(From The Way-Back Files – The Farmington Valley Herald,
1980 - 81.)
Early in my career, I had the good fortune to interview two very fine, thoughtful writers: Clavin Fisher (1912 – 2006) and Stephen Minot (1927 -2010). They were incredibly kind and supportive, and they quickly became part of my stable of regular interviewees. This quote by Elizabeth Goudge, herself a wonderful spinner of tales, sums them both up for me:
“For storytellers know what is the source of the misplaced admiration; they as well as actors, clowns and conjurers, are the public entertainers, and from the dawn of the world the entertainers have been placed upon pedestals because they can amuse the world, make it lay aside its worries for a whole hour as it watches players upon a lighted stage, or forget its pain as it holds a book in its hands and cries aloud like a child at night-time, “Tell me a story. Light the candle and tell me a story.”
********************************
His enthusiasm for history and local legend dominates the conversation. And you quickly get the feeling that Clavin Fisher writes his historical children’s novels more for himself than for anyone else.
Fisher, who lives in West Simsbury, Connecticut, casually dismisses his work as “junk.” He has always been a writer but “a sort of frustrated one,” he says in that gentlemanly self-deprecating way of his. “I’d had success immediately, which ‘got’ me.” He’s referring to articles that he wrote for Our Navy and Boys’ Life back in the 1940s. The need to earn a living after the war put that dream on hold, however. Only when he retired from the Aetna Life and Casualty insurance company in Hartford was he able to purse his pet project: a children’s novel about Simsbury’s involvement in the Revolutionary War.
A Spy at Fort Ticonderoga started out as a story for Fisher’s own children, Peter and Wendy. It focuses on a young boy named Davy Holcomb, who accompanies his uncle, Captain Noah Phelps, on a spying expedition for the Connecticut and Massachusetts militias. And it has enjoyed a steady popularity with young readers as several thoroughly dog-eared copies in the local library testify.
Davy is fictional, based on the writer’s son Peter. “I wanted people to believe that he [Davy] was a real person,” Fisher says. By using a common New England surname like Holcomb, he hoped to make the boy even more “believable.” But the story itself is based almost entirely on fact. The plan to capture Fort Ticonderoga, a British stronghold on Lake Champlain, was developed by the Connecticut Committee on Safety, a forerunner of the present state legislature. At the time of the war, it served it served as a sort of transitional government.
Fisher tells me in detail how the expedition left Hartford for Fort Ticonderoga in the spring of 1775. Phelps was considered “a logical choice” for a leader: as a teenager, he had spied for the British during the French and Indian War. He’d also been with General Jeffrey Amherst’s troops in 1759, when the fort was originally taken from the French: his inside knowledge of the fort and his skill as a spy were “critical to victory.” Apparently not overly concerned with self-glorification or prestige, Phelps relinquished his command – first to Captain Edward Mott of New Preston, Connecticut and then to the joint leadership of Ethan Allen and Benedict Arnold.
“The Connecticut and Massachusetts militias were almost entirely responsible for the capture of Fort Ticonderoga,” Fisher says seriously. “The Green Mountain Boys played only a small part in it.” He goes on to explain how after the Revolution, an enterprising journalist interviewed a number of veterans and compiled these “exclusives” into a book, complete with battlefield sketches. The interviews with Allen and his Green Mountain Boys are “quite revealing” as to how much of a part they actually played in that victory. A priceless find by any historian’s estimation, the book became one of the main sources for A Spy at Fort Ticonderoga.
Fisher has an ear for a good story, and he brings some of his best stories along with him for the interview. One involves a notorious Tory colonel named Philip Skene, who owned what amounted to a “little kingdom” in New York State – 50,000 acres of land complete with mills, a general store, and a small fort, which was captured by Captain Elisha Phelps (brother to Noah) before Ticonderoga was seized. It had to be. “It would have been a dagger in their backs if they hadn’t,” Fisher explains.
Skene and his family were taken prisoner and marched down to Connecticut, but they left something behind: the crudely mummified body of Mistress Skene. Phelps and his men learned that the dead woman had enjoyed a substantial yearly income, which was to last, according to the legalese of the day, “as long as she remained above ground.” Eager not to lose the income, Skene had her mummified. “I don’t know how true this next part is,” Fisher remarks, “but they say he used to hold her hand whenever he signed the money receipts. I wanted to use the story in A Spy at Fort Ticonderoga, but I couldn’t because it was a children’s book.”
Even without this story, A Spy at Fort Ticonderoga (which was, at one point, on the New York State school program’s suggested reading list) is still a wonderful read. Fisher has a gift for making history very real to his young readers. “I get a kick out of reading and re-reading the letters kids write me,” he says happily. “One of the youngsters wrote to me that I seemed to know so much about Benedict Arnold that I must have just talked to him.”
*****************************
A sharp intelligence and an equally sharp sense of humor characterize Stephen Minot’s conversation. Hunting words is definitely his delight: a well-turned phrase or image has him practically purring. So we go off on a word expedition. “That’s good,” he says when I quote from a review I’ve just read. And it isn’t even about one of his books. He just knows a good figure of speech when he hears it.
Writing has always been a major part of his life. In addition to several novels, he has written a number of short stories and a textbook, Three Genres: The Writing of Poetry, Fiction, and Drama. “I wrote my first novel when I was 16,” the Simsbury, Connecticut writer recalls. “I didn’t finish it, but I started it.” He laughs genially. “You see, if you do become a writer, then people will say that you knew what you were meant to be at an early age.”
There’s more to him than that, though. Minot, a former associate professor of creative writing at Trinity College in Hartford and winner of a National Endowments for the Arts (NEA) creative-writing fellowship, is deeply concerned with socio-political issues, and that concern shows in his writing. Back in 1966, fiercely opposed to the war in Vietnam, he ran for Congress as a third-party candidate. His slogan? “Why not Minot?” He didn’t win, but the political activist never went away either.
