Journey to the American West

The low light of Fall has re-entered the painting space in Brook Hollow these days. Its low angle usually projects the balcony pickets onto the canvas, a texture I usually work to “not see” but its made me think this morning about shadows.

I finished a three part series which used some faded blooms of iris and lily today too. Its not that the partially-dried flowers represent anything, I enjoy them for their variable translucency, delicate inner structures, and colors that persist through the drying process. They also just “are.” I don’t form them or idealize them, they just “are” and this “are-ness” is something I enjoy in the painting/assemblages. Its a factor I can’t control, and have to try to read in order to make the next action. Maybe it is a form of dialogue with something that’s past. The iris bloomed one day, was cut and sold then next and the curls of the petals, the delicate veining beneath the surface, all were part of its life and being able to concentrate on that and appreciate it helps me to try to keep it “alive” in some sense on the canvas. Odd isn’t it?

Fall is a time of harvest for many people, and I can see that the walking through the fields (does a John Deere combine “walk?”) discovering and collecting the grain, fruits and vegetables is maybe the origin of walking door to door collecting candy, a symbolic sharing of our “bounty.”

There won’t be many trick or treaters stopping in at Brook Hollow tonight I don’t think. The bowl of candy will have to find another home (wake up incentives for my lectures attendees!) and its a bit too bad to not be able to share my “harvest” of milky ways and twix (twix being especially hard to pick from the twisty twix twee) but I’ll look for other ways to share.

The low light of Fall will get even lower come the holidays, we’ll share the longest night and celebrate it, making festival from fear with lights and food and gifts made with the time we don’t have to spend tilling our fields and tending our crops, in some ways, the fact that most of us don’t till or tend, or if we do, we till and tend on top of a full time job can take most of the pleasure out of the seasons. Maybe these days the best gift to give is our time.

In the meantime, holiday making season is upon me, time to get producing for friends and family! Maybe this year, in this economy we should put a tiny bit of time in on a gesture, instead of taking that part time job to afford purchased gifts…lets put ourselves in our gifts instead of our credit line! Now I have to think, which sister is a right spiral and which is a left? What to make for an accessorizable daughter, What to make for a minimalist? How can I ship a table to a brother? And what is the form of box for a handmade truffle? Somehow these questions make me think of all of you, and fills the cold husks of fall with warm memories. Thanks!

Think of each other this season, be good to each other, and share your bounty (not the paper towels!)

Its a hard day today. Nine years ago we were all in shock from the events of the day, today, somehow its harder to know all the details, to hear the radio calls, the last phone calls from flight 93, the sadness that’s still in the voice of firefighters. Its just a hard day.

As a parent of a responder, you somehow never think your daughter, or someones spouse or father or mother is at risk when they get in the truck and run towards the disaster. I feel that risk more now.

And what can one say about the heroes that day. They were among the trained, and among the ordinary people around us every day. American heroes, fighting back with hot water and soda cans, pulling at steel with bare hands, prying at concrete debris with whatever was at hand.

They showed us the best of America that day. People willing to fight for the lives and freedom of people they didn’t know on the ground, willing to risk their lives to try and get one or two more out of the fires in New York and Washington. They are the best of us, what we all hope we’re up to when the situation calls for us. We fight, we risk, we die for the principles of freedom, fair play, doing the right thing.

Don’t ever fight for retribution, there is no payback for inhumanity, there is no justice in denying anyone their rights under the law. Fight for the rights of all of us, no matter what language we speak, no matter what we call our God, the strong protects the weak, its the American way.

Never forget. Always be willing.

Take Care of each other, even if you don’t know who you’re caring for.

I think my painting period is coming to a close.

I say this because the paintings are becoming less about paintings and more about process and narrative, and there are some bits that make them more three dimensional or techniques that make them ultra two dimensional and its becoming tricky to manage to call them paintings at this point.

