Archive for: Memoir

James Penha
First to Last

I recently replied to a tweet from someone I follow but otherwise don’t know except that we like each other’s politics. I had no idea he was a teacher until I read: ‘First day of school tomorrow. 3rd year teaching. I’m still nervous.’
      Oh, do I know what he means! I had forty-five first days over the course of my career. I was anxious on every one … and during the 1600 restless Sunday nights before Monday mornings … and on many other days among the 72,000 for which I prepared lessons so meticulously that I could belt them out like a Sinatra doing ‘I’ve Got You Under My Skin’ at Carnegie with syncopation, improvisation, and a particular spin rolled out for each and all of the students in front of me.
      ‘It means,’ I tweeted back, ‘we care.’
      But caring for the education and emotions and expectations of young people is exhausting—like parenting in some ways, but not in others. Although students regularly left the nest of my classroom, new hatchlings, their mouths and (I always hoped) minds open, appeared every new academic year. Despite the exhaustion and the anxiety, I loved the process because I learned as well—more from my mistakes than from my successes—to become a wiser and increasingly effective teacher with every brood.
      And my students, each successive year more junior than I, kept me young long after my youth was gone.
      By the time I reached my sixtieth birthday, I experienced neither ennui nor burnout, but an aching, physical weariness disabusing me of the dream that I would one day drop dead in the middle of a lively discussion of ‘Do Not Go Gentle.’ I had to admit that I was growing too old and too tired to teach until I died. Nonetheless, I struggled to continue, postponing retirement for another seven years.
      But my last day did finally come. The department party and the paeans by administrators at the final faculty meeting had taken place. On my last day, I discussed semester exam results in classes and delivered report cards to members of my homeroom. Their goodbyes and godspeeds were sincere, but they only knew me for a year or so and had a summer vacation to get to. I soon found myself alone in my—no, not my any longer—the classroom. The cleaners arrived with brooms and mops and emptied the last of my refuse from the trashcan to a big black plastic bag. I made my way out the door, down the stairs, on the path through the quadrangle to the street, and I felt a perturbation more disquieting than any anxiety I had ever known on a first day of school.     AQ

Daniel Hudon
Between Thailand and India

I’m in limbo. Floating.

For all the temples, the Buddhist idols, the conversations with monks, the meditation, my first real lesson in Buddhism comes about by accident. After an hour in flight to New Delhi, the captain returns us to Bangkok due to mechanical problems. He tells us they will work on the plane overnight and we’ll fly out in the morning. I’ve left Thailand, not arrived in India and haven’t officially returned to Thailand because back at the airport I have to surrender my passport to get the hotel voucher. I exist in some meta-state, somewhere between Thailand and India, between past and future.

In the hotel room, I spend a few minutes reading the bedside book, The Teachings of the Buddha. Its simplicity is compelling. ‘Monks, a thought is like the stream of a river, without any staying power; as soon as it is produced it breaks up and disappears.’

I run a hot water bath because it’s the first time I’ve seen the combination of hot water and a tub since leaving Canada three and a half months ago. I throw in some bubble soap, watch the water foam up, and get in. The stress and excitement of long-term travel begins to settle as I soak in the tub. I scoop out handfuls of bubbles, blow and flick them. It is quiet. I listen to my breathing, my heart. The tap drips into the water. Bubbles burst with a constant fizz. Eons pass.

The warm water has opened my pores and I feel like I’m breathing through them.

I inhale and exhale like a fish, hearing nothing but air. Afterwards, I am drawn back to The Teachings of the Buddha. ‘Monks, a thought is like the stream of a river…’

I have no thoughts. I have forgotten about India and Thailand. And time. I am nowhere.

I am here. That is all.           AQ

Bryan R. Monte
Paper
in memory of Dawn Clements, 1958-2018
© 2019 by Bryan R. Monte. All rights reserved.

In August 2013, my partner and I were holidaying in London. Looking through a gallery guide, we saw a listing for the Saatchi Paper exhibition. We had originally planned to go to another gallery, but for some reason, probably related to time and/or distance, we decided instead to walk to the Duke of York’s HQ, just a few blocks from our hotel near Sloane Square, to see Paper.

Not expecting much from such a simple, unassuming title, some of the art didn’t disappoint. One piece was a ‘sculpture’ of brown, butcher block paper wrapped around a wooden frame with a hole torn straight through the wrapping. Others included furniture wrapped or tree trunks capped in newspaper. ‘How sublime!’ I thought sarcastically. However, in one large hall, I believe it was the first one, were panoramic drawings of modern home or flat interiors, which immediately impressed me. They reminded me of the establishing and/or travelling shots used in film, where everything is in deep focus as the camera follows the actors from one room to the next. I looked for the title of the works and also for the artist, whose work I had never seen before. One of the drawings, which started with a staircase on the right and which drew the eye upwards and to the left to reveal rooms with their exterior walls removed to show their contents, was entitled Travels With Myra Hudson, 2004, by Dawn Clements. Dawn Clements. I believe there was another room of interior drawings, one which wrapped from one wall around a corner to the next. ‘Could this be the same Dawn Clements, with whom I attended film and semiotics classes at Brown?’ I thought. The artist’s bio, with birthplace and date in another gallery, confirmed it was indeed Dawn.

