Eggs and eels

Life is short except when it is so long, and breakfast should be the best meal of the day. When I am old I will especially want exactly what I crave at breakfast. Don't mess with me!

We have just realized that Dad's allergy chart lists eggs, so he hasn't been served an egg--over easy, poached, or scrambled--since at least June. Somehow a very old list of allergies that may or may not cause eczema has limited Dad's breakfast choices. All this time I just thought he had developed a strange fondness for cream of wheat!

You are old, Father William, and you should have eggs cooked to your specifications! But no eel. Please do not balance your breakfast on your nose.

I'd forgotten that Father William is a creation of Lewis Carroll, and went searching for the old guy and his eel in Edward Lear's poetry.

"You are old," said the youth, "one would hardly suppose
That your eye was as steady as ever;
Yet you balanced an eel on the end of your nose
What made you so awfully clever?"

"I have answered three questions, and that is enough,"
Said his father. "Don't give yourself airs!
Do you think I can listen all day to such stuff?
Be off, or I'll kick you down stairs.

[Lewis Carroll (1832-1898) First publication date: 1855]

Peter Pan did not grow up. My dad is growing younger by the day. Christopher Robin had so many meals of sweetened condensed milk with Pooh. I plan to read the novel Alice I Have Been, by Melanie Benjamin, maybe even in time for the author's talk at the DMA Late Night on March 19th.

Arts & Letters Live: Melanie Benjamin
Date Friday March 19, 2010
Time 7:00 PM - 8:30 PM



© 2009 Nancy L. Ruder

Roses en route

Don't know why I decided to drive north up US highway 75 instead of I-35. Backward justification made me search out road construction advice to avoid the Ardmore section of I-35. My first hint at the real reason came when I picked up a tourist ad for the Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa at a gas station.

Contemplating the Gilcrease set me to pondering a detour to Claremore to visit Will Rogers' home. Fritzi would have had this drive planned and researched. I was just flying by the seat of my capri pants with color-coordinated sandals.

Crossing the river I spotted an exit NOW sign for the Philbrook Art Museum, and took it. Mom had enjoyed a visit to the Philbrook collection in the opulent estate of oil baron Waite Phillips. Still, she would not have advised crossing two lanes so quickly, even under sparse traffic conditions.



Nature and nurture wholloped me with Fritzi's perfectionistic over-packing and over-planning tendencies, right down to the barf bags and accordian-folded plastic rain bonnets that fit into your purse. My mom's best moments were when she got so caught up in her enthusiasm for art museums, architecture, gardens, and golf tournaments it balanced out her anxieties. Those were some really outstanding vacation experiences for everyone along for the ride.

These roses were almost "glowing in the dark" on an overcast noontime in the formal Philbrook garden:





After this good month of rain and a quick pruning, Fritzi's long-suffering rosebushes had nice flowers. Mom rarely had time or inclination for gardening. The rosebushes baked on the south side of the house by the old television antenna, barely daring to hope someone would rip away the bindweed and spurge. Still, Mom loved floating pretty, fragrant roses in bud bowls on the card tables for bridge club.



Oh! I once heard a poem that goes:
"A rose is a rose is a rose"
Well I don't agree,
Take it from me,
There's one rose sweeter than any that grows!
That's my Rosie
Life is one sweet beautiful song to me.

It's good to take life's spur-of-the-moment side-trips. It doesn't hurt to recast your parents as Dick Van Dyke and Janet Leigh, either!

Silver and stainless

The Dallas Museum of Art's exhibit, Modernism in American Silver, running June 18 – September 24, 2006, leaves me far colder than a long handled spoon in a tall glass of iced sweet tea. A few bowls in natural, asymmetrical forms please me, along with a simple glass bowl on a silver base creating geometric shadows and rainbows. The highpoint of the exhibit it the "Celestial centerpiece" with its beautiful, thin tapers and sapphire dandelion fluff. This centerpiece was designed for an exhibit at the 1962 Seattle World's Fair.

The dandelion fluff on the Dallas skyline is the Reunion Tower. I enjoyed looking at all the lighted buildings of downtown Dallas during last evening's Late Night at the Dallas Museum of Art. The DMA's website rarely works, so I won't add it here. Late Night is a monthly event sponsored by Starbucks with activities and music for all ages on a theme connected to one of the current exhibitions. Last evening's theme was the World's Fair.

