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Posts Tagged ‘Art’

Road Signs

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on September 30, 2025| Leave a Comment »

It was my birthday weekend, and the one year anniversary of Hurricane Helene. Bob and I packed up for a long weekend in Asheville, NC with the Big Chill OGs – the original members of our NJ high school class of 1966. We sang, we cooked, we reminisced. We complained about our ailments, but not too much. We saw a glass blowing demonstration in the River Arts District https://www.riverartsdistrict.com/artists-by-medium/ ; one side of the district was washed away, but the other side survived.

The Bride told me that Asheville was a major distributor in the Southeast of the clay that potters use to throw their creations. So of course we went shopping and I found a blue butter dish! One of the merchants in a small town said there were Class IV rapids flowing down his main street during the hurricane. He had to move his coffee shop, but he’s still here… All in all, Asheville is rebuilding with a vengeance.

On our way home I couldn’t help but think about my catastrophic fall last year, the day before election day. Has it only been a year? I’m rebuilding too – walking with hiking sticks, doing Pilates-like exercise, eating calcium-rich foods, getting Reclast infusions! And on our way home to Nashville on I40, from one Blue Dot to another, I couldn’t help but notice these road signs:

“Get Right With God”

Seen on the side of a dilapidated barn. I was thinking I was getting more Left with God but then again, whose God are we talking about?

“Distillery and Prison Tour”

No prison touring for me! But I’ve always wanted to do that whiskey tour of the actual, original Jack Daniel’s distiller – the previously enslaved Nathan ‘Nearest’ Green. https://unclenearest.com/distillery/

TRUMP MAGA Super Store

NO thank you.

“Regret Taking the Abortion Pill?”

Well, we Boomers didn’t have any Mefepristone back in the day. Think about it. Life would have been a lot easier for us – no back-street abortions, no getting septic and compromising our reproductive future, no dying. No being shipped off to ‘homes’ and being forced to deliver a baby and then give it up for adoption.

ARRESTED? Call (this lawyer)

Nope… never been arrested. But there’s still time.

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When Water Rises

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on October 1, 2024| Leave a Comment »

What’s happened to the Appalachian Mountains post Hurricane Helene is apocalyptic.

And we are no strangers to hurricanes. When you marry an Emergency Physician, you learn to live with contingencies. We would fill up the bathtub so we could flush our toilet in the Berkshires before a Nor’easter. We had a generator in our garage on the Jersey Shore.

But last week in Nashville, Bob was walking around the house muttering about emergency back-up plans, or the lack thereof. He needs to know that everything will fall seamlessly into place when all else fails… I mean he used to write disaster plans! This is why doctors seem so serene in the midst of chaos, they figure they have everything covered. We even have a mophie wireless charging brick just in case we lose power.

But last week we didn’t lose power, we only lost internet service for four days.

This is day FIVE since Helene roared her way up from Florida, leaving over 100 dead and 600 missing. We had dinner with Les and her husband Saturday night and she got us up to speed on Asheville. She and her husband David own a condo in the middle of town and she told me she spoke for less than a minute with one of her neighbors before they lost cell service. She was starting to pack her car when she heard the roads were gone and only emergency services were allowed in.

Roads in and out of Asheville have washed out. Cables are gone and cell towers toppled. They had a boil water alert before they lost water altogether. Power and internet service is down and food is running low. Every creek and river overflowed after being drenched the week before, then Helene dropped the amount of FIVE Septembers of rain. The hospital there, Mission (recently bought by HCA) was running aground before all this happened. Doctors and nurses are living on-site with the help of generators.

People in North Carolina, Tennessee and Georgia have lost everything. It is unimaginable but not totally unexpected. Most people living in the Northeast don’t understand how a mountainous area can flood, but climate change has challenged that belief. The once every hundred year flood is happening every few years. I checked on the Facebook page of a widowed friend living in Haywood County, NC. Her daughter is a physician who works with the Groom, and she worked as a journalist for a newspaper in her younger years. The Bride thought we’d have a lot in common, and we do. I found a picture on her timeline of a coffee cup a friend posted for her with this caption:

“She’s hand grinding her own coffee beans and using a camp stove.”