Surviving the Flood (Atheneum), his latest novel, is essentially a “re-telling of the whole Noah story from the view of his son Ham, age 900, looking back to his youth,” Minot explains. “It’s a ‘now-it-can-be-told’ expose of what really happened on the Ark, an ‘if-you-ever-wanted-to-know’ piece. It has some of the comic elements you might expect on a boat with a lot of people who don’t get along with each other and a lot of animals who don’t get along with each other.”
There is, however, a darker side to the novel…disquieting “suggestions” about “who are the fortunate, who are the unfortunate, and how the survivors should look upon the latter.” It is, to Minot’s way of thinking, a particularly “telling theme” for the 1980s, when people are dying in underdeveloped, politically unstable countries. “The novel is essentially comic, but there is this other side which keeps it from being a Mel Brooks screenplay. Every time you read the newspaper, you see this relationship between the advantaged and the disadvantaged, both on a domestic and an international level.”
For Minot, it’s a matter of re-visioning. The Noah’s Ark story always appealed to his imagination, but it struck him as being way too short. The idea of that many human beings attempting to survive this apocalyptic flood in a wooden boat, no matter how large, was one that “called out for enhancement.”
But he’s quick to point out that he’s not the only one who has thought that. Artists over the centuries have paved the way with their imaginative illustrations, some of which appear in the novel. “If you look at what the artists have done with the story, you see that it is in the common possession of us all, similar to the Greek myths, which do not belong to the Greeks or pagans alone any more than a Biblical story belongs solely to Christians.”
Several enthusiastic reviews have already appeared. “He [Minot] makes legendary figures long since assumed to have been frozen in stone come marvelously to life in a way that will horrify Biblical literalists,” a writer for the Dallas Times Herald observes. “Surviving the Flood is sure to make their hit list and that is enough to recommend it.”
And that, to Minot, is probably one of the most satisfying accolades of all.
Thursday, April 11, 2013
Monday, March 4, 2013
Heart to Heart
You know plain enough there's somethin' beyond this world; the doors stand wide open.
- Sarah Orne Jewett, The Country of the Pointed Firs and Other Stories
***************
She was just a high-school kid, living with her aunt in Queens, New York, when she met him, Shawn Reid remembers. Delroy – or “Bunny,” as everybody called him – was a track star from Montego Bay, Jamaica. But he had friends in Connecticut, where her mom was living, so they had that in common.
“We became friends.” Reid, who works in a correctional facility in Suffield, Connecticut, speaks very earnestly. “You know when they say you meet your soul mate? He was mine.”
They married in 1988. Four years later, Bunny and some friends headed down to Louisiana for some guy time. “We used to do ‘girl trips’ and ‘boy trips,’” she says, “and this particular trip was his turn to go away. He was the one driving the car. They got into a car accident and hit a pole. He was the only one who got hurt and eventually died from it. Nobody else got hurt – not even a broken arm or leg or anything.”
Curiously enough, the autopsy also revealed something that Bunny hadn’t even been aware of: an enlarged heart.
Shawn, who was seven months pregnant when the tragedy took place, dragged herself home after the funeral. She went straight to bed, only to find that she had a visitor….Bunny. “I don’t care what nobody said, I remember him coming in that room and touching my hand and telling me everything is going to be O. K. I felt his presence – I smelt him and everything. And you know how you sleep but you know what’s going on around you? I felt him telling me everything is going to be O. K.”
But Reid could be excused for thinking that her husband’s spirit wasn’t the best oracle out there. The very next week, Tia, the baby girl she’d been carrying, was born prematurely and died twenty minutes after birth. The child had developed a heart problem in utero; and if things weren’t bad enough, so did Reid. “It happens in one out of 2,500 pregnancies that you develop a heart problem,” she explains. “That whole month is like a blur. I couldn’t even tell you the day, the month, or anything….My aunt passed away that same month. It was a horrible, horrible month.”
Things didn’t turn around right away either. Reid’s body just broke down: she had a stroke in 1996 and then, two years later, found herself in need of a heart transplant. When she was admitted to the hospital, she was “so full of water that they told me if they didn’t get the water off, I had only two more weeks to live. So, when I got there, I was so out of it, you could say I was, like, comatose.”
She remembers lying in that hospital bed, connected to tubes and being vaguely aware of her family’s voices in the background. And then, suddenly – it really was like an out-of-the-body experience, she says -- there she was, talking to Bunny again.
“He’s telling me, ‘It’s not time – go back.’ I’m listening to him like ‘I’m just sick of all this.’ And he’s saying, ‘Go on back – just go on back. Everything is O. K.’ He was telling me how he was taking care of my daughter – that my aunt was helping him.” His eyes never left her face. “He looked happy and still looked good.” The fact that he was still watching over her, just the way he had when he was alive, was “a comfort.”
When he told her about Tia, her response was instinctive: “‘Let me see her – I want to see her.’ And I remember that was the end of the conversation, with him telling me everything was all right. But I never got a chance to see her. I always wondered why, you know…always wondered what she looked like.” Reid sighs. “I’ll see her when I get there – I’ll see her when I get there.”
Reid adjusted to life with a new heart and was able to go back to work in 2000. Her finances turned around, and she met somebody new. And over time, she got rid of Bunny’s things. But she still has that sense of him being around “all the time. You know, we used to do a lot of traveling back and forth to New York. And if I go by something that we would talk about, then a smile will come on my face because I can hear him saying, ‘Remember that? The things we used to do?’ Because we used to talk all the time. He was my best friend.”
- Sarah Orne Jewett, The Country of the Pointed Firs and Other Stories
***************
She was just a high-school kid, living with her aunt in Queens, New York, when she met him, Shawn Reid remembers. Delroy – or “Bunny,” as everybody called him – was a track star from Montego Bay, Jamaica. But he had friends in Connecticut, where her mom was living, so they had that in common.
