Barbara Stoner's Blog, page 3

The Crew

Nothing had prepared me for the day in 1996, sometime after Jerry Garcia died, when Richard told me that Robert Hunter, the lyricist for the Grateful Dead, was coming to town and asked would I like to join The Crew?

Barbara, Caroline, Joan, Margo

The Crew: Caroline, Joan, Margo and Brion - had already been together for a few years before I came on board. The women always prepared the backstage area, complete with snacks and drinks. Brion picked up “the talent” from the airport and drove him around at his request. I barely knew Richard, the brains behind a little production company called Crabby Goat, before he asked if I would be interested in helping promote a concert by the Tibetan Gyuto Monks at the 5th Avenue Theatre downtown. My “help” consisted in posting flyers around the north end of Seattle. Richard was so certain the entire thing was a failure that I was prepared to be as positive as possible, but as the theatre slowly but surely filled up that night I was also told by others in The Crew that Richard was always convinced the entire thing would be a failure, right up until curtain time. I guess it’s a promoter thing.

So when he asked if I wanted to be in the Hunter Crew, I assumed he meant I would once again be plastering flyers all over North Seattle. Instead, he wanted me to dress the stage. He wanted me, who had not a designer bone in my skinny body, to create a space in which Hunter would sing and play. It had, he told me, to contain a rug, a chair, and a side table. Anything else was up to me.

Luckily the other women of The Crew came to my rescue. Caroline (I think) had an old Persian carpet, of the kind the Dead used on their stage. Someone else had a comfortable chair with a side table. So that was that. I was set. But no.

When we placed all of the requested items on the stage, this time at the Showbox, it looked shabby. All it needed was a bare lightbulb hanging from the ceiling to look like a cold water flat. I wanted something else.

I was online with other local Deadheads at the time – had gone looking for them after Jerry died – so I put out a plea for help. One of them whose name I have long forgotten but who was the shining heroine of this piece, told me that she worked in a gallery and that there was a painting there that she thought would be just the thing. So off I went to take a look at it.

It was just the thing. It was a golden marsh of sparkling reeds and sun on water with a buttery haze of sky. It wouldn’t distract from Hunter. It would be more like the view out of the window from his comfortable seat on the hearthrug. It was about 4x8 feet and the price tag read $10,000. The artist said that he would be honored for it to be used for the occasion, but the owner of the gallery told me that he could not let it out of the shop unless I signed a promissory note in which I agreed to pay the gallery 10 grand if it were damaged or stolen. Don’t ask me how or why I signed the thing. I knew I could find the money if I had to. Also don’t ask. But I signed and, even crazier, called my friend Brandon, the only one I knew with a van, to pick it up and bring it to the theatre.

Then I went back to arrange a tripod of sorts – don’t remember how we did that – and await the arrival of both Hunter and the painting. I was not at all hopeful. Especially when someone yelled that Brandon was here and I went out onto the loading dock to see Brandon and one of his favorite running buddies, Lloyd, almost certainly drunk, hanging out of the van and yelling my name.

But I shepherded them all up into the theatre and onto the stage, where we got the painting suitably arranged. Just a few more hours until showtime. I remember going up into one of the box seats and looking everything over while Hunter was doing a sound check. That’s when I almost cried at the thought that after all these years I was finally an integral part of a Dead show of sorts. The lyricist himself was playing down there on Caroline’s rug in front of the painting that I had made possible, practically lighting up the stage with its golden glow. Then we all went out to dinner.

The show when on as scheduled. I barely remember it. All I could think of now was getting the marvelous painting back to the gallery in the same shape in which it was taken away. Actually, there was a high point when, at the intermission, someone in the crowd remarked on it, saying that the set was unusually beautiful tonight, and their companion said, yes. That painting is brilliant. Right then and there I decided that if I had to lose 10 grand, it would all have been worth it. Even if Hunter never seemed to notice it. Which he didn’t. However, huge success all around. Richard even made book. Maybe even a profit.

