Bad Behavior!

(If you are in the least bit squeamish about rats, please do not read further!)

I'm the grown up here, so get a grip! It's not entirely my fault that my pet rats, Blu and Lily, spent the night in the defunct oven again! They crawled into the cabinet when I wasn't looking; crashed through the airduct, nearly scared me to death. I thought it was a raccoon from the roof who'd found it's way in. I'd accidentally left the cage door open and... oh, never mind...

I have no control over these rats, they won't stay put. (Was i this lenient with my kids? I don't think so. Absolutely not!) If they hadn't come out of the oven this morning I'd have to call Patrick the Plumber. Ah, but they did. I threw them back in their cage where they weren't happy, and they made sure I knew it— sticking their noses out to get my attention, climbing up and down, not settling. At least with a baby you can drive it around in the car until it passes out, or put a little whiskey on its bottle. But rats? Man, there's absolutely nothing you can do to make them behave!

(News flash: I just read where landmine sniffing rats in South America have been trained to respond to commands such as, "stop," "let's go," and even training their babies. Perhaps not all is lost...?)

***

I'm psyched about my class at Art Center. I did my first comic ever! (excuse the bad copies, but my scanner is also defunct).

 "Cleaning out the cabinets..."

 

"Everything I looked at was out of date—

by at least 5 yrs."

 (Use by 2000, 2001, 2005, etc.)
 

"But some things never grow old...."

(use by 2050)

And I have a new look for the main character of my rat story....

 RR

Now I just have to finish it...

Picher, Oklahoma

 Picher, OK

home of the Gorillas since 1918

I've heard of them, but I've never seen a ghost truck before, that is, until last week in Picher, OK. We were cruising down the main road, past abandoned buildings, when out of nowhere a large diesel truck came careening towards us, kicking up dust. The cab was high off the ground, the windows tinted; even so, we could see that no one was behind the wheel. On the side of the road, chat piles spread out for miles, and in the distance, a ghost fire was burning.

 

(photo credit: zendogpictures.com)

Ghosts aren't unusual for this area. Once, close to here, Mary saw a man with a green face walking by the side of the road. Spook lights (mysterious floating orbs) haunt the woods. But the condemned town of Picher is particularly scary; not for its ghosts, but for what happens when industry destroys the environment with mining, in this case, lead. The town which lies between Miama (pronounced My-a-muh), OK and Baxter Springs, KS, is virtually deserted. On Quapaw Tribal land, the town became the center of lead-zinc mining in the early 1900s. In 1981, the EPA declared Picher a Superfund site, the most toxic in the US.

Main Street

Good citizen Gary Linderman was the only pharmacist in town. When the government offered to buy everyone out in 2006, Linderman refused. Who else would help the 40 or so remaining residents when they got sick, he asked, so he stayed on. The Ole' Miners Pharmacy is a neat little shop, with shelves full of prescriptions and some old timey benches for sitting. People come from miles away, picking up scripts, wanting to talk. No one mentions the empty streets outside, the collapsed buildings, the dust in the air.

Gary Linderman

It's eerie walking here, like on a deserted beach, but you're in a land-locked state, so maybe a better analogy would be the moon, you're walking on the moon.

I didn't want to come here with the kids and all that dust kicking around, but Tom wanted to see it. Tom's mom's family grew up next to chat piles outside their home in Miama, and the siblings who didn't die of other causes, breathed in the dust and got cancer; some have died, some still standing.  He didn't say so outright, but I figured, as part of family history, Tom wanted to show the kids this ruin of hell.

The EPA wanted the town cleared because of the network of underground mines threatening collapse, but the real tragedy here is lead, how it seeped into the water, into the ground, into people's blood and tissues. A third of the children had elevated levels of lead, and that was enough for most people to get out of dodge. The Quapaw tribe hopes to reclaim this land as wetlands after the last person standing gives up the ghost... or moves on.


(The Creek Runs Red, an Independent Lens documentary, tells a more complete story of the tragedy of Picher.)

Leave Taking

These are the people I'll miss most when I leave my job at the end of this week: 

David...

            Donna and Nicola...