Dawn and I met in Professor Michael Silverman’s Berlin Alexanderplatz film class in September 1984. She immediately caught my attention due to her unique attire. Unlike the other students standard uniform of jeans and flannel shirts that made the first week gathering on the Green look like the most recent Levis commercial, Dawn usually wore a plain blue skirt, white blouse, dark tights and flat black shoes. I also remember her straight blonde hair and big eyes, which seemed to take in everything. She usually sat quietly in the middle or back of the room during the weekly viewing and discussion of one or two episodes from Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s then-recent, but now legendary, 13-part, television series. The series was named after Alfred Döblin’s novel, which we read as we watched each instalment and compared it to Fassbinder’s film in terms of narratives or discourses and their containments, suppressions and/or erasures.

Dawn and I became friends and I remember talking with her before and after class. She was especially excited (as was Professor Silverman) when I decided to republish my class paper on the gay discourse in the fourth issue of my gay magazine, No Apologies that next spring. I also delivered a paper with video excerpts from the TV series for the Modern Language Association conference in Chicago in December 1985.

During this time I didn’t know Dawn as an artist, but rather as a film enthusiast, who later became Professor Silverman’s intro to film teaching assistant. Sometimes Dawn would roll part of that day’s film before or after class and we’d gasp at the long, establishing, tracking shots or how Technicolor made the wine in the dinner glasses a deep, glowing, cranberry-juice red. Dawn wrote me in 2014 that: ‘those teachers, those films and those readings…helped shape me into a person who “reads” the world.’

We also talked about the joys and tribulations of our past, romantic relationships and both of us quoted Eartha Kitt as we joked we ‘want(ed) a man with a big, big, big, big … yacht’ (from ‘Where is My Man’ by Bruce Vilanch with Fred Zarr and Jacques Morali from the album I Love Men, 1984). She was one of my three friends at Brown, and the only one with whom I maintained contact immediately after graduation.

I drove up to see her at the University of Albany in early September 1986, her first week of classes as a grad student and my first week as a high school writing teacher in rural Massachusetts in my new, five-speed, manual-transmission Subaru, which unfortunately, I was still learning how to shift properly. Her landlady let me in with a wink, not realizing I was gay and I would be sleeping on the floor — alone.

Appropriately enough we went to see the Rodney Dangerfield’s Back to School that weekend at the student union. Since I wasn’t so confident driving my new car, we drove around in Dawn’s late ’50s or early ’60s ‘boat’, which made people swerve out of her way if she floated just to the right or to the left in her lane. We had a good weekend, but then we both became immersed in our new worlds: Dawn at SUNY Albany’s Graduate Art Program and me, teaching writing. We exchanged letters a few times. I sent Dawn a Christmas (1986) card with a deer amorously locking its horns with a coat rack. Unfortunately, I was too poor, disorganized and a bad typist to make photocopies or carbon copies of what I sent her. I can only guess at what I wrote from Dawn’s response. Her letter, dated January 14, 1987, was handwritten in black biro on thin, yellow, translucent, unlined paper with one word in almost every other line partially obscured by a woolley, black cloud.

A line from Dawn Clements’ letter to Bryan Monte, 17 January 1987

In my letter I had probably described my Thanksgiving weekend with my family in Cleveland, which distressed me so much I literally dislocated my right arm in my sleep. I was seen by an casualty doctor, who put my arm back into its socket and then into a sling. Unfortunately, as a result, my mother had to ride with me back to Massachusetts to help with the stick shift. In addition, just after Christmas, I broke up with my partner of two-and-a-half years.

Dawn shared news of her family holiday get together. She reported that one of her parents had just had a health scare. For the first time, she realized her parents weren’t ‘indestructible’. To underline this thought, she copied out an eight-line passage from Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, which her parents had given her for Christmas, in which Proust recounts his first realization of his parents’ mortality.

She then mentioned one brother about to fly down to Australia for a job and another brother, who had announced he would be married four days later because he wanted his Australia-bound brother to be his best man. With an artist’s eye, Dawn then describes, in almost the same style as her later interior drawings, the ’60s-style, split-level, suburban home ‘with original furnishings’, where the ceremony took place. She mentions the ‘sunken living room’, with ‘a glassed-in fireplace … (where) ‘a … blue-flame “log” blazed.’ flanked by ‘two sofas next to each other’ and an extremely long ‘coffee table’.

Then Dawn mentions the Albany sights she’d discovered after my visit: ‘a U-haul truck suspended above a skyscraper’ and 21st US President’s Chester A. Arthur’s monumental gravesite statue. I must have also asked in my letter if she had met any interesting and unusual people. She had and wrote they were ‘kind, supportive and extremely talented’. She ended her letter asking about me and suggesting we meet ‘in Boston sometime.’