“We became friends.” Reid, who works in a correctional facility in Suffield, Connecticut, speaks very earnestly. “You know when they say you meet your soul mate? He was mine.”
They married in 1988. Four years later, Bunny and some friends headed down to Louisiana for some guy time. “We used to do ‘girl trips’ and ‘boy trips,’” she says, “and this particular trip was his turn to go away. He was the one driving the car. They got into a car accident and hit a pole. He was the only one who got hurt and eventually died from it. Nobody else got hurt – not even a broken arm or leg or anything.”
Curiously enough, the autopsy also revealed something that Bunny hadn’t even been aware of: an enlarged heart.
Shawn, who was seven months pregnant when the tragedy took place, dragged herself home after the funeral. She went straight to bed, only to find that she had a visitor….Bunny. “I don’t care what nobody said, I remember him coming in that room and touching my hand and telling me everything is going to be O. K. I felt his presence – I smelt him and everything. And you know how you sleep but you know what’s going on around you? I felt him telling me everything is going to be O. K.”
But Reid could be excused for thinking that her husband’s spirit wasn’t the best oracle out there. The very next week, Tia, the baby girl she’d been carrying, was born prematurely and died twenty minutes after birth. The child had developed a heart problem in utero; and if things weren’t bad enough, so did Reid. “It happens in one out of 2,500 pregnancies that you develop a heart problem,” she explains. “That whole month is like a blur. I couldn’t even tell you the day, the month, or anything….My aunt passed away that same month. It was a horrible, horrible month.”
Things didn’t turn around right away either. Reid’s body just broke down: she had a stroke in 1996 and then, two years later, found herself in need of a heart transplant. When she was admitted to the hospital, she was “so full of water that they told me if they didn’t get the water off, I had only two more weeks to live. So, when I got there, I was so out of it, you could say I was, like, comatose.”
She remembers lying in that hospital bed, connected to tubes and being vaguely aware of her family’s voices in the background. And then, suddenly – it really was like an out-of-the-body experience, she says -- there she was, talking to Bunny again.
“He’s telling me, ‘It’s not time – go back.’ I’m listening to him like ‘I’m just sick of all this.’ And he’s saying, ‘Go on back – just go on back. Everything is O. K.’ He was telling me how he was taking care of my daughter – that my aunt was helping him.” His eyes never left her face. “He looked happy and still looked good.” The fact that he was still watching over her, just the way he had when he was alive, was “a comfort.”
When he told her about Tia, her response was instinctive: “‘Let me see her – I want to see her.’ And I remember that was the end of the conversation, with him telling me everything was all right. But I never got a chance to see her. I always wondered why, you know…always wondered what she looked like.” Reid sighs. “I’ll see her when I get there – I’ll see her when I get there.”
Reid adjusted to life with a new heart and was able to go back to work in 2000. Her finances turned around, and she met somebody new. And over time, she got rid of Bunny’s things. But she still has that sense of him being around “all the time. You know, we used to do a lot of traveling back and forth to New York. And if I go by something that we would talk about, then a smile will come on my face because I can hear him saying, ‘Remember that? The things we used to do?’ Because we used to talk all the time. He was my best friend.”
Friday, February 15, 2013
A Man and His Cat: Dr. Frederick Feibel & Herbert J. Cat
He was walking through the wards at the Avon Veterinary Clinic, Dr. Feibel recalls, poking his fingers through the cage doors the way he always did. But this time, a white kitten with a Charlie Chaplinesque face “came charging up and grabbed a finger – no claws out – and hung on. Purred like mad.” The 87-year-old vet laughs. “After three or four times, I said, ‘I can’t leave this little guy here,’ so I hauled him home.” And that was the beginning of his fine, furry friendship with Herbert J. Cat, an Animal Friends of Connecticut rescue.
Feibel, who opened the clinic in Avon, Connecticut back in 1958, had always been partial to cats. Back when he was in vet school in Oklahoma, he and his wife Miller “had a cat – looked somewhat like Herb. She adopted us and presented us with a litter of kittens.” Puss Mama traveled from Oklahoma with the Feibels and proceeded to make herself very much at home, sleeping with them and scooting as far under the covers as she could go. But then Miller began to have “a real bad asthmatic reaction. The doctor tested her and decided that it was the cat.” So Puss Mama went to live with Feibel’s mother, and the household remained cat-less till well after Miller’s death in 2001.
Feibel was a little worried about introducing a kitten to his two older dogs at first. He needn’t have been. The moment he let Herbie out of the rec room, “the two of them accepted him. The big yellow Lab, he [Herbie] rubs his head on her head. Other times, he torments her: he chews on her tail, chews on her feet.” The vet’s voice trails off in laughter. “And the elkhound…he’s just totally in control. He goes by her and reaches up and whacks her.”
Yep, Herbie pretty much runs the show. His food dish is on the counter, away from the dogs, but that doesn’t stop him from joining his human for a more up-close-and-personal dinner: “I must admit, my wife would probably be upset, but while I’m eating at the table, he hops up there. And if there’s salmon or turkey, he helps me along….He doesn’t mind helping me out at all.”
Feibel’s laughing as he talks. In fact, he laughs throughout the entire interview. His joy in this cat is very real. “He’s so much fun, so much company, it’s just great for me to have him around.” If he’s relaxing in his recliner, Herbie doesn’t just walk over to him – he “runs across the room, leaps through the air, lands on my lap, and stretches across my leg. He has this perfect position he has to get in. He purrs away, and he’s happy to be there.” At night, when Feibel’s reading in bed, this scenario repeats itself with a few variations. Even though Herbie has “his own bedroom with a regular bed in it” (“It’s pretty classy,” the vet observes.), Herbie will suddenly appear, leaping over the bed and “stick[ing] his butt up into my face. So, at least five or ten minutes, I rub it down, and I’m patting him, and his motor’s going all the time.” And it’s not necessarily a one-shot deal: Herbie has been known to show up again in the middle of the night for another massage/work-out if he hears his buddy wake up.
