Yale class

It was New Haven, Chapel Street, Sunday noonish. When at the very briefest of eye contact, the black lady started addressing me, breaking me out of my fuzzy, head-down reflection on the way to the Yale Center for British Art, I stopped and looked around, startled.

This lady, who was just sitting on a some steps, started to talk about Yale Rep and Cambridge's ART, about Bartlett Giametti and whom he fired, about directing Wedekind's Lulu (and gave me a quick synopsis) and a dramatization of Rimbaud's Season in Hell and more.... Wow!  I was impressed. Would you like me to perform for you, she asked. Thank you, no. I'm on the way to the museum, and also thinking about something, and she asked and I gave her some money, not very much.

It would scare me to hear your story, ma'am, a tale, I suspect, of talent and high hopes, conflict, bad luck, and a collapse. How quickly, how easily the promising beginning can become a bitter memory. I recognize this fact about the world, but you know the other side first hand. I don't know how to respond to negative narratives, and I didn't want to practice today. I have my own issues to turn over in my mind. So, I am stingy with time as well as cash.

The exhibit I went to see was about British amateur naturalists of the past and modern artists dealing with the same themes: plants, insects, birds. Not so much the collections and sketches teaching the new-fangled (for the time) Linneaean taxonomy, but the delicate attention paid to this indentation, that surface; and not so much the response to the moderns to the Victorians, but the wonderful playfulness today's artists, making collections, for instsnce, of butterflies with wings made vivid fabrics and printed plastics.  I remember one: a book standing on its spine half open, the upper outer leaves cut into shapes of trees and the paper charred so the whole thing looked like a burnt forest and, attached with wires, black bird silhouettes flying up and away. I could almost hear them raising ruckus.

I tracked the woodcuts of one particular artist through all the rooms of the exhibit: a Sister Margaret Tournour--a dandelion here, a teasel there, an evocative Paradise Garden. I learned she had been a teacher for 40 years, until at 60, confined to a wheelchair and with the companionship of a pet hedgehog, she turned to making these exquisite little studies.

I broke a bill.and headed back to the car. On the way, I met a man sitting in a wheelchair with a sign: Help the Disabled. I dropped less than a frou-frou coffee into your box, and you said, in the most cultured voice, Thank you (this is after all New Haven) and looked me firmly in the eye. I mumbled, You're welcome, and walked on but (still glowing from the exhibit I had seen) I thought: I am (more) ready now to stand before you, sir, you, ma'am, listening, saying and doing what I can, and confident in God-in-love for other open doors.

Let's see.