I was relieved to know she’s alright. Of course she is, she roasts her own coffee beans on her front porch! If you would like to help people recover from this storm, all the usual sites are accepting donations – Red Cross, the Salvation Army and United Way. Also you can register online if you live nearby to help with food: “World Central Kitchen, which set up meal service Monday at Bear’s Smokehouse BBQ, welcomes volunteers who have registered online.” There is also: https://mercychefs.com/helene-response and https://www.heartswithhands.org/

In retrospect, losing Google Fiber for four days was nothing compared to Helene’s wrath. And please remember when you vote next month, one ex-president’s response to a disaster was to throw paper towels out to victims after a hurricane hit Puerto Rico. And vote accordingly. Wonder Woman painting by Ashley Longshore.

Screenshot

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World View

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , , , on September 3, 2024| Leave a Comment »

Happy September, the month of family birthdays.

Hope your Labor Day weekend was warm and sunny! We had a good downpour in Nashville and I didn’t complain because all the trees were wilting. After days and days of three digit temperatures, I’m looking forward to Fall. My Irish lineage craves soft, overcast rainy days. I’ve started a new knitting project and the Bride is taking a pottery class. The Grands are back in school and thriving… the Pumpkin is playing soccer and the Bug has finally grown an inch taller than me! But of course I’m shrinking, so there’s that…

I came across a little known connection between Ireland and our country while reading the BBC News yesterday. Did you know that back in 1847, while the Native American Choctaw people were being “relocated” to a reservation in Oklahoma, their tribal leaders sent a donation to Ireland to help with the Great Famine? They reached out to help others suffering around the world while experiencing their own Trail of Tears, where 15,000 died from disease, starvation and exhaustion.

What caught my eye, and the reason for the newspaper article, was the glorious “Eternal Heart” sculpture recently unveiled in Oklahoma by the Choctaw to symbolize our kindred spirits. And I say “our” because I have always loved Native culture, and wear a silver feather pendant from a Native artist in Arizona like a talisman around my neck.

The Irish and the Choctaws have continued to honour this gesture through continued acts of generosity. In 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, the Irish people demonstrated their support by providing €2 million in aid to Native Americans severely affected by the crisis. Similarly, in 2018, former Taoiseach (Irish Prime Minister) Leo Varadkar announced a scholarship for Choctaw people to study in Ireland.” https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvg3zvq3vz8o

But it’s not just one or two acts of generosity, it’s not just the companion sculpture of feathers in County Cork, Ireland, this connection is an example of the purest form of altruism. It’s the opposite of selfishness. According to the Cambridge English Dictionary, altruism is a “willingness to do things that bring advantages to others, even if it results in disadvantage for yourself.”

Could you reach out to another with love and support, while suffering yourself, like the Choktaw? Dr Jim, my psychologist brother, said something to me the other day that stuck – “There are two ways of looking at things depending on your view of the world; they are the abundance vs scarcity model.” I had to sit with his reasoning for awhile. If you can take the balcony view, if you believe in the ‘greater good,’ your world view is that of abundance – you can appreciate the rain instead of fuming about a washed-out barbeque. You pick eggplants in your husband’s vegetable garden and imagine a new recipe for the evening’s meal. You can feel free to be creative, even fanciful.

You can donate money to one of the TN Three even if you know there’s no chance in hell a Democrat will be elected to the US Senate in this state. https://www.votegloriajohnson.com/ But you feel it in your bones that a woman, a smart compassionate woman, will be our next president.

You might even let your granddaughter weave fairy hair into your greying tresses!

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Disconnected

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , , , , on June 11, 2024| Leave a Comment »

As we approached the medieval city of Pietrasanta last week, I was surprised to see a giant sculpture of a teddy bear laying down outside of a church with a knife through his heart. Marco and Claudio had told us this place has long been a haven for artists – from Paul Klee and Joan Miro to Henry Moore and Fernando Botero. But I had no idea the exhibit we were about to see, including large busts of cherubic angels with their mouths taped shut inside the deconsecrated church , was by a sculptor connected to the Jersey Shore, Rachel Lee Hovnanian!

