Moustache Night

Like my Grandmother before me, I had two daughters a little later in life. They are close in age, but wide apart in temperament. They cope with life's adversities, picking and choosing differing weapons from their arsenal of responses. The elder is prone to swift untempered reactions, while the younger one diplomatically bides her time and moderates her replies - perhaps as a result of years of witnessing the consequences of her sister's rash outbursts. Attempting to assemble some very upscale hanging lamps inherited from her elder sister, daughter number two sat up in her room sweating amidst a pile of wires hangers and folded paper shades. The instructions were long gone. Usually the whiz-kid of the family, she sat alone seething with frustration and disbelief - she had been beaten by a lamp. Fortunately her sister was living across the street at the time and was summoned over to assist in sorting out the tangled mess of parts. Up the stairs stomps elder sister, grumbling about this disruption of her personal life. Her upper lip was etched with marker and we stared at it surreptitiously, afraid to comment lest we irritate her further and trigger a sudden and premature departure. All too aware of our guarded curiosity she announced, "it's moustache night", in the same way one would say "it's Saturday" - and promptly, deftly assembled the mass of parts into several fixtures, turned and disappeared across the street.

Bad finger

One afternoon during her first year of elementary school, my daughter came home and gravely took me aside to reveal some new found knowledge. Holding out her chubby hand and speaking in a lowered, reverent, confidential tone, she said - " Mom, did you know that one of my fingers is a 'bad' finger?" One of her ten fingers was arbitrarily singled out to be given a life sentence by some ancient schoolyard morality codex. The finger that yesterday was an innocent appendage today has been branded as corrupt and evil. What crime did it commit? It will look just the same as it did yesterday, but from this day forward it will forever bear a stigma and serve as a reminder of lost innocence.

Unwrapped

I make specialized hand carved and painted wooden sculptures for a living and just finished another Holiday season. The biggest giving time of the year when Yuletide trees fill underneath with presents, charities ring bells and inundate us with telephone solicitations and our mailboxes overflow with catalogs. There is no escaping the call for gifts. Our emotions are played upon with the tunes of holiday favorites, seasonal renewals of friendship come with each card, co-workers friends and family gather and the pressure is on to give tokens of affection, respect, fealty, and kindness. There is little escape lest we be branded a Scrooge or Grinch. We 'must' give - and that we 'must' somehow diminishes our gift. So we are compelled to annually exchange presents, burdening one another with mementos of relationships. Periodically I attempt to scale back these accumulations, sorting them and setting aside the 'keepers' while tossing out items never really liked or wanted. I hold fast to some if they were given by a loved one, or perhaps remain the only physical token of a long ago friend, or just because they possess that magical aura of having been a 'gift'. And yes, there are a few things that I have guiltily passed on to others. Re-gifting seems to me a cheaty way of dealing with an unwanted object. We'd like to convince ourselves that the item will find a loving home and useful purpose. Perhaps it will, perhaps it won't. Perhaps instead it will carry cooties of distaste from every hand that held it, bacteria of repugnance growing with every transfer. When my creations leave my hands what do they become? a cherished keepsake or an embarrassing white elephant? And do I really want to know?