He’s an indoor cat, naturally. “I worry about the coyotes,” Feibel admits. “I get shudders when I see out here [on the bulletin board] a note about a lost cat.” But Herbie seems to be OK with not going outdoors. He has a fairly busy life…stretching his claws and doing “his exercises” on the sofa…checking out noises around the old farmhouse…making the rounds of the upstairs bedrooms…and warming himself on the slate by the woodstove in the dining room.
They’ve been together three years now, and the camaraderie between them is titanium-steel-strong. “I’m so fortunate to get a hold of him,” Feibel reflects. It’s still “so funny” to him, the way Herbie “attached to me as a little kitten. There were four or five in that litter, and he ran over and grabbed that finger. Yeah, he chose me.”
Monday, January 14, 2013
House Call
(From The Way-Back Files -- Miracles of Healing, Guideposts 2006.)
We sat atop the cemetery knoll, my old friend and I, staring in
disbelief at the newly made grave. “What
am I going to do, Jenny?” I sobbed,
crumpling against her shoulder. “What am
I going to do?”
I was 34-years-old
and just widowed with a 3 ½ -year-old child, Zeke. I felt as if someone had ripped my arm off
and beaten me over the head with it. And
I had this horrible aching sense of suddenly not belonging anywhere, not even
in my own home. The house that Tim and I
had bought prior to our marriage – a circa 1918 house that I had loved for its
quirks, even while he’d complained about its smallness – had, overnight, become
a desolate No-Man’s Land, and I was wandering around in it like one of those
shell-shocked WWI soldiers in a Hemingway novel.
Still, Zeke and I had
to live somewhere. So I went over the
checklist that we’d been working on before Tim’s car accident. We’d already contracted people to do the
painting and wallpapering, so I went ahead with scheduling those things. My oldest brother finished up the enclosed
front porch, putting up the last few pieces of tobacco-barn wood paneling that
Tim hadn’t gotten to. I cleaned up the
rest of the old beadboard wainscoting and painted the trim in the kitchen.
Better, I thought once those things had been completed, but it’s still not enough. I moved my bedroom up to the third floor,
where Tim’s absence would, I told myself, not haunt me so deeply. I took down the mini-blinds and put lace
panels in their place, hoping to let the light in but, at the same time, maintain
some privacy. I hired a carpenter to
build a new stair railing, extra kitchen cabinets, and covers for the
old-fashioned stand-up radiators.
Nice, I said to myself. But,
in my heart of hearts, I knew I’d been happier when the whole house was still a
work in progress with barely any wallpaper up and what Tim had scathingly
called “garbage-bag-brown paint” in the kitchen. When he’d been there with us, joking and
moving through the various projects with that quicksilver energy of his.
I kept working on the
house, basically doing whatever I could to make both the house and myself feel at
ease with one another again. Then, one
morning, a good 5 ½ years after Tim’s death, I was painting the kitchen – again
– when the truth came to me. Not with
any fanfare but quietly and kindly, like an old friend waiting for just the
right moment to speak her mind. It’s time, isn’t it? Truth said, pulling up one of the
Hitchcock chairs that I had so carefully saved up for early in my marriage.
Yes, I said, pausing in mid-brushstroke, it really is. I don’t want to be
here anymore. It's hard admitting that you've fallen out of love, whether it's with a person or a place.
I found a realtor – or,
rather, a realtor found me. Lori showed
up at my back door one day, canvassing the neighborhood for prospective
sellers. And I found a house – or, I should
say, the house, like Lori, found me.
Early one Sunday afternoon, I was scanning the real estate section in
the paper when one house in particular caught my eye. The picture showed a white Cape
Cod house in the town where Tim and I had grown up. It was very similar to the one I’d grown up
in and very much within my price range.
I told the man I was
dating – a letter carrier who happened to work in the same town as the Cape – about my find.
There was silence, followed by a chuckle. “That’s the fourth house on my route,” he informed
me, adding thoughtfully, “I could make it the last house on my route,
though…Would the postman have to ring twice?”
By the end of the week, I was standing in the
Cape ’s wide sunny living room, and I knew, without
knowing how I knew, that I had come
home. I could see us sitting in this
living room, my grandmother’s black cat andirons presiding over this hearth as
they had over the great stone hearth in her old farmhouse (there’d been no
fireplace in our 1918 house) – could see Zeke playing in the finished-off
section of the basement on rainy days.
There were enough trees on the property to satisfy my tree-worshipping
heart and an inexplicable but strong feeling that the house – which had been
neglected by its current owners -- had been waiting for us.
Oddly enough, my
father-in-law, pragmatic soul that he was, wrote me a letter that underscored
this feeling. He was living out in Arizona Clark house.”
Of course, it takes
awhile to put down roots in any relationship, and this new one that we were entering
into with the Clark house was no
exception. I tackled both house and yard
slowly, trying to get a good feel for what they needed. And there were still things that I had to
call experts in for, such as wallpapering, re-wiring, and removing the
half-dead shrubbery out in front. But I
did more of the work here myself, rag-rolling the majority of the rooms in
purply-blue, mauve, and creamy yellow and putting in flowers, trees, and herbs
that spoke to something deep inside me. As
I painted each room, I, like the walls, became alive and singing with color.
Likewise, as I planted pale-yellow Solstice roses, rainbow-hued irises, red bee
balm, and kaleidoscope butterfly bushes with their fragrant calico flowers, I
drew new strength and energy from the ground I was working.