We never met in Boston. Unfortunately, I lost touch with Dawn due to a very bad winter, which ended with two blizzards in April that made roads impassable for days followed by a two-week heat wave the next month during which I lay on the floor of my attic apartment next to a fan and a pitcher filled with ice water. In addition, I had not met any friendly people in Massachusetts with whom I could share and develop my writing. By June, I had decided to return to California.

I did not come in contact again with Dawn, or her work for 26 years. During this time I moved back to San Francisco during the AIDS crisis, worked for an insurance company by day, and taught English and creative writing by night. Then I emigrated to the Netherlands, where I taught English, communication and computers at private schools and at a university, got a Masters in education, and taught English language and culture at a Dutch polytechnic. I also met my current partner. (Dawn told me later that she, at about the same time, had come across the copies of No Apologies I had given her at Brown).

When Winfred and I returned to the Netherlands, I tried to find Dawn’s e-mail or telephone number to get in touch. Unfortunately, her e-mail address wasn’t quite the same as her name. Fortunately, by late January or early February 2014, I had found her via LinkedIn. Dawn was happy to resume contact and she wrote that she thought it was ‘an honour’ that Saatchi had placed her work at the beginning of the exhibition. I wrote Dawn about my David Sedaris interview, which I would publish in my new magazine, Amsterdam Quarterly the next month. Dawn wrote back the same day about her recent exhibition at the ‘Bell Gallery at Brown alongside (work by) alumni Paul Ramirez Jonas and Kelly Tribe.’ In e-mails later that month, we got caught up on 26 years in two or three pages.

Dawn wrote about her graduation from SUNY Albany and teaching art from community colleges to Skidmore from the late ‘80s to the early ‘90s. Then came her ‘Cinderella moment’ when Flash Art wrote about her NYC Drawing Center show ‘and I was invited to show my work in the Venice Biennale in 1993.’ She wrote that her first years in NYC were hard. She ‘painted murals and dressed mannequins … drew the first pencil sketches for the Victoria’s Secret’s angels wings!!’, and made ‘backdrops and scenery’. However, even with shows and fellowships in the US, the UK, Belgium and Italy, she confessed, ‘I need to teach to pay my rent’.

She continued in this missive to comment on the ‘great sets, great clothes, great color’ in North by Northwest which I happened to be watching as I wrote her my email response. She also talked about her love of Sirk’s use of colour, excess, and camera work in Written on the Wind in which:

Dawn and I could always connect through film and I could see how its language, especially the travelling and establishing shots where everything is equally in focus and its use of melodramatic storytelling, had greatly influenced her own drawings.

We emailed and skyped each other in the months leading up to my visit to New York later in early July 2014. Dawn collected me the afternoon of 6 July as we’d agreed and we drove to her studio, which was in a long, former warehouse on a street, which ended at the East River. Her studio was large a rectangular space, longer than it was wide. I remember there were books, canvases, drawing supplies and an upright piano. I also remember the studio had a window, which looked out onto a canal. Just as Dawn mentioned this to me, a tugboat outside suddenly blew its steam whistle, which made me jump out of my chair. There were also two long drawings tacked up on opposite walls. One was actually two pieces according to my journal: ‘a ropey charcoal studio set and on the other wall, a curly-haired movie star, who I couldn’t identify and which I forgot to ask about.’ (The next morning, Dawn informed me this ‘movie star’ was Sylvia Sidney, who was part of a new watercolour work).

We sat down and had white wine and matzo crackers as we talked about our lives, teaching, writing and art. I gave her a tote bag from the Royal Academy of Art and some postcards, which Winfred and I had purchased a few weeks before.

Dawn gave me some maple sugar candies and a copy of Fence magazine from 2010. She said ‘it was only magazine that had her work in it that she could give me.’ I filled her in on the first part of my holiday in England. This included classes at the Birmingham Quaker Centre and a few days in Cumbria to visit friends with whom we walked around and photographed each other at Castlerigg Stone Circle and had lunch on Lake Windermere.

After getting caught up in her studio, we drove around scouting places for the AQ 2014 Yearbook reading that January. We visited Pete’s Candy Store, the Perogi Gallery and a few Dumbo bookstores. (The event was held at the Anne Frank Center). Then we had a roast chicken and sausage dinner at the Vinegar Hill House restaurant. Afterwards, Dawn drove me back to my hotel near Penn Station, where miraculously, we found a parking space, so she came up to my room for a few minutes. There I asked her opinion on two different background colours for the AQ 2014 Yearbook (sand v camel) and I gave her a copy of the AQ 2013 Yearbook along with a William Morris birded wallpaper blank book so she’d start keeping a journal.

From that time, Dawn and I emailed and skyped with each other, on and off every other month or so when either of us had time in our busy schedules On 5 Oct 2014, Dawn sent me a PDF of a clear glass vase holding long, greenish flowers It was part of her ‘Chrysanthemums’, 2014, watercolour that would later be part of the installation she was drawing for her Bates College show in January 2015, when she would also start teaching at Brown. Her busy autumn schedule would include helping move her mother, ‘little visiting artists jobs … that (will) help me pay the rent,’ and graduate student critiques work ‘at the Maryland Institute College of Art.’ Dawn was so busy she even apologized that her 16 January 2015 Bates opening would prevent her from attending AQ’s 2014 Yearbook reading just two days before.