 Bogdan, who taught under Bulgarian 

Communist rule, making 40 dollars a month

(and the only one of us who appreciated our salary)

and...

Our Bahá security guard, Komy, funniest guy around, if it wasn't for him, we'd all have lost our minds.

 and...

 Beker's granddaughter who sang for us

 and my crazy Korean students...

and my beautiful Farsi Students.

Ah Parvin, how you drove me crazy,

 

and all the parties we had on company time...

I will miss it all, but I'm ready for my leave taking. Good-bye colleagues, good-bye Komy, good-bye students. Good luck to us all!

Highland Park Utility Boxes

 

 

Viewed from north and south perspectives of the street, these Highland Park utility boxes were found abruptly transformed one morning on Figueroa, at Ave. 50. Who is this mystery artist, who knows firsthand the viciousness of wolves and the playfulness of coyotes and skunks? Please step forward so I can tell you how much I like your work. (note: panther, which appeared earlier at Ave. 51, was drawn by an artist at Franklin, the local high school.) Could it be the same person? I doubt it, but what do you think?

This is what I love about Highland Park; it always surprises, and lately it's been surprising a lot. 

***

What else surprises? A daughter who comes home for a week, spends most of it away with friends, and leaves only the scent of her coconut shea butter moisturizer behind. AS IT SHOULD BE! (I keep telling myself...) I already miss her. We had a lovely tea in the garden with her superlative, talented friends— and admiring, superlative moms— before she left, and that will hold me, at least for awhile.

Maya with best friends Frankie, Theresa and Lucy

Holding Hands

Whose hands are these? I wonder. Surely, they can't be mine! They look like fat juicy sausages, fingerling potatoes, roots of the agapanthus plant, old as Moses. They remind me of the Buddha Hand I saw in the produce section at Whole Foods...

(Is that fruit giving me the finger?)

....Or that gloved hand perched on a pipe at the LA Arboretum. Stiff and strange.

I've been thinking of hands lately: my own, because I've been neglecting them; my children's, long and lean, without nary a wrinkle; my husband's hands, hardworking, warm and firm, full of pain at times, good to hold. 

Today is our 25th wedding anniversary. Holy moly, that's a lot of years! Happy Anniversary dear Husband! Happy Anniversary to us! Your hands have held firm, even when mine have not. Look, even in the midst of everything, we're holding hands.

 June 7, 1987

This post wasn't meant to be about our anniversary, at least, it didn't start out that way; but there it is, the nature of blogging, one thing leading to another— hands to a long marriage. 

***

While I'm on the subject, I made a little video over the weekend (a nightmare experience, since iMovie changed a perfectly good operating system into a two-headed drunken monster...with google ads I can't stop!), with my rats, Blu and Lily, and Dylan's little cousins. A big thanks to them for being such giggly, good sports. Here's the video... called, Washing Hands.

Tom's Hat

Blogs have a way of building themselves; sometimes they workout at the gym and get fit; other times they become musclebound and inflexible, or in the case of this one, they just sit there on their mat listening to their ipod, checking their fb, not doing anything. 

Why has it been so hard to get started again? 

Anyway here's a post I meant to do last week, a little out of date, a little inflexible— as I've tried to change it but it insists! At least its off the mat, lifting weights. (OK, you don't have to point out they're only 3 pounders... working on that. 5 then 8!)

•••

In last Sunday's LA Times, a headline below the fold in the California section read, "England returns 7 Native American skulls to California," to which Tom responded, "Only seven?"

Tom has a droll sense of humor when it comes to things native. In the case of stealing Indian bones and moving them elsewhere—to be studied or put on display—the most infamous account was in 1918, when the boys of Skull and Bones, a secret society at Yale, dug up Geronimo's grave in Fort Sill, Oklahoma, and took the remains back to Connecticut. Geronimo's descendents sued Skull and Bones in 2009, but lost their suit a year later; still, the fight for repatriation—"the return to tribes of indigenous bones and artifacts"—goes on.

