I always feel awkward promoting stuff, but here goes: I will be giving a talk at the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts next Wednesday (October 9, 2013) at 7:00 p.m. to launch the Kalamazoo Art League's 59th lecture season. I'm excited and honored to have the opportunity to do something like this in my beautiful hometown and would love to meet anyone who's interested in coming down there to hear it.
I'll be talking a bit about the blog, but mostly about the photos from the Disappearing City series you can see here.
More information here.
They were both wearing shirts of that orange only hunters, convicts, and ten-year-old boys can get away with. I didn't know much about them---just what you can glean from conversations between strangers overheard on a boat. The mother of one (or both) of them was wearing a Harley Davidson t-shirt and denim shorts that were maybe a little too short and she was just dating the bald-headed park ranger, judging by the flirtatious way he fed her peanut M&Ms that he bought from the little concession booth amidships, standing together at the very tip of the bow as the boat plowed through the choppy water. He wasn't the father of either boy---they seemed far too impressed by him for that to be the case. In his distinctive ranger flat hat, with his patches and tags and badge he was all authority. He was cool, even in khaki shorts, and today he was introducing them to all that made him so, describing the things they could do on his island. There would be swimming, hiking, and fishing, of course. But they could also climb the sand dunes or explore the houses abandoned by farmers who found island life too difficult and moved to the mainland. There was a shipwreck and an old schoolhouse and creepy old cemeteries. "I'm on duty from seven to three every day," he told them. "But after that we can do whatever you guys want." The mother smiled as the boys adored this man. I could not tell what the future held for any of them, whether a man tethered to an island in the wilderness could make this work, but I wanted him to. I could not help but root for them.
The boat was traveling southwest in a direct route to the island. The two boys were innocently leaning against the port bulwark when the first spray hit them. They looked at each other with saucered eyes and a slow contagion of smiles and then laughter. Seconds later the prow slapped right into an even larger wave and a real splash of lakewater arced over the edge and the boys were soaked, all shock and laughter as they turned to show each other just how wet they now were. I leaned back against the bulwarks on the dry starboard side, having caught a bit of their joy, and watched them as the waves painted the deck.
* * * * *
The last time I stood on the deck of the Mishe Mokwa was eighteen years ago when I was eighteen-years-old, half my lifetime ago. A college class took a camping trip to the island and I stood out there leaning against all that graypainted steel letting the waves crash over me again and again until everything I wore was soaked. It was mid-September and the only other people on the boat were my new classmates, including numerous girls---girls from all kinds of different places with all kinds of different hair and none of them had any idea what I was in high school and this would be the first thing they would ever notice about me, an act of stupid joy so much easier than words, standing alone just above where the prow broke into the waves sending them splashing again and again and again and I stood there shouting into the wind and the wet because I was in college and on a boat heading into the wilderness with girls and I was just so excited to be alive.
* * * * *
After the two boys in soaked orange shirts left the deck I entertained the thought of standing where they'd been, then thought better of it. I only had the clothes I was wearing and just the one pair of boots. I leaned over the bow and soon found myself there anyway. After the third wave hit me I looked up at the captain behind his glass with his oldfangled steering wheel and wondered how many simpering idiots he'd seen do this. Had he seen me eighteen years ago? Had he seen ten thousand fools like me? Wet beard, wet clothes, wet boots: I left the deck to show my family what I'd done. My wife guffawed but my wide-eyed kids fought for the chance to get wet too. I propped them up against the side and we cackled and screamed as the waves hit us, each proclaiming that we were the wettest. It had been warm but now we were cool, and my daughter insisted that we do this on the ride back to the mainland too. How could I have known, eighteen years ago that I was about to meet the most beautiful girl I'd ever know, that eighteen years later our eight-year-old daughter would be standing there with me in that spot between my arms catching as much of Lake Michigan as we could in our faces? Our son rested in the crook of my arm, almost too old to be carried (almost) and she was watching us from the back of the boat. We shouted to the world's driest wet blanket to join us but their mother had the good sense not to. I looked back at her and she just shook her head and smiled at what we'd done.
My wife puts a note in our daughter's lunch every day. Our eldest still has some anxiety about school, and the notes are always written to help her conquer some of her challenges, to let her know how proud we are of her. They are really sweet. This year my son is going to school every day for the first time ever. I'm going to miss them both. I really wanted to make something for him and his sister that would be something like a note from me that they could see every day. So last week I decided to make them lunch boxes decorated with their favorite animals. It is only a matter of time before they get teased into shame over stuff like this, but until then. . .