Buried under work, Dawn apologized repeatedly for not answering my e-mails for weeks or sometimes even months. However, this hard work did finally deliver some results. On 20 March 2015, she wrote she’d gotten a ‘full-time position at RISD’, happy it would give her financial and health benefits. She decided to commute up to Providence from Brooklyn to teach there. I had written Dawn about trying to get together in NY in May or June, but she said she couldn’t. She had an opening in Hudson, NY around 1 June and a possible two month residency. I wrote her back congratulating her on her RISD job and told her about my recent memoir about Thom Gunn in AQ12. In July 2015, I told her to ‘take care of herself,’ reassuring her that ‘We’ll get together when things settle down for you.’

Due to her hectic schedule, however, I didn’t hear from Dawn again until March 2016. She apologized for not corresponding for a while, but indicated she had ‘been … consumed and exhausted by her very extensive schedule….’ She sent an e-mail from a train on her way to work at the Yale where she worked as a ‘critic’ in the MFA programme. She mentioned studio visits, conversations, critiques and ‘admissions interviews.’ She admitted it was a bit much — RISD plus Yale and even Cranbook Academy near Detroit — but said she ‘enjoyed engaging in mature conversations with young artists.’ She ended her email apologizing again for her late reply and hoped I was well.

I thanked Dawn and advised her to take time every now and then to ‘pause, breathe and enjoy. Draw something on a scrap of paper as you did on that train ride in Europe that lead to your first big project. Just as then, the pieces will put themselves together later.’

Just two months later, however, Dawn’s life took an unexpected and unfortunate turn. On 29 April 2016, she wrote she had cancer. She also mentioned how ‘kind and helpful’ her mother had been caring for her in hospital. She described Bellevue as an ‘enormous factory of a hospital,’. She wrote ‘the medical show’ had ‘more colour than Amherst, Massachusetts’. Perhaps Dawn was putting a brave face on things by looking outward, because in the next paragraph she wrote ‘there’s more in store.’ In addition, she thanked me for the Morris bird blank book I’d given her in July 2014 and reported:

I responded the next day with my regrets about her diagnosis. I told Dawn to ‘get plenty of rest, take your medication, don’t move around too much … (and) Keep in touch where you’re feeling up to it.’ To try to take her mind off her illness, I mentioned Winfred and I had just recently bought a miniature dachshund pup called Rex, who was ‘two hands big’ when we brought him home, and was now ‘an armload and still growing’.

On 11 June 2016, I emailed Dawn asking how she was. I also mentioned it was so unusually warm in June, that, for the first time, I’d had to run a portable air conditioning unit in my flat. She wrote back the next day saying that she was ill, had just had her first round of chemo and couldn’t write much. I was sorry to hear that she had been in hospital and hoped she would soon complete her treatments. I attached three, small photos of Rex she could view on her phone with my message.

I sent Dawn another e-mail in August, but I don’t have record of having been in touch with her again until 18 November when, according to my journal, I saw her green light on my Skype panel, for the first time in months, so I decided to call her. Dawn answered right away. I asked if she was in her Brooklyn studio, since it was already dark outside the window. She told me that she was in Rome at the American Academy on a two-month fellowship. I asked her how she was doing. She told me the cancer had returned. I couldn’t say anything except, ‘I’m sorry, I’m very sorry.’ Dawn told me she was expecting another call in the next five minutes, so we kept it short. Dawn returned my skype call on the 21st. I wrote in my journal that Dawn looked a little bit better this time. She didn’t have a hat on (so I could see she still had her beautiful, blonde hair) and the dark circles around her eyes were almost gone. We talked a little about my annual AQ yearbook print production schedule, and she told me more about her health.

I asked Dawn if she’d been enjoying her stay in Rome, including the sights and the food. I mentioned the cool, ancient, underground villas with their wall murals and she said she’d been near there and that Italian food was wonderful. I asked if she was working on anything new, but she didn’t give anything away. She said her mother was coming for Thanksgiving and that they were going to see the Vatican together. I told her to make sure that one of them was in a wheelchair, so then they wouldn’t have to wait in long lines to see things. I asked if she’d like an ARC of the AQ 2016 Yearbook, and she said yes. I sent her a copy and a box of German chocolates wrapped in Dutch Sinterklaas paper.

On 20 December Dawn wrote she found ‘a happy surprise’ in her AAR mailbox. She thought the chocolates were delicious and ate the whole box in one evening. She asked about my health and said she was starting her second round of a new drug which had sometimes given her ‘heart attack symptoms.’ when walking, so she had to ‘stop and wait and go VERY slowly.’ Despite her health, however, she said her stay had been ‘very productive.’

I responded that I was very happy the box of chocolates had helped her stay up all night and create. ‘The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom,’ (William Blake) I reminded her. I also told her about the time my legs suddenly stopped working once on the Leidseplein (and I’d neglected to wear my leg braces per my doctor’s instructions). It took me a quarter hour to slowly, walk crab-like, the last 25 metres into a Central Station-bound tram.

