Impossible to influence something you don’t own...

working for money vs passion

I worked as a waitress in a Princeton restaurant, The Alchemist and Barrister. I had a somewhat regular customer that would wait until I had an available table. I called her Babs and she was a hoot.

“I want to read your fortune” she would exclaim. I showed her my palm, “No dear, the whole hand.” The one and only time I had my fortune told to me with such specificity and joy.

I knew little about her. A family divided by a feud, her lovely home up the road, nothing all that extraordinary to the imagination of a fiercely independent soon to be college graduate. I mean, I rode my bike 15 miles to work every day so nothing was routine or typical.

At that point what I didn’t know about the capriciousness of life was sufficiently supplemented by my own wandering nature and boundless curiosity. What I didn’t find out until I read her obituary in the New York Times in 2013 is that I thought she was saying Barbara but in actuality it was Basia—sounds like Bosha—which is why I simply called her Babs and she never corrected me.

Oh and she was the maid that had married Seward Johnson I and inherited all the money when he died, minus what was won by family in a multi-year lawsuit. Her home “up the road” was a 140-acre estate named Jasna Polana, now a private country club.

If you know Princeton you might recall the whimsical bronze statues of families having a picnic or a person sitting nearby on a bench. They were once everywhere and brought joy to everyone lucky enough to witness them. Seward Johnson II (son of first wife Ruth or Dilly as I recall) was the brilliant artist responsible for the lovely pieces of art. An interesting side-note is he was fired by Uncle Robert Johnson II creator of the large healthcare corporation which may have been a bummer for him but quite the benefit for us and his artistic talents.

My son joining in for a read…

Nearby in Hamilton New Jersey there is a treasure trove of art that bears the fruit of his art, influence and philanthropy at the Grounds for Sculpture.

Grounds for Sculpture Interactive Map

You can walk among the 3-dimensional representations of works of art. I am pleading with the lovely Manet nude (thought to be Victorian Meurent) based on Le Dejeuner Sur l’herbe to perhaps put on a robe lol.

The painting…

Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe by Édouard Manet.

Joy is being surrounded by art in a strange city. Back in the traveling days, I made it a point to visit the museum of note in whatever city I didn’t have time to otherwise explore. I was thinking about art this morning.

I am working on a book proposal about autobiographicacy. I made up the word to represent graphicacy as memoir.

“Graphicacy is defined as the ability to understand and present information in the form of sketches, photographs, diagrams, maps, plans, charts, graphs and other non-textual formats”

I first heard the word graphicacy used with intention by Alberto Cairo at a lecture. Perfect for visualizations that include maps and a wide variety of other formats.

Maps feature profoundly in my story telling and autobiographicacy from 1963, the year I was born. But how best to tell these stories? In the case of stories almost 60 years old we seem to be straddling the worlds of memory, history, and remembering.

Lucky for me I was listening to The Lonely Palette and a story about Memorials.

The host and art historian Tamar Avishai asks a relevant question,

“How is memorializing different from simply remembering?”

I am not interested in retelling a story with the same lens. How would we view these events if we were able to feel the human aspect. I was reminded of Tamar’s conversation with the creator of Dictionary of Negative Space, Karen Krolak.

Karen had observed a 9/11 tribute. “The names in the glass at the front were printed. But as you through to the back fo the glass, it was everyone’s signature. There was something so powerful about seeing each person’s individual handwriting suddenly made that back layer really feel human.”

I feel this with art, music, and almost anything visual. The humanity of the history is where I hope to make the connection.

Memorials are tasked with embodying two opposite experiences at once. A larger cultural history would explains and captures an event in the past. And the personal subjective memories that comprise that history. I mean, history is memory and memory is us. It's a single story and it's infinite stories simultaneously urgent in timeless, private in public.— Tamar Avishai

Where would we be without art in all of its illusive and often obvious forms? Although not as unstructured and solitary as Martijn Doolard, I am inspired by his choices in how to live a life worthwhile. He mentions in his docu-series Two Years on a Bike that his life was missing the element of getting physically tired. The mental tiredness of staring at a computer screen (he works as a graphic designer) is all to familiar.

I invite you to watch his filmography and storytelling. It is also art in a different manifestation. I think of Martijn as the paintbrush and his life is the beautiful canvas.

Thanks for following along through my meandering. This is what my week in thoughts and ideas was like. It might be why I never have an answer to the question, “where do your ideas come from?”

Maybe this is why I am an ultra runner, who knows?

But if you have passion in your life either from writing, working with data, or a physical activity—you should own your life. Don’t let it own you.