Carving a Memory
It always saddens me to take down Christmas decorations. It’s like unpacking your suitcase after a trip, putting your toothbrush back in the bathroom and throwing away the travel brochures stuck in your carry-on.
I typically procrastinate, waiting until the three kings have come and gone to put away the Nutcrackers and take down the tree when their once glorious branches look like an old man’s chin, thick with stubble.
This year, however, was a minimalist Christmas since my youngest daughter Aster and I went to my brother Brad’s in Michigan for the holidays; a potted Norfolk pine served as our tree. It will continue to grace my living room throughout the winter, minus the red silk bulbs attached with green pipe cleaners. (all for $10.99 at Meier.) As far as I can tell, my cats haven’t confused it with their litter box, so it is safe for now. Its soft needles are now peeking above the window sill, proof that my tree will be spared the fate of other trees dragged to the curb.
Still there is work to be done. I tuck the silver-framed photo of my kids – three cherubs posing in front of a tinseled pine- in a buffet drawer underneath a Frosty the snowman tablecloth. Next to disappear is a picture of me with my four siblings squished together in front of an enormous tree ; my brother Steve holding up our dog Charley on his hind legs, my sister Eileen, laughing and tossing back her strawberry blond pixie cut hair. I must be sitting on my knees, the only one taller than the ancient Magnavox TV with a princess phone on top.
I finger the rough wood of the creche scene carved by a gentle man named John. There is a Mary, a Joseph, a one-eared donkey, and baby Jesus, the soft wood notched to make the manger’s hay. A middle-aged man whose innate sweetness made up for the fact that he would never hold a paying job or marry, John would whittle anything he could get his hands on. And whittle he did. Handles of brooms he found in the street became lean soldiers or trolls with stovepipe hats. Every day, he took two buses from Chicago’s south side to volunteer in the thrift store run by a West Side agency where I worked that helped people get sober and find jobs. You had to stand really close to John to understand his speech, since he mumbled a lot. But every day, he worked his post, besides the cash register, patiently wrapping up the mismatched dishes and place mats, candy dishes and shoes, and putting these treasures in donated shopping bags.
John died at age 50 of a heart condition. After he died, I discovered that his work had appeared in an exhibition of ‘Outsider Art” at the Chicago Cultural Center in 1997. His painted carving of Adam and Eve-with Adam portrayed as the aggressor, won praises from a reviewer in the Chicago Reader. Like other featured artists who displaying a wide swath of work: painted over superman comics, costumed-jewelry-adorned figure of the Queen of Sheba and and King Solomon, decorated cardboard cut in the shape of a goat– John had no formal training, but a deep inner passion to create. He once told me that he would scour the Near west Side streets, looking for discarded chunks of wood.
And as I wrap his wooden figures in tissue paper, I think of John in the Thrift Store, ever faithful –both to his art and the neighborhood shoppers looking for bargains to get them through a hard winter.
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