After the show, I think we all went to the Moon. Or maybe there was a second show the next night? So much of that time is just a blur to me now. When it came to returning the painting, Brandon and Lloyd were not to be found. The theatre manager would be there for a few hours during the day, and that’s the only time he could let me in to get the painting. I had no idea of how I was going to transport it. I didn’t have a car. Nobody had cell phones. Somebody, probably Caroline, gave me a ride to the theatre along with a big quilt in which we wrapped the painting and brought it out to the loading dock. It was pouring down rain. Then she left me there with a book I was reading – a jaunty little adventure called Neanderthal – while she went off to rent a truck. After an interminable wait, she finally reappeared in her car. It was the first of the month, she told me. Everybody who was moving had rented all the trucks. But don’t worry. Brion is looking in Bellevue. And off she went, leaving me with my book and a $10,000 painting wrapped up in a ratty old quilt on an ancient loading dock while garbage workers came and went unloading some construction dumpsters. I couldn’t help noticing how much they all resembled Neanderthals.

The afternoon crawled on, while scientists prowled about the newly discovered community of ancient humanoids hidden away in the mountains of central Asia, I died of thirst, and was fantasizing about peeing off the edge of the loading dock, when finally Brion came peeling down the alley in a moving truck. Together we loaded the painting safely into the back of the truck. I insisted on riding with it, holding on to it so it could not be jarred against the walls. It was pitch dark in there after Brion pulled down the door, but the gallery was just a few blocks away and we made it. The painting completely unscathed. My 10 grand saved. And my place in The Crew apparently secured.

Over the next few years there were a scattering of other shows that brought The Crew together, but I will always remember and cherish their adoption of me in that sorrowful year after Jerry died. Caroline left us too soon, and then Hunter himself. But Margo and Joan and Brion carry on doing good works wherever and whenever they are able. I had to leave Seattle for Madison, and I guess my part is to remember and record. The way we were.

Richard, Barbara, Caroline, Joan, Margo

Take a Walk on the South Side

Exploring Southark was not on my primary list of things to do in London and yet, if one is to say one has walked across the Tower Bridge, what is the use of just retracing steps. As it turned out, a walk along the Thames' south bank not only gave me a marvelous view of the city across the river. It also had some glories of its own.

It was Tower Bridge that I pictured when writing Ghosts of the Heart, but perhaps it should have been London Bridge, now fallen in estate to a tourist attraction in Arizona.

Looking back across the Thames, you can see the Traitor's Gate entrance from the river to the tower. I had just seen that gate from the inside.

It might looklike an oversized slinky, but it was actually London's City Hall when I was there.

Hays Galleria is a mall on the site of what was once Hays Wharf, where goods came up the Thames to London or down the river to the world as evidenced by this statue, The Navigators.

Further on you find a replica of The Golden Hind, a galleon captained by Francis Drake in his circumnavigation of the world between 1577 and 1580, but since it had never been crewed by 16th Century tars living on hard tack and rum, I did not pay the tourist fee to examine her.

I was tempted, however, to pay to explore The Clink but either because of time or weariness, I did not. All in all, as Pink Floyd might say, it's just another brick in the wall.

Tags: Peregrinations

Bushman

Way back in a previous century I had the only job I had ever lobbied for and loved. I was hired as secretary in the P.R. Department at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. We were a three-woman department: my boss, Corky, her assistant, and me. I roamed the Museum freely whenever possible, and was often sent to the basement with galleys for the printshop that lived behind a rear wall down there.

The mummies were down there as well (they have now been relocated to fancy new tombish quarters), and so was this guy. Bushman. The great ape who had lived long at the Lincoln Park Zoo. I cannot say I ever saw him in life. We lived downstate when I was growing up, and he had long been relocated to the Field Museum by the time I got there. But I felt an affinity nevertheless.

Field Notes, an in-house Museum newsletter, was a brainchild of mine and I published it for the too few years I remained at the Field. Along with little updates from the various departments (you know that behind all those little windows at the top of the Field that you see when driving down Lake Shore Drive are the offices of world renowned adventurers in the various -ologies, don't you?), I included a little column of my own that I called, "Conversations with Bushman," in which I mused about the Museum and all my favorite denizens, like the lions of Tsavo and Carl Akeley, who stuffed the African elephant forever charging down the great hall.

The Field Museum of Natural History was a magical place, full of famous names and artifacts, but this guy was always the King.

About the War

There’s a real war going on. And when I say real war, I mean a war with tanks and battleships. They’re even digging trenches, which is not a good sign.

As a matter of fact, there are few good signs in this war. Unless you count the defenders. We Democrats think we’re fighting for democracy – and yes, we really are – but the Ukrainians are fighting for democracy, for their own homeland in which they were in the process of setting up a working democracy, in which they were in the process of rooting out the left-over Soviet structures of corruption. In which they were building a modern nation for their people.

A homeland which the invading Russians are blowing into dust, like a petulant child knocking down carefully built structures.