We skyped a few days later and I told her about my pillbox, which I drybrushed in Photoshop to illustrate my poem ‘The Rattle’ that would appear in AQ18 that spring. She directed her camera down quickly to show several opened foil medicine holders on a burlap background on a table, which she was drawing and which would later become part of ‘Three Tables in Rome’ (the table farthest to the right), watercolour, 2017.

The next time we corresponded was on 15 February. Dawn wrote that her reply would ‘be brief’ because she would be going to teach at RISD for a few days and that was worried about her ‘stamina’ and hoped her time at RISD would ‘be healing.’ She added that RISD had given her twice as many TA’s and that her health was ‘mixed, but hopeful’, since she was trying to get treatment with a new drug. She also mentioned she had joined a support group. Dawn thanked me for sending her photos of Rex in various outfits and poses: ‘GQ Rex’, wearing a new hand-knitted winter jacket; ‘après-ski Rex’ wearing the jacket on a leash in the snow; ‘GQ Rex’ reclining on a leather sofa displaying his family jewels; and ‘Cheshire Cat Rex’ with a ball, with large, white teeth painted on it, in his mouth.

On 1 April, I sent a bouquet of mixed flowers to the opening of her Tables and Pills and Things show at the Pierogi Gallery on Suffolk Street in Manhattan. She wrote me back on 3 April thanking me for the flowers with photos of them in a vase in her flat. On 23 June, I sent Dawn a postcard of Gerrit Rietveld’s, Harrenstein Bedroom, 1926, while waiting for the monthly AQ writers’ group to begin. I wrote that I’d recently attended the press showing of the Edward Krasinki retrospective at the Amsterdam Stedelijk. I wrote that the show had just been at the Tate Liverpool and ‘they could have kept it there. This guy’s signature move is to put blue electric tape on the wall at 1.6 meters’… (and sometimes through other’s artwork) ‘to break it into two planes — a sort of minimalist constructivism.’ Stealing a line from Bill Sherwood’s film Part Glances, I continued: ‘There’s more art in one square inch of your panoramic interiors than in this entire show!’

Dawn contacted me later that month. She was at Yaddo in a room with a large window that looked out onto a dense wood. She asked me if she should continue to apply to programmes, and if she should mention her illness. I advised her to keep applying, to not mention her illness, to take her drugs with her and to arrange transport to nearby hospitals for treatments, if necessary. She reported ‘no real progression of her disease’ which was good news.

In later emails we joked about and discussed what she could draw at Yaddo. I suggested a reflection of the window in front of her with a scene from Rear Window on the TV or PC, or from the window, have a view of the iconic, criminals’ lair in North by Northwest, or draw a picture of the project she working on and have its reflection and that of the room behind it in the big window with or without herself at the table.

Dawn listed three drawings she might attempt. The first in ‘black ink’ … ‘of objects on a table with the woods in the background.’ The second in colour, she’d ‘do at night.’ to take advantage of the big window’s mirror effect. She’d ‘split the image between (the) directly observed table top and the mirror image of the table top.’ The last would be in a ‘limited black palette and vermillion Sumi inks.’ with ‘surface graphics of the objects. No shadows.’

In late September, I travelled to the Communal Studies Association conference in Zoar, Ohio, where I would read a paper. Just before I left, however, I sent Dawn a Sophia Loren biography, which included photos of Loren as a young woman with friends and handwritten correspondence in Italian. On 15 October 2017, she thanked me for the book ‘chock-full of information!!!!’ and said she was ‘inspired by my energy and spirit.’ She referred to her Yaddo experience as ‘tremendously productive.’ Unfortunately, she wrote her cancer therapy ‘wasn’t working’ … and that she was ‘quite depressed, but pressing on all the same.’ She added she was ‘crazy busy now with teaching,’ but was looking forward to ‘mid-December’ when she would have a two-month holiday to work on her art. She ended her letter with ‘you inspire me’ and her love. Around the beginning of December, I posted Dawn an ARC of the AQ 2017 Yearbook.

I wrote Dawn again just after Christmas. I mentioned switching on the holidays lights to chase away the winter blues, and that I could call her whenever she wanted to talk. Unfortunately, I didn’t hear from Dawn again until 11 February 2018 when she emailed her health ‘had taken a serious turn from the worse.’ She had just begun a new drug trial and was on painkillers, so it was sometimes difficult for her to ‘do anything.’ Despite her situation, however, she expressed concern for me and hoped I was ‘feeling better than … last December.’ Six weeks later on 24 March she wrote with good news after I had telephoned and left a message. Her ‘cancer makers were down,’ and she was off ‘the pain killers.’

On 22 June, I wrote her with my US itinerary for October/November, so we could try to meet. I mentioned the Wayne Thiebaud cakes postcard I’d sent her from his European retrospective at the Museum Voorlinden in The Hague with a link to my review in AQ22. Dawn emailed a week later saying it was ‘pretty awful’ that Thiebaud and some of his paintings (there were three or four empty spaces on the walls) didn’t make it for his show’s opening. She had recently sent out a group email stating how she was doing because she didn’t have time to write everyone separately. In her next missive, she confided ‘between you and me, I am losing some hope.’ The trial drug had stopped working and then ‘the rate of growth was dramatic.’