My unwavering daughter chose a pheasant and a fox (she's been both animals for Halloween). After carving the images into the leather, I added dye and a protective finish, deciding to leave the rest of it natural. On the back I added a fox pocket for mom's notes.
My favorite thing about making stuff like this myself is designing it for exactly what we need. My kids eat a yogurt cup with every lunch so I put a little leather ring that for that specific purpose in the corner, and a little leather band with velcro to hold a freezer pack. I glued an insulating pad inside, and covered it with a piece of 1950s fabric that I think came from the attic of an old farmhouse that's been in our family for generations. While that pointer isn't the exact breed as ours, I thought she'd also like a reminder of her birddog during her day. There were even pheasants on that fabric.
My son's favorite animal is a red-tailed hawk, and has been ever since that impressive experience of watching a red-tailed hawk flying around our living room. His hawk has a little more detail than the pheasant. I adapted it from an illustration in an old nature guide called Exploring Nature With Your Child. The real challenge here was mixing the dyes to get the right coloring for the red-tailed hawk. I added the cloud and shading to make the hawk stand out a bit more. He's about to catch a mouse (but sitting next to me while I worked on this, my son assured me that the mouse actually gets away).
The roots of his love for his other favorite animal aren't quite as deep. We had just returned from a week Up North when I started on this project, and that's where my son saw his first real porcupine. They were at the beach in Northport early one morning and saw a porcupine walk towards them down the pier, cross the playground, and disappear into the woods. What was he doing coming back from the pier? The children concluded he must have had a little boat moored there. My wife made the potentially unwise decision of chasing him with her camera phone:
Picking quills out of his mother's shins might have soured him on the idea of a porcupine. Fortunately that didn't happen and I found myself carving a North American porcupine into the pocket of his lunchbox, singing "Porcupine Racetrack" the whole time:
"I know that I'm a sinner, but I really need a winner, or the orphanage will close. . . so God, if you're above, and it's orphans that you love, then please help the porcupine I chose. . ." (Sorry, I just went back and watched that clip like six times).
I let him choose some of vintage fabric for the inside of his box. It was an easy choice:
I hand sewed everything while watching baseball (and will probably go back to complete those running stitches this week). I'd never worked with zippers before, so that was kind of a challenge. Initially I thought I'd use zippers from some old sweatshirts or something, but my wife explained I could buy new zippers at a fabric store and she dragged me to one (I fear fabric stores: So much fleece! So many notions!) I was able to find some that were the perfect size and the color even matched the heavy brown veg-tanned leather I used for the back and sides of the lunchboxes! I might even go back to the fabric store to buy some kind of spill proof plastic fabric to put on the inside, depending on how they hold up these first few weeks. The handles are just heavy latigo straps attached to rings.
It felt strange working on such a practical project for them (but then again, I could have bought them lunchboxes for like five bucks, so I guess I don't need to worry about being too practical). Don't worry about me, though: I'm already getting back to work on the extremely impractical projects that kept me busy all summer.
I started this project a few weeks back as a way to use up some smaller leather scraps I had sitting around. I twisted them into dragon's teeth, tendrils, and horns and designed the dragon mask so the kids could see through the mouth (the lower jaw can be adjusted up and down).
Now my wife insists that whenever she walks into a room I announce her with a string of titles, including "Khaleesi of the Great Grass Sea, Tolerator of Goofball Husbands and the Mother of Dragons."
Several readers have sent me links to this great image taken forty years ago in a Detroit suburb. It reminded me of a picture from my personal collection of old press images (found at a local book store). A cropped version of this image appeared in the Detroit News sixty years ago (September 13, 1953), accompanying a story on the Jeffries Housing Projects in Detroit:
The kids are identified on the back, from the left, as Reginald Dozier, Tommy Gairick, Joanne Grañio, and Susanne Delangy. The photographer was Peter MacGregor. The Jeffries projects were mostly demolished between 2001 and 2008.
When your kid breaks a bone, everyone wants to know how it happened. Like with divorce or some freak accident, there is a natural, selfish curiosity that surfaces when someone else breaks something: we want to know how, and why, perhaps so we might avoid breaking precious things of our own.
