January 2024 - The Other Ones

There is a cylindrical piece of concrete extruded from a curb in Chelsea near London Terrace where I taught dozens of kids how to swim over a six year period in my thirties. The concrete is flat on one end of the cylinder and textured on the other so that it can stand vertically on my windowsill with a found rubber ball sitting in the crevasses of the textured side. The rubber ball is blue and white, swirled like the clouds twisting around a water covered globe. Together they send me to an alternate universe where the earth does not orbit the sun but instead sits on the moon in the middle of the day, passing time.

There is a dried pomegranate that sits on a bed of dried tree needles taken from Hills of Eternity cemetery in Palo Alto. The pomegranate and tree needles rest inside a small teak salad bowl that has been around for forty years and that has been drilled into the wall, repurposed as a shelf.

There is a bundle of wood, pine ends from makeshift ledges that are wrapped together by black straps from a pair of goggles that are no longer in use. The whole thing is no more than five inches in any direction.

There are a few pieces of pine, cut from the corners of frames that are wrapped with scraps of canvas that were used to stretch across the frames for paintings during a stay in L.A. One is a triangle that has a half inch wide piece of raw canvas making its way around two corners making it look like it’s wearing a jockstrap.

There is a large metal ring, about three and a half feet in diameter, that hangs on screws on the wall years after being rescued from the trash. The ring is also about three inches deep, looks like it may have been used as the edge of a kitsch kitchen table, now repurposed as a frame within which an ink drawing on 8x11 paper has been resting on its lower curve, leaning against the wall.

There is an oblong oval made out of some form of rattan. It was once the edge of a very shallow basket. Now it hangs on the wall, from a red pushpin, serving as a portal to nowhere.

There is a collection of rocks, somewhat oversized, originating from Massachusetts Bay at the tip of the Cape. Each rock has a white stripe circling its body. They used to live on a wooden deck and now live in a pre-war apartment.