It has been 11 years
since we came here. Perhaps the
pussywillow tree that I put in a couple of years ago says it best. I have always loved pussywllows – as a sign
of spring and for memory’s sake but especially for the old Polish legend about
them. According to that legend, some
kittens were thrown into a river; and the mother-cat cried so piteously, the
willows on the bank felt her pain and held out their branches for the kittens
to cling to. My tree reminds me of that
legend and how, in a very real sense, this house called to me, holding out a
life-line and helping me find my way back to myself.
Wednesday, January 2, 2013
Mama's Rabbits
The
rabbits are white -- well, sorta -- and definitely the worse for wear. The dainty pink-lined ears have been cobbled
back on so often, there’s more than a little beading of glue around them. And one of the sitting-up rabbit’s ears was
glued on badly the last time around, giving him a slightly askew look.
Mama,
my maternal grandmother, gave them to me.
One
afternoon, while we were visiting her up at the old farmhouse, she and my
mother fell to discussing a woman they knew.
I was just at the age -- 11 or 12 -- when adult conversations were
starting to intrigue me, so I listened in. Besides, I knew the woman they were talking about and liked her. Mama did not, however, and made that
colorfully clear. I protested.
“You
hush up!” Mama snapped. “This doesn’t concern you.”
She
was right, of course -- it didn’t -- but the words jarred me. She had never yelled at me before. I mean, this was Mama whom I played gin rummy
with and who told me all sorts of bobbeh-mysehs (literally
“grandmother’s stories”) about her childhood.
Who called me “mommeleh” (“little mother”) and who had gotten my
beloved cat, Alexander, for me when my dad had been in the hospital. Still smarting from her rebuke, I went home
without giving her my usual good-bye kiss and hug.
The
following Sunday, Mama came to our house for dinner. She handed me a shoe box. In it were two white rabbits she had made in
her ceramics class. She never said a
word about our argument, and we never had another one in all the years that
were left to her.
Other
knickknacks have come and gone, but those rabbits still sit on the bookcase in
my office. And they’ll keep sitting
there because I’ll keep gluing their ears back on as long as there’s something
to glue them back onto. You see, they’re
reminders not only of Mama’s love but also of some simple truths that I am only
beginning to grasp...truths that she understood as instinctively as she did the
flowers in her garden. That there are
many different ways of saying you’re sorry.
And that some things, like my china rabbits, are worth fixing, no matter
what.
Friday, December 7, 2012
Angels in Fur Suits: Julie Tichota
(From The Way-Back Files —Just Cats!, Winter 1998.)
Julie Tichota was one of those souls caught between worlds. The artist, who started Angels Afoot, a mail-order cat-art business in Joplin, Missouri, back in 1993, had an obvious spiritual bent. “Julie went to church, and she was very into angels, as you can see,” remarks Hazel Balfour, the minister’s wife and fellow Maine Coon cat breeder who took over the business with her friend, Joyce Major, after Tichota’s death from myelofibrosis in December 1997. “She had lots of angel babies [in her work]….She had been a hippie type back in the ‘70s – some of that still clung to her.”
Tichota’s winged felines aren't the cutesy little critters with wings and halos that you might expect. Based on her own Maine Coons, they are drawn in the same loving detail that you see in British artist Lesley Anne Ivory’s work. In fact, so realistic are they – right down from their sweetly soulful expressions to the lynx-like tufts of fur in their ears -- you almost forget about those wings.
The drawings, which grace T-shirts, nightshirts, stained-glass hangings and boxes, “reflected her personality, too,” Balfour insists. “That’s the type of personality she was – very tasteful.” But Tichota, despite her fascination with angels, wasn’t entirely otherworldly. She was a perfectionist, using only the highest-quality materials. Since the myelofibrosis had left her extremely sensitive to chemicals, she had to make sure that those materials were “as non-toxic as possible.” She was “very safety-conscious in that respect. When she had to use the darkroom [for printing], she had to wear a safety mask.”
Her love of cats was, in a sense, the bridge between the two worlds for Tichota. In her studio and darkroom – cat angels; in the day-to-day world – her beloved Maine Coons, which she began breeding around 1992, and the strays that she helped whenever possible. She gave both time and money to the Joplin Humane Society: she was so involved with the organization, Balfour remembers, they once called her in “to calm down an unmanageable cat. She showed up with some herbs to calm it down because she wanted it to be adopted. I know she was tickled when they told her it had been adopted.” And when she died, the Society turned up in full force at her memorial service.
Bucky, her first Maine Coon – or, at least, her first Maine Coon-type cat – came to her courtesy of them. Not only did he get her hooked on Maine Coons, but he became the poster kitty for Angels Afoot, appearing in the original version of “All God’s Angels Come to Us Disguised.” (Later, Tichota re-did the design, using two kittens from her first litter of Maine Coons.)
Bucky was soon joined by Phoebe, a purebred Maine Coon that the artist bought. Among Phoebe’s first kittens was Gracie, who was Tichota’s feline kindred spirit and who figures in a number of prints. (There is still one painting of Gracie that Angels Afoot has yet to release.) Gracie had one litter of her own, then died in 1996 following a routine spaying operation. Essentially, she “bled out.” For Tichota, it was like losing a child: “Julie spent the whole night making a casket for Gracie. She even got those beads with the letters on them and made a bracelet for Gracie’s paw. She had her cremated, and she kept the ashes. And when she died, she wanted her ashes and Gracie’s put together.”
But that wasn’t the end of it. Not for Tichota, who was “very headstrong when it came to her cats and her art.” She painted Gracie steadily for a year after her death. Balfour recalls the artist saying, “’It was fun – I got to look at her all day long – I got to look at her face.’ Artists are that way. I would’ve found it very upsetting, but it was her way of grieving.” “Heavenly Vigil” -- which turned out to be Tichota’s last work and the only one she ever did in full color – featured two of Gracie’s kittens, Tink and Wooley, “looking toward heaven to their mother.”
