SAXOPHONE

Saxophone
Lately, in City Park, like clockwork dusk carries saxophone notes. They waft over bayous and oak trees, float through the Spanish moss, and drift into an open window just across the street. There, Catherine listens with a smile, wondering who that could be, as night falls over the city of New Orleans, who is out there blowing home the day?
One night, she crosses the street to see. It's Matt, my son Davy's friend and fellow jazz cat, the two of them known in the city as a guitar duo, an up-and-coming pair. In their teens they played at the Acadian, a beer hall, on Wednesday nights, soloing in tandem. After symphony practice the bass player would sit in with the young band, to "stretch out," Davy always said, implying a shedding of some classical restraint he'd been forced to endure those hours before. Now, when Catherine shares her news of Matt’s switching instruments, Davy's not surprised. "He was getting too good at guitar," he says.
All these years I've remembered those words, though I never knew what Davy had meant. Until now. Imagine the pressure when you're up to bat, when the melody halts and all eyes turn to you, alone in the spotlight, expected to wow. And it's not just the audience who've heard about you, who've come out, in fact, at least some of them, for you alone. It's your own expectation and the fear that this time you'll fail to deliver, this time you'll fall flat. And why not, then, seek out the darkness, the solitude, and the spanking new instrument you're learning to play? Why not recover the joy you've lost, the sheer delight in sound itself?
 


Gourd
In my own way now, past seventy, I'm channeling Matt; I'm hitting pause on the memoirs I've been writing for years and taking up a new craft: making masks out of gourds—animals, women, a gallery of birds. I have no idea what I'm doing, and therein lies the joy. I've learned to scrub through the mold, to scoop out and save the seeds, to saw, to paint, to glue, to nail. I've learned how versatile wire can be. I'm learning that less is often more. There is no one in my mind's eye awaiting my product. There are no expectations from others or myself. Before, I would freeze before the empty page, rendered mute by the pitfalls there, all the ways to fail: wordiness, passive voice, banality, mixed metaphors, flowery prose. I knew too many rules. Write what you know. Show, don't tell. Be sparing with adjectives; use nouns and verbs. Now, I'm just guessing, as I hold the gourd between my knees. Should I paint the surface or leave it bare? Should I go for a known bird or settle for birdish? How much whimsy is over the top? Should I tone down the bling? Once I spent the whole day attaching a beak to a parrot's head, failing, trying again, imagining how different my day would be if I'd sat through wood shop instead of that sewing class in junior high.
I set the gourd out to dry in the sun, after spraying it with a clear-gloss coat. I pour a glass of wine as the sun goes down. The fumes of enamel hang in the air, like saxophone notes.
 
Order of Operations
I was not a math whiz, though I could left-brain my way through almost any problem the teacher threw out. I was a plodder, never skipping a step. I could memorize, plug in a formula, check my arithmetic, and get it right. I knew to keep my ducks in a row. But who knew gourds had a PEMDAS too?
I learned the hard way, as I've learned every lesson once I took up gourds. I had chosen a Maranka gourd with its ridges and snout. It was the perfect elephant, and I jumped right in with Juniper berries, dates from palm trees, dried oleander flowers, and agave spikes all held in place with super glue. I used a marker to draw designs in several of the hollows, and when the shapes came out wobbly, I turned to a magazine, found a design I liked, and pasted it in. After all, I reasoned, Picasso and Braque had used such clippings on their canvases. I was happy with my elephant, which looked vaguely Eastern, even though it had no ears. I got out my saw to make it flush with the wall, and my drill for the hanging loop. Too late I saw I had jumped the gun. There was no way to grip the gourd as I sawed off its back. There were berries and barbs beneath my palms; they'd be sure to fall off from the pressure of my hands if not from the motion of sawing itself. I should have sawed first, then drilled, before adorning the gourd. I would need a Plan B.
I found an old coffee tin from Trader Joe's, covered it with bamboo and magazine designs, then balanced the gourd on top, and set it in a recess with my Evil Eye, my Persian fish plate and a street-scene I'd bought in Dbrovnik. I admit to being pleased with myself until I noticed the dusty surface of the elephant's hide. I'd forgotten to spray it with enamel, and now it was too late. The paper would buckle; the juniper berries would turn a bright green, and I wanted to keep their dusty gray-blue. I could almost hear a math professor drilling home his lesson: Order of Operations. P(Parenthesis), E (Exponents), M (Multiplication), D(Division), A (Addition), S(Subtraction). PEMDAS! I would need my own acronym.
S (Scrub) the gourd, then S (Saw) off the back, C (Clean) out the seeds, D (Drill) a hole and A(Attach) a hanging wire. Then, and only then, begin to G (Glue). S (Spray) with clear enamel after most plant materials and metal are attached but before gluing paper, feathers, fabric or any berry whose color might change. SSCDAGS, sort of like Skedaddle. I'd have to remember the fine points on my own.
 