“Hovnanian’s “Poor Teddy in Repose” sculpture shares a powerful message. “Poor Teddy is a reflection on the ways in which childhood playtime has changed in the contemporary era,” Hovnanian shares about her work. “Children are no longer interested in teddy bears and other tangible toys – the smartphone seems to have eclipsed all other toys as the ultimate pass-time for children, a knife to the heart for Teddy.”…Hovnanian goes on to share that her choice of raw material – bronze – was deliberate. “It emphasizes the industrialization and commercialization of childhood,” she explains.” https://www.forbes.com/sites/janehanson/2024/05/28/how-one-artist-is-using-teddy-bears-and-angels-to-redefine-the-way-we-communicate/

It was a July day in 2002 when Hovnanian’s 15 year old son, Alton, drowned in his jet ski-type watercraft in the Navesink River. Word spread quickly in our Rumson-Fair Haven community, Hovnanian Enterprises was the number one building firm in the state. Alton was taken to my husband Bob’s ER in Red Bank, NJ. I had friends who were good friends with the boy’s grandmother. His grandfather, Kevork, was an Armenian immigrant from Iraq when he started his company.

Now the silent angels stared down at me, more menacing. I felt a chill inside the dark vestibule of the Complesso di Sant Agostino, maybe it was my fever? We turned a corner only to find another gigantic, lonely teddy bear surrounded by floating, electric plugs that looked like the tentacles of an octopus. The Love Bug said it made her feel sad, and we talked about the meaning of art. The Rocker told me the artist herself was in the next room.

It was an accident that night when Alton plowed into a moored sailboat. The Rocker was 17 and had just graduated high school, we were packing him up for college; while Rachel was burying her son instead of sending him off to high school. Luckily, I had stopped writing for the local newspaper the year before. And here we were, in Tuscany, in a room with another Poor Teddy having a solo tea party.

When we arrived home, I handed over my iPad to the Bug for her Design Camp. She is an artist like her Aunt Kiki! You see, I thought I would be the Nana with a basket for devices by the door; that Grands would be required to drop their screens and connect IRL. This was my fantasy. But instead, I am the wild Nana who says “Anything Goes” when the kids come to our house. My daughter and her Groom said “NO” to screens until thirteen!

At first, we went along with their Luddite ways. I hated to see a toddler in a stroller clutching an iPad while sucking a pacifier! But lately, social media seems to have creeped into the Grands’ lives nonetheless. After all, mostly all of her friends have either a cell phone, a tablet or a smart watch. While we were walking through the ancient streets of Pietrasanta, I noticed the Love Bug, who will turn 12 this summer, doing a little dance move of her own here and there. I asked her where she learned it.

“Oh, it’s on TikTok,” she said. “All my friends are doing it.”

Poor Teddy

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Trolling Around

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on May 7, 2024| Leave a Comment »

We’ve probably all been targets of internet trolls. People on our social networks who deliberately post provocative or humiliating comments would like nothing more than our response, our attention. Which is why it’s best to just ignore, block and report the trolls. Let them start a fight with someone else. But what if you’re walking along in a beautiful garden, dodging cicadas, and a gigantic, wooden troll appears out of nowhere? Well then, you engage. You listen.

Bob and I visited Cheekwood, Nashville’s Botanical Gardens last weekend to stroll among the whimsical sculptures in their Trolls exhibit: “Save the Humans.” It seems a Danish musician/artist, Thomas Dambo, has turned his creative sights towards crafting immense sculptures of trolls out of discarded construction pallets! They are not painted, they are meant to decay in fact. With one troll lying flat, listening to the earth, and another wearing recycled plastic jewelry, his message is clear.

“Thomas is known internationally for his larger-than-life Troll sculptures made from recycled wood. With over 100 sculptures all over the world, these Trolls have begun to have a life of their own. Popping up in Denmark, the USA, France, Germany, China, South Korea, Chile, and many more on the way, the message of sustainability and unlimited imagination have reached millions through in-person visits, shared photos, and international media coverage.” https://cheekwood.org/calendar-events/trolls-save-the-humans/

Once upon a time, Nordic people were sailing the seas, spreading their DNA along with their myths about giant trolls who lived in castles, not under bridges. According to Ancestry, I have a giant ONE percent Norwegian gene! You probably do too. Bob and I would love to visit Scandinavia next year. In fact, Norway looks like a fine first destination:

“On June 17, 2023, what they call the world’s first and only research station for the species of trolls opened in Rindal. “Home of the Trolls” is not just a research station for trolls. It is also a nature-based experiential destination with activities, outdoor adventures, local food, and exotic accommodation options.” https://www.visitnorway.com/things-to-do/art-culture/the-mythical-norwegian-trolls/

I wonder if the US would ever open a research station for Bigfoot? This morning, after sweeping more than enough cicada exoskeletons from the patio, I may have glanced at all the gowns celebrities wore to the Met Gala last weekend. Its theme was “The Garden of Time,” and aside from all the flowers and feathers one thing stood out to me – the hundreds of hours it took to hand embroider and create one. single. dress.