What I’m calling process pieces are less about the process of making and more that they include some element that is responsive to something other than the brush and paint. I enjoy this because I don’t control it. I do try to cajole it most of the time. Trying to convince it to make a graceful arc, or a convincing knot. But by and large, the material makes up its own mind about what to be…and then I try to find the next act…”well if you’re going to be like that then I’ll put this next to you” …and then the “this” takes on its own will and I look for the next move…its like a game of chess I try to outthink the material, but the material usually has its own way, and at some point, I agree with it and try to help it become more of what it is.

This is a good example of what I’m trying to say. The wood fibers have their own history. Drought, solar access, injury, nutrition, all have shaped each set of cells that make up the fiber. This history affects the fiber’s ability to make a tight turn, or stand straight, or curve gently or tightly. It took me a while to accept this, and a while more to be able to offer the fiber some discrete assistance.

The wood fibers move a lot, because they are largely unrestrained, and because the humidity here varies quite a bit. So each day on the wall, each time I relocate the piece (i don’t have too many walls that are receiving parallel light) its different in ways I can see and appreciate. It could be that if my eyes were better educated, I could see the difference in color, shadow and texture in the other paintings throughout the day too. But the nuances are too difficult for me to see. It could be a question of patience.

All this is to say today I started cleaning up the painting place in the living room. Not the way most people would clean…I thought I’d try and put most everything that was on the table, onto a canvas…but not all at once!

So today I was making a spot for some silver wire and brass rods that were leftover.

And like usual, there was paint leftover, so, waste not want not…I took another canvas and the nearby mixing bowl, outlined the bowl and began working the leftover indigo and gray into the edges of the circle, pulling to center. The darkest paint went to the center and the overall effect was…uninspired. So, given that this piece was shaping up poorly to my eyes, I took bits of wood fiber that were laying about, and cut them over the top of the painting. As the fibers fell into the acrylic they made their own pattern which I realized was a function of both what i was cutting with the scissor, and where I stood to cut it. I moved to the second side of the painting and cut some more. The pieces fell as they might. There was some ribbon that I had gesso’d into to a canvas months ago, the pulled out to leave the line subtracted in the surface. It had red paint and gesso on it and so sometimes fell heavily when snipped, sometimes floated down. I noticed that when the air conditioning came on the ribbon moved on the air currents until I hit a gesso spot, then it fell heavily.

So there is a lot that I’m not controlling specifically in this one, and I’m not sure how to hold the fragments more or less where they fell. I’m thinking of a gesso pour over the whole thing to try and hold all the bits. What do you think?

The last stage of this might be for me not to control the title. You’ve seen the captions get long and maybe too convoluted or cryptic. Partly I’m not sayin’ what i’m thinkin’ when I make these paintings and things, and partly the naming is a reaction to the photo more than the painting itself. Regardless, I was thinking it would be interesting if you named this one, if you’d like, if it strikes you…

I’ve been giving paintings away lately and hope whomever gets them takes the opportunity to rename them…mostly i hope they don’t end up in the trash! If nothing else paint over them to recycle the canvas and stretchers!

Anyway, time for work.

Take care of each other. Enjoy the beauty of things you can’t control, and try not to control too much..

I’ve written a bit about song lyrics in the past. Some days certain words or phrases just seem to jump out and grab your attention.

The last few days, a few lines that I’d wasn’t able to hear clearly during the performance caught me.

The song is “Another Day” from the broadway show “Rent.” Its got a few good lines;
“forget regret”
“or life is yours to miss”
“no other road”
“no other way”
“no day but today”

