There was a nice full moon the other night. Every full moon seems to have a name. Why isn’t “full moon” enough any more? When it happens and the night is clear the moon wakes me up and makes it impossible to sleep. I resist the urge to get out of bed and just stare at it and later try to keep my eyes on the road as I drive to the gym in the dark morning.
I make up for lost sleep later in the nights that follow. I think there is some old lore about women and moons but I really don’t care. There are nights that it just needs to leave me alone.
These are the condition of my boxing gloves.
This was the condition of the bag before they tossed it out and replaced it with a kick boxing bag.
And here is the bike I peddle for over 4,000 steps before going into the workout section of the gym.
I can’t punch the kickboxing bag because it is too soft and my hands shift with each hit and get rubbed raw. I miss beating the stuffing out of something. I miss the jarring action in my arm and chest. And I don’t have the time now to wrap my hands before putting on my gloves. But someday I am going in there and really hit that new bag hard, really hard over and over. If I wasn’t seventy-five and feeling I would topple over, I’d take up kickboxing. My gloves wait in the gym bag reminding me there is still going to be time to smack something.
The daily drawing continues.
This pulley system
needs a mate across the street
in order to work.
I picked this thing up
then bought it because it felt
so good in my hand.
I thought I might use
this piece shaped like a window
for a book or box.
We will be sending
Rudy Osolnick’s turned bowl
on to Arrowmont.
I was looking for something in my drawer of cards the other day and found old photos of things I used to do. A welded bear and a welded family of three.
And one of the postcards from my MFA graduate exhibition. It is a detail of one of the men that was the focus of my graduate work.
Five men gave me old shirts that I painted with the silver paint they use on tin roofed sheds. The shirts hung on conduit aluminum pipe shaped into a stand at their individual heights. Shelves of old harvested wood hung where their chests would be and those were filled with collections of bits of scrap pieces that seemed relevant to what I felt was their internal selves. Lots of old electric cords that showed their relinquished power hung from the box. They were arranged in a grouping much like they gathered in on the corner each morning. They stood on a rug I had them use to stand and work on at another gathering place to fix things…make those things work again.
A sound system was triggered with wires under the rug and into their chests. When you walked among them it would trigger them talking to each other. The voices were recorded months in advance. And deep in a waste bin near these “men” was the soft tones of one of their friends saying grace before their Saturday breakfast in the back room of a gas station and the sound of Mary Chapin Carpenter singing, “A Town in Caroline.”
When I shipped all the parts to graduate school in Vermont a viewer walked through the men and informed me that one of the guys did not talk to him. I told him that even if he visited my men in North Carolina, some would not speak to him.
A lot of those fellows are gone now. I smile whenever I think of them…how they had so much security and sureness about who they were and where they belonged. I envy that feeling that each and every day you can go some place to be with those who know you belong there.
Til later…probably Sunday.