What is Mother Nature telling us? Giving us another solar eclipse, directing two cicada species to emerge from the ground simultaneously? Placing enormous, sweet Trolls in our path? Amid the constant drumbeat of two proxy wars, I think we must continue to plant and nurture our own gardens for as long as we can. Because 3 baby robins are flapping their wings over our patio, and they need the worms.

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Being Afraid

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , , , on October 31, 2023| Leave a Comment »

It’s Halloween. Some people like going through haunted houses, dressing up with ghoulish makeup, and tricking you into handing out candy. Perfectly normal women become sexy French maids. Not me. I won’t watch horror movies or anything with zombies. In fact, I was watching a trailer with Ralph Fiennes in LA that caught me off guard – what appeared to be a cooking contest turned into something else entirely. I closed my eyes.

Did I say LA? Yes, Bob and I took a short, stealth trip out West to see the Rocker and Aunt Kiki. We flew in to see their finished home perched on a hill. It was so sweet to sit and talk, watch Cooper’s hawks gliding above us, and play backgammon. We didn’t Go Go GO! Instead, Bob taught them how to make pasta from scratch. I found myself looking around, at their beautiful home, at the amazing life they are building together in California, and catching my breath.

Kiki came home with her studio’s new coffee table book, so I immediately ordered mine. The living room on the cover is divinely inspired…. “Shamshiri: Interiors.” I’m lucky to have such an outstanding designer daughter on speed dial! Then we went for a seaview walk hike and I saw my first wild coyote.

The coyote is a medium-sized member of the dog family that includes wolves and foxes. With pointed ears, a slender muzzle, and a drooping bushy tail, the coyote often resembles a German shepherd or collie. Coyotes are usually a grayish brown with reddish tinges behind the ears and around the face but coloration can vary from a silver-gray to black. The tail usually has a black tip. Eyes are yellow, rather than brown like many domestic dogs. Most adults weigh between 25-35 pounds…”

https://urbancoyoteresearch.com/coyote-info/general-information-about-coyotes

It actually did look like a skinny wolf. I wasn’t afraid of the coyote, but I understood why my son’s cats must stay inside. They are predators and usually hunt rodents and rabbits, not people. You’re supposed to make a lot of noise if you see one, and indeed this guy looked at us, turned around and slowly sashayed away. I could picture his text bubble: “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

We’re back in Nashville and luckily I bought tons of candy before we left. Our new/old house is in a neighborhood of young families. I didn’t count last year, but I hope I don’t run out of treats tonight. There’s a skeleton waving from my front porch rocking chair and that’s the extent of my spooky decorating skills this year. After a week that’s seen another mass shooting in Maine of all places, and more and more anti-semitic rhetoric on social media I’m feeling enraged – but I guess that’s better than fear.

I will not let fear dictate my behavior.

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Love Hurts

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , on July 25, 2023| 2 Comments »

Good Morning! The rain has stopped and brought us clean air (really, much cleaner air), sunshine and low humidity. So far, the “heat dome” hasn’t hit Nashville, let’s knock on wood. Also my glamorous, big sister, Kay, has flown into town from New York City. I’ve figured out that as we age our bodies don’t regulate temperature quite so well; as the globe heats up, we ‘senior’ humans are cooling down. So Kay is perfectly happy sitting on our shady, front porch in 80+ weather waving at all the neighbors passing by – young couples with a baby stroller and a dog or two, our friends Kristi and Jay, and an older woman with a cane and an outrageously big sun hat.