I think of this in the context of the speed of life today. There’s always a text waiting for answer, an email waiting, a facebook post to respond to…and when we’re forced away from the smartphone or the computer, we rush, and in rushing around, we miss things, miss people, miss moments that are all around us.
The wind here has been blowing out of the southeast lately. It pushes a lot of moisture up from the gulf so our afternoons and evenings are filled with flashes and booms and torrents of rain. I’m pretty isolated from it in my concrete office building, but the roar of downpour is unmistakable. Yesterday after the roar ended, and the spritzing was still in the air, I walked from the office to the car. Its about two or three blocks but its not a walk through a neighborhood, its mostly through other parking lots. My eyes were drawn to the little clusters of leaves blown out of the trees, the swirling sand at the curb, the storm drain in full gurgle. I’m not sure why. Maybe the noise or the presence of curved things in the rectangle-ruled world of a parking lot caught me.
Either way, it slowed me down.
I’ve been carrying a camera to help me slow down and see the world around me and I found I had to work a bit to take it out of my pocket and take a photo of … what? … sand? … a storm sewer? It seems odd, things that are not especially photogenic and we walk by, but the camera asks us to actually look close, to SEE it, and try to frame it, to BE in the sun (in order to get the sun where it needs to be for a good photo) and it turns out, it slowed me down. I forgot all about linked learning outcomes, about impending layoffs, all sorts of things that weigh on us all, disappeared into that picture…which turns out was not a keeper!

Which is all to say, it probably is true, life is less about the destination, and more about the trip.

One other line from this song;
“give in to love”
“or live in fear”

That one I can’t connect to the parking lot.

But I think its something we all dream about.
Take care of each other.
Use that smartphone to take some pictures between here and there, it’ll help you to slow down for just a few minutes.

It was cool this morning, under 80 anyway, and not too humid. I woke up to a strange sound…quiet! I noticed my airconditioning wasn’t running, neither was my neighbors…I thought “power out” but a quick look to the alarm clock showed the power was still on. But it was very unusual for a July morning here in Texas.

As I drove to the office, I had windows open, sunroof open, and the radio off. More quiet. Its kind of peaceful really. I think we don’t know how much “noise” is in our lives until its not there. Then all of a sudden one finds themself trying to reach for the volume knob to turn down the frogs and cicadas. The constant whir and woosh and squeaks of air systems, email beeps, radio, pandora, itunes, kind of builds a level of nervousness in a person and it reduces the “calm reserve” that we need to get through stressful times.

I spent yesterday reading. A little Aquinas, a little Levy-Strauss, some Heidegger and Crichton too. It was a good quiet way to spend the day after a week of getting thumped every other day, I was ready for it. I couldn’t understand how the caustic emails I was getting were so acutely tuned to what I was doing. And Friday it hit me…facebook! I had been posting artwork and some chatter, responding to peoples posts…the usual things one does to tell friends “We’re attentive to your life.” And I hadn’t thought anyone else could see those, but somehow my torturer did, and each day would send between one and seven emails to reach inside and twist at an old wound, and do it with language that was way too current. So I’m toning down my facebook participation, which is too bad because it really is a good way to attend to friends and former students, but until the courts rule on my torturer, I’ll lay low, stay quiet, read and enjoy the silence as much as I can…I recommend it to you all too!

Now if I could just turn down those Cicadas!
Take Care, be safe

Its been a month of struggle so far, Frank and I were invited to make a proposal for a book, about construction and ornament which, as usual, I think too much about and somewhere inside feel relates to life in general. This is likely not the case, but as is true for all these blog entries, I’ll make a start, see where it goes and try to wrestle it to a conclusion before my few readers click away to something more interesting.

A book about construction and ornament is a curious thing in our time. Ornament has largely been abandoned by architecture since 1908 or so when Adolph Loos thought we needed a break from using it, because the ornament, that thing added to utility to make something more beautiful, had become applied and meaningless.

I thought about ornament and life today, looking at jewelry. Some jewelry is precious in its own right, some very ordinary in terms of its substances, but meaningful in an associative way.

I’d seen a necklace in Chicago this summer, one made of a simple loop of a woven fabric, and hanging from the loop was a sort of rectangular (not geometrically perfect) bit of bark from a Birch tree.

