that I really had to become happy by more contact with the outside normal world of human beings.

I was seduced by a website that advertised the more intellectual sort of folk (Ok not MENSA or anything too weird) and wrote to a girl who seemed like she might have some things in common with my (previous and preferred) kind of lifestyle. I didn’t want any men, no need of that, just friends. Expected some older and stuffier and well-schooled tweedy boring sorts. I thought I could brave that if they were really thoughtful. This event was attending a museum with a group of unidentified people — but it was a museum I could easily get to after a leisurely dinner, which was incentive enough.

Things that most often happen to me when this sort of event is planned:

1) Me: I arrive too early and feel like a dork while everyone else is milling around and I’m scanning the bodies with no idea whether to ask them if THEY’re the ones I’m supposed to be meeting with or not - “Are you from the website? (Name of which escapes me?)” all the while wondering if I look as dorky as I feel.

2) The Art: I look around and get disappointed with what’s already in the museum and immediately want to leave. Unless the artists have a really good line of bullshit that I can logically follow in their artistic statements, I’m going to give this hastily slung-out crap a big thumbs down.

3) The group: is either well beneath my age range (did you do that graffiti on the ass of your baggies, or is that just a new grab from Melrose Ave?) or

4) Oh MAN I’m not into, like, Country French décor with ducks, ok? And I will ALWAYS see over my steering wheel.

5) There’s a great looking 30s or so woman in black! She looks interesting! Unusually dressed! Wicked dyed hair and glasses!
Oh, …she’s …. out the door.

6) “Excuse me, please stay behind the line.” repeated every five seconds by little pit bull guards in blue suits. The ones who look like Philippine grandmas are the worst of the lot. Has someone fraudulently persuaded them they’ll be promoted or something?

7) Gregarious Greg arrives. He’s from the group, and he’s definitely looking to hook up with some single babe and ply her with wine at a nearby restaurant soon. Um, well, I’m neither single nor babe. And you’re waay too tan.
Gushing Impressionist Woman arrives. She raves about how she LOVES art, she eats and breathes and sleeps it. Her favorite artists are Monet, Renoir, Marie Cassat, and of course Vincent Van Gogh. She just LOVES the colors they use. They go so perfectly with her living room, and in fact, pretty much everything she owns. (See No. 4.).

9) Skinny Art School Duo arrives. Boy and girlfriend — He’s inevitably in shredded jeans, hightops and striped or band-advertising t-shirt with various leather and plastic wrist bands, and usually cap and sunglasses and messenger bag. Her in dyed hair, nosering, rings and feminine sleazewear on top. The bottom half of her inevitably looks just like the bottom half of him. They loll about, eyelashes batting like giraffes for a while, look bored, and disappear into thin air.

10) The M Couple wanders through. The two wealthiest people in the entire museum, generally grey haired, dressed in understated fine sand or tan fabrics, hailing from places like Manhattan or Marin or Malibu. One wonders whether they truly know anything about what they’re looking at, but to them it might be irrelevant, since they’re just deciding how they like these, based on what they saw in the Prado or the Ufizzi or the Louvre last month.

So pretty much 8 out of 10 was happening last night. Not the attack-personnel problem though, much to my surprise and pleasure. (In fact, I actually saw two guards — who definitely didn’t have the speech nor air of being American college graduates — frankly discussing their opinion on the works to each other. Now that’s what’s SUPPOSED to happen, I thought.)

The group people finally assembled and it was easy to see I was not going to have a good time. The first woman who latched onto me with incessant questions was small, with a strangely pale, surgically altered lopsided look to her face. She was dressed well, and seemed to carry herself with a lot of clout and interruption, but she couldn’t pronounce my name, even after I repeated it twice, and it went downhill from there. She asked about Joan of Arc, as in “what was she famous for.” I, not understanding her question, made a joke about her potentially being the first well-documented dyke in Western History, but then she made it clear by her next question that she really knew nothing much about her.

“?!??”

She knew she’d been killed, she knew she wore armor, but she didn’t know why nor who did it. I was bit in shock, but oh well, I breezed on, and began telling her about the interesting transcripts from Joan’s trial, which information was then was interrupted by the arrival of Ms. A. Just as well.

Ms. A was supposed to have been my Asian lifestyle connection to this group. She was about as Asian as tennis shoes. By that I mean, she had an accent, i.e. perceivably from Taiwan or China, but she was basically a white girl other than that. Her comments about the art we saw were laughable. Unless there was a recognizable flower or tree or window in the work, it was all pretty much lost on her. This was actually a loss to me. I would have liked an Asian companion to do Asian stuff I miss with around here. Alas, it was not to be.

The guys were basically non-verbal. No point in being around there…. I just don’t have time to deal with that anymore. I’ve already got one at home.