Reader Response
A part of studying literature is debating the question of where meaning lies. In the author's notebooks? In the cultural moment? In the text itself? Or maybe in the mind of the reader who determines that answer for himself. Could it be the same with gourds?
One day I was working on an ibis in my laundry room with the door propped open to the street. This would be, I had decided, a realistic bird, like those I'd seen in New Orleans, and in Gainesville, Florida, where I'd lived before that. I had covered the bill with chili peppers and the red fruit of prickly pears, the dominant plant in my backyard. I was working on the head and face, gluing calyxes from that same plant, now spray-painted white. Then I heard the sound of a wheel chair coming up the driveway. My neighbor, Frank, had come by to see what I was up to. "It's a white ibis," I explained. "These are the feathers." "Looks like a bathing cap," he replied. In an instant I could see it too. I'd had a bathing cap just like that in the early 60s, a white, vaguely petaled affair. Frank had been gone but a minute when my next-door neighbor happened by. Shiling had gone to medschool in China, then become a researcher at U of A. She looked at the gourd, but saw no retro bathing cap. "Looks like brains," she said.
My realistic bird had conjured up for Frank the memory of bathing beauties in his youth; for Shiling, the memory of dissections in a Shanghai lab. I sighed, and let it all go. The next day when I finished the bird, I sent a picture to my brother Tom. In the comments field I typed "White Ibis." Then, reluctantly, "Bird Brain."
 
Katrina
I've always had a thing for the folk-art animal, though never in a million years would I have guessed that someday I'd be making my own. In New Orleans I had a menagerie atop my kitchen cabinets: a Polish ram, a Guatemalan wolf, a Mexican bird , a Navajo sheep, and sadly I've forgotten the rest. But in 2005 they were foremost in my mind when I'd left New Orleans on August 27th and found myself unable to return. The levees had collapsed on the morning of the 29th, sending ten feet of water onto Memphis Street. I did the math—subtracting my porch steps and threshold and ending up with, give or take, seven feet of lake water in my house. In other words, I had lost it all: my books, my clothes, my pictures, my desktop, my furniture, my artwork, but not, perhaps, my animals. It all depended on the force of the wave. Had it been a tsunami? A Lower Ninth Ward deluge sending cars and even houses down the block? Or a slow-water swell, rising in increments almost, but not quite, to the cabinet tops where my animals might be standing still, high and dry? I had to wait almost six weeks to know. In early October I opened the door, looking past the mold on my living room walls and over my toppled refrigerator to that high ledge where they all remained, exactly as I'd left them. They looked strangely serene.
Then, six years later, I lost them all when my crack-addict neighbors set fire to my Tucson house while I slept in a motel in Junction, Texas, halfway to New Orleans where, six years before, they'd beaten the odds. Maybe that's why my house now teems with gourds, some sixty hanging on my walls. It's a step shy of hoarding. It's a ranch-house clown car. There are owls and chickens, elephants and dogs, fish and parakeets, beautiful women and hideous crones. There's a deer and a cow, a generic rodent, a mallard, and a swan. There are gourds in spades.There are gourds in abundance. There is no scarcity of gourds.
 