Facing the inquiries, I feel for parents who break kids' arms on accident, swinging them around or wrestling in some playful moment that turns glee to agony. When a kid breaks his arm in this town, every doctor and every nurse asks the child what happened over and over, and as a parent you know what thin ice there is between you and a world of social workers and Kafkaesque bureaucracy, and you hold your breath each time when he answers. I was not even right there, so I was lucky, in a sense. I was free range parenting fifty yards away, letting the kids be kids on the playground without hovering over their every move. It is the natural lot of younger siblings, I guess, to be hovered over less, and to reach for things it seems you ought to be able to reach, like that metal bar your sister can swing her legs over to hang upside-down from. He fell trying to reach for something he couldn't quite grasp. When they carried him to me his arm looked like the neck of a goose in one of those hunting still lifes, slung over a velvet bag with a hare and a pheasant near a powder horn in brooding Flemish oils. With his sister screaming louder than he was, I gently slipped that fractured arm into the car seat harness and ran both red lights between him and the hospital. Hey, it's Detroit, where stoplights are little more than suggestions.
So there it is: the how and the why, and now the sullen admission of failure. I should have been there. Should have been paying better attention. Should have stopped him. With every judgment-laden look from other parents, every time he gets frustrated by some simple task made near-impossible by that arm burdened with plaster, even when I see him playing one-handed as though nothing had ever happened, I feel like I may never mend.
* * * * *
Before he broke his arm my son and I were running together a few times a week. He would follow me on his little bike and we'd have conversations the entire time. After he broke his arm, he couldn't ride that bike so we found the little roller contraption his grandpa gave him a few years ago and he transitioned to it with a natural grace that said nothing was going to slow this boy down.
That thing wasn't fast enough for our May runs, though, so I pulled out our old jogging stroller and as I sweated and puffed he talked nonstop below me, and I grunted back at all the crazy, random thoughts that a five-year-old is compelled to share with his father. I have almost been grateful at times for that broken arm, how it tethered him a bit closer to me for just a little while. He's getting so big, and time is doing what it does best. It makes you grateful, to see your child broken just a little, if only for the reminder of just how delicate and tough you both are.
* * * * *
A few days ago the cast came off, seven hours short of five full weeks (which was the shortest we were told it might take, but still seemed so long five short weeks ago). It haven't even updated this blog since it happened. It seems a five-year old's bones heal faster than I can be bothered to update a blog that's been around eight years. I am writing this now to remember it, to remember how we talked on our runs and how small his arm looked when they cut off his cast and how he raced around on that recumbent bike and how he hugged his dog with that heavy cast for five weeks sitting on his back whispering secrets in one floppy ear and how that whitemuzzled beast tolerated so much love bursting from his broken boy. I am writing to remember how we woke up cold on the day he broke his arm and drove to the woods with his viking costume and how we pretended the forest was a border of Jotunheim and the chill in the air was the breath of frost giants and how it was his job to drive them back to their icy land. By afternoon it was warm and we'd driven back a hundred jotuns and he told me it was the best day ever and I will remember how excited he was just to play at our playground when we got home on the day he broke his arm. He told me later, delirious from the drugs they gave him, that it must have been a troll or a frost giant who cursed him and made him fall so I stayed up late that night photoshopping a few trolls into the pictures we took that morning.
Yesterday he hopped on his old golden two-wheeler and pedaled behind me down the sidewalk. I slowed down so I could hear every word.
It turns out it's not so easy to explain the concept of honor to a five-year-old. This is one of the wonders of parenthood: knowledge that you have spent decades taking for granted suddenly requires detailed explanation. How do you explain honor to anyone, let alone a five-year old? Lord knows I don't want to start talking about Latin word roots. Only assholes do that. It went like this:
"Yes, ninjas are definitely tough and cool. But they have no honor."
". . .?"
"Ninjas sneak around in the shadows and throw crushed glass in your eyes when you find them. Where's the honor in that? A samurai has honor. A samurai would never throw crushed glass in your eyes. Dude, have I never told you about samurai?"
