it was a burger night. we had been out hiking for hours and needed something substantial to eat. the thing that hadn’t occurred to us – when we headed out to hike – was that it was still winter there – up in higher elevation, the trail tucked into the woods. it was some hard work – even with trekking poles – to stay upright on a very-snowy and mostly-icy hike. each step was calculated and careful. and it was ridiculously beautiful and exhilarating.
so it was a burger night.
we decided that – though, in all the times we have stayed in breckenridge, we have only eaten out once – we would go over to try kenosha breck – a steakhouse whose name combines our home and our fave-place. our intention was to order a burger-to-split and fries to-go.
but the bar – where we would place a to-go order – was in the back of the pub and the doors right adjacent were wide open to fresh air and setting sun and the mountains were visible past the outdoor dining tables and umbrellas and the bartender was super friendly and it wasn’t crowded and there were two stools at the end of the bar closest to the outdoors….so….we stayed. (and the earth shook a little – acknowledging this very unusual decision to eat-out….)
we sat and shared a glass of wine, reviewing our what-felt-treacherous hike and the gorgeous day, the beautiful days preceding it. we chatted with the bartender. we gazed out the open doors, staring at the mountains we would immediately miss when we left the next day. we lingered.
some days a burger and fries and a little wine are the perfect way to end the day. nothing fancy. just a simple meal on a couple stools in a mountain town.
buymeacoffee is a tip-jar website where you may choose to help support the continuing creating of artists whose work resonates with you in big ways or little ways. ♡
20 sees faces everywhere. and because he does, so do we. taking the donkey chip out of the bag, it was without hesitation i sent him chipface, pointy nose, weak jaw and all. he sent some snide remark back, making me laugh aloud. communication at its best.
i sorted through some of the most brilliant comments i’ve heard in recent days to choose an apt quote for this little guy. i decided to pick the one that is most obvious, the no-duh-est, the thing people who do-as-i-say-not-as-i-do often say. i agree wholeheartedly with chipface. communication IS the biggest thing in any relationship. and lack of communication – with its undercurrents – makes fools of all of us.
christopher wool holds nothing back. his work is stark and transparently void of flowery language. the piece pictured below – “fool” – sold for $7.8 million at a christie’s london sale in 2012. its predecessor “blue fool” sold for just over $5 million and was identical but with blue font. clearly, black is more fashionable than blue. mostly, it makes me laugh aloud to read that someone paid $7.8 million to own the painting of the word “fool”. particularly because christopher is said to not “suffer fools” and his pushback on people must be rampant. i do wonder if you’d only hang this seasonally – say, on april fool’s day – or if it is a piece for the year round…as a reminder…a humbling…a nudge.
david and i attended a talk in chicago between christopher wool and a docent at the art gallery. in pure christopher wool tongue-in-cheek deliciousness, after the docent went on and on about the premise behind one of wool’s photography pieces, after she touted his possible psychological state and the philosophical underpinnings of his work, he shrugged, looked at the audience and – advancing his relationship with that audience by leaps and bounds – merely said, “i took the photograph because i liked it.”
communication at its best. yes. truth. pure and simple.
“99% of people wouldn’t notice that”, he said, “and they’d just keep walking.”
the stranger had stopped where we were. i was off-trail, taking a picture of sun as it glinted off cattails. i was precariously close to the water’s edge, hidden by dried leaves and twigs in the marshy area, but worth it for the photo. d had just given me a hand-up back onto the trail when the stranger stopped.
he asked to see my photographs and i complied. and we all started talking. george spoke from the wisdom of someone close-to-80 as he recounted stories of trails he had recently taken, of people going too fast to SEE anything at all. he told us he was happy we noticed the glowing cattails, happy that we were looking – really looking – as we hiked. he told us that “it” (life) is all about looking and learning, researching, wondering, thinking and looking some more. we agree.
i’m not sure there’s ever been a hike – anywhere – when i haven’t taken at least a few photographs. there’s just so much to see. sometimes, in the middle of our not-knowing, we’ll look things up right away. sometimes, we save that for later.
just a couple days ago – in a truly magical moment – we stopped on the trail, separated from a pond by a bit of woods and grasses.
the red-tailed hawk was still. in the air – suspended on a current, wings curled up – it was absolutely still, hovering in place. though i know hawks are apt to do this as they hunt, this hawk just stayed still as we watched. then it flew a little lower and hovered a little bit more. it never dove down for any prey; it just hovered and then landed in a tree nearby as if to say, “there! that was for you.” it was a gorgeous and spiritual moment. i won’t forget it.
the trail – in both its simplicity and complexity – is a constant reminder for us.