Scavenging
“What you’re doing,” my old art professor friend from Baton Rouge told me, “is called Found Sculpture.” “But you probably knew that,” he added. I knew in theory, but I didn’t know the term. A colleague of mine in New Orleans made jewelry from the scraps she’d scavenge, and I felt a connection to that. But long before then I’d collected objects, we all had, my sister and brothers, tossed into a station wagon every summer after school let out and taken to distant parts: Alaska, Nova Scotia, New England, the Pacific Northwest. We brought only ourselves, the five of us, and a pillow case containing our clothes, which would double as a pillow in our sleeping bags at night. There was no room for toys or books, so we spent our days finding objects to amuse us. At one point we each had a jar, which we’d filled with rocks. We found bullet shells. We found bottle caps, whose cork seals we’d remove to make badges for our shirts: the cork on the inside, the bottle cap pushed onto it from the shirt’s outside where it stuck for awhile. We collected flat stones to skip over water. I still remember the day in Alaska when my perfect find hopped seven times across the lake. I was six years old.
Now I scavenge in my backyard, a forest of prickly pears and gray-blue agaves with deadly spears. I gather ocotillo spines along the Rillito, a river bed toward the north of town. I stoop for mesquite pods, especially the rarer screwbean sort, which I know where to find. One day I was gathering a bunch that had fallen from a tree along the river path when a woman walking past said, “I collect those too. I put them in glass bowls around the house.” “A kindred spirit,” I thought, “though one with better taste.” I use mine for hair on my female gourds or for a kind of garnish on a fish’s tail.
I pick up not just these pods, but any seed pod whose shape I like. A man with a dog once commented as I walked by, “Jimson weed.” “Really?” I said, remembering the plant from The Sound and the Fury, my favorite Faulkner novel. When I got home I Googled it: a common name for the poisonous datura plant, along with thornapple, devil’s weed, and hell’s bells. Georgia O’Keeffe painted four large blossoms of the plant in the thirties and titled her canvas “Jimson Weed.” I stuck mine on a round gourd with paddlewheel spokes, each a dried pod in various shades of orange and brown.
Sometimes I’m embarrassed to be caught in my gathering. I looked both ways once for witnesses before sinking to my knees in the middle of the street to pull the feathers from a Gila Woodpecker, hit by a car sometime the night before. I’ve twice scooped up flattened lizards from the bike paths on the river’s edge. I’ve collected dead fish from a pond in Sun Lakes, then dried them out on my patio. I attached the heads to some rusty tin cans I’d found on my wanderings to make a kind of hybrid form, a taxiderm-art. I pick up rusty nails. I pick up glass. I pick up metal shards and, come full circle, I gather up bottle caps, flat and rusted or folded up like shells. They no longer contain cork. My beer-drinking brother provides me with his leavings in blues and golds, deep greens and reds. They make eyes and mouths for my human gourds, random bling for my animals. I’ve learned to attach them with a tiny nail whose head blends in with the cap’s design. I’ve learned to clamp them onto twine with pliers. I’ve flattened them with hammers, then glued them to my gourds. They’ve become my most versatile embellishment: shiny, colorful, unabashedly manmade, yet strangely organic when folded in two.
My scavenging has added purpose to my long desert walks, and even to my travels. In New Orleans I stripped Spanish Moss from the oak trees in City Park. In D.C. I pocketed the oyster shells my daughter had slurped before the waitress could cart them away. At Shenandoah National Park I picked up pine cones, catkins, and moss-covered bark. Wherever I go, eyes fixed on the ground, I add to my cache, never knowing what someday I might need—just the right shape of metal or color of glass, the feather, the burr, the blossom, the bone. I hunt and I gather; I carry things home.