Waterworld

Growing up with a swimming pool my parents built when I was in the fourth grade, we kids played watergames as much as yard games. Our Birthdays and Christmases provided us with a continual supply of fins, facemasks, and various flotation devices. We went through endless quantities of goggles and masks, compensating for their frequently broken straps by squishing them onto our faces and inhaling repeatedly until the suction pressure held it in place. The residual headaches and red marks on our foreheads were a small price to pay for razor sharp underwater vision. Swim fins were a must for our pool length races, enabling us to fly back and forth with lightening speed. Full of initiative like our do-it-yourself Dad, we became aqua-engineers, building floating structures out of stacked innertubes and Styrofoam paddle boards so that we could swim around in secret, peeking out of slits between the tubes while immune from water gun attacks. We piled up tubes at the steps on the shallow end, roofing them with upturned wading pools and deflated rafts to make aqua forts. Inspired by TV shows like Seahunt, we longed to spend our days submerged. We tested our endurance by doing as many underwater laps as we could on one breath - in case, like Lloyd Bridges, we would have to perform underwater rescues when our aqualung tubes had been slashed by the bad guys. We would kick around the pool with an inverted bucket over our head and try to submerge with it as if in a diving bell, an exhausting endeavor later replaced with the technique of sitting on it to keep it submerged and taking turns diving under to get a breath from the air trapped inside. Mom was given a metal ornamental frog as a garden sculpture – whose weight, when gripped tightly, made it an excellent device for a quick drop down to the bottom of the deep end for a meditative moment. These underwater activities led to numerous ear infections and much of the time I remember being in the pool protected with cotton, ear plugs, and a stiff rubber bathing cap - which kept out the water as well as much of the sound. After each swim, I learned to shake my head sideways with a NO NO NO NO on each side, hearing the sound of liquid inside slosh back and forth until I could feel the trickle of warm water finding its way out. Eardrops were dispensed daily - I can still hear my Mom timing each side after a dropperful with “one, two, button my shoe …three, four, shut the door… all the way to nineteen, twenty – that’s aplenty”. She stuffed cotton wads in afterwards to keep the medicine inside as I slept – a dry land treatment that shut out the sounds of my busy home much like my waterworld sojourns. My submerged activities were a constant source of enjoyment and even now I thrill with the freedom of a comic book Aquaman, undulating underwater with a dolphin kick and arms stretched out in front as if in liquid flight. The world above becomes less real and I return to those childhood bottom of the deep end moments with the frog, looking up at the rippling surface and wondering what strange land is that above me.

Structural Engineering

Dad built so many items for our home – partially due to the economic constraints of our oversized family, but mostly because he loved being a ‘do-it-your-selfer’. Dad would look over whatever Mom was currently admiring in a magazine picture and figure out how to make it for a fraction of the cost. It was a mission and a challenge! Each project began with a Saturday morning trip to the lumberyard. We would be there for hours, Dad searching for items on his list and calculating costs; us killing time wandering around the sawdust covered floors, inhaling the sweet smell of cut lumber and looking for the vending machines. They always had a row of them tucked into some corner near a doorway luring us with their colorful packages filled with stale Tom’s peanut bars, cheese cracker snacks, beer nuts, Chuckles candy and other delectable items. He’d give us pennies for the gumball machine and like juvenile gamblers we’d try our luck – hoping for a jackpot to come through the chute. On this particular Saturday we were shopping for redwood for outdoor armchairs that Dad had decided to make after seeing them in a Sunset magazine. Ours were designed to accommodate square vinyl covered foam cushions that we had purchased at the Akron discount store. These plastic cushions were water and soil proof, perfect for a large family with grimy little kids. We sat on them when watching TV, stacked them on top of one another for thrones and forts, used them as landing pads for indoor sporting events, or lined them in twos or threes for makeshift mattresses during sleepovers - the slippery vinyl units inevitably sliding apart by morning to leave us in a tangle of blankets, pillows, and cushions on the hard floor. Being cheap and plentiful, they became the key element in the chair design, their yellow and orange 60’s colors stylishly complimenting the redwood frames. Dad had opted for ¼” plywood as the supporting surface for the seat cushions, figuring that would keep the structure light and thus easy to move around. The plywood was set into narrow slots in the side rails of the seat frame. Unfortunately over time, weathering caused the plywood to shrink and warp, popping out of the slots when too much weight was applied to them. Seeing the grownups suddenly finding themselves in a near fetal position with their knees up under their chins was a source of great amusement for the younger kids, whose lighter payload made them immune from such catastrophes. But Dad was a problem solver and design tweaking after test flights was a naturally occurring part of his job. Undaunted by this minor setback, he seized upon some old tire inner tubes, (a supply of which no household in those days was without) cut strips from them and stapled the straps across the chair bottom in place of the plywood. The result was enhanced security and far greater comfort. No longer suffering the shock and surprise of splintering crashes, the occupant would sink incrementally in an almost genteel fashion as the aging rubber tore through the staples one by one, relaxed in the knowledge that escape could be made before disaster struck.
Now when I open the door of my shop and step onto the sawdust covered floor, the aroma of lumberyard imbued with Dad’s spirit fuels my efforts, bracing me for whatever daily obstacles my work may encounter.