BUT THERE WAS THE ART: OH was there ever. It was actually true art this time. Not derivative crap, not fast and frantic attempt for glib Schnabelesque fame, not arte povera without the povera, it was the best of the old groundbreakers, the members of the Societe Anonyme. Not the stuff people hang over their couches, but the REAL stuff that’s the visual equivalent of say, “Difficult Listening Music”, as Laurie Anderson used to put it. Undaunted people leaving the 19th Century behind.

It was Duchamps at his most quizzical, and (I couldn’t believe my eyes) AGAIN, for the second time in my life, the valise. He had a few valises of little objects signifying each of his works, and little replicas of various objects and paintings that all unpack like a suitcase pop-up display. I actually felt a warm glow when I saw it. The first time I saw that work was in Japan, up the last flight of stairs, in a museum in Kyoto. I couldn’t believe here we were again, face to case, travelling through all those years together, travelling out of Marcel’s hands, so far away ago, to me again, here, AGAIN. We’ve got to stop meeting like this, I said gleefully, touching the glass that surrounded it. No one even told me to step away. I just sat there and looked at all the familiar objects again and the thin writing and sepia of the boards and the leather, and just felt like “ah.” Friend Duchamps.

But WAIT, there in the corner was hanging on a wall, a wood construct by none other than Kurt Schwitters — of course I would have loved to see his tiny little collages he used to make from found scraps on the street, but HEY, it was a real Schwitters. You almost never ever see his work at all. As I looked at it, I suddenly saw that one of my teachers had totally been influenced by him. How about that. I hadn’t known. It is likely the only Schwitters I may see again for years, or perhaps ever in my life, there are so few.

But OH MY GOD, LOOK AT THIS SCULPTURE IN THE MIDDLE OF THE ROOM!! FUCKING BRANCUSI !!! I have never seen a Brancusi in person. I don’t know why, there must have been lots of his work. But this was totally Bird in Flight.

Then I looked at another clear case in the center of the room, an amazing piece. In early plastics, both solid and clear, a tiny standing sculpture that looked…. so ….. incredibly monumental.

The tag read “Naum Gabo.” NAUM GABO!!!! I was literally doing little hops in front of the pedestal. The guards must have thought I was insane. But I mean if you had shot this work with a camera, it would have registered to your mind’s eye to be about 20 feet tall, that’s the way he proportioned it so perfectly, and every angle of every side was perfect, a wonderful, engaging composition of shapes and space and color on every plane or point you looked from.

Gabo was like that. I adored his work even as a child. I saw it in the Art Institute in Chicago when I was no more than 10, and it made me want to work with transparencies, plastics, resins, fiberglass, wax, …. and none of my works in that series of substances turned out to be the vehicle for me. Because I discovered I could not be him. He is calculating, thoughtful, thoughtful, precise and more thoughtful. I could see hours and days and months of planning and rearranging in his works. They were perfect. Nobility oozed from them. He was royalty in cellulose to me. The piece in Chicago so long ago had been made of arcs of clear plastic bowed circles, placed upright against each other, with strings of gut or acrylic spanning them like a tiny perfect alien bridge. I made bridges later in classes. He made shapes that I loved so much that his vocabulary pours out of me from time to time…. like wine in an old Joni Mitchell song I suppose. I walked around and around and smiled like an idiot for quite a while.

I looked around again, and Aha, why there’s a Calder, and a good one. And wait just a MINUTE. Wait a MINUTE.
MONDRIAN? Like THE ONE that I’ve seen all my lame life???? That was it. red, blue white. black lines. Mondrian.

Kandinsky! I don’t have time, I’ll have to come back for those. Miro too, and Leger.

One huge dark canvas on the wall seemed to stride out in geometric three dimensional copper metal from the background. It WAS metal, and it was a jumble of spoolish and spindle shapes summarizing a female form. Archipenko, I read on the tag. CLAP MY HEAD! Oh! Of course…. the whose work one I saw the movie of years ago. He was one of the first stop-action animators who took his sculptures — made of wonderfully graceful metal shapes — and made them dance in a ballet on a chessboard. I remember all the pieces on that chessboard. These shapes. Here I was in front of it at last — or another in the series of thoughts.

I could go on for each piece but I think most people are not like me, so suffice it to say when I got to the next rooms of some other much more recent rooms of plain old photos, I was just full. No more needed. And I sure didn’t need the people. I headed to the bookstore and, finding no books on the objects I liked, went home.

Driving along in the night, the shapes of the buildings and the lights in the city were just echoes of pieces of a giant artbox of some construct Louise Nevelson might have liked to build in scale model. She was another one I liked, because one day, while walking home in New York City, the color yellow on the seats of two chairs in a shop window actually totally healed her of her depression, she was so drawn to color. I understood that experience completely. I thought I was the only one? But no, here Louise was talking about it in her biography.

And as the buildings in the dark and the blonde colored lights in the trees buzz by, I am FULL….. and so sure that I am…. and I am HAPPY the way I am. I know who my friends are.