That strong mother-feeling she had for Gracie came into play with other cats, too. “As ill as she was,” Balfour says, “the cats were a part of her life – not just her cats but any cats.” Take Amigo, for instance. The elderly stray (“He was old,” the artist’s friend remarks. “I mean, that cat was ancient. He looked like he’d been through wars!”), who had tested positive for Feline Infectious Peritonitis (FIP), couldn’t be allowed to mingle with her other cats, of course; so Tichota “got a large dog house for him, put it in her front yard, put straw around it, and he pretty much stayed there” until he died. Then there was Biscuit-Head, another stray whom the partners are still looking after. “Any cat who knew the neighborhood knew it could get a meal there [from Julie],” Balfour laughs. “It helped if they were sick. She would see a cat by the road, and she’d pull over and try to catch it.”
The Balfours, who already run what Hazel calls “a hospice and placement service for Maine Coons,” have been taking care of Tichota’s cats since her death; whatever profits they’ve made from Angels Afoot have gone toward their upkeep and medical expenses, including spaying and neutering. It has been tricky finding the right homes for the cats because they’re not used to being handled. Tichota was too ill to pick them up, Balfour explains, “so she didn’t. Basically, her days consisted of her lying in bed with the cats all around her.” Still, they’ve managed to place all but the two most skittish ones.
Taking care of Tichota’s beloved pets – trying to keep Angels Afoot going and “to present Julie’s work in the same manner that she would have wanted” – all these things the women have undertaken out of their love for her and for all things feline. “We were in the cat realm,” Balfour says simply. “Some people are in the cat realm, and some people aren’t.”
*****Since I wrote this piece, Angels Afoot has expanded its line-up to include mouse pads, clocks, cutting boards, ceramic plates, jewelry, and mugs featuring Tichota’s work. They also do more personalized work. You can find them at http://www.angelsafootdesigns.com.
Julie Tichota was one of those souls caught between worlds. The artist, who started Angels Afoot, a mail-order cat-art business in Joplin, Missouri, back in 1993, had an obvious spiritual bent. “Julie went to church, and she was very into angels, as you can see,” remarks Hazel Balfour, the minister’s wife and fellow Maine Coon cat breeder who took over the business with her friend, Joyce Major, after Tichota’s death from myelofibrosis in December 1997. “She had lots of angel babies [in her work]….She had been a hippie type back in the ‘70s – some of that still clung to her.”
Tichota’s winged felines aren't the cutesy little critters with wings and halos that you might expect. Based on her own Maine Coons, they are drawn in the same loving detail that you see in British artist Lesley Anne Ivory’s work. In fact, so realistic are they – right down from their sweetly soulful expressions to the lynx-like tufts of fur in their ears -- you almost forget about those wings.
The drawings, which grace T-shirts, nightshirts, stained-glass hangings and boxes, “reflected her personality, too,” Balfour insists. “That’s the type of personality she was – very tasteful.” But Tichota, despite her fascination with angels, wasn’t entirely otherworldly. She was a perfectionist, using only the highest-quality materials. Since the myelofibrosis had left her extremely sensitive to chemicals, she had to make sure that those materials were “as non-toxic as possible.” She was “very safety-conscious in that respect. When she had to use the darkroom [for printing], she had to wear a safety mask.”
Her love of cats was, in a sense, the bridge between the two worlds for Tichota. In her studio and darkroom – cat angels; in the day-to-day world – her beloved Maine Coons, which she began breeding around 1992, and the strays that she helped whenever possible. She gave both time and money to the Joplin Humane Society: she was so involved with the organization, Balfour remembers, they once called her in “to calm down an unmanageable cat. She showed up with some herbs to calm it down because she wanted it to be adopted. I know she was tickled when they told her it had been adopted.” And when she died, the Society turned up in full force at her memorial service.
Bucky, her first Maine Coon – or, at least, her first Maine Coon-type cat – came to her courtesy of them. Not only did he get her hooked on Maine Coons, but he became the poster kitty for Angels Afoot, appearing in the original version of “All God’s Angels Come to Us Disguised.” (Later, Tichota re-did the design, using two kittens from her first litter of Maine Coons.)
Bucky was soon joined by Phoebe, a purebred Maine Coon that the artist bought. Among Phoebe’s first kittens was Gracie, who was Tichota’s feline kindred spirit and who figures in a number of prints. (There is still one painting of Gracie that Angels Afoot has yet to release.) Gracie had one litter of her own, then died in 1996 following a routine spaying operation. Essentially, she “bled out.” For Tichota, it was like losing a child: “Julie spent the whole night making a casket for Gracie. She even got those beads with the letters on them and made a bracelet for Gracie’s paw. She had her cremated, and she kept the ashes. And when she died, she wanted her ashes and Gracie’s put together.”
But that wasn’t the end of it. Not for Tichota, who was “very headstrong when it came to her cats and her art.” She painted Gracie steadily for a year after her death. Balfour recalls the artist saying, “’It was fun – I got to look at her all day long – I got to look at her face.’ Artists are that way. I would’ve found it very upsetting, but it was her way of grieving.” “Heavenly Vigil” -- which turned out to be Tichota’s last work and the only one she ever did in full color – featured two of Gracie’s kittens, Tink and Wooley, “looking toward heaven to their mother.”
That strong mother-feeling she had for Gracie came into play with other cats, too. “As ill as she was,” Balfour says, “the cats were a part of her life – not just her cats but any cats.” Take Amigo, for instance. The elderly stray (“He was old,” the artist’s friend remarks. “I mean, that cat was ancient. He looked like he’d been through wars!”), who had tested positive for Feline Infectious Peritonitis (FIP), couldn’t be allowed to mingle with her other cats, of course; so Tichota “got a large dog house for him, put it in her front yard, put straw around it, and he pretty much stayed there” until he died. Then there was Biscuit-Head, another stray whom the partners are still looking after. “Any cat who knew the neighborhood knew it could get a meal there [from Julie],” Balfour laughs. “It helped if they were sick. She would see a cat by the road, and she’d pull over and try to catch it.”