Kay is an artist and a southerner-in-training. She attended the Art Students’ League in NYC and had a side hustle drawing meticulous medical illustrations for Mt Sinai Medical School. She is one of the reasons I never even tried painting. Even her clothes are artistically curated. She’s not exactly Iris Apfel, but at 88 she will still turn a head on the street. https://www.advanced.style/

So of course, we had to take a trip to the Frist Art Museum this past weekend. “Storied Strings: the Guitar in American Art” was the main exhibition and we borrowed a wheelchair to make everything easier. Don’t forget, Kay is only six months post-op on her second hip fracture. She uses a cane for mobility, and/or a rollator for stability when she’s outside. We enjoyed looking at each painting and reading the accompanying descriptions. Women historically were not taught to play the guitar, but artists always loved painting the female form; so lush paintings of women posing with the instrument were common.

If you were to walk into any room in our house, you’d encounter one of Kay’s drawings, paintings or needlepoint pillows: a beautiful watercolor of our Rumson home with two Corgis in the yard; a pen and ink portrait of the Flapper; a still life of flowers in a Delft pitcher. Almost every soft surface in our house is adorned with a gorgeous Kay needlepoint. I have fond memories of the Bride learning to look at life through an artist’s lens in Aunt Kay’s apartment. I remember roaming around the Metropolitan Museum of Art as a girl with my big sister; it was just a few blocks walk down Fifth Avenue.

After the “Storied Strings” exhibit, we strolled through an installation about Beatrix Potter at the Frist. Potter was born into a wealthy English family, but because she was a girl in Victorian England her future was limited. Writing stories came naturally and roaming around the Lake District, today we might say “forest bathing,” lead to her career of illustrating and writing children’s books. She called herself a “country mouse” living in the city. Eventually she became interested in fungi, drawing some of the most tiny, intricate mushrooms known at the time…

I feel like a country mouse living in this southern city with my city mouse sister. We walk across the street to swim in the mornings; we drive to Thistle Farms like ladies who lunch; we Zoom with my big and her little brother Dr Jim. Last night I made a salad from summer squash, whole wheat orzo, lemon and feta cheese with fresh herbs. Only the rabbits had eaten all my dill, so we had to improvise. https://www.washingtonpost.com/recipes/grilled-chicken-zucchini-orzo-salad/

We’ve also been enjoying Bad Sisters on Apple TV. So when we walked into Thistle Farms gift shop, a safe place for abused and trafficked women that sells tee shirts proclaiming “LOVE HEALS,” I was only slightly surprised when Kay asked if they had a shirt that said “LOVE HURTS.” They didn’t. I explained to the young salesgirl that my big sister was visiting from New York City.

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Everyday Dust

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , , , on October 25, 2021| Leave a Comment »

“Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life” Pablo Picasso

Today is Picasso’s birthday, he was born in Spain on October 25, 1881. My relationship to art is unfortunately subjective – if it moves me in any way, if it reminds me of the mountains or the sea, if I could just fall in love with the colors. But Picasso is a different breed of artist. Although I can understand his modernist vision, I wouldn’t want to hang his paintings on my walls…. even if I could afford them! His deconstructed asymmetrical portraits would haunt my dreams.

This weekend the Bride found an artist she loves at Artclectic, an annual art exhibit at the Grands school. Jaime Barks hails from Chattanooga and infuses her gorgeous paintings with the colors of nature. I wasn’t planning on attending, Bob and I had a mini-Oktoberfest planned with some dear neighbors in their carport. They cooked the bratwurst and kraut, we all brought a dish along with our folding chairs.

But I managed to sneak away from a simmering pot of German-style potato soup to immerse my masked-and-vaccinated self in the swirl of mixed media and sculpture at the school’s gym.

Last year Artclectic was cancelled due to Covid. They may have had an online auction, but nothing beats meeting the artists – “In Real Time and Real Life” plus mingling with friends and neighbors! Our everyday lives are expanding; children must get to religious school or soccer practice, dogs must go to the vet, parents are back at work, and social events are continuing outside and inside. The Grands should be vaccinated next month… it’s like post-Covid life has begun.

After four years of the clown presidency, coupled with our current pandemic, our mundane day to day way of life has been stirring up a lot of metaphorical dust.

And with it all, the artist/writer who carried me through lockdowns and other losses is Nashville native, Margaret Renkl. She sees the world the way my better self would want to see it. She can break our natural world into words that will inspire her reader. And she did just that this morning in the NYTimes, “The First Thing We Do, Let’s Kill All the Leaf Blowers.”