And killing people. Killing lots and lots of people.

I’m with the Ukrainians.

Russia is razing Ukrainian cities to the ground and turning each apartment bloc into a killing field analogous to the jungles of Cambodia. By design. As if in rage that Ukrainian cities should outshine those of Russia. Which perhaps they do. Putin has not put much effort into modernizing his country, into stabilizing people’s lives and livelihoods, into small business and industry, into all the little things that make a country prosperous. It is said that Russian countrypeople still live like peasants, that shopkeepers have to import all the small items that a business uses in a day of trade.

We have said elsewhere that Trump wanted to be another Putin, but today it looks more as if Putin wants to be another Trump. He wants to destroy the idea of liberal democracy and tear apart the fabric of what we call Western Civilization. He is Sauron, perched in a lonely redoubt, flailing against those who would keep him small and powerless. No wonder the Ukrainians call his soldiers “orcs.” Did he truly never suspect that his first big move in that direction would be like a key that, when turned, unlocked the resolve of NATO, the U.S., and the democracies of the world to rally against him. To make this battle one which could determine the next century or so of world history. One which, I believe, we must win.

This is, to my mind, a metaphoric battle. If Russia wins out, it will strengthen the forces of autocracy the world over. If Ukraine wins the day, it will be dogs’ years before anyone can accuse the democracies of weakness. And this, I think, is important. I believe in the ideals of the liberal democracies. They may not work for all cultures, but they work for me and for many others across the globe, and I would not like to see those ideals seem to fail.

There are other wars in the world today. Smaller wars. Minor wars. Except for the deaths, no one of which can ever be called minor.

But this war – and no, it’s not a “good war,” not one of the defenders had a hand in beginning hostilities – is a necessary war to win, for all the reasons I have stated above and likely many more. We are the defenders, not the aggressors. And what we are defending remains worth the fight, whether at the ballot box or on the battlefield.

SHIELD WALL!

Tags: Politics

Two Sisters

Two nice Norwegian Lutheran girls, born and raised on a hog farm in northwestern Iowa, went west to Los Angeles in 1941 and struck it rich, if you count two good and true husbands and lives that mattered to all who knew them.

At least I think it was 1941, because it must have been just after the declaration of war with Japan. I think they both got jobs – at least my mother did – in the offices of The Lockheed Aircraft Corporation. That’s where Ellen met Ted, my dad. Thelma’s beau Elmer, as you can see, was in the Navy.

Could this be my mother’s wedding day? Hence the corsages? My sister, Joan, might know. They were married April 11th, 1942. You can see a ring on her finger. She’s the pretty brunette on the left. There is no ring as yet on Thelma’s left hand – she’s the perky blonde on the right – but there soon will be. I think my cousin Steven is near my age, and I was born the following February. Events moved fast in those days.

Thelma and Elmer settled on the West Coast when he returned from the War. My dad joined the Army Air Corps and was sent to Paris, while my mother went home to Iowa with little me. When Dad came home from the War, we stayed in the Midwest. I always regretted not knowing my Aunt Thelma better. Check out the look on her face. She was fun-loving, mischievous. She had four children, two boys and two girls, all of whom adored her. My own mother was loving, but religious. She had six children, but later on none of us could figure out when or how. There were no stolen kisses in the kitchen, that we recall. No slap and tickle. No flirtation between our parents at all, that we could discover. And when we learned the facts of life, we had trouble relating them to our very proper parents. The few times we visited with Thelma and Elmer, though I can’t recall anything specific, I remember thinking that they loved each other very much

There is another reason I wish I had had more time with Aunt Thelma. I could have pumped her for information about my mom. I did ask mom about Thelma, and there is only one story I remember.

Sometimes, when my grandmother took her two girls to town shopping, she and my mother were always clean and neat and well-behaved, but continually embarrassed by Thelma who was prone to getting dirty by putting gum on the end of a stick and searching the storm drains for pennies. I had to wonder why I had never thought of that. All I did was wander off by myself, something my mother referred to as “getting lost.”

Elmer was killed in a plane crash. He loved to fly, and often took his boys with him on short flights around Portland, where they had settled after many years in California. I don’t remember why the boys didn’t go with him that day, but they did not, and so Thelma lost the love of her life but was spared losing more than that.

Both of my parents died within a short time of each other, being in a nursing home with various degrees of dementia. Thelma went long before them.