“it’s not about you,” it whispers. “look around. there’s so much to see. it’s all here FOR you.”
yes, yes, two heads are better than one, for sure. particularly now. between us, we can have a complete grocery list, a complete song, a complete conversation. it’s like mad-libs, but real life.
how is it that these words – practical words…not multiple-syllabic barely-used thesaurus type words or foreign expressions or highly technical jargon…just words like avocado or ravioli or well, i can’t remember any more examples…how is that these words disappear into thin air? they are seemingly irretrievable, escaping all the umms and uhhs buying time to try and unearth them.
it is fortunate that we most often choose partners who are in our approximate age bracket. for there is grace when you are both punting for a word, jaunting into the vast recesses of your brain with a flashlight and bucket – sieve-ready – like you are panning for gold in an old gem mine deep underground. only not.
instead, you are just trying to remember the round green things that go on top of chili.
i’m going to try and remember my grocery list from now on. standing there in the middle of the market – gawking at each other – blank looks on our faces – going through the alphabet, certain that the word we are seeking starts with some letter (one that turns out isn’t even in the word) – can be embarrassing. people are staring. they are wheeling their carts around us – two statues in the fresh veggie section, frozen by the broccoli and brussels sprouts. we are causing a rubberneck situation in the aisle. we are certain to remember what we need – as soon as we get home.
in the meanwhile, we know that our people are here too. they are the ones who glance over with sympathetic and understanding eye contact. they calmly – without disdain – walk around us. they smile. because they, too, have a few wrinkles and – every now and then – they stand still in some aisle, a lost look on their face, gazing around in search of some elusive item. and then – you can see it – their face lights up and you know. avocado. that’s it.
and we all skip to the check-out, hoping it is 5%-off senior day. because by now, we deserve it.
he was waiting on the trail for us. the eastern tiger salamander, poised, ready. we’ve never seen one – in all our hiking. so this was extraordinary and this little guy was trusting as we picked him up and moved him to the brush on the side of the trail, an effort to keep him from being hurt by fat-tire bikers passing by.
it’s the 300th week of our melange. we’ve been up and running these blogs-with-images for 300 weeks straight, sans interruption. some of that period of time it was five days a week; since may 2021, with the addition of our smack-dab cartoon, it has been six days a week. there is an imperative for us; writing begets more writing.
we sort the stories of our lives – threading back – and find clues and reasons and validations. we sort the stories of our lives – in the here and now – and find questions and individual moments – specific themes and thoughts. we sort the stories of our lives – moving forward – and see the utterly undeniable need to be present, to notice beauty, to go slow, to appreciate.
silly stories, divulging stories, grief stories, stories of wistful, ordinary stories, stories of pensive thought or roiled-up rant, stories of the essence of gossamer threads, we share with you – our dear readers – our lives. it is – truly – the yada yada yada of life.
we came upon him on a sunny and clear day, in a bit of shade on the trail. though a nocturnal creature and usually in an underground burrow or under a log in the daytime, this salamander was just there, waiting for us. as is our way, we talked to him for a bit. he didn’t answer any of our questions about why he was there, if he was ok, where he was headed. he didn’t seem to be moved by our telling him it was the first time we had ever – in all our time hiking in the area – seen an amphibian such as him. nor did he seem to care that we thought he was “a cute little guy”.
it might have been just too many spoken words – or he may already read our daily blogs – because as we carefully picked him up and moved him, hoping to save him from harm, he eyed us and squeaked out, “nada yada yada.”
long island’s ice storm of ’76 was a doozy. crunch was over, hanging out at our house when it started. though we encouraged him to stay, his big green four-wheel-drive truck made it to his home through what was heavy slush at the time. in the middle of a snowglobe world, magically coated in sparkle, he was back the next day and we wandered the neighborhood, taking photographs of everything encased in ice. it was stunning. the graceful mimosa tree, tall stately oaks, forsythia bushes, azalea, rhododendron, rose of sharon…all wrapped in crystal, the sun’s glare making sunglasses an absolute.