Happy Birthday Dad - Roger Westvig 1/24/1919 - 9/27/1997

Snapshots

Taking photographs and making pictures has always been a part of my existence. I can still feel myself squinting as a child in the summer sun while Dad took our family portraits, gussied up in our church clothes, sweaty and itchy and feeling as though we had already suffered through enough with being at church all morning in scratchy starchy finery when we could have been playing. Each Christmas time he would take home movies of us hanging up our stockings for Santa, the hot glare of his camera lights burning our retinas while the fireplace was cooking our backsides. My parents both grew up with fathers who were camera buffs, so documenting their lives with snapshots was as much a part of their daily routine as eating and sleeping. Like his father, Dad took photographs too and even made his own prints, first with a makeshift enlarger fashioned out of an old cocktail shaker and later on in a cramped darkroom he built in our basement. Though unconcerned with the technicalities of how the camera worked, Mom was well aware of the magic it could generate. To her, photographs were tangible ‘hard copies’ of time and place and face that you could keep. She selected and preserved them in our family photo albums as devotedly as any medieval monk, knowing that they were her legacy as well as our history. The albums served to trigger memories and tales from the past – our past. Time after time, we would flip through their pages remembering the people and events held fast in them. After my parents’ deaths, the most cherished and difficult items to divide up were the photos. I took custody of them, duplicating each image multiple times so everyone would have a set. Recently I have been creating albums online for our now distant family to enjoy and share anew. Digitalized images are easy to enlarge for aging eyes, revealing details overlooked in those little snapshots we got back from the drugstore and pasted in books or kept in wallets. I have used photos as reference materials for reminiscing, writing and painting ever since grade school, improving my drawing skills by rendering the images over the years when live models were illusive and weather hampered attempts to paint nature in ‘plein air’. The photo was always there, holding still for hours, days, years, while I worked. The living subjects may have grown up, grown old, grown apart, but their images in the photographs are unchanging, captured in time and place for eternity.

Letters from Home

Lately I have been rummaging through boxes of old letters written by me to my folks and by them to me, and those to and from siblings and friends over the years. They are treasure chests filled with tangible bits of the past so unlike today’s electronic missives. These messages were penned and folded and licked by loved ones now long gone and opening them engages all the senses. A tearstain here, there a lipstick smudge, a pressed flower, a spatter of kitchen grease, colored crayon scrawling, all shrouded in a lingering perfume of musty attic. Old letters are not just read - but touched and smelled. Why some of our correspondence from the past was saved and others thrown away is a mystery. Were some kept as cherished mementos, historical references, proof of love, incriminating evidence, or for future blackmail? They are records of trips, births, deaths, aspirations, joys and despairs - all of the significant hurdles we surmount through life. Events we have triumphed and fretted over and noted down in dispatches to loved ones. We scan the margins of these remnants of the past for little asides, clues that may reveal new answers to old questions. Now and then we come across omissions, and painfully regret those things never written. Letters we wrote years ago reunite with the ones we have received and their long forgotten conversations are rewound and replayed on crumbly papers. Personal stories, anecdotes jotted down on the backs of postcards, on fancy stationery, in greeting cards, on cocktail napkins, clipped newspaper articles annotated with ball point pen, snapshots and ticket stubs, all combine to chronicle a family ‘history’. They get sorted and resorted, tied into bundles, stored in boxes and plastic Ziploc bags. We catalogue them, grouping them by year and writer, classifying and reclassifying them according to ever-changing schemes. The process awakens memories which have been slumbering, raising them up to hazily stretch and drowsily mingle with current thoughts. Like resurrected zombies, they arise and shuffle among the living, moving and speaking once more, reiterating long buried conversations. Our inner ears grow sharper over the years and prick up on phrases once passed over and dismissed as trivial, but now blaringly significant. The study of Philosophy and poetry puts great significance upon the meaning and specificity of language, requiring careful and repeated readings to absorb their content. With this in mind, I crisscross my fields of letters again and again hoping to glean a few new grains of meaning with every passage.