The Balfours, who already run what Hazel calls “a hospice and placement service for Maine Coons,” have been taking care of Tichota’s cats since her death; whatever profits they’ve made from Angels Afoot have gone toward their upkeep and medical expenses, including spaying and neutering. It has been tricky finding the right homes for the cats because they’re not used to being handled. Tichota was too ill to pick them up, Balfour explains, “so she didn’t. Basically, her days consisted of her lying in bed with the cats all around her.” Still, they’ve managed to place all but the two most skittish ones.
Taking care of Tichota’s beloved pets – trying to keep Angels Afoot going and “to present Julie’s work in the same manner that she would have wanted” – all these things the women have undertaken out of their love for her and for all things feline. “We were in the cat realm,” Balfour says simply. “Some people are in the cat realm, and some people aren’t.”
*****Since I wrote this piece, Angels Afoot has expanded its line-up to include mouse pads, clocks, cutting boards, ceramic plates, jewelry, and mugs featuring Tichota’s work. They also do more personalized work. You can find them at http://www.angelsafootdesigns.com.
Tuesday, November 20, 2012
Bone-Deep: Andrew Tertes
As a boy, writer Andrew Tertes had a powerful connection to nature. “Our backyard bordered a woods-and-wetlands area, where my brothers, friends, and I adventured,” he recalls. Given the strength of this feeling, it’s not surprising that he was drawn to Native American culture and its “joyful practice of conservation and stewardship.” Growing up in a Conservative Jewish home, he didn’t have the words for these concepts, only felt “a resonance in my bones [that] became translated into a fantasy about peoples I didn’t really know.” At eight, he was already writing stories about Indians “who lived ‘back then.’ It was a time I yearned for but which I believed was untouchable.” But he had an equally strong sense of his Jewishness and “was proud of being different.”
All these richly-colored threads come together in Tertes’s recently released novel, Jacob’s Return (put out by Sapphire Ink Press, which he and his wife, Shoshana Gugenheim, started). The hero, Jacob Goldman is, in many ways, his creator’s alter ego – a Jewish man whose “warm and mysterious relationship [with God] had become cold and distant during his adolescence, only to become more rigid and devoid of feeling and possibility as he grew up.” Married to Sheila, a strong-willed Native American woman very much in tune with her own heritage, Jacob reflects that “[t]here had always been something about her [Sheila’s] Native American ceremonies that was familiar to his bones, even though he stayed at arm’s length.” It is an archetypal journey: like Jacob in the Old Testament, he has to wrestle with “Spirit and claim [his] birthright” and to create new meaning for himself by somehow bringing their two worlds together.
In his bones. That phrase comes up time and again in Tertes’s writing and during the interview itself. And he does not use it lightly. He, too, has done his share of wrestling with his heritage. “In high school, my friends and I considered ourselves existentialists after diving into Camus,” recalls the writer, who now lives in Israel with his wife and son. That was the beginning of a long through-the-looking-glass journey that took him through T. S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland,” Western philosophy courses at Tufts University, Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time, and a personal transformation seminar.
But in the midst of all this, he was aware that there was some part of himself that he had to retrieve. “I re-connected with my childhood love of dancing and fostering a relationship with spirit,” Tertes explains eagerly. “What I’d called God as a child. Prayer began for me as a way to integrate my being and to know my source. So did ventures into the hills, mountains, forests, and coastal regions of Northern California. Spending time camping as an adult reminded me of how vital my connection was to the natural world as a boy….It took me years to re-acquaint myself with nature, re-developing communication and intuition with that which wasn’t man-made or only thought-based.”
He began writing Jacob’s Return. He wanted – needed – to find out more about his roots “but not through the Conservative channel in which I grew up.” By this time, he was living in Oakland, California. He began exploring the ways in which early Jewish culture (which had been land-based and largely nomadic) and Native American culture resembled each other. He took part in sweat lodges. And in March 2000, he met with Clarence Atwell, chief of the Tachi Yokuts, an active tribe in the San Joaquin Valley in Southern California. The upshot of that meeting – which Tertes showed up at carrying both a mezzuzah and some tobacco he’d grown himself – was a four-day vision quest that led him to a deeper understanding of both God and his grandfather’s world. Curiously enough, at the end of it all, he was “given a wool poncho by a man named Lucky, half-Jewish and half-Indian.” Talk about the universe giving you a sign….
But there’s another part to Tertes’s story, and it goes quite a bit further back. It also deals with someone that he never actually met. In 1988, he read Chaim Potok’s My Name is Asher Lev and was completely blown away by it. Asher, growing up in Brooklyn’s Hasidic community during the 1950s, is deeply artistic; his gift puts him at odds with that community since many Hasidim see art as a violation of the Old Testament injunction against the making of graven images. Potok himself was also an artist and a rabbi, and the novel deals with Asher’s struggle to reconcile his artistic yearnings with his religious upbringing.
The book made it possible for Tertes to enter the Hasidic world and enjoy “the emotional and spiritual depth it offered to Asher, even while he searched his soul and found his individual voice, something which was against the grain in that tradition.” Potok became a major influence in his own writing despite the response of one teacher who scoffed, “He’s not a writer, he’s a storyteller.” But Tertes had found a writerly voice that spoke to him, and he didn’t back down. He even hoped to some day meet with Potok and remembers with painful clarity that July day in 2002 when a friend told him that the older novelist had died: “I walked outside to an oak tree and sobbed. Later that day, I wrote a poem, ‘Cadmium Red.’”