Memoir
I might have switched from essays to gourds, as Matt replaced guitar with sax, but I’ve kept my solipsism close at hand. In essence, I’m still writing memoirs, though of a woody sort. The first was a sun gourd bearing witness to my life in the desert Southwest. I used a different shade—from tan to sunburn—in pie-piece segments around the face. Then beneath the left eye, with thorns from a mesquite tree, I honored my skin-cancer scars. It was my own secret comment, like a diary kept locked and stashed under the bed.
Then I made a dog named Hoffman, referencing Hoffman Park, where his flesh-and-blood dead-ringer took a chunk out of my leg as I was power walking the perimeter. When I stopped and said, “Ow,” his owner tried to gaslight me: “He’s a heeler. He’s just trying to herd you.” “He bit me!” I said. Then I walked on, in a vain attempt to salvage my work-out. My leg hurt; when I looked down, I saw blood from my calf to my shoe. But the woman and her dog were gone. My gourd reenactment gave the biter bulging eyes and saguaro-fruit ears, a coat of grey, black, and brown with some shiny metal bottle caps halved and wedged between the warty protrusions on his face. Hoffman’s one of my favorites. I hung him next to another warty gourd that I named Little Lamb. Hoffman’s side-eyed glance makes his intent clear, his eternal unrequited wish to bite Little Lamb, who remains eternally unaware of the menace to its right.  
I’ve made two gourds that document the musical lives of my second son, Davy, and my brother Tom. In Davy’s two joined sand dollars form the body of a guitar while a strip of nails, still attached to their backing, forms the guitar’s neck. Tom’s has the same double-sand dollar base with a neck made of ocotillo, rusty nails and agave spikes. There’s a strange meta-tinge to both of these gourds in that the sand-dollar guitars are memoirs themselves, records, however brief, of a trip to our beach house in Estero Morua on the Sea of Cortez. Everyone who visited the house wrote their memories on a sand dollar, then hung it on the porch. There was soon a long line of them, then more, until the space ran out. They were mini-memoirs, the real-life equivalent of modern flash fiction. And on my gourds they are memoirs upon memoir, a double-decker record of two men’s lives. Davy’s date to the nineteen-eighties, May of ’82, when he was two, then July two years later, when he was four. One of Tom’s records that same May visit, with the now cryptic comment, “Fun Crabs.” The other references Labor Day of 1976 with the note, “Big Wind,” and another, “Hot Coal,” appended to a drawing of that burning lump under Tom’s bare foot.
Most recently, I’ve given face to the 2020 quarantine with another meta structure, a gourd mask wearing a mask. I’ve a mask myself from the same blue fabric that my gourd woman wears. She has hair made from the blossoms of my prickly pears and deep blue eyes made from four beers whose caps Tom popped, then saved for me. She has eyebrows of rusty nails I picked up in my neighborhood. And on her chest is that now iconic virus form, a grey circle bearing five red spikes made from prickly pear calyxes, the same shapes that form my ibis’s face.
Beneath Covid Girl hangs my most self-citing gourd, a woman growing out her gray, as I am myself in these long, languid months—isolated, reading, making gourds. Her bangs have reverted to silver tones, as have three-inch segments from the central part on the top of her head. For a moment I considered updating that growth with a paintbrush periodically to mimic my progress, then reconsidered, as it seemed to border on a weird self-absorption, my world become internal, smaller, as I maintain social distance from the people outside.
I’ve saved for last Niobe, since she breaks my heart. She weeps perpetually, become a stone, as a punishment for boasting of her fourteen children, seven daughters and seven sons, before Leto, who herself had only two. As punishment, those two, Artemis and Apollo, killed Niobe’s children, Artemis the daughters, Apollo the sons. Ever after Niobe mourns. I left her gourd-face uncleaned, her mouth a bottle cap line, her eyes black and under them a stream of black tears. She represents my sorrow at the death of Linda, Davy’s dog, who died on my watch. Suffice it to say, she had kidney disease, and I took her to the vet, but not in time. We FaceTimed good-bye to her family in Brazil from the office of that Tucson vet. For ten days I wept myself, then recovered enough to make my gourd.
Every day I watch Niobe; she watches me. Sometimes I still weep.
 
Ephemerals
I learned about ephemerals from a post someone sent me of a man arranging petals in an artful design; then the hand of that very artist sweeps them all away. I was shocked, but also mesmerized, as the action recurred, again the creation, again the tearing down: “And nothing stands but for his scythe to mow.” Then I realized the photograph of each gave it permanence, that these were ephemerals, doomed to die, to wilt, their colors to fade.
Though my gourds are indestructible, my scavenged objects often aren’t. I’ve watched beaks shrivel when I made them from agave parts; I’ve watched palm debris change color over time; I’ve swept up pollen from the floor beneath a gourd whose hair I made of blossoms from my prickly pears. Only twice have I made whole structures from a fragile source, both times when I’d run out of gourds and found a replacement in my backyard.
Both my parakeet and turtle have been strangely long-lived, though made of prickly-pear pads, my turtle to date( June, 2020) having lasted eighteen months, though its green is now lighter than the deep forest color it originally had. My parakeet only recently died, having first proclaimed its health by sending out a new pad. I was then in DC and my renters texted me: “Your sculpture is alive!” with a picture of the sprouting bird. My turtle has recently sent out two pads, a desperate glomming onto life. Perhaps it’s not long for its world, the wall over my kitchen sink. I wonder if it will die the same way as my parakeet.
One morning I casually wiped up a coffee spill on my kitchen counter, then came back later to find another spill. I’d finished with my coffee long ago, had swished out the dregs and washed the cup. This was no coffee spill. Then I looked up to see that my parakeet looked saggy. When I touched it, its skin felt like mush and a foul brown liquid gushed out in a widening pool on my counter and floor. “Goodbye, old friend; you’ve served me well,” I thought, and dumped him in the trash. I hung in his place a more hardy bird made of bottle caps, oyster shells and feathers on a gourd, nothing likely to rot or drip.
Today, early June, once again I’m out of gourds, and the gourd farm is closed due to Covid-19. I need a different armature. I’m scrounging in my workroom. I’m looking for metal. I’m thinking bamboo. I’m through with ephemerals, their transience too apt now, the life having oozed out of over a hundred thousand souls, and one black man, most recent in a long line, drained of life. We are all ephemerals.
 