The piece struck me immediately. Maybe it was the bark itself, which I strongly associate with summers in Minnesota where we peeled Birchbark from the trees that fell the previous winter and stored the bark in the tinder box next to the stone fireplace. Mom and Dad would take us to the big city, Grand Rapids from time to time when a part was needed for the outboard, and all six of us would get to walk through the big northwoods souvenir store. A place filled with moccasins, boxes made from aromatic cedar, and all things birchbark.

I like the history of birchbark in Minnesota. Dad once took us to meet a fellow who made birchbark canoes on the banks of the Bigfork river. He was really old then, maybe in his 60’s, but he took time and explained the whole process to us, a process he had learned from the Chippewa Ojibwe Native American tribe. They’d drive stakes in the sand on a flat beach to outline the gunwales, and using split spruce roots, tie spruce and steamed cedar together to form the ribs of the canoe, then overlay the rib structure with large sheets of birchbark, lace them onto the ribs using spruce root, and paint over each joint with pine tar. There’s a great description of a Smithsonian recreation at this link http://www.pbs.org/riverofsong/music/e1-enduring.html

As he spoke, Mr. Hafeman would pick up a bit of root that he kept in a barrel of water, split it with a knife at the end, and pull the entire length in half. I remember the swampy smell of the barrel of roots (you just HAVE to poke your nose in things when you’re 12) and pull some cedar from under a tarp billowing steam to show us how to split (same knife) and form it, and the heated pine tar pot that at least one of us poked a finger in and smeared all over our “good” tee shirt.

He told us the birchbark was an essential part of the Ojibwe life, and that it was disappearing. For many years I thought he meant the birchbark, but now i realize he was speaking of a way of life, where raw things were refined by hand with the benefit of years of traditional knowledge passed on with story and demonstration, just as he had done that day for us. Birchbark had been transportation, shelter, food storage, and a way to preserve the sparse history of each family.

In the souvenir store I had thought the black gridlines on the toy canoes were just a pattern, an ornament, something optional. But that afternoon, Bill Hafeman taught us that those lines were a critical part of the process of making the canoe…without those pine pitch lines, the canoe would leak, and be useless, or worse, dangerous.

I’ve been back and forth to Weiss College at Rice University this past week. To observe and photograph the surfaces of the dormitory. Marcel was good enough to come along and teach me a bit more about digital photography, perspective correction, and exposures for deeply shaded spaces. Early in the week I’d scouted the complex with my point and shoot camera, seeing the curious treatment of mortar joints, the staggered window pattern, distinctive projection of the window head flashing beyond the windows and the exposure of certain supporting lintels.

Instinctively I believed there was something to all this. The surface was too carefully worked to just be a pragmatic solution. Certain things were changed, made more visible than usual. These were all necessary things to be sure. The lintels were needed to support the brick between columns and above windows, flashing needed to protect the lintels, control joints needed to prevent cracking and associated water intrusion…but until just now, I didn’t realize I was looking at the canoe. The raised prow at the front and back decorative but has a role in wave breaking, and gives the Northwoods canoe its distinctive figure. The canoe builder’s knowledge of surroundings, knowing where the large birch trees are, becomes visually apparent looking at the canoe. One with few pitch lines used large bark, one with many used the bark from small birch trees, and more joints means…more leaks down the road…

Somehow I’m trying to think of people in all this, because in many ways, we are the objects we make….or the things we make-make us…I think Churchill said that. “We form our spaces and thereafter they form us” or something. So what is our ornament? Is it just a necklace or a watch? Is it part of us or something we can take off or put on without it changing us? What other outward visually apparent signs of our knowledge (or lack of) do we carry?

I wonder about this because I’ve carried a mark of my carelessness around this week, prominently displayed on my nose!

Last Sunday I was working in my garage/shop/storage space and had stood some square edged (now I know why they “ease” or radius the edges) oak boards that I was going to make into sculpture bases. I was kneeling down, plugging the saw into my improvised electrical center and tugged a cord…that ran under some plywood…that had some pine leaned against it…that was next to the oak…that had the square edge.