The poem, which he was later able to share with Potok’s daughter and widow, conveys a strong sense of kinship:
Your tales unearth
my rich past
lichen to stone
moss to earth
Sholom Aleichem, Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav
the forever heart of holy words
Scribe and parchment….
You guided me
with the blade of light I offered myself.
But the exploration of his Jewish roots doesn’t stop there. Tertes is currently working on a novel about Bernard Blumberg, a widower and secular Jew who is enraptured by 19th-century New England writers. Blumberg, a retired tailor, begins to have visions, “all of which come to him in what feels like the ‘texture’ of fabric, the language he knows best. He is moved to prepare himself for what seems to be the receiving of prophecy. As he is not a man of words, he is directed to busy his heart and hands with the message that he receives.”
More threads, both literal and figurative. Here, too, the writer’s earnestness comes through, reminding me of that line from Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s that has somehow never lost its freshness despite the many times it has been quotes: “One sees clearly only with the heart.” If that is indeed true, then Tertes has 20-20 vision.
Related links:-- http://www.AndrewTertes.com
-- http://www.SapphireInkPress.com
All these richly-colored threads come together in Tertes’s recently released novel, Jacob’s Return (put out by Sapphire Ink Press, which he and his wife, Shoshana Gugenheim, started). The hero, Jacob Goldman is, in many ways, his creator’s alter ego – a Jewish man whose “warm and mysterious relationship [with God] had become cold and distant during his adolescence, only to become more rigid and devoid of feeling and possibility as he grew up.” Married to Sheila, a strong-willed Native American woman very much in tune with her own heritage, Jacob reflects that “[t]here had always been something about her [Sheila’s] Native American ceremonies that was familiar to his bones, even though he stayed at arm’s length.” It is an archetypal journey: like Jacob in the Old Testament, he has to wrestle with “Spirit and claim [his] birthright” and to create new meaning for himself by somehow bringing their two worlds together.
In his bones. That phrase comes up time and again in Tertes’s writing and during the interview itself. And he does not use it lightly. He, too, has done his share of wrestling with his heritage. “In high school, my friends and I considered ourselves existentialists after diving into Camus,” recalls the writer, who now lives in Israel with his wife and son. That was the beginning of a long through-the-looking-glass journey that took him through T. S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland,” Western philosophy courses at Tufts University, Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time, and a personal transformation seminar.
But in the midst of all this, he was aware that there was some part of himself that he had to retrieve. “I re-connected with my childhood love of dancing and fostering a relationship with spirit,” Tertes explains eagerly. “What I’d called God as a child. Prayer began for me as a way to integrate my being and to know my source. So did ventures into the hills, mountains, forests, and coastal regions of Northern California. Spending time camping as an adult reminded me of how vital my connection was to the natural world as a boy….It took me years to re-acquaint myself with nature, re-developing communication and intuition with that which wasn’t man-made or only thought-based.”
He began writing Jacob’s Return. He wanted – needed – to find out more about his roots “but not through the Conservative channel in which I grew up.” By this time, he was living in Oakland, California. He began exploring the ways in which early Jewish culture (which had been land-based and largely nomadic) and Native American culture resembled each other. He took part in sweat lodges. And in March 2000, he met with Clarence Atwell, chief of the Tachi Yokuts, an active tribe in the San Joaquin Valley in Southern California. The upshot of that meeting – which Tertes showed up at carrying both a mezzuzah and some tobacco he’d grown himself – was a four-day vision quest that led him to a deeper understanding of both God and his grandfather’s world. Curiously enough, at the end of it all, he was “given a wool poncho by a man named Lucky, half-Jewish and half-Indian.” Talk about the universe giving you a sign….
But there’s another part to Tertes’s story, and it goes quite a bit further back. It also deals with someone that he never actually met. In 1988, he read Chaim Potok’s My Name is Asher Lev and was completely blown away by it. Asher, growing up in Brooklyn’s Hasidic community during the 1950s, is deeply artistic; his gift puts him at odds with that community since many Hasidim see art as a violation of the Old Testament injunction against the making of graven images. Potok himself was also an artist and a rabbi, and the novel deals with Asher’s struggle to reconcile his artistic yearnings with his religious upbringing.
The book made it possible for Tertes to enter the Hasidic world and enjoy “the emotional and spiritual depth it offered to Asher, even while he searched his soul and found his individual voice, something which was against the grain in that tradition.” Potok became a major influence in his own writing despite the response of one teacher who scoffed, “He’s not a writer, he’s a storyteller.” But Tertes had found a writerly voice that spoke to him, and he didn’t back down. He even hoped to some day meet with Potok and remembers with painful clarity that July day in 2002 when a friend told him that the older novelist had died: “I walked outside to an oak tree and sobbed. Later that day, I wrote a poem, ‘Cadmium Red.’”
The poem, which he was later able to share with Potok’s daughter and widow, conveys a strong sense of kinship:
Your tales unearth
my rich past
lichen to stone
moss to earth
Sholom Aleichem, Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav
the forever heart of holy words
Scribe and parchment….
You guided me
with the blade of light I offered myself.
But the exploration of his Jewish roots doesn’t stop there. Tertes is currently working on a novel about Bernard Blumberg, a widower and secular Jew who is enraptured by 19th-century New England writers. Blumberg, a retired tailor, begins to have visions, “all of which come to him in what feels like the ‘texture’ of fabric, the language he knows best. He is moved to prepare himself for what seems to be the receiving of prophecy. As he is not a man of words, he is directed to busy his heart and hands with the message that he receives.”
More threads, both literal and figurative. Here, too, the writer’s earnestness comes through, reminding me of that line from Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s that has somehow never lost its freshness despite the many times it has been quotes: “One sees clearly only with the heart.” If that is indeed true, then Tertes has 20-20 vision.
Related links:-- http://www.AndrewTertes.com
-- http://www.SapphireInkPress.com
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