I wish I had known Thelma when she was young and happy-go-lucky. Even more, though, do I wish I had known my mother, who said goodbye to the farm and headed west on an adventure. Never again would she launch herself away from all she had known before and set out to seek her fortune. I sometimes wonder if she settled on a future a little too soon.

Lines From a Life III

August of 1983, Northern Wisconsin

A sunrise sky of mauve and cream and silver through a light cloud cover. Clouds with vaguely silvered linings.

Morning on the Paint River. Another one of the holy places. The ancient rocks. A small plane sailed overhead--a faint hum. Fighter jets in the evening sky last night. Visions this morning in the sun on the water. Healing visions. Oh--to have the strength to touch the sad souls--to give them light and strength and joy. The power to transform--if only by a shade--to lighten the shadows. Here rocks glisten in the suinlight and the water runs greenish-black and tumbles white around the rocks, while in the pool of back water, behind the island, three water reeds stand green and still. Each rock is a landscape of its own--the ruins of an ancient civilization are etched on one--cities built into its cliffs and roads that crossed the mountains and broad valleys--the remains of ancient lakes. The shadows on the rock downriver are a a pair of bear, sniffing the air before crossing. Others are remains of logs--others are just rocks.

At time like this I feel as if I could finally clear away the confusion, and my strength would bring my laughter back, and then it will have the sound of many bells, and my language will flow with the music of the earth and al of its peoples and I could show them pictures of themselves revealed as glory and we would laugh together and be strong.

Back in Green Bay. I just walked out on the roof again to water the tomatoes. The tacks are being torn up at a prodigious pace - there's already a slab of raw concrete across the street and deep holes on down the way. It's a bit of a morning-after, and with these city noises, it's even more so. A morning after the country and the night before.

Yesterday I stood in a magical garden, behind the garage, where last year the bulldozer came in and cleared a space for semi's to turn around. It's been free now for over a year, and the muillein have moved in, tall and thick, with candlelabra arms like cactus. Full-blown thistles, with their seed pods burst and dovered with thistle down all dewey and shining like silk in the sun. Against the garage wall was a garge, fragrant evening primrose. The world was sparking and marvelous and new.

The mornings are always like that - wherever I am. When the sun is shining and things are beginning again. I don't understand how it all falls apart, mangled by necessity and duty and getting through the day.

24 August. September weather is out there somewhere. It's overcast and cool - early autumn cool. The trees look heavy and tired. I have my feet in the oven for the first time this year. And I'm still paying last winter's heating bill - well, maybe not. I'm probably just beginning to pay this summer's bill.

25 August. A promisingly lovely day. Yesterday - rain and cold. The rain was long and heavy, but it started to break up when I went to the store around 2:00. A rainbow arched in the east and the sky was filled wih an incredible variety of clouds and colors.

The rainbow rose over blue-grey clouds - below and to the north the storm clouds that had moved northeast mounded up sooty black and thick. In the west, the sky showed blue with trails and scarves and wisps of clouds at different heights and shades, from dark scribbles to a patch of bright pink catching the last of the senset, to white edged in silver, and all of it moving swiftly but at different speeds depending on altitude. It was marvelous.

28 August. Lovely day again. The weather is cooling perceptibly. Fall comes fast here, but with any luck at all, it stays for awhile. We barely get spring, summer is all too short, but the autumns are long and lovely. What Green Bay does best at, though, is winter - if you call doing something long and interminably cold doing it well.

7 September. Woke up at 6:00 this morning. Decided to throw some clothes on and go finish JAG before they got to work. Stole a dollar from Steve for cigarettes and went in to play cleaning lady. The city crew was wroking outside painting new lines in the intersection. They had the entire intersection festooned with little orange cones. It looked like a Halloween party. Tried to take a picture of it through the screen. By the time I got my clothes on, it was gone. Party's over.

14 September. Cool and cloudy - the treetops showing yellow-green - the wind chime swinging lazy with an end of summer tinkle.

Friday 17 December. A cold gray dawn. No snow as yet. No sparkle in the world. Green Bay looks like a cheap black and white movie.

19 December. When I think of ideal landscapes now, they are barren deserts. Even rocks and cactus would mar the perfect world which should be warm and dry and contain absolutely nothing.

Lines From a Life II

December 1982, Christmas at Lake Benedict:

The lake lies frozen, covered with a light snow - swellings of white and depressions of grey - it doesn't look frozen at all, just a lake of white-grey water.