Can you see the outcome? I tugged the cord, it shifted the plywood, but my focus was on the cord and on not getting my fingers across the terminals of the receptacle (hey i know THAT much about electricity!) i heard the pine shift but it was a ways away from me so I didn’t look but then (suddenly) i heard the oak next to me (a distinctive oaky sound) and looked up just in time to see the board inches from my face. I closed my eyes, turned my head, but still got smacked with the oak, its square edge neatly scraping most of the skin from the tip of my nose. I was unahppy with the oak, but holding my nose and after some first aid and a nap (don’t work with power tools when you’re tired or grumpy!) went back, cleaned up the fallen cascade of wood, and finished the project…but now a week later, the nose is healing but not pretty. So I mostly hide out here at home, sitting and typing about ornament, birchbark, and meaningful figures and patterns….

The moral of the story…he who has not arranged things neatly (in life) is likely to suffer injury at the hand of his improvisations.

or something

Take Care, be well, watch out for falling oak!

Listening to the news these last months, trying to attend to content and dismiss the hyperbole, brought the words in the title to mind.

I found a few interesting comments and quotations on the general concept of fools and foolishness, one of my favorites is:

“The point of being an optimist, is to be foolish enough to believe the best is yet to come.” Peter Ustinov is credited with that one. True he’s not a renowned philosopher, but it does say something about our ability as a people to overlook things, facts of the present and immediate past, and hope for a better future.

Ustinov puts this under the term “foolish” to let us know that in reality, from his perspective, things are what they are, they will be what they will be, and our beliefs, or dreams, or wishes can’t change them. Its some kind of fatalistic approach to life.

That little voice inside me tells me he might be right, but it doesn’t stop me from working to make the future somehow better, better for me, better for people I don’t know, better for my friends and people I love.

Herman Hertzberger told me once that as an architect, he cannot save the world, that he sees himself more like a dentist, just relieving a little discomfort here and there.

Maybe that’s all that’s needed.

Think about what the impact of 309 million people doing little things to make the future better. Individually, it would be easy to say that picking up the water bottle in the parking lot doesn’t make a difference and that only a fool would believe it to be otherwise.

But think about it.

390 MILLION people. If every day we did just one thing, in a year there would be almost one billion things done each year. Think about 390 million people going to the gulf, dipping out their one bucket of oil, staying one night in a local motel, eating three meals. The impact of that would make the 20 billion dollar escrow fee tiny.

I believe the future is in a decentralized approach to problem solving. It seems like just a few generations ago, all of America was “off-grid” and “off-pipe.” Every major building in a city made its own electricity, heat, and propulsion for its elevators. Every family farm harvested water and stored it for the dry spells, made electricity, grew food. The rural countryside is filled with remnants of a sustainable society…it worked for a few hundred years…until we centralized the economy.

I’m off track yet again. I’ll close with this quote by Epictetus. “If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid.”

Kind of takes one back to Forrest Gump.

Be safe, be good to each other, and when they get that thing capped in the gulf, take a trip, scoop your bucket, and lets go full speed into a foolish future.

…and pick up that water bottle!

When you think about a waking day, a lot of words pass through ones mind. Some words are destined to be spoken, some not. Some of the words are part of a more complex inner thought. Thoughts that really only happen when it gets quiet enough that the world outside isn’t grabbing our attention for one reason or another.

Along this line of words some stick out.

Over the last few days I’ve become aware of the word “rescue” maybe because I was thinking of the people who fly for the Coast Guard, maybe because I was thinking about applying sensor networks for finding people trapped in big debris fields like the one from this week’s tornadoes in Ohio and Michigan. There’s probably other reasons, but I’m thinking about that one word “rescue.”

The Oxford English Dictionary (where else can one start?) defines rescue as “save” and then “from a dangerous or distressing situation.”