i can’t remember an ice storm like that here, at least not in the last three decades since i’ve lived here. wisconsin is more of a sub-zero-temps/snowfall state than an ice-storm state. but there was a pretty devastating winter storm in 2020 when everything along the lakefront was frozen, trees bending to the pressure of wind and water.
in predictions for this next week or so, accuweather uses terms like “limited outdoor activity recommended” and there is the emotionally wrought overuse of the word “bitterly” used next to the word “cold”. negative windchills are prevalent and even miracle mittens aren’t enough.
so when you look outside and see blue skies only interrupted by the artful limbs of trees, you are fooled. it may appear to be the perfect day for a walk, but warnings not to be outside – “hypothermia likely without protective clothing” – are pause for thought.
we haven’t walked on the lakefront path past the marina lately. when the water starts churning from north and northeast winds, the lake pounds the shore. ice forms along the coastline – sometimes in those circles called ice pans or ice discs – and the metal railings jutting out over the lake along the walk have collections of giant icicles. we’re not sure what’s there right now.
in this neighborhood of big old trees and above-ground power lines we hope ice storms continue to be a rarity. each time a huge beautiful limb is down or a tree succumbs i feel a sense of sadness. though i believe the soul of a tree is somehow left behind and surrounds us with the wisdom of the ages, i wonder how the squirrels will move about. for here, in our ‘hood, there is a festival of complex travel high above the ground, branching every direction. savvy squirrels scamper from tree to tree to high wires to tree – squirrel highways.
out the window next to me, even now, i catch the shadow of a squirrel running south down the line parallel to the driveway. it makes me smile every time.
in my memory bank, i can remember my sweet momma and poppo holding hands. they would grasp each other firmly. they would hold pinkies. they would hold hands often. and, for me, it was one of those telltale signs that they loved each other, despite the day, despite the challenges, despite everything. my dad would not let my momma cross a parking lot without holding her hand. my dad would not let my momma walk on a sidewalk without holding her hand. for that matter, my dad would not let my momma walk on the road side of the sidewalk – ever. he placed himself between momma and the cars zipping past. he opened doors wherever they went and waited to close the car door after she got in. a gentleman always, his stock of niceties was plentiful and momma never had to remind him.
i am a hand-holder. and i, obviously, come by it honestly. but i haven’t always been around hand-holding types. some folks just prefer not to hold hands. for me, it is an intimate sharing of moments, a warm reassurance, a statement of adoration. to adjust one’s stride to match another’s, to hold their hand, is gentle reinforcement – of pooh-piglet “making sure of you” right-here variety.
i don’t know if david’s mom and dad held hands through the years; i haven’t known them that long. but columbus is a sweet man who tears up when it’s time for anyone to leave, who loves to hug, who has a glint in his eye that says, “i like you! you’re in!” and so, i would imagine that he has been a handholding proponent, an advocate of a firm and tender grasp. and david’s mom stands with this man who, if he still understood and remembered all that had gone before these sadly-ever-increasing dementia-ed days, would still grab her hand, declaring his undying love and devotion.
i cannot think of a time that we do not hold hands. we hike holding hands. walk the ‘hood holding hands. watch movies holding hands. sit together to talk holding hands. it is a gift i relish – a many-many-years-yearning during which i spent years watching others. and pining.
in this painting columbus stands in the cornfields of iowa, the place he grew up, the place he packs to go regularly in his memory care apartment. jeanne finds him with bundles of clothing secured by belts or wrapped up between the sleeves tied in button-down shirts. he’s excited to see her when she comes to visit, a new limit that must be incredibly difficult for her to fathom after decades of marriage. most of the time he still knows that she is ‘the one’ – the one he would choose most in the world to hold hands with. but he is confused and sometimes he does not readily recognize her for who she is. he is still settling into his facility. it’s not likely he will go to iowa again now.
it matters not. together they stroll the halls and step into the colorado sunshine. jeanne, steadfast and brave, chats about the family and reminisces and columbus tells tales of the things he believes he has seen that day, visions of beloveds who have gone before, of places he cherishes and stories of the way-past. they walk slower than they used to; columbus breathes with a little bit of oxygen helping him along. jeanne checks in to see how far he wishes to walk, how tired he has become.