The idea of a World's Fair was confusing stuff to a second grader in the years of the Mercury manned suborbital missions. What was that space needle? Did it give shots? The monorail was more kid friendly. It was the transportation of the Future! All I knew, I probably learned from My Weekly Reader!

My tastes in silver, stainless, and other tableware was already being formed in 1962. The "modernism" silver pieces at the DMA do not have the simple, clean, elegant shapes of the stainless serving dishes and trays my mother preferred. Her stainless is timeless, and much respected today. The silver of Gorham and Reed and Barton on display look quite ridiculous, like someone trying to hard to be cubist or Jetson space age.

This Elvis movie was being projected on the Ross Street plaza wall outside the museum. Silly stuff with Elvis taking a little girl to the fair and playing ukelele. The sort of stuff your mother, or at least my mother, warned me never to do. (I probably didn't need a warning about ukeleles, just strangers at fairs.)

So many World's Fair predictions for the future never materialized. I'm going to have to track down a recording of the Firesign Theatre's "I Think We're All Bozos On this Bus" to hear the robotic President at the Future Fair. Just remember, "the Future's not here yet!"

Device Circle

I'm pretty sure we had this jigsaw puzzle set out on a card table in the living room during the blizzard when we saw the snowy owl in our backyard pine trees. The puzzle of Jasper John's oil painting was a family favorite. Fritzi enjoyed working jigsaw puzzles with us almost as much as she liked playing Scrabble or going along to the Henry Doorly Zoo in Omaha. I am glad my sons will always have the memory of playing Scrabble together, three generations sitting at the round dining table with the board on the big lazy susan, their grandma basking in the shared moment.

Just opened my Dallas Museum of Art member magazine for July-September 2005. There's an intriguing large exhibit called Dialogues: Duchamp, Cornell, Johns, Rauschenberg coming up after the Gordon Parks' photography exhibit ends 9/4/05. It sounds as fascinating as the 2000 exhibit The Artist and the Camera: Degas to Picasso. [I checked, but there's not much on the DMA website yet.]

My parents came to visit during the 2000 "Camera" exhibit, and three generations were wowed. My folks drove down again during the spring of 2001, and we were awed by the DMA's Henry Moore exhibition. I will never forget Moore's drawings of the people in the underground subway shelters during the London blitz of WWII.

I'm marking my calendar for a lecture by filmmaker Larry Jordan on the films of Joseph Cornell, Thursday, 9/15/05, at 7 p.m. in the Horchow Auditorium. There will be a screening of the experimental silent films of Cornell, and rare footage of the artist at work. It's only $5 for DMA members, $10 for the public. Make reservations at 214-922-1826. I'll look for you there!

This is the info from the DMA magazine:
Dialogues: Duchamp, Cornell, Johns, Rauschenberg
9/4/05-1/8/06
J.E.R. Chilton Galleries

This fall the Dallas Museum of Art examines the complex and textured artistic dialogue among four seminal modern artists...

Dialogues will study the artists' incorporation of found and assembled objects, with the central work of the exhibition being Duchamp's Green Box, a piece that had a profound significance throughout the century. The intersection of these artists draws from different sides of Dada, Neo-Dada, surrealism, minimalism, abstract expressionism, and pop art.

The exhibit will include more than forty works by Joseph Cornell, Marcel Duchamp, Jasper Johns, and Robert Rauschenberg. More than half of the works will be drawn from the Museum's own holdings and from the Marguerite and Robert Hoffman Collection, which was recently committed to the DMA.

Dialogues will go beyond the artists' real interaction and knowledge of one another's work to examine how the both adopted and contested different aspects of each other's creations. The exhibition will delve into the artist' use of appropriated icons, language, simple machines, circles, and mechanical movement, providing a rich intellectual exploration of major currents in 20th-century modern art.

Dialogues will push the viewer to reconsider the work of these seminal artists of the modern tradition through a new lens.
Out of town visitors welcome at Miz Nancy's Empty Nest B&B!!
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Alternate motto--That tickly thang between the sheets is just a piece of Bounce.
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