Pretty simple. Actually there may not be enough here to write about, but lets see if its possible to drone on for a bit, something might pop up.

Another context where rescue popped up this last week was in the music that my “genius” app on the ipod put together for me. It put two songs together back to back that I wouldn’t have, but maybe Steve Jobs has somehow canned a real genius and put them in an app? The first song was “Love Story” performed by Taylor Swift, followed by the classic Motown hit “Rescue Me” performed by Fontella Bass. Both are less about dangerous and more about distressing situations which seems to be the tricky thing about rescue.

Its not hard to imagine being saved from one distressing situation only to find oneself in another. Kind of “out of the frying pan into the fire.” Both songs focus on the moment of rescue…and from what? Being alone.

Following the logic, being alone must be the distressing situation, and I can see there’s something to that. Maybe not completely a good idea, to see someone else as more interesting to be around than ourselves. But, it could be parts of us want someone else to tell us, we’re interesting and good people, parts of us want to find a way to be more than we’re able to be on our own, and can’t figure out what that means. Having another person around lets us see the world from another perspective. That’s pretty reasonable sounding, especially if the two people share that outlook.

But at the root of the rescue question lies the question. Did we get ourselves in a dangerous or distressing situation and now want someone else to extract us so we don’t have to do it ourselves? Sometimes danger comes at us from outside, and sometimes the the most reasonable person can’t see far enough ahead to not get caught in the flood, fire, hurricane, earthquake…. I can see that. But when the danger or distress comes from the inside, its a different story.

At that moment, when the little voice inside starts saying “rescue me,” its time to cowboy up, look in the mirror and realize nobody but the reflection can save you (vampires and various forms of undead excepted.)

It wouldn’t be as good a song for Fontella Bass to sing “grow with me” or “build with me” but might be the right sentiment. Then again, who doesn’t like the moment when the two are visible in the fog, one on a knee, holding the other’s hand, the thin loop of gold flashing in the morning sun. I haven’t found that in the Oxford English Dictionary yet, but there’s a lot of time in the quiet of Brook Hollow, so I’ll go turn a few more pages and see what jumps out at me.

Be good, enjoy some time alone if there’s time, take care of each other, don’t forget the one in the mirror.

It looks like a typo doesn’t it?

But from time to time, we get presented with certain truths. One of them being that while we become part of something larger than ourselves from time to time, that larger thing, it isn’t always aware of us. Sometimes that’s a good thing, sometimes not.

I tend to identify closely with what I do, and the people in my life are usually those who are part of the same organization. I’m proud of my friends, amazed at their commitment to the larger organization, (which is kind of a nested set of organizations and relationships) and its always a difficult day when you can’t do what they ask you to do. You feel like you’ve let them down, and, I guess I did.

Its not like they ask often, or for trivial things, they have good judgment, great judgment really. They can read a persons integrity in a few short sentences and know things about us we have a hard time learning ourselves. So its hard to let them down. The larger thing we are part of brought us together, and is kind of close (ok, not super close) to being a really good thing. It just needs the right mix of people at all of the right levels, who have a clear sense of purpose, and really, of integrity.

It seems hard to hold on to both of those things, purpose and integrity as one moves upwards in the nested layers of the organization, and today, one of those people who had managed to hold on at a pretty high level decided not to keep at it. We could tell something was in the wind, the person was relieved having made the decision and why not? Those jobs leading the nest are not really super rewarding in our bigger organization, and especially in our time when whittling, reallocating, and from time to time weaseling (such strong language!) resources from one nested layer to another is a way of life. Where is “one” to find satisfaction in such a time and place? Its not easy to answer.

I’m happy this person has been able to hold on to what they value through the trials and tribulations of daily life in a big nest. I’m happy they kind of know what to do next, which voice inside to hear clearly. But, that said, there will be a hole in the nest, in each of our nested layers as this “one” slowly moves out. I feel it already, maybe the quiet evenings allows for too much reflection. We shared similar values, similar commitment, but I always thought they were stronger, could work through the conflicting situations that we are presented with each day. It turns out everyone is human, and in many ways, thank goodness for that!