That's all it really takes for a new obsession to start at our house, fueled in this case by knowledge ill-gained from classic samurai movies and reading The Tale of the Heike once in 2004, with all its feuding clans of samurai and warrior monks and raging fires, earthquakes, battles, suicides and executions. I knew reading that book would all come in handy someday, I thought, clenching my fist with this minor victory of fatherhood while explaining the concepts of seppuku and bushido to a fascinated five-year-old boy. I mean, when one of the core tenets of your existence is that KNIGHTS ARE AWESOME, what do you even do with the knowledge of how much more awesome a samurai is compared to a bunch of sweaty guys from France stumbling around in tin underwear? I mean, even after they knew guns existed, the samurai were like, "Nah, man: swords are better." For like centuries! So I'm explaining feudalism and Japanese isolationism and holding a globe while talking about the geography of northeast Asia and it's starting to get a little too homeschooly up in here so I tell him that the only thing the samurai ever did was train to fight and then go out and fight: "In battle the samurai showed no fear and actively sought death. During peace time they would grow restless and get in fights for no reason. They would overreact and imagine slights from common people and the law gave them the right to cut down anyone, man, woman, or child who disrespected them. They also had to do anything their masters told him without questions. If their master was killed they had to go kill the guy who did it and bring back his head and throw it on their master's grave and then probably commit hara-kiri on the grave too and man there must have just been piles of dead samurai everywhere in medieval Japan." I should probably go ahead and hire a scholar of Japanese history to instruct my son on the dull realities of the Tokugawa Period so he doesn't rely solely the word of a man whose knowledge arrived via far too many B&W samurai movies.
Aside from his honor, the coolest part about a samurai was probably his armor. Samurai armor so bizarre and terrifying yet also colorful and beautiful. The University of Michigan Museum of Art had a full suit of Edo-era armor that I used to stare at all the time when I was in school, and I drove the kids over to Ann Arbor to see it a few weeks ago (unfortunately it wasn't on display). My son and I have spent a lot of time looking at pictures of samurai online so I wasn't surprised at all when all he wanted for his birthday was "samurai armor" and damn, I was excited to make it. I still have my boy with me all day Mondays and Fridays and those are the days we make stuff and then go out and have adventures. He is so much fun right now.
For this armor I started with those huge rectangular shoulder pads (sode), punching tons of holes in the leather and using embroidery floss for the traditional silk cords that make traditional samurai armor so colorful. In retrospect I wish I had used something thicker, like shoelaces or even nylon parachute cord.
Then I made the cuirass (do), also out of good 8-9 oz leather. I found some old woodblock paintings of Japanese dragons and incorporated some of my favorites into a single design that I drew and carved into the leather. The dragon also loops around onto the back of the armor. After carefully carving the design I nervously added the dye, mixing green and gold leather dyes for the dragon's skin. I was so inspired by all the real armor we looked at that I really wanted to make this as beautiful as I could.
After adding buckles and straps I got to work on the helmet. It was so much fun seeing that helmet (kabuto) take shape. The back is made from overlaying strips of leather tied together with the embroidery floss. Of course no samurai helmet would be complete without the metal crest signifying what clan the samurai belonged to. We chose the fairly common one that resembles the leaves of the sagittaria plant (don't worry: I filed the edges dull).
Next we worked on a mask (hoate). A lot of the old masks had big bushy mustaches so I couldn't resist. He really loves looking at himself in these pictures.
Whenever I show him these pictures, he stands behind me imitating all the moves he's doing in each shot. It's pretty awesome. All the designs on the arm and lower torso protective plates we found in the gorgeous Utagawa Kuniyoshi samurai woodcuts that we looked at for inspiration. One day we went to the Oriental garden on the grounds of the Cranbrook Educational Community and went on a hunt for enemy ninjas and nasty sea serpents.
In most of these pictures he's holding his leather naginata spear.
I've been making the kids wooden ninja swords for months so we have a bunch of them. I told him all about how the Japanese perfected the art of sword making and read him passages from books about all the labor and the many craftsmen it took to craft a single blade. In one of the books we read it said that most samurai boys were given their first set of armor and swords at age five. I made him a special sword for these adventures out of a beautiful wood called katalox. Like any good samurai, he gave his sword a name ("golden dragon"), so I carved a dragon on the sheath and dyed it gold.
We like to go to the park and have fake samurai battles where we run toward each other like they do in the movies and then with a single slash one of us falls down and dies dramatically. I taught him all four Japanese words I know: hai, iie, ikimashou, tachishoben (yes, no, let's go, public urination). He yells them at me randomly while running toward me with his katana.
I almost didn't share this project because we're venturing into some fairly extreme nerd territory here, but in the end I don't care. We're also having a lot of fun.
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