The Intentional Fallacy
In gourd art, as in writing, you learn to let go. A passing neighbor might make you see your creation anew, or the gourd you are shaping might morph beneath your fingers. I’ve seen this happen on the page before. Once I had in mind from the outset how my essay would end. Then, a paragraph before I was to launch that plan, the essay decided to end itself. “Oh, no,” was my first thought. My second, “Oh, well.” So I knew what to do when a gourd-bird asserted itself.
My intention was to use the wire I had scavenged in my neighborhood to make the feathers for a bird’s face and neck. I twisted the wire into feather shapes and nailed them on with gold-colored brads. What could possibly go wrong? It seems there is more to feathers than shape; there is texture, softness, a wispiness my metal couldn’t capture; it was heavy and rigid, incapable of feathering, of being a verb. So I followed its lead. Instead of the real bird, the Monk Parakeet I had set out to make, I let the bird express itself. It was clearly drawn to the punk subculture, into piercings, if not tattoos. I underscored this leaning by adding glass to the wire forms. Then I hung the bird in the kitchen to the left of my ibis, another bird not easily corralled.
As I cook my dinner, my two birds amuse me, the ibis become Bird Brain and his soulmate Pierce, the Punk Parakeet. They hang, in a double sense, bird bros on my wall.
 
History
When I scavenge on the river path, I think of Alaska and my six-year-old self, scooping up bullet shells and flattened rocks. When I superglue my findings onto a gourd, I envision my mother, sitting on our patio in Tempe, Arizona, with tiles in her hand. For awhile she was slightly obsessive, as I am now, gluing tiles onto tables to create, like me, birds. The first was a phoenix rising out of its ashes. Beneath it she mosaicked the word “Immortalis,” a spot-on capturing of how the bird lives on in a gourd-strung kitchen in Tucson, Arizona, and perhaps someday in another iteration by an offspring of mine.
I remember the table she made for our foyer, a small rounded L-shape, suggestive of Miro. Though she didn’t tile it, she hung above it a Degas dancer changing out of her clothes. She was seated with her back to the viewer, her reddish hair unraveling from her bun. I loved walking in the door to my mother’s table and Degas’ print, then into the living room where she’d hung a Roualt, “Two Kings” as I remember, and over the piano a seascape by Picasso with a French flag, its colors running out of its frame. “Dripping Flag,” my father would say in disparagement as he walked by. Together my parents were an oxymoron, my father fact-bound, my mother poetic. Once I tried to explain to my father why an abstract artist might paint as he did. “Why,” I said, “would an artist want to do what a camera could do itself?” He wouldn’t listen. The best art was mirror-like, and that was that.
When I was in my teens, my mother made a table just for me. This was highly unusual. We were many, my siblings and me, like a litter, even almost grown, a kind of conglomerate. Alone time with a parent was rare. To be singled out rarer. To be singled out and given a handmade gift, absolutely beyond my ken. When I was sixteen a boyfriend noticed that my back was crooked. When he pointed it out, my parents were shocked, and sent me to the doctor who was furious that my curvature had so progressed. “I’ve never seen this one,” he said of me. Had anyone seen me? At sixteen I had never been to the doctor, and now I’d carry to my grave that crooked spine. But my mother was making me a table. A thunderbird atop a surface she’d painted black. It had coral and silver and jade and a wish for me: eternal happiness, my mother said.
Today, for the first time I looked up the thunderbird, and nowhere does the notion of“happiness” appear. Instead, it is a figure of power: lightning shoots out from its beak, and thunder claps with each beat of its wings. Had my mother failed to look up the bird she was making? Or, true to her nature, had she given it her own spin, preferring to gift me not power but joy? I took the table along when I moved to LA after college. Later I stored it in the workroom of a friend, and someone stole it. I was crushed. When I told my mother, she never let on if she were devastated too. We never mentioned it again. It occurs to me now that this was my first in a long string of losses—houses, photographs, and folk-art animals to fire, flood, and theft. Did I lose my gift of happiness too? Was it transferred with the table to the thief? My mother said on her death-bed to my sister, “Wendy, I’m perfectly happy.” So maybe the gift remains with the giver, the wish fed back onto its source.
I’m looking up now at the line of birds on my kitchen walls—no phoenix among them, no thunderbird, but I see my mother just the same in the choice to veer from the natural bird, the creature in the mirror, and to freestyle instead. There is joy in just winging it, in stretching out, in soloing, in starting anew.