On the same day Indian skulls were in the news, the solar eclipse appeared above the western skies, at 6:38 pm, for about an hour. I'd read in the same Sunday paper that Navajo custom called for praying, fasting and staying indoors, but Tom was skeptical—historically, he wanted to know, "how would they have known when one was approaching?" For his part, he wasn't praying. In the afternoon, he set up a mirror on a grip stand to reflect the sun, and then went down below to plant sunflower seeds. 

Meanwhile, I drove down the hill to an opening of a new bookstore on York. The intensity of the sun was hard to bear. My clothes felt uncomfortable, my skin too tight. Trying to avoid looking at the sun, I kept looking at it. Maybe it was this feeling of unease that contributed, but the bookstore opening was a bit of a letdown. I bought a used E.L. Doctorow for 3 bucks and drove home.

When I arrived, images of the eclipse were everywhere. 

Eclipse on wall, with Tom's Hat

On the side of the canyon

(reflection off mirror)

 

3 crescent moons reflected through Tom's Hat

After the moon had passed, I noticed a bluejay chasing a mockingbird through the trees, making a racket. What a relief to hear birds singing again! I took a walk around the hill and felt the day's intensity fading away. The lights over Highland park rose up, shimmering, as I descended into the cool night air.  

 Tom's hat

Hidden Treasures

Walking in Riverside Park with my friend Melissa. The giant oaks were dark with rain. 

We were heading north along the path she walks with her famous dog, Esau, when we came upon Grant's Tomb at 122 St. and Riverside Drive, in Morningside Heights.

If you ever go up to Grant's Tomb, be sure to wipe the smile off your face. The mausoleaum is a somber place, with a funereal NPS ranger inside answering questions—a park ranger so humorless and gray, he looked more dead than General Grant himself.

Grant shaking hands with Lincoln

Outside the tomb, we noticed some colorful mosaic benches surrounding the plaza and walked over to take a look: they were fantastic! They reminded me of Nikki de St. Phalle's Tarot Garden in Tuscany, which was influenced by Gaudi's Park Güell. I was convinced the benches were created by an artist, but M thought school children had a hand in making them.

I had to admit they were pretty wacky, and didn't make a whole lot of sense—an evil Mickey Mouse next to a blue-eyed bull...

...a Medieval damsel with a red-headed, black Pippy Longstocking.

 

A slave ship? Was it history? Someone's bad dream?

Who were these people?

Nothing was written about them, no plaques or signs, so, despite not wanting to, I entered the Tomb again and asked the park ranger if he knew who had made them.

"A Spanish artist named Gawwdy," he spat, stretching out Gaudi, like he wanted to throttle him.

"The Gaudi? From Barcelona?"

"Yeah," he said, in disgust.

"But why isn't there anything written about him?" 

"The NPS never wanted the benches in the first place; they don't belong here," he grumbled.

I couldn't believe what he was saying. A world renowned artist like Gaudi, and the National Park Service had ignored him? It couldn't be. It also seemed unlikely Gaudi had actually been up here, tucked away behind Grant's Tomb. 

We went back to M's apartment and googled. With a little sleuthing we found out this: the "Rolling Benches of Grant's Tomb" were created in 1972 by a group of artists and children, led by the Chilean-born NY artist Pedro Silva and the architect Phillip Danzig, under the auspices of CITYarts. The benches were inspired by Gaudi, but poor Gaudi had nothing to do with them.

At the time, the "Rolling Benches" were the largest public art project in the nation. But the NPS thought them unworthy of the highfalutiness of Grant's Tomb, so they threatened to remove them, even prying a section lose to see how difficult it would be to chuck the whole project in the Hudson.

But the project was saved, and in 2008, Silva returned with his son, and hundreds of neighborhood volunteers, to restore the benches, with some of the original artists.

One of them, Frieda Heldman, came back in 2008 to restore the bench she created in 1972

(website: CITYarts)

And here is her bench:

Dancer Bench by Frieda Heldman

More benches:

 

 

 

 Melissa under archway

We had stumbled upon a hidden treasure. Even though they've been abused and ignored by the NPS, these whimsical benches are still standing, just waiting to be appreciated one day. 

 (click on photos to see as slide show)