“They come in a deafening, surging swarm, blasting from lawn to lawn and filling the air with the stench of gasoline and death. I would call them mechanical locusts, descending upon every patch of gold in the neighborhood the way the grasshoppers of old would arrive, in numbers so great they darkened the sky, to lay bare a cornfield in minutes. But that comparison is unfair to locusts…. Grasshoppers belong here. Gasoline-powered leaf blowers are invaders, the most maddening of all the maddening, environment-destroying tools of the American lawn-care industry.“

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/25/opinion/leaf-blowers-california-emissions.html

Leaf blowers are maddening! They can destroy a meditative dog walk in a minute. We live directly across the street from an apartment building, every single day there is a team of leaf blowers that surround the whole block. I hated the sound of them in Rumson on expansive suburban lawns, but here in the city, it’s not just the jet-like decibel level of noise. It’s the swirling daily dust and debris with an occasional leaf thrown in that is almost disabling. Conversation stops, we look away to protect our eyes, but sitting in our garden, mask-less, cannot protect our lungs.

“That dust can contain pollen, mold, animal feces, heavy metals and chemicals from herbicides and pesticides,” notes Sara Peach of Yale Climate Connections. All this adds up to increased risk of lung cancer, asthma, cardiovascular disease, premature birth and other life-threatening conditions.“

Bob has always been a huge proponent of “natural” lawn care. We would never spray chemicals on our lawn, we’d watch the grass turn yellow in August like it was meant to do, and Bob never believed in blowing the leaves into a pile. We’d occasionally rake the Fall bounty into piles for the proverbial ‘child romping in leaves’ picture. But he always felt like leaving the leaves alone was best, and maybe cleaning up the corners in the Spring. Turns out, Bob was right after all! But don’t tell him I said that.

Tell him I found a beautiful painting of the mountains, and I’m making another soup.

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The Woodcarver

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , , on May 28, 2021| 6 Comments »

When Clay Hudson Favell, aka Great Grandpa Hudson, married my Mother-in-Law Ada 40 years ago, we were all at the wedding! And for once, Hudson wasn’t the officiant. Long before anybody could become certified to marry people via the internet, he was the go-to officiant for half of our friends and family. Our tiny Bride was the flower girl at Ada and Hudson’s parking lot wedding, who would grow up to marry her Groom in an apple orchard with Hudson under the chuppah; blessing the new couple with his grand daughter Violet spreading flowers at their feet.

How did a lapsed Southern Baptist pastor, a widower who had built hospitals in Ghana during his missionary days and fought in the South Pacific during WWII, end up marrying a divorced Brooklyn Jewish marriage and family counselor in NJ?

Easy! He was smitten from the moment he saw her. Hudson was the moon to Ada’s sun. He was kind, steadfast, thoughtful, and he adored her. We called him the Poughkeepsie Gypsy since he would drive from NY every week just to see her. Ada told me he doesn’t get flustered, and he keeps his promises. He always loved it when their children and grandchildren would descend on their home for Jewish holidays or just for a swim in the pool.

When Hudson lost his first born daughter, Louanna, in a car accident, Ada was there to help. And later when Ada lost her second born son, Richard, they joined that horrific club together – the one where parents have lost a child. By that time they had created a counseling business of their own, one where pastoral counseling and family therapy could blend seamlessly.

As Hudson began to retire his therapy practice, he started carving totem poles. This is how his son Charles described it –

“Hudson was an incredibly talented artist. His specialty was woodworking. He made one of a kind pieces of wood art on his lathe. Ranging from wooden tables and table legs to toys, including figurines of people that would be incorporated in family therapy sessions. Hudson was immensely talented with a chisel as well, creating countless works of art by hand. After a trip to Alaska with Ada, inspired by the totem poles he saw and learned about, Hudson taught himself how to carve story poles. He created numerous story poles that artistically described the stories of his life, and life with Ada.” 

https://www.dignitymemorial.com/obituaries/fort-smith-ar/hudson-favell-10209776

Ada and Hudson surrounded themselves with his totem poles, and soon he was getting commissions. Every Christmas we’d wonder what type of creative carving he would deliver. A mobile of a seagull one year, a bagel cutting block another. I’m not even sure how many oatmeal ladles I have that were hand-carved. Of course our cardinal totem pole, with Jewish and Irish symbols, is our favorite.