Squaw Point at sunset with a swelling moon rising east in slate blue. Sucker Bay lying frozen, stretched in shades of pink and blue. The sunset marshes glow golden - tall, light shining gold of marsh reeds, stocky deep burnished gold of marsh grass, red-gold of winter maples.

Chunks of ice cut from the fishing holes, lying in circles like camp fire rocks. We picked them up and held them to the sunset, held them to the slate-blue moonlight - they held frozen necklaces of air bubbles, crystal spirals, thin silver leaf.

We found the front head plate and a rusted pair of headlamp covers for a Model T Ford in the woods, just as the sun slipped down. That was Sunday.

Early morning, Green Bay, January 1983

Came out into a magical world. It had snowed Thursday. From the second story porch of Dennis's, the world appeared like a Grandma Moses painting. The light was brilliant at 1 a.m. Dark clouds ringed the horizon, but overhead, like a bowl, was an overcast night sky of glowing clouds - grey, yellowish, pinkish. We wondered if there had been a power surge or something. It was so incredibly bright. A rabbit ran through the back yard. A neon world. At home in bed, I wished they'd turn the lights out outside.

Lines from a Life I

There is rain moving in
From the north and west,
And the wind coming up with
Threat and thunder.

Wet air comes, blowing sweet and cool
Across my cheek, a wonder of a sky-blown river.

What's left of bright and blue slips down the southeast sky,
Some scattered pearl drops spot the porch around my feet,
And I'll have to turn the lights on in the house
When I go back inside.

January 4, 1978
We live in a shell of glowing ice. The sun lights the windows like mother of pearl in candlelight. But it isn't the ice on the windows that keeps us here - it's the ice in the wind.

May 7, 1981
Another beautiful day, with the sun coming up like hotcakes.

May 19, 1981
Full Flower Moon last night. Steak and potatoes at the cabin. Whitethroats calling, coyotes singing, grouse drumming. Walk over the fields around 2:00 a.m.

June 27, 1981
I just imagined the landscape full of holes where people had been - big pools - poofs of dust - like a war zone. Plops and puddles of empty spaces in a dead dry desert beyond my wall - where people I have known stood once and then were lifted out - just gone. There are others standing there, but the hold is light and they can lift away anytime. There is no one in the cage that holds me. I am alone in there.

August 16, 1981
The sun shone nectarine red in a hazy sky. It outlined a firepath through the water, which was smooth and unruffled except when it lapped back from the water's edge, indicating a flow against the land not otherwise visible. The last tourist family left shortly after we came. The water was too cold for me - the air was damp and a bit clammy. Far out by the point a pair of loons swam across the sun path, and later they swam into sight just offshore.

A Day in the Life

For most of the farm years, I began each day with a new notebook page citing critical information from the Old Farmer's Almanac: sunrise, sunset, moonrise, moonset, moon phase, moon sign, day of the year, factoid.

2/17/91, for instance.

Moon phase, moon sign, sun rise, snakes laying eggs; Napoleon at Waterloo, Boston under 9 feet of snow; Every day, every hour, every teensy tinesy millisecond of time has its own particular history, is itself a repetition of cycles within cycles, and in its moment bequeaths its own ghosts to the future.

That's why, to my mind, these notebooks have all those notations - science, history, astronomy, astrology, folklore - it seems I wanted to keep sight of as many parallel universes as possible. All the stuff I didn't know left uncomfortably breezy gaps and all the stuff I did know was way too much to remember.

Under each of these ritual notations come the lists of things to do that day, comprising my own historical and cyclical existence. In terms of things accomplished, the Old Farmer's Almanac is much more accurate.

Take That, Happiness!

A few weeks back, I posted a thing I wrote long years ago about finding myself in a state of happiness. This is a piece I wrote immediately preceding that one. The happiness essay was, I believe, written as a defiant gesture to the following:

There's a frightening precariousness about equilibrium, and the longer the equilibrium continues, the more frightening and precarious it seems. Because happy creative equilibrium is not highly advertised as a possibly constant state. Tripping merrily along the top rail of the most beautiful and loveliest of fences can only end in tripping off of it sooner or later, and the later it gets, the sooner the fall.

I even find myself trying to trip myself up. At least I'd be in charge of the fall. But I suspect the only way to upset myself will be to finally accept this happiness, assume it to be a constrant, make it necessary and precious to me, and the Norns will at last turn their eye my way. That's what terrifies me. Someday being caught unaware.

The happiness essay ends with the follow-up: Reader, I divorced him.

I showed happiness a thing or two.