Archive for April, 2007
The Third Body, New York to Houston
April 10, 2007 4:21 pmCandy Pick
12:03 am I’ve owned this particular object almost longer than anything in my life. 
I used to always lose the most valuable things, watches especially. My first few watches were nice metal ones with brass finish that looked like gold, but after a while it would be the cheapest thing Timex made because I could never seem to hang on to them. Oh, I still have the wooden desk that my mother gave me when I was twelve, that she said was from the Civil War (but I think is just a replica) — but it’s hard to misplace a whole desk. And there are the framed photos of my Dad and Mom, but of course you don’t go around losing things like those. But this thing, this pick, this plectrum — it’s so small and easily misplaced. And it’s not like I’ve been especially careful. It always lives inserted over the E/under the A/over the D string, high on the neck, between the sound hole and the shoulder. But it’s not like I’ve never traveled with the guitar. Last summer it went with me to empty out the entire contents of my Dad’s house on Long Island, during which time I visited my step-brother at his rental in East Hampton where he and I and a friend of his howled and banged on our strings out on the deck by the pool for hours. The summer before that it went with me to Wyoming for a month, not to mention the stops in Chicago and Minneapolis.I was given the pick by my girlfriend at my first job. I’ll call her “Laurie.” I lived east of Poughkeepsie and Laurie lived just over the border in Connecticut, and though she went to Yale she was a country girl at heart. Her mother was from Wyoming, and I think she always thought of herself as a misplaced orphan of the west. She drove a four-cylinder sky-blue 1977 Ford F-100 Ranger which looked like it was designed by Stonehenge enthusiasts, it was that angular. The suspension was as stiff as an anchor on a battleship, and driving down a country road was about like riding in paintmixer.
Laurie liked that I played guitar, though I didn’t play well at all. The guitar was a cheap Guild copy (“Madeira” — that’s Spanish for “wood”) that my mom had bought for me from the House of Guitars for $105 when I went off to college, and the neck was warped out of the box and the action too high I learned not by playing with friends or an instructor, but working alone in my sad little bedroom on songs from my Bob Dylan songbook, or making up my own songs when I was feeling blue. But I think it approximated Laurie’s need for an educated cowboy boyfriend, though I was a far cry from cowboy. Still, my grandfather had raised sheep and my brother raised cows, so at least I knew some of the lingo and had worn manure on my boots. Our breaking up was a torrid affair, and on my way home from New Haven I stopped at a guitar store and traded the warped Madeira for the black Martin copy (plus cash, of course). I started smoking Marlboros to remind me of her (though I switched over to Camels, and then Dunhills). I started on and off for the next twenty years, though for a while it became more like stopping on and off than starting.
She didn’t give me a lot, besides that bad habit, but she gave me this plectrum.
I like it because it reminds me of candy, of taffy to be exact. The pink, red, and orange bits especially. It looks like a bunch of pieces of Turkish Taffy were pressed flat and then sliced to make this pick (though, I have to say, mint is my least favorite taffy flavor, except maybe coffee; and I don’t know what that dark blue would be — way too dark for blueberry). You can’t see it in the picture, but pressed into the plastic is the word “Japan.” High quality mass merchandise.
I can’t believe I still have it.
Whirlwinds bring change
April 9, 2007 12:32 pm
My wife and I had been having significant problems in our marriage, so I was surprised when she took me into Animas Traders just before my 35th birthday and told me to pick out something I wanted. Things weren’t so bad that I thought she would just forgo the formality of giving me a present, but they were still so raw I thought she might get me a book or CD or something similarly impersonal.
Our marriage had been getting more difficult ever since we moved to New York in 1990, and we were both struggling now more than ever. With each other, and with the ghosts of our pasts
For me, it was the ghost that had compelled me to come back to New York from Colorado after my mother died in August of 1988, two months after wife and I married. Except for brief vacations, until then I had avoided the old homestead near Rochester for all of my adult life. But when my mother died, I felt a sudden need to come back and begin taking some responsibility for the legacy her family had left – in this case, the farmhouse on the Oatka Creek that my grandfather’s mother, Marion MacPherson, was born in. The property had first been built on by her father around 1815, and it had been in our family since then. If I didn’t move in, it was likely going to leave the family.
For my wife, it was the anger at having given up the life she had begun to start for herself in Colorado, and all the ghosts that lived down where that anger lived that hadn’t yet been exorcised came rushing out with it. Most immediately, by moving to New York with me she gave up her first new house which she had only just bought the year we met, and complicated her son’s life, whose father still lived in Colorado.
It was a battle between families living and dead, and between two temperaments that were defining themselves as more and more disparate, in spite of some common interests.
Much of what was in the store repelled me as derivative, touristy rip-offs from various native cultures around the world. I saw a collection of carved ironwood, and remembered my trip to Baja Kino, Mexico, with Virle to trade with the Tiburon Indians there who made it – an apparent rarity, according to Virle. On our way back across the border, I saw panel vans and lunch wagons selling loads of ironwood figures and other “authentic Indian” crafts by the side of the highway.
I was getting ready to leave the shop, despairing a little at another example of our apparent differences, but my eye fell on this particular bola, and it called to me. I asked the owner and collector if he knew what the angular figure was on the left. The katchina, as I knew, was a ceremonial dance figure in Hopi ritual dances which represented the border between this world and the other, between the conscious and the unconscious life.
What I mistook for a cornstalk, however, he told me was a stylized figure of a whirlwind. “It means whirlwinds bring change,” he said, looking into me in a way that made me feel naked. I felt two things simultaneously: that I had misjudged the owner whose junk helped pay the bills for treasures like these. Treasures, at least, in the eye of the beholder. I suppose to another, with different needs but still in a crisis period in his life, the dolphin carved out of ironwood stained with brown shoe polish and imported from the one side or the other of the Sonoran desert could likewise be transformed from kitsch into talisman.
The second thing came with a feeling like something was opening in my chest, similar to the feeling when I had come to the realization a few weeks before that we were caught in a net not of our own making. And now, that maybe these whirlwinds which had felt so destructive might blow away all the dead litter of our misunderstandings and hurts.
When I wear it on special occasions, people sometimes snicker and remark on my “cowboy” outfit. If I say anything, I just tell them what the figures represent. The throat-piece is in the shape of a shield, and though I’m too often sensitive to others’ comments, there’s little they can say about it that bothers me.
April 9, 2007
