Mainly, it’s so damn lush. I haven’t seen it like this in any of the sixteen years we’ve been here. Everything in the photo except the blue flax flowers is just the natural stuff. There’s tall, sturdy grass with waist-high seed heads all around the house. I love the way it looks waving in the breeze. The changes in the plants themselves, their bigger leaves, how high they grow, are fascinating. This is quite a change from years of brown and dusty, you understand. The vistas are actually green. The acequias are running high. The utterly clean air, deep blue sky, and sharp white clouds say anything is possible, go out and do it. It’s like recovering from being crippled in your soul.
So dense and disturbing. I love it!
This was going to be a post about psycho-emotional rigidity and being blind to what’s just underneath our noses, but the requisite gumption has fled, I think. At least you get to look at this magnificent weirdness produced a number of years ago by yours truly at the Maryland Institute in Baltimore, where I was taking a class in small bronze casting.
It’s the very first thing I made. None of it came out the way I’d intended, and in fact there are five castings here, produced in a single pour. Three of them were complete failures, but I decided to leave the entire casting as it was (seven and a half inches high, at least a couple of pounds) rather than cut the good ones off, because the end result possessed a certain post-apocalyptic charm. Everything you see began as wax except for the honeybee, an actual expired bee I found inside the engine compartment of our beloved Jetta.
The way this casting business works, you sculpt a thing in special hard brown wax, encase it in high-temp plaster (investment), melt the wax out in a kiln, and pour the molten bronze into the resulting mold while it’s still red-hot. (Don’t want anything to blow up, do we?) There’s a lot of action with big stiff gloves, face shields, and tongs, and then you get to drop the whole mess into a barrel of water! Immensely entertaining, that.
You also need imagine the sculpture upside down. Upside-down in this case is really right-side up, because that’s how I cast it. The base is actually the top, where I poured the bronze. The molten metal then flowed down the trunk of the upside-down tree, as it were, and up into the branches. At the tip of each and every one, I placed a sliver or little stick of wax, so that when the mold came out of the kiln, there would be a vent to let the air escape as the bronze poured in. That’s where things went “wrong,” because the bronze began to cool before it could fill up all the space. My vents were just too small. You can see all this when the casting first comes out of the tank, still fearsome hot and stinky. The successful vents will have filled up with bronze, leaving stalks and rods to cut away. The others and the forms they’re part of just don’t manifest, or else you end up with cool failures like the bird’s head with no bill above.
The other students in that class each made one itty-bitty little thing for their first pour. I got away with my bizarre experiment because I told my teacher that I wanted to make as many mistakes as I could in the shortest amount of time, so I would learn faster, and he was good with that.
Sunset virga last week »Buy This Photo!«
For the longest time, I was the oldest of five. Then Teresa died, and I was the oldest of four. The way things are going with brother Bill in Tucson, I’m on the threshhold of being the oldest of three. I’m tired of dealing with death, especially in Arizona. Our parents died years apart, also in the spring in Tucson, where the vortex of the damned first pulled me in and colored my perception of the place. Try as I might, I always clench a little at the name, and look at how it makes me write!
Bill has cancer in both lungs. For a time it looked like he’d miraculously arrested the progress of his illness through twice-monthly chemo and plenty of meth. The chemo probably did the work—though what if there’s some synergy or will—and at least the other made him happy. Then yesterday my sister M. (a nurse) dropped in on him after a road trip from Texas. She found him bedridden and abandoned inside his stinking hot singlewide, too weak to sit up or stand. He hadn’t eaten in several days and had cellulitis in his legs. He was septic, she said. Like rotting inside. A couple of days from being gone. There was a cell phone, but he hadn’t called. Most of you probably find that hard to believe, but to me it has “Bill” written all over it. (Bill, Bill, Bill…) His oxygen tank was empty, too, so she phoned for an ambulance right away.
He’s in the intensive care unit at the V.A. hospital in Tucson now, feeling better, apparently, after antibiotics, fluids, and food. We want him in hospice, but if he insists, he might end up back at his trailer after all. He wants to go home so he can keep getting high. I totally understand, but then he’s on his own.
My first reaction on hearing the news was shock and grief. My second reaction, something approaching acceptance, derives both from the fact that there’s nothing anyone can do if the doctors let him go, and that dying is perfectly safe. However the impossible suffering bastard with a secret heart of gold checks out, we can surely say he did it his way, and a part of me will feel some pride in that. No matter what the past, I’ll honor his memory and do him up right. When it’s all over, it’s over, and the world trundles on. Save for happier reasons, I may never set foot in poor Tucson again.
After the rain had gone »Buy This Photo!«
All morning long I cleaned. First I backed the truck down the driveway, almost to the front door. I needed to empty the back and re-arrange the contents—boxes of family artifacts from my late Aunt Mary’s house in Maine, the “truck box” (tow chains, jumper cables, tools, rope, lug wrench), the carton the microwave came in, three recycling bins, old towels, and a folding camp chair. There was chipmunk or mouse poop on the old T-shirt I’d used to cover up an open box from Maine; it was chewed to pieces besides, so of course I tossed it. Inside and now exposed, a heavy cardboard mailing tube with “Marriage license of Hamilton Young” written on the side. For almost a year I’ve been driving around with my great-grandfather’s marriage license in the back of my ’87 Ford, and to think I used to have his saddle bags. Where they are now is a longish tale of cruelty and hijacked heritage. A family thing, in other words, mirroring the care I showed the junk, I guess. Oh well.
The point of all this was to ready the truck for a storage unit run. The artifacts, mostly photographs my siblings will never understand or place, as well as a large plastic bin of my own photos and slides that had morphed into furniture in our crowded living room, were better off there. (Why do I even have these things?) Anyway, straightening the truck made room for the bin. While I was at it, I loaded the empty boxes I’d stashed in the corner over by the kiva. Now there was space behind me at my desk and the room felt so much better. To finish up, I pretended to vacuum. At least the brush on the attachment rearranged the cat hair on the rug.
For some reason this exhausted me. My wife was at her studio. I called her to say that I would not be walking that afternoon as planned because I felt so tired. She was adamant that I not push myself, which I was already guilty of, but the intent of moral absolution mattered most. Twenty minutes later, a thunderous rainstorm out of nowhere attacked the mesa, making me the second smartest guy on earth for staying put. My prize was getting to take a nap on the leather sofa in an empty, just-cleaned house while rain plonked down on the skylight.
I fetched a blanket from the bedroom and stretched out, grateful that I could. The upholstered arm made a fine pillow once I turned on my right side, with my body pressed against the back of the sofa. Under this arrangement, there was no place for my left arm, so I let it hang down across my torso. With my back against the cushion and the weight of my arm below my ribs, it felt like someone was holding me, and I quickly drifted off.
Living in the moment »Buy This Photo!«
The lazuli bunting is such a little bird, smaller than a sparrow, smaller than an indigo bunting (which we also see)—but they’re so beautiful, I have to pay attention, and when I can, I take another picture. It’s just one of those things, like rainbows. What kind of an idiot doesn’t take a picture of a perfect rainbow? Neither can I resist cropping the resulting image to get in closer, to examine what might otherwise be overlooked. The original of this one shows a lot more of the tall grass around my homemade feeder—really just a piece of plywood laid across one of those alleged whisky barrels sawed in half—but once I’ve zoomed in, there’s no going back! Too bad, because the wide view is pretty damn slick as well.
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