Ice Sculptures

The days before Christmas brought with them a cold, fierce wind. There were whitecaps on the lake, and the wind whipped them into strange and beautiful ice sculptures on the shore...

PentaXmas

It's a mark of desperation — or just a sign of how far my digital camera has gone downhill — that I pulled out a good old-fashioned film camera for snapshots on Christmas morning. My newer Canon Rebel was out of batteries, so I went back further yet to the old Pentax P3 I used to make a living with. And I rediscovered something: I like these old cameras for a reason. They just plain take better photos. But at $11 per roll for processing, and I-forget-how-much for film, I don't think I can afford the roll-a-day habit for long, though. It might be time for a good digital SLR.

Dear Santa, I've been a good boy. For next Christmas, I'd like...

Packerton, IN

I think
this town's main economy
is the county landfill.
Which may also be
the source of it's lawn ornaments.

There are six lawnmowers and
a playground merry-go-round
but the centerpiece would have to be
the Coke machine.

Orange and white
It sits by the roadside
tipped precariously back towards the lawn.

The sign reads:

QUARTERS ONLY
NO NICKELS DIMES
OR PENNIES NO
CANADIAN MONEY

Edvidence, I think
That I do not want to meet the owner.

Or
That I could probably get a pop for two nickels.

But also
That someone must check this thing daily
that the machine is stocked
and the pop is probably ice cold.

Perhaps I'll contribute to the local economy.

My gloved hands find
Massachusetts, Indiana
and a spare key---
enough to test my theory.

Two clinks and a tap
on ROOT BEER in magic marker
rattle down
a frosty can of Mug.

And I wonder if that means
that those six lawnmowers
would start on the first pull.

a e k

A Fine Place to Di e

The jazz was swinging at Milano's. Plates of pasta swung their way to customers as the chatter of a very full restaurant ebbed and flowed to the beat. No one noticed the guy with the gun until it was too late.

No one really called Don Givenni a victim; if anything, people said, he had it coming, and he had been asking for it. Well, he's got it now, thought Tony Milano, as he spied yet another camera crew doing a piece for the evening news outside the front door. Wish they'd just go away.

But, of course, they didn't. If anything, the shooting had advertised the place to all of Chicago, and he was having to hire more staff just to keep up. The place had mystique now. Milano's was cool. He could have done without the college kids dressing in too-big overcoats and trying to talk gangster through their rolled-up paper cigars, but he couldn't complain.

Be a good girl

Melinda was writing a book. It was, I'm sorry to say, the sort of book that tries to get children to see things from an adult's point of view, rather than the other way around. But she went about it in an earnest sort of way, trying to make things dreadfully obvious and unassailable, and thus losing her audience completely.

"What are you doing, mama?"

"I'm writing a book," said Melinda proudly, "about a little boy who does the wrong thing, and gets in trouble for it." Sensing that she was not redeeming herself in the eyes of her daughter, she continued, "And a little girl who does the right thing, and is rewarded."

"What's 'rewarded'?"

"That means the she got something nice for being so good."

"Wha'd she get?"

"A pony."

"Oh." Susan looked at her mother questioningly.

"Now, be a good girl, and go play in the living room."

Susan went, but she doubted that there was a pony to be had for her obedience.

The eye of the beholder

Graphic design was a pretty expensive major. You had to buy all sorts of stuff — paints, canvas, paperboard, construction paper, zip disks, special rulers and pens... quite the list. And you only used it once, of course. But once a year, you had a chance to recover some of that money by entering stuff in the juried exhibit. That meant framing your work, though, and that could get expensive very quickly.

So I had gotten into the habit of collecting old picture frames. Goodwill always had some good ones; you just had to toss the terrible painting that was in it, or turn around the picture of a moonlit wolf (there was always one of these in the art bin at Goodwill) and use it as a backing for something worthwhile. Five bucks would get you several usable frames if you had the eye for it, and maybe another one where you could hide the ugliness with a can of spray paint. By my senior year, I had built up quite a collection. I was going through it, looking at them and trying to decide what would look good with a particular piece.

After maybe the tenth frame, I noticed that the wall behind the frame was more interesting than the frame itself, so I decided to frame that. I shone a little clip lamp into the corner and suspended the frame in space using a few pieces of thread strung from the mirror and the windowsill. It sat at a jaunty angle, and I liked it. It showed off the texture of the wall nicely. One of the guys was walking by, so I invited him in to view "my new piece of art."

After the annoyance of having to ask where it was (as if he couldn't tell, hmph!) it was easy to see the thought running through his head: It's an empty picture frame.

Yes, it is, I thought to myself.

"So what do you think?"

"It's um, nice. I guess." And obviously casting about for something else to say about this empty picture frame, asked, "What is it?"

"What do you think it is?"

"Well, an empty frame..."

I gave him the "You poor, ignorant Philistine" look. He was there on a baseball scholarship, and the meanings of paintings was not his forte.

"What does it mean to you?"

"Mean?"

I nodded. He screwed up his face like it was an examination question and studied the hanging frame in a worried way.

"Well," he finally ventured, "It's your life. It's open and empty, and you have to fill it. You go through it, and there's a light on the other side."

I nodded, acting impressed. "Pretty good," I said.

"Really? I got it right?" He gazed back at the frame with a sense of awe now. "Wow! I never understood art before. This is cool!"

But I really was impressed. He had come up with something so completely different than what I had imagined, and had obviousy gotten something out of it. I went down the hall to find Jon.

Jon was used to me showing him my pieces. He ambled back to my room.

"So, whaddya think?" I prompted.

"Think of what?"

I rolled my eyes. Philistines.

"My new aaaaart installation," I drew out, gesturing at the brightly lit
corner. "Do you like it?"

"Well, maybe if I knew what it was..."

"That never stopped you in class, did it? Come on, what do you think it is?"

Jon slumped into Art Mode.

"It's life."

Now my mind was spinning. It was the same answer Ryan had given me. Trying hard not to sound too excited, I prodded for more.

"How so?"

"Well, you go through it, you know, and then, bam, you hit a brick wall, and you're done." He slapped his fist into his hand. "There's nothing between you and that wall. You step through it and there you are." He shrugged and looked over at me for confirmation. I nodded sagely.

"Really? That's what it means?" I raised my eyebrows, not daring to say anything lest it spoil the electricity that was arcing around my brain.

"Pretty good, then," he nodded.

I was floored. I had stumbled across a bit of some Universal Truth, and it was starting me in the face, daring me to explain it. I dragged in person after person from the hallway, and each one told me about not the picture frame, but about themselves. People say that 'Beauty was in the eye of the beholder" — by which they mean that everyone has their own tastes — but really it's because the beauty is in them. So was hope, or despair, or whatever, but it was in them, the beholders — not the things I had hung on the wall.

One thing still nags me, though. They all said it was about life.

So artists have been failing all along. Why has no one else realized that it was the frame that symbolized life, all along, and not the drawings we cluttered them up with?

Photo Friday