She also wrote that she had gone to Angels in America on Broadway. ‘It may seem strange to attend … in the midst of all this bad health news, but it was great and I’m glad I went … with a very good friend, Judy.’ Dawn reported that after she left the theatre, she ‘sobbed. … glad to express … my extreme sadness.’ She then wrote that she ‘had started of book of drawings’ and wanted to do ‘at least a page per day.’ She ended her email with news that she’d been invited to MacDowell from Sept. 5 to Oct. 15, and hoped she would ‘be well enough to go.’

I told Dawn I would have a lot to share with her when I saw her in New York. I would have just visited my paternal grandmother’s father’s village in Banco, Trentino, Italy the month previously. In the meantime, I would try to post another box of inspirational chocolates to her at MacDowell.

There were a few mails in between, mostly with regard to making an appointment to meet in Manhattan. On 9 August, Dawn let me know she had received the chocolates.

On 25 October 2018, Judy brought Dawn to meet with me in an Italian café in Koreatown near Herald Square. During our meeting, Dawn told me that her doctor had begun to discuss hospice care and said he hadn’t given her longer than the end of the next month to live. From my experience with at least a two dozen people with AIDS (including two partners), I knew what to talk about at a last meeting — the weather, college, hobbies or music, a pleasant mix of the present and the past, but not the future, and certainly nothing about drugs or treatments.

I had also brought two gag gifts — faux Delfts blauw teabag and spoon caddies in the shape of a teapot and a wooden shoe respectively. These made Dawn giggle and laugh as she carefully extracted them from their protective cardboard and blue-and-white wrapping paper. I hoped it made her forget, at least for a few moments, the gravity of her situation. I showed her the earliest pre-production copy of the Amsterdam Quarterly 2018 Yearbook. She said she especially liked Peter E. Murphy’s ‘Open’ photo on the back cover, which showed a valve with the word ‘OPEN’ stamped on it, rusted shut. I told her I would send her an ARC as soon as they were ready.

I also showed Dawn my photo book of my paternal Italian-America grandmother’s family’s village, including the church font where my great-grandfather, one great-uncle and one great aunt were baptised, and the location of their flat, with its view of apple orchards and the Dolomites. When I returned from the toilet, I noticed Dawn taking photos with her phone of the pre-production copy. She said she had done that so she’d ‘have something to read later.’ Dawn also noticed a picture of Rex on my phone, sitting on a dark blue pillow and she asked for a copy, which I emailed to her that evening.

Saying goodbye to Dawn for the last time was not only emotionally, but physically draining. As I rolled to the Herald Square taxi stand with her, I suddenly discovered the last three fingers of my right hand wouldn’t work, so I had to work hard to propel myself with just my thumb and index finger on that hand. I said a last goodbye to Dawn and gave her a hug.

Whilst on the road in the US, I sent her a postcard of the 1954 Kalamazoo Gal, sitting on the hood of a blue and white Chevrolet Bel Air, with news of my readings, which I hoped would make her laugh. As promised, on 4 December, I posted the AQ 2018 Yearbook ARC with a box of chocolates. The next day, however, I received the news Dawn had passed.

There’s a saying in Dutch, Wie schrijft, blijft — S/he who writes, remains (forever). I hope that also applies to artists, and that Dawn knew what an indelible mark she had left in my heart, in the art world, and on paper. AQ

Rosanne Trost
Too Late For Answers

I grew up in an Irish Catholic family. My mother’s maiden name was Murphy. Dad’s mother had the same maiden name. My sister and I used to joke that our parents were cousins.

March 17th was always a big day in our home. Dad had one Kelly green plaid tie, which he wore every St. Patrick’s Day. My sister and I always donned some sort of green attire for school. For several years we would receive half-dead three leaf clovers from Dad’s distant relatives in County Mayo. The box also contained St. Patrick medals.

To celebrate the holiday, my mother always made corned beef and cabbage, and during dinner we listened to Irish music on the radio. Dad would choke up when he heard the sad song, “Danny Boy.” He reminisced about his parents who had emigrated from Ireland to Denver. Back then, I was embarrassed by his tears, but now I think how tender. I can still see his expression as he talked about his family.

Dad was the youngest of five children, and was baptized Philip. Joey, the sister next to him in age, was nine years his senior. His parents were older when he arrived, and both of them died within a year of each other when dad was just a teen. Joey and her new husband took over his care, and moved from Denver to St. Louis. Years later, my dad and Mary Murphy were married. I was their first-born.

As a young child, I was Joey’s favourite niece, and she shared with me how very devoted she was to my dad. I can still see her, cigarette in her mouth, praising dad, “He has been a good brother, and you know he is a loving father. Your dad was happy-go-lucky and he always made us laugh.”