i imagine jeanne takes his hand and squeezes it. and i imagine columbus smiles. he knows she likes him. and, just like piglet, he knows she’s right there.
between us we have two master’s degrees, two bachelor’s degrees, four businesses, a coaching and consulting practice, various certifications, multiple states of teaching credentials, fifteen albums, four singles, hundreds of paintings, multiple play-scripts, countless productions and concerts and performances and gallery showings, a radio show, four cartoons, books, blogs that contain a few thousand posts, numerous and diverse leadership positions in theatres and churches and educational institutions, too many non-profits to count, long resumes and a combined total of over eighty years of work experience.
we are artists. and, as you know, that is not the easy path. it’s gig economy in a corporate environment. it means piecing things together, working a plethora of jobs at once, purchasing your own healthcare, investing in your own so-called retirement, advocating for your own value, balancing, balancing, balancing. the tightrope is thin, but anyone doing the tightrope dance (funambulism) is well-acquainted with the balancing pole and standing tall in the center of mass on the rope, necessities in an artist’s life.
in a workplace conversation once, i was asked how i would even speculate about having a second job. an incredulous moment, as a person who has always had simultaneous multiple jobs, it was ludicrous to me that the person asking this, who apparently has always lived in absolute bullet-pointed stability, could not fathom having more than one job at a time. were artists to be so lucky. were any gig workers, in their area of professionalism, to be so lucky. that is another world entirely.
so we are always on the lookout for additional gigs, so to speak. education, experience and skills from the wide spectrum of the first paragraph speak well to helping with growth and change processes and insight and honoring students and employees, not to mention the separate and interwoven threads of music, painting, theatre. these experiences that span decades speak to the arts, that which the world turns to in times of chaos, unrest, dis-ease, periods marked by adjectives like distraught, devastated, frenzied, unprecedented, uncertain, arduous, splintered, divided, distrustful, untrue, exhausted. the arts – that which feeds society. yet, “creativity takes courage,” understated henri matisse (painter, 1869-1954).
as many of you, we receive solicited and unsolicited lists of jobs in our email. we peruse through the obvious ill-fitting options like neurosurgeon or stem cell biological researcher; we look for opportunities to plug our work as artists into the world. we are also emailed positions that line up with our professional abilities and tenure in the arts.
and this is what we’ve been sent: sandwich ARTIST and GALLERY advisor. it’s hard to know whether to laugh or be insulted. sandwich artist? if this is really what subway calls their employees, i would say most of us have related experience since the first time, at like age 3, we spread peanut butter and jelly on our wonder bread. and gallery advisor? tesla, really? car dealer concierge maybe?
it’s a dim future if you cannot see relevance for the arts in a society, if they are secondary to anything and everything else, if they present in sandwiches and on dealership floors. where are the organizations, the institutions, the employers who recognize the multi-faceted diamonds in an artist’s perspective, an artist’s drive, an artist’s commitment, an artist’s vision, an artist’s project-driven dedication and multi-layered stamina, an artist’s sensitivity, an artist’s heart?
as two artist-funambulists, we’d like something better for the gifted artists giving breath to joy and hope and tomorrow. from the tightrope of this gig economy, it makes our toes curl to think any differently.
to write on-the-fly requires a certain letting-go. one cannot be too exacting. there is always another note, another rest, another phrase, another measure. always a chance to iron out the details, clean up the rough, rake the sandy grit. composing improvisationally is stepping into not-knowing and following threads that show up. because, instrumentally, i am typically an it’s-a-song-without-words writer, i listen and hang on to where the thread brought me, seizing it to wrap back to themes stated, to gestures implied. the starting gate is full of imagery or word-phrases, emotions to elicit. a shred of hope rose up in front of me today and this time, in an effort to not push back against hope, i answered. the call and response to a scintilla of hope spoke in glimmers of 1 minute 42 seconds.
yesterday was an historic day. after days, months, years, decades of not really speaking up, i found myself speaking. processing the balance of liability-seesaws, i wondered why i hadn’t spoken aloud about things that were not ok, things that were clearly unfair, inequitable, people who were aggressive, people who were passive-aggressive, those who were destructive, those who undermined, those who did not help. i felt the confines of the wrapping-which-kept-me-quiet and pulled tightly across my heart drop ever so slightly away, fibers draping and drifting. voice, a deep breath, a little lighter. a beginning. a shred of hope.
