I need to slow down but I can’t do it this week. Monday I
had lunch in a near-by tourist town with my Gathering Girls pals. Tuesday it
was a fun lecture/slide show about a huge art contest in town that registered
1,200 entries from 40 countries. Wednesday---today---you’ll find me at the
cemetery getting my husband’s gravestone ready for winter and stopping for my
flu and shingles shots. Thursday I’ll be going to the audiologist to get my
hearing aids turned up because sentences like, “I love your cat” are starting
to sound like, “I love your fat.” Friday my cleaning service girl is coming. Of
course, these things were/will be in addition to all the normal details of
living---fixing meals, doing laundry, taking showers, walking the dog, watching
‘Dancing with the Stars’ and the new ‘You’ creepy-but-addictive TV show on
Lifetime. And I won’t tell you about how many times Starbucks waves me in to
test their new fall menu of drinks. So far the Maple Pecan Iced Latte wins my
vote over the Pumpkin Choco Chai or the Hot Apple Chai. Wouldn’t you love sit
in on a drink naming session? I would. Same for the paint companies that create
so many new wall color names every year. Seriously, how on earth did Sherwin
Williams come up with ‘Salty Dog’ for what looks like Hyper Blue straight out
of an artist’s tube with a dab of black added in? But I digress.
Back on topic: I am also babysitting seven closed e-Bay auctions
and seven active auctions. Are you sick of hearing about my widowhood adventures
at e-Bay yet? If you are, you'll be happy to know that I only have October to
continue the hard-charging listings before I’ll quit until after Christmas. In
the meantime, here’s a pop quiz/history lesson for you. Do you know what the
item is in the photo above? I’m guessing ‘no.’ It’s known as a Yellow Dog, popularized
by something Teddy Roosevelt said the first time he saw a group of them in the
dark of night. A reporter traveling with him wired a story back East and a front
page newspaper headline soon proclaimed: “Roosevelt sees Yellow Dogs in Texas!”
It was one of my husband’s favorite possessions because after he bought the
cast iron what-the-heck-is-it, it took us two years to find out the answer. If
only Google had been invented sooner. I showed my niece another what-is-it last
year and within a few minutes she took a photo of it, posted it on a website
that helps ID things and we had an answer to the what-is-it question that had
eluded me for two decades.
How we found out what the pot with two spouts was used for is the kind of
story Don enjoyed telling to anyone who’d come over and spot it in the house.
We were on our way to a Romance Writer’s Convention in San Antonio, Texas in 1990
when we stopped at a tourist visitor’s center. Smack-dab on the front of a
museum brochure was an unidentified and unexplained two spouted pot like ours. Off
we went on a 100 mile detour just so we could learn that it’s an oilfield derrick
lamp, the official name that no one uses anymore. At night from a distance the
yellow flames coming out of the spouts looked like yellow eyes to good old
Teddy and the shadows the lamps cast on the ground below looked like a pack of dog
heads below the derricks where they hung. I can’t imagine what it will be like not to live with possessions that
all come with stories to tell.
The art lecture/slide show I went to was billed as an Armchair Art Show. The art show it featured was the brain-child of Betsy DeVos’
son and is billed as the “largest public art show in the world.” It runs for
two weeks and the pieces are all over our downtown area. A $200,000 prize goes
to one person who is voted in by the public and another $200,000 goes to someone who is picked by a
five member panel of art critics and it is possible for one artist to win both,
bring their prize money up to $400,000. Five other artists win $12,500 each.
Our senior hall took four busloads of people downtown to see the art this year and
I have gone in the past years. But the crowds and pressure of meeting back up with
the bus a dozen times over an afternoon so it could shuffle us between various venues
was too stressful. The ‘armchair tour’ via a slide show was a new addition at
senior hall this year and it was extremely well attended.
Much of the art I don’t
understand and much of it is ‘message art’ created to draw attention to things
like human trafficking, saving the bees, the environment or white rhinos, or to
commemorate things like the Pulse Night Club lives lost or people who suffer
from PTSD. The public gets to vote twice---once to narrow it down to the top
100 pieces, then again to narrow the 100 down to the top 20. The winners are
yet to be announced but one of the art jurors thinks a bunch of tee-shirts
hanging on some clotheslines should be the top winner and I thought it looked
like a bunch of ho-hum tee-shirts hanging on clotheslines. She’s too young to
remember drying laundry that way, God, I have paint brushes older than her! After
the art lecture three of my Gathering Girls pals and I went to the Guy Land Cafeteria
for pie, coffee and good conversation. ©
A video of
this year’s top twenty entries can be found here.