But back to my first point.

I think to act in one’s own best interest is unavoidably an act of separation. And its hard to act in one’s own interest for many of us. Some of us spent our lives trying to keep family, colleagues, everyone around us happy, and lose ourselves along the way. So I felt poorly when I didn’t jump up to volunteer to take a spot in the bigger nest today, and hope it won’t separate me too far from my friends.

We all make choices about our future. We have to, and its inevitable that we’ll disappoint some people in the process. But our friends while being disappointed will still accept us even after the we choose for ourselves…we all hope for that.

I’m getting a little or a lot lost here, but thanks to the head of our nest for years of looking after us at their own expense, thanks to those that take us in and accept us, and please know that no matter which voice inside you follow, there’s always a spot in the friends nest for you.

The whole nest metaphor needs some more elaboration one day. It just occurred to me that one can get pushed out of a nest, just as easily as one can leave the nest on their own…

I’m a bit more obscure than usual since recent events aren’t fully public yet, I’m hoping readers will recognize who to thank and who to forgive and let back in the nest.

Take Care of each other.

I did something this weekend that I hadn’t done in maybe….45 years? I ironed a shirt.

Wash and Wear has been steadily improving since 1965 so I hadn’t really needed to iron but the wrinkles were there as was the iron and board and I thought, “I can do this!.”

Its funny how muscle memory comes back. Its been a long time, but I found myself knowing how to proceed along the shirt, managing to work the wrinkles out of the back, front, and sleeves without “ironing-in” more wrinkles.

I was remembering Mom teaching us to iron. We started on handkerchiefs, moved up to pillow cases and sheets, and once we quit “browning up” the items we were ironing (I stopped moving the iron once when a really compelling scene played by “Bozo the Clown” came on WGN) we graduated to ironing Dad’s shirts.

Like shoe shining, ironing paid a little bit, maybe a quarter or so, but back then, eight quarters meant a new Revell, AMT or Monogram model, and three more meant new paint colors!

I was also remembering, it was one of the few times we could get one on one time with Mom. When she was teaching us, we’d have her attention, until a scream, a crash or a thump would divert her to another part of the house. (who was that thump?)

I remember the ironing lessons, like the bowling lessons (push, swing, glide, release) and the friday night at the fights wrestling events, (didn’t Lori always beat us?) (unless we cheated and tickled) all took place in the “new addition” as we called it.

This strikes me as odd since it was the only addition to the house back in those growing up years. I remember the addition was built by Dad and a fellow named Ted who was a carpenter I think. John and I hammered nails into the plywood floor there and it had some sliding windows that we still call “the andersons” and each of us kids knows which windows they are.

Like a few projects, the addition didn’t finish up all at once, and I think there still is a switch that dangles on some wires over the dryer to turn the lights on there, and the dimmable light in the middle of the room, that we once pulled down low over the card table to work puzzles, now is too low to walk under without clanging my head.

The addition could be reached by either walking through the kitchen, utility room or by walking through the bathroom and dressing room. This whole-house loop became an endless loop for us to chase each other, our dog, and sometimes the rabbit around the first floor.

I’ll be back to see the addition again this summer, will be again amazed at how small it seems, remember the floor fans we’d all lay around on hot summer evenings, watching the first color tv! I think we all watched the Beatles on Ed Sullivan there, the tv debut of the Jetsons, and after school with Paul Revere and the Raiders. (What were we thinking?)

All these memories came back to me as soon as the hot iron hit the cotton fabric yesterday. I didn’t have the tv on so I managed not to burn the shirt, and was pretty satisfied with how the final product seemed almost starched, perfectly smoothed and was the most comfortable thing I ever put on. (warmed clothes are pretty comfy)

Amazing the things that triggers memories of out past.

Be good to each other this week!