My dad was the last of his siblings to die. It’s been over 40 years. For his funeral Mass, he was “laid out” wearing the green tie. In his hands was the rosary that his sister, the nun, had made for him. When I looked at his tie, memories flooded in from my childhood.

Our family has continued the St. Patrick’s Day traditions. I still see him struggling with the green tie, and my mother straightening it.

Last summer, all the memories of dad took a bit of a detour. Through a second cousin, we learned that my dad was Jewish and had been adopted. He never learned of the adoption.

Aunt Joey had sworn her family to secrecy, saying, “If you tell Philip or his family that he was adopted, I will come back from the grave to haunt you.” Apparently, family members believed her. No one shared the information…until last summer when our second cousin, the only surviving relative, could no longer keep the secret.

As of now, we have had no luck locating records surrounding my dad’s birth.

My sister, brother and I did have DNA tests, each of the results reflected that we are half Jewish.

So many questions, and few, if any, answers. AQ

Pat Seman
Paska

Easter. The biggest festival of the year in Ukraine.

It begins with Willow Sunday and the ceremony of the blessing of the willow, a practice that stems back to pagan times when the willow with its healing properties was a holy tree and one of the first in Spring to show signs of life. People believed that by tapping each other with a freshly blooming willow branch they could draw upon its energy and strength.

There was no sign of tapping at church that morning, simply an enormous crowd of people, everyone clutching pussy willow twigs and pressing forward into an already packed church. Once inside, standing squeezed like a sardine and peering over a sea of shoulders, I could see nothing of the ceremony. But the singing was sublime. One voice emerged in what felt like the crescendo of the service, strong and deep with an ever greater sense of urgency, till at its peak it melted into a sea of harmony, one with the rich and sonorous tones of the choir. Then abruptly, the service over, the crowd turned and I was carried with them as inch by inch we shuffled and stumbled our way out into the pouring rain.

Holy Week or Willow week as it’s called in Ukraine is a period of cleansing both spiritual and physical in preparation for Easter. In my street the women were out sweeping the pavement in front of their houses, scrubbing doorsteps, cleaning and polishing the windows till they shone. In courtyards and gardens, carpets were hung out to air. Caught up in the general fever of spring-cleaning I cleaned my flat from top to bottom. After such a long winter it was good to open wide the doors and windows and feel the first balmy breath of Spring entering. At school my students and colleagues, their figures trim from weeks of dieting and fasting, were all talking about their trips to the ‘bazaar’- an enormous market on the edge of town – and the new clothes they’d bought to wear on Easter Sunday.

The girls in my groups told me that they were making ‘pisanki’, the beautiful traditional painted eggs for which Ukraine is famous. Decorated with stylised symbols from Nature they were said to contain powerful magic, a protection against evil and natural catastrophe. Once they were painted by women only. They would gather together in secret when the children had gone to bed, singing and telling stories as with wax and plant dyes and a special stylus they created the delicate patterns of the pisanki. For centuries the tradition was handed down from mother to daughter only to be banned under the Soviet regime. It was the Ukrainians in the Diaspora that ensured its survival. I know my grandmother took this skill with her to Canada.

Now the girls have lessons at school in dyeing and decorating pisanki. In the weeks before Easter you see these decorated eggs everywhere. They come in many colours – orange and red, yellow, green and deep blue. Often the patterns are geometrical or with spiral motifs, but there are also motifs of birds, flowers and animals. One, which I saw amongst a cluster of colourful pisanki in the local market, was encircled with a chain of young women dancing.

Pisanki represent the gift of life.

At Easter they’re placed in a wicker basket of food, which is taken to the midnight mass to be blessed. In my cousin Masha’s basket: pisanki, ham, sausage, horseradish, butter, cheese and rye bread, all covered by a white embroidered cloth. And a ‘paska’, or Easter bread, a round, sweet loaf, decorated again with motifs of plants and flowers formed from dough to celebrate nature’s rebirth.

The paska must be made with great care. When preparing the dough and during the kneading you must keep your thoughts pure and the whole household quiet to ensure the bread bakes properly. This means that no-one, not even friends and neighbours are allowed to come in during its baking lest they make a sudden noise or cast the evil eye, causing the paska to come out flat.

We arrived at the cathedral about an hour before midnight. Masha gave me a candle from her basket, then we both put on our scarves and joined a throng of women jostling to get in through the door. Inside they parted to leave a clear passage down to the altar, placing their baskets on either side of it ready for the priest’s blessing. We stood on the cold stone floor amongst the crowd of worshippers listening as the deep voices of the priests and choir intoned the solemn liturgy. The sequin-sewn white scarves of the congregation glimmered and glittered in the soft candle light, while over their heads, in the shadows near the altar hung a life-size figure of Christ on the Cross surrounded by a mass of deep red carnations.

A stirring, a murmur of expectation. Heads turned as some men entered carrying banners. Masha, checking her watch, muttered that it was now gone midnight. Still we stood waiting patiently as the priest continued his incantation. Then all at once the chandeliers went on in a blaze of electric light. Red neon letters spelling CHRISTOS VOSKRES flashed above the altar and a procession of nine priests, resplendent in white and gold followed by the choir, led us out of the cathedral with the bells wildly pealing. Out into the cold midnight air as the Easter flame was passed through the crowd from one candle to the other, then in a rambling procession we circled the cathedral three times, singing and stopping every so often to roar out a reply to the priest’s call ‘Christ is risen’, ‘He is indeed risen!’