wednesday was an historic day. we gathered together online again, ukuleles and singers. and yesterday i read a post from one of the young women there, “when you play music in a group where the ages range from 31 to 94 you always feel blessed.” community. shared. a place of i-love-you-love-me. a shred of hope.
tuesday was an historic day. a brilliant woman of afro-indian descent was chosen as the vice-presidential running mate of the democratic party’s candidate. oh, where we have finally come, where we will finally go. a shred of hope.
monday was an historic day. the derecho roared by. our tall old trees were spared. this time the rain did not pour in by the air conditioner. the dog and the cat shared the basement with us until the tornado warning expired. we sipped wine and rocked in rocking chairs, listening to the sound of the wind and rain above us. our little space in the world was safe. a shred of hope.
the prayer flags shred in the wind, sending prayers off into the universe. bits and pieces fall to the ground or fly off in the breeze. a perfect heart landed on our deck. a shred of hope.
it all doesn’t change the lost-ness of last friday’s on-the-fly. we have much to weave back together and so much to let go in this broken narrative, a tapestry of individuals, families, cities, states, a country, a world in pain.
when he said, “make hundreds”, he wasn’t referring to blogposts. my sweet poppo was for-sure-analog and didn’t really even know what a blog was. he was sending me off to school or work, calling after me to “make hundreds”, a tad bit of pressure for an A+ seeking student but taken with a bit of a grain of salt because my poppo said it with great love. today starts the one-hundredth week of our blogposts in the melange and daddy-o would be impressed. it’s one hundred weeks, after all.
clearly, in just a few short weeks it will be two full years. two years that we have sat next to each other and written a post that was inspired by the same image, the same quote, the same painting or piece of music. it has been a profound experience. we have written on the raft with dogdog and babycat curled up next to us, on the beach, in the high mountains, in hotels and airbnbs, in coffeehouses, in relatives’ homes, in the noise of a city, in the quiet on island. whether or not others are reading my words, i look forward to every single day of writing and am stunned to think that i probably have more in the way of written word now than songs. is that possible? (even at a mere 500 words a post it is somewhere around 250,000 words, about 3-4 novels worth.) it is the best stuff of sitting up in the maple tree outside my growing-up-house on long island for hours on end, writing, writing, writing.
we sit at the starting gate with our inspiration of the day and then, without looking at what the other is writing, we expound on what we see or feel or think. it’s ‘he said, she said.’ we’ve often thought about, and might just follow through, capturing them into a journal where the same image or quote could stimulate a third person’s writing. a ‘he said, she said, you said’ book. having a prompt is the juicy stuff that makes it absolute fun.
my posts are often stories, emotional – perhaps poetic – glimpses into our life. david’s are more esoteric, more complex. a friend of ours said she can tell the difference without even looking. goodness! i’m sure that is true. when we share our writing with each other, reading aloud, i often wonder about the value of what i’ve said. like recording an album, these are words ‘put out there’ for all to see and you and i both know that judgement is alive and well. but i always bravely try to remember what our point is.
we wanted a place to put a variety-pack of endeavors, a place that our conglomerate artistries could live under some kind of umbrella. that umbrella became our‘studio melange’ and we found we could offer our individual work (paintings and music) in addition to our cartoons (earlier on, the melange included chicken marsala and flawed cartoon) as well as the quotes we jotted down each week and the images i recorded on camera that we found pertinent or thought-provoking. about a year along the line we changed the melange and added ‘merely-a-thought monday’ and ‘not-so-flawed wednesday’ in lieu of our cartoons.
if you pare our melange down you will find one overwhelming similarity. hundreds upon hundreds of moments. moments captured, moments written down, moments to remember, moments we’d sometimes rather forget, moments of confusion, moments of regret, moments of incredulousness, moments of fear, moments of scary honesty, moments of challenge, moments of pushing back, moments of questioning, moments of indescribable joy and moments of deep sorrow. all of them moments of life, a reminder to grasp onto them and hold on dearly. for that is what we have. the ability to make moments. the ability to make moments count.
reverse threading 