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A real table for my imaginary family

Thu, 30 Sep 2010 01:02:00 +0000

Some years ago, I decided to build a dining table.

"With what?" my wife asked.

"With my hands," I said, holding up my hands. "With my hands."

"I've seen hands before," she said.

It was six weeks before Thanksgiving, and I had invited my parents and siblings to our home in upstate New York for the holiday dinner. That was probably what accounted for my wife's surliness. But while her expectations for a stressful unnecessary failure were mired in the cold mud of reality, I pictured us all gathered around the completed 8-foot-long traditional harvest drop-leaf cherry-wood table, laughing and joking, eating turkey and drinking wine, our wide-eyed children listening in rapt attention to my grandma's stories about holidays past. We didn't have children, wide-eyed or otherwise, both of my grandmothers had been dead for years, my family had never gathered around anything for longer than 10 minutes without trying to kill each other, and my father was a violent drunk when I was a child so the wine was probably out of the question, too. Still, though. That a few details of this idyllic tableau were slightly unrealistic only made my desire to build a very real table even more pressing; here was a detail I could control, something possible from that impossible picture. Perhaps, I thought, making such a table a reality would do the same for the rest of the image?

Where everything is huge — and deep fried

Wed, 22 Sep 2010 01:01:00 +0000

It's that time of year again, at least in these parts, for the State Fair. Our northern neighbors have seen their own state fairs come and go, due to pending weather, perhaps, or some other traditions. But in Texas -- in our own little infernal ecosystem -- it's finally decent enough to walk around outside by mid-October. It's a hope anyway -- some days can still reach the 90s -- but there is the expectation that soon things will not simply melt.

How to write a TV show, sort of

Tue, 14 Sep 2010 23:01:00 +0000

I've never been good at making things. I'm not mechanically inclined. My hands are tormented grasping instruments that struggle with the most basic motor functions. In kindergarten, it was noted on my report card that I was "poor with scissors." As I walk through a park, I often envy the dexterity of the common squirrel, who can grasp and fondle acorns with grace and ease.

But I do like to make up stories, which, though not very craft-oriented, is a form of making. In the first grade, I wrote my first tale -- it was about an astronaut stranded on the moon. Somehow he attaches an engine from his broken-down spaceship to a rock and flies home. In addition to the text, I provided cartoons. I've always liked to doodle. I can't handle a screwdriver but I'm not bad with a pencil. I then improved upon this classic bit of science fiction, many years later, during my sophomore year in high school, when I wrote a Kurt Vonnegut-inspired apocalyptic short story, titled "Keep Out of the Reach of Children." As a sign that I had a future in the arts, I lifted the ending from an Isaac Asimov story. I submitted this bit of fiction and plagiarism to my English class and received an A+.

My paper of record

Fri, 10 Sep 2010 01:30:00 +0000

In our era of sleek, glistening, multifarious multitasking handsets, I'm still lugging around the same chubby, scuffed blue leather planner I've owned since around the time of Operation Desert Storm. It's cumbersome, unsightly and not terribly functional; the address pages are falling out despite the fact that I've fortified their frayed binder holes with Scotch tape, and the book is so bulky that it's often hard to cram into my purse or backpack, forcing me to leave it behind.

I fantasize about the days when I, like everyone else I know, can immediately locate that great florist I used one time in Chicago (without having to search through years of e-mail for the original recommendation); or the water park someone told me about in New Jersey, or the reasonably-priced roof repair guy we hired years ago. I long to be able to make a plan without having to say, "I'll let you know after I check my book," and to not have to copy out addresses and directions to bring along with me, so I don't have to weigh myself down with it.

A jar of her magic

Wed, 01 Sep 2010 00:01:00 +0000

When I was a child, I spent weeks of every summer on the farm where my mother was raised, making things with my grandmother. There was so much to be done: wild strawberries, raspberries, blackberries and, once, gooseberries to turn into jam; beets and eggs and cucumbers and beans and crab apples to pickle, pies and zucchini breads to freeze, tomatoes and wax beans to put up in watery jars.

All those years ago, I didn't think it unusual to spend so much time making stuff. This had a lot to do with my grandmother, a woman who, when she was not preserving produce, was ceaselessly creating other kinds of goods. She spent her evenings at her handwork: The needlepoint and cross-stitch samplers she'd frame and hang on walls; she hooked rugs and sewed the odd quilt, made Christmas ornaments and wine cozies and doorstop covers. As a little kid, I followed her lead, pulling thick yarn through big-holed plastic patterns of butterflies and strawberries, later graduating to friendship bracelets, some small needlepoint and, briefly, origami. But eventually I graduated altogether, and grew into a young adult who did not spend the bulk of her time in the production of material goods, instead wiling away evenings reading, talking on the phone, watching television. I was not a maker.

My proud little Siamese freak show

Wed, 25 Aug 2010 00:25:00 +0000

My sister once told me that no one good was born on her birthday. She said this as casually as you and I might recite the last four digits of our Social Security numbers, as if it were an indisputable and long-standing fact. By "good" she meant "famous" because that was the nature of our conversation.

"That can't be true," I protested, in a mock effort to find fault with an argument that didn't matter either way.

"I think one of the guys from Chicago has my same birthday."

"Oh. That is desperate."

"Well," she sighed dramatically, "not all of us can have Martha."

Oh yes, that's right. The Queen of Crafts herself, Martha Stewart, and I have the same birthday. I prefer to think it's the glue-gun wielding, perfect-tart-producing Martha and not the copper pan-throwing, jail-going Martha. But I suppose if I am going to share a calendar square with some of Martha, I have to share it with all of Martha. Our immediate neighbors to the past and future are crafty as well (see also: Yves Saint Laurent, Andy Warhol). I'm not sure when God set aside those seven days to create the world, but from a decoration standpoint, it was probably the first week of August. But despite all this general creativity floating about, it is Martha and Martha alone in whose perfectly stenciled shadow I live my life. And my tributes to her have been, in a word, poor.