At 6 in the morning I ate with Masha and her family as they broke their fast. All the food from the basket, which had been blessed by the priest at the cathedral, and more, was spread out on the table. We each had a hard-boiled egg dyed red which we had to hold firmly while tapping everyone else’s trying to crack them. Masha’s husband, Vasili, was the one who came out victorious; the last with his egg intact, his face creased into a big smile. As I walked back home through the early morning mist, the streets were still full of people carrying home their baskets and flickering candles. The aim is to bring the flame safely home and with it to trace a figure of the Cross on the lintel of your house. Mine had gone out in a gust of wind within minutes of leaving the cathedral.

Later in the day the mist turned to bright sunshine and the unpaved road to Vasyliv, my family’s village, was shiny with puddles and mud. Fields stretched on either side of me, empty and grey. But in the village the freshly dug earth in the gardens was a rich, dark brown covered here and there in a haze of fresh green. I arrived to the clanging of bells, drove past a group of boys taking it in turns to pull on the rope in the small bell tower by the church gate.

Masha with her parents and Vasili, their son, Pavel and Masha’s brother were all waiting for me, bunched together on two beds around a small table which was crammed to overflowing with dishes: hard boiled eggs, salads, fish fried in batter, meatballs, salami, cold pork, cheese and a sweet, creamy macaroni-like pudding. Vasili told us that he was going easy on the vodka as he was saving himself for the next day, the first Monday of Easter or ‘Wet Monday’, when he and his friends would hit the streets to douse the women passing by with water. Yet another old custom rooted in pre-Christian rites of purification and rebirth, and one which, according to Masha, is practised with an unbridled enthusiasm. ‘Never mind’, she said, ‘on Tuesday, it’ll be the women’s turn’.

Masha then told me that when she was young, on Easter morning, she and the other village girls would dance and sing in front of the church, round and round in a circle in imitation of the movement of the earth round the sun, to encourage the Spring to waken and bring them good luck and a plentiful harvest.
 
 
An integral part of the of Easter ritual which follows Easter Sunday is the honouring of the dead, when families gather at the graves of their loved ones and ancestors bringing food for them. Often they stay and eat together next to the grave, so that the dead too may take part in the celebration, the joy of Easter; the idea being that the ghosts of the dead are always with us, that the border between life and death is as permeable as a cloud.

Driving out of Chernivitsi towards Vasyliv the next Saturday I saw heaps of plastic purple and pink wreaths for sale at the side of the road and people walking along the verge with these large wreaths slung over their shoulders or on the handle bars of their bikes. In the countryside I stopped at a cemetery just outside a village where so many wreaths had been laid or propped against headstones you could hardly see the graves. Between them wooden tables and benches had been set out as for a party. The sky was sullen with dark clouds threatening rain, the cemetery empty, except for a man and a woman and two children who were sitting at a table next to their ancestor’s grave, quietly eating and drinking. Out of respect I kept my distance, but as soon as they spotted me they sent over the young boy with an Easter bread and a pisanka. The bread was ornamented with a cross made of dough, the four arms curved at their tips as if about to spin into motion – an ancient symbol of the sun and the wheel of life.

In Vasyliv the cemetery lies at the centre of the village, a large field full of stone crosses, many of them ancient, some all but toppling over in the long grass. There were no wreaths and no tables and benches laid out when I arrived. All was quiet. A football match was going on in the neighbouring field. Every so often there’d be shouts from the small tribune alongside the dirt path skirting the graves.

I trudged through the mud and wet grass in search of Masha and her family. She’d promised to take me to our great-grand-parents’ graves and say some prayers for them on my behalf. She was at the edge of the cemetery with Vasili, their son, Pavel and Vasili’s mother. They were gathered round Vasili’s father’s grave. His mother was in tears. Vasili came to me and solemnly handed me an Easter bread, an orange and some chocolates in memory of his father.

The spot where my great grandparents lie buried is marked by two stone crosses. They stand side by side, leaning slightly towards one another, not far from a border of tall, sheltering acacia trees. My great grandmother Vasylina’s cross stands on the left, and on the right, that of my great grandfather Vasil. Their surfaces are so worn that it’s impossible to trace an inscription. The arms of each cross are decorated with flower patterns, and at the centre of Vasil’s is another pagan symbol of the sun: a circle, from which branch out four short arms like rays. Clearly engraved within the circle is a wreath of flowers, symbol of Mother Earth.

Masha and I stood silently at the graves of our great-grandparents. It started to rain. We returned to her parents’ house where her father and his family were waiting for me to join them in yet another feast.

When I left, Masha gave me one red carnation. It had been blessed in a service of remembrance of the village dead, my Ukrainian ancestors. It hangs now, dry and drained of colour, at home above my desk.