He was the only grandfather my children have ever known. I like to think he taught them the art of patience, he brought a southern sensibility to his northern family. A friend on Facebook said he was “…a quiet force of nature and wisdom.” The Rocker describes his grandfather like this:

“hudson was an archetype of post-war tough, a navy veteran with an impeccable work ethic, a gravelly southern drawl and minimalism of words. the quiet contemplative yin to my grandma’s firecracker yang. but he also subverted a lot of the expectations of the archetype. he was deeply emotionally intelligent, a professional therapist; he was an artist and a master woodcarver, his home was covered in gigantic totem poles (wink wink) that he carved by hand from wood he cut himself, and art he made or collected through the years he spent traveling the world with ada.”

And the Bride had this to say about Hudson:

“When I remember my grandparents, I still see them in their house in Dover, my grandma squealing with delight at our arrival, squeezing us tightly. And behind her, quietly rocking in his chair in front of the wood stove, my grandfather sits. Adding newspaper and wood to the fire, slowly, consistently, a big smile on his face to see us. The yin to her yang. The quiet, kind, consistent rock to her insatiable joy.“

Grandpa Hudson officiating at our Cville wedding 2010 with his son Charles

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Momala Kamala

Posted in an expository essay, Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on August 14, 2020| Leave a Comment »

I stood up clapping and yelling in my empty office after Kamala Harris spoke to an empty auditorium in Delaware on Wednesday. It was her first time appearing with Joe Biden as his running mate, and I was on pins and needles waiting for them. When she said the case against Mr T was “…open and shut,” I swooned. When she called our Toddler-in-Chief a whiner, I Tweeted; then I followed her husband – possibly the first ever Second Gentleman – on every social media platform!

When Kamala said, “I’ve had a lot of titles over my career and certainly vice president will be great, but ‘Momala’ will always be the one that means the most,” I got it.  I’m pretty sure only Italians and Jewish people use Momala as a token of endearment. She married Doug Emhoff, an entertainment lawyer, in 2014 and her two step-children started calling her Momala. Great Grandma Ada, who btw I’ve called Momala for years, called me up to tell me Emhoff was from Brooklyn; and then I read that Kamala broke a glass at their wedding to honor his tradition.

Wait, I misspoke. I wasn’t entirely alone watching Kamala on CNN. Ms Bean had been napping peacefully on her bed, only slightly medicated because of those pesky afternoon  thunderstorms, when my cheering started. I guess I must have been jumping around too much because she joined in with ferocity, barking and climbing up on me. She hasn’t seen me that excited in almost six months, or maybe even four years.

The Flapper was a realist when it came to politicians. Except for the great FDR, I remember her saying, “They’re all crooks.” But my foster parents were dyed-in-the-wool Democrats. I remember them getting dressed up to vote at night after Daddy Jim came home from work. And try as I might, they’d never say who they voted for, although it was pretty clear to me that they voted a straight line Democratic ticket.

After all, the Democrats were for the “working man,” the great “middle class.” I was also told the Irish vote blue, so there ya go. And once Kennedy, the first Irish Catholic president was elected and later assassinated when I was just 15 years old, my tribal loyalties were sealed in stone. McGovern was my first presidential vote, and I’m still proud of it to this day.

Many Dems I know felt discouraged after voting for Hillary in 2016 and watching the electoral college – a holdover from the southern slave states – trample our desire for a woman president. Discouraged and depressed. But this time there is something in the air. Systemic racism has crawled out of the shadows, and sitting on a fence for this election is simply unacceptable. Thanks to this administration, the American people will be asked to make a choice:

Continue running our government into the ground, chipping away at affordable healthcare during a global pandemic, and ignoring the economic plight of our people? Should we vote for a man who has single-handedly destroyed our trust in institutions like the Post Office and makes a mockery of the Justice Department? Or shall we vote for a return to truth and dignity with a Biden/Harris ticket?

She broke a piece of crystal under her heel at her wedding, and she will be the one to shatter the glass ceiling. Painting of Wonder Woman by Ashley Longshore.

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