I made myself into a father

Sun, 22 Aug 2010 16:20:00 +0000

Every year I care less. I forgo gifts, and it just doesn't matter anymore. Yeah, I mean, but so what? What I really want is just too big, so for birthdays? Father's Day? I insist: little stuff. Save the money for college and maybe weddings and to pay down debt.

A few practical jokes from Manny's. A little Moleskine book. Just think of me. A-OK. Like this year? I got a $100 Apple gift card, so I could then have something to give to Roxanne two weeks later for high school graduation. I'm broke, see.

Months ago, like magic, some dollars came in, a few clients finally paid, and -- hey, presto! -- Rocky gets a laptop, a new pillow for her dorm, her textbooks.

Make do.

Me, I subsume. I'm good at it. Hi there, fellow parents! I pretend there are greater gifts, and it works. This father I raised in me, the public me, believes it. Swallows rocks, years after year, and lo and behold: It's OK. No big deal. I get less to unwrap, nothing fancy, but I get to be a Good Man.

Somewhere in there, though, behind those rocks, is a little boy, with pale new down on brown freckled limbs, muscles smooth and wiry, bike chain grease on a taut inner calf, fresh from a fast ride away from a bad house, who still doesn't get it.

My father didn’t “take” pictures

Thu, 19 Aug 2010 18:45:00 +0000

My father was a news photographer. When he talked about his work he would say he didn't take photographs, he made them. There's a difference, he'd say.

I never asked him what he meant, but the distinction seemed important to him. I remember thinking when he said it that the word "made" sounded conspiratorial. I thought he was admitting that he somehow manipulated a scene he photographed, that he violated what seems a contract with the viewer. As Susan Sontag says in "On Photography," "The picture may distort; but there is always a presumption that something exists, or did exist, which is like what's in the picture."

Sometimes people ask me how my father got a photograph, particularly "The Loneliest Job in the World," a photograph of President John F. Kennedy silhouetted by a window in the Oval Office. They want to know if my father composed the photograph in his mind first, and then asked the president to lean on the table. This is what my father said: He watched the president and saw that, because of the president's injured back, the president often went to the table at the window to read. My father waited, and when Kennedy moved toward the window and the table, he positioned himself with several cameras set at different exposures. He said he had seen an image in his mind and knew that underexposing the film would create more than a picture of the president. He took several frames from slightly different angles.

Slaying the backyard beast

Wed, 18 Aug 2010 00:20:00 +0000

A week before I moved into my house, the previous owner stood with me by the big windows in back, showing me the gardens and grounds, which are elaborate and which he planted, telling me what to water, what to prune, what to weed. The property, which rambles across two acres, rises in terraces, each filled with perennials and ornamentals, ending at a hilltop under the shade of very old beech trees.

To the left of where we stood, the property continues down a gentle hill, which was lost under a sea of vine and weeds. Looking at it, I immediately appreciated the hard words used to denote such growth. Thistle. Thorn. Bramble. When I asked about this part of the property, the previous owner behaved like a captain turning the bridge over to a petty officer who is not quite worthy: "Just forget about that hill," he told me. "Don't touch it, don't even think about it. You'll have plenty to keep you busy right here."

(The previous owner was not the sort of man to sell, move and forget. Even now, all these months later, he still sends the occasional e-mail: "The first frost is coming! Time to cover those magnolia trees!")

Honey, can you build this?

Wed, 11 Aug 2010 01:01:00 +0000

It's summer, it's hot, I'm at least 21 months pregnant, I think (I'm pretty sure, anyway. It's my third, so I'm not really keeping track), and all I want to do is build stuff. Well, I should be more specific about that; all I want is for my husband to build stuff.

Let me explain something. I'm huge. Not huge as in, "First I'm going to say I'm huge and then everyone feel free to interrupt me with a big chorus of 'NO's' and 'OMG you're TINY's.'" I'm huge, OK? Like a bear. Like a big fat bear whose arms and face are also pregnant with children of their own. When people see me on the street, they wince in pain, because I just look like I hurt. And I do. Teenagers look away and pledge themselves to eternal abstinence. My mere presence is so visceral that I give vagina-phobes the instant vapors. And why shouldn't I? I'm like an overripe papaya that's about to fall to the ground from its own weight and split open on the sidewalk with its seedy innards spurting all over the place. Gross. I mean, I get it, it's the Miracle of Life and everything, which is "beautiful" in the abstract. But it's also frankly kind of gross.

The craft that consumed me

Wed, 04 Aug 2010 00:30:00 +0000

It's rare that I'm not at work on some sort of craft project. I've often enthused about the need to make things; how it employs a unique set of muscles -- physical, intellectual, spiritual -- that I can attain a state of flow when making something that I almost never can when writing. Much like those of an athletic bent who are constantly succumbing to, or having to resist, the impulse to turn everything into a ball (or so I assume. I have never been moved to use a ball even as a ball), if you make things, all objects house the potential to be turned into something else. They fairly beg to be turned into something else.

The eggs were something of a departure, given their utter uselessness. Actually, strike that. That insistence on functionality over aesthetics is something of a lie I tell myself, possibly homophobic in nature, or else it's a penitential inoculation against my getting too big for my britches. If I stress utility, I will be less tempted to think of the visual stuff I make as "art," and consequently of myself as a you-know-what, a label really only rightly conferred by others. I've certainly lost myself in making purely ornamental things before -- lino cuts, paper cuts, snow globes, etc. -- but I do get an extra lift if the finished product is practical to boot.