Getting Better All the Time OR Who’s going to eat all these doughnuts and drink all this Mike’s Hard Lemonade

First of all, if you haven’t been reading Rachel’s blog, you should be. I like to see the way our plots converge and diverge, considering we’ve been through pretty much everything together. She’s got pictures I may not be putting up. Taylor Jones (brother of Brian and Rachel’s newfound pen pal) sent her a song for the blog called “In The Box.” We have adopted it as our own.
Check us out on Channel 4. It’s under the obvious headline in the group of videos on the right.

It was a really refreshing day yesterday. Thursday, I was worried that we might go crazy, but Friday was so pleasant and successful that I am rejuvenated.

Some highlights:

*This is the first thing I saw yesterday morning:

He read everything out on our window out loud to his son as we were waking up.

*THE MELNICKS DROVE THROUGH FROM FLORIDA! I didn’t know they were coming, but they were on their way from Miami up to North Carolina. “Where are you? We’re here,” they told me. I hesitated for a moment and then said, “Um, I live in a box.” They came and we talked for awhile. They ate downtown and brought Rachel and I back some spring rolls. Thanks Melnicks! Enjoy your vacation. Miami faces! Yes!

*Kerry and Marc dropped off Clifford (CCK, I wish I had the real Clifford here), happy hour in a bag, MIKE’S HARD LEMONADE (in case we were feeling like middle school girls gone wild), and a huge canvas, which we are still figuring out. Thanks Fergusons. Next time, leave us Mirabell.

*Joy, her two children, nephew and two friends stopped by just to see us. Her clan did some chalk drawing, while she told us ghost stories (I didn’t even solicit her. She just came out with them. Must be my lucky day!). In the home that was moved entirely from one place to another, where her first husband died on the front lawn and her second husband moved in before the children, there is a nurse. Everyone, even people outside the family, has seen her. The children are comfortable with her. They feel she protects them. Her nurse’s uniform is white, with the old fashioned square hats. They used to only see her by the front doorway, but now sometimes, she will brush against them while they are doing dishes or heating something in the microwave. She told us about a haunted house by Converse where people routinely hear little girls playing. We talked for a while. We talked about cats and how they can sense the supernatural. She told us about something she had heard recently in the news: a cat in an old age home who did not much like to interact with people, but would sometimes lay with one person or the other. When the cat laid with them, they would usually die within the next 24 hours. He was so accurate in his sense for impending death that when the nurses would see the cat in bed with one of the patients, they would immediately call them families and tell them to gather. I love this stuff.

 

*Some people were upset that we hadn’t made up our beds with all this company coming by. I make my bed for no man (or crowd). One man told me I was going to have a hard time finding a husband.

* Ruth and Charles Deal came up from Gaffney to see us. They hung out on the stoop with us and just chatted. Charles smoked cherry cigars in our folding chairs and Ruth told us about how they met, when he was in the Air Force, in her hometown of Essex. They were married in four months and they moved back to the States together, where they’ve been for 35 years. “But history repeats itself,” she told me. Her daughter met a man on a visit to England and stayed there to marry him and raise the Deal’s first grandchild there.

*People, people, people. People with stories. People with enthusiasm. People with really, really cute kids. I’ve met so many—I’ve liked almost every one of them (there were maybe one or two that made me feel awkward and uncomfortable, but I feel like I must have talked to a gazillion people so far, so that’s a pretty good ratio). Community, ah! Now that’s refreshing. I knew you were there Spartanburg, I just couldn’t see you before.

It occurs to me now that I might really miss the box when we’re gone, and back to what now seems like relative isolation at Hub-Bub. I feel like the box should be required for all rising artist-in-residence groups. I would have rather done this in the first month then go to all of those forced “meeting people” situations: awkward “cocktail parties” with bad energy and stale conversation. But something tells me (and I hope I’m not being too cheesy here) that the connections formed through this event will set the tone for the rest of our stay here in Spartanburg.

Activities:

*Our mystery event, which ended up as “Art on the Sidewalk” was really great. We had three artists here that we had met just from being in the box. Cristen is an art student at Converse and she was kind enough to set up her paints on the street (she was painting a cow, which obviously rules) and to bring us some small canvases to play around with. Harry and Isabel came by and did some sketching. You can see Harry’s work here (his granddaughter made him a My Space page). You can see Isabel’s work here. They are both new transplants to Spartanburg (well, Isabel is sort of new. She grew up here and has been away 30 years) and we’re really happy that they could come get involved. Derya, Nicholas, Alix, Marie, and two-year-old Chapman were along too, sketching and making sidewalk art with chalk. It was nice to finally have some quiet time devoted to doing some actual art. I drew the Kress building that we look at all day. It has been waiting patiently for me.

 

Marie’s and mine, side by side:

Harry’s:

Isabel’s (on her blog.)

*Our tea party was pleasant. We couldn’t get many people to partake in the tea, but most people wanted a piece of Brian’s chocolate chip cookies and cream-cheese cucumber and dill sandwiches. They say make new friends, but keep the old. That’s a good idea. We mostly had our friends here tonight, the ones we met before the box: Cate and Aaron, George, Kris and Patrice Neely, The Hendersons, Luke, and the famous Ashley Fly.

What this night was really about, though, was Nova. Just look at that face. When you sing to her, made-up songs with her name in them, she gets really excited and wiggles around.

Nova in the box.

We also got to talk for a long while to Officer Mike Foster, who works “3rd shift” and has for many years (this basically means he keeps nocturnal hours). My heart goes out to people on the night shift. What a lonely, lonely existence. “Some people can’t take it,” he tells us, “they get physically ill after six months and have to be transferred off the shift. It just contradicts everything the human body wants to do.” But he can handle it, though he says it has been difficult keeping friends around. “They want to go out for a drink when you are going to work.” The only time he hasn’t kept those hours in the past couple years was on his tours of duty in Afghanistan (he’s been twice.) He did Intelligence work there the first time, relief work the second. “We are making baby steps. It’s a shame though, because it’s a really impressive country.” Thanks, Officer Foster for making us feel safe.

The Drop Box:

*The Converse Girls who came by last night left us poems in our drop box on their way home from Wild Wings. Some of my favorites reprinted here:

My Ontology

What exists?

1. My car - on day far away.

2. Your nose - until I steal it.

3. All the wood that a woodchuck could chuck.

—–

Eternity is
A day longer than you thought it would be.
It’s shorter than you want, or will be once you’re there.
In His fuzzy star sprinkling galaxy.

- Anonymous

—–

Thy flame shall burn brightest
Thine pants shall be tightest
Thy step shall be lightest
Dirigibles thou smitest

- Lydia

—–

Q: What is tonight’s special at Applebees?
W: Pizza.

- Pamela Monaha

*This amazing match. Who left this? Show yourself! (Picture does not do it justice. It’s a little box made inside the match, without disturbing the match and with no glue.)

*This poem from Marie Griffin, “Kafka, Cats and Cupcakes”:

The flying cat tossed

cupcakes at the hungry

artist looking out of

a window on East Main

Street. An evangelist

who witnessed the event

yelled, “It’s time for

the rapture.” The flying

cat catterwhaled. The

minister fainted and

the artist grabbed up all the cupcakes.

*And this reflection on downtown Spartanburg as it was from Janice Whisenhunt Pach, who has been by to visit us twice now. She also reflects on her parents, in response to the prompt:

Hey girls,

I was born in Sparkle City and grew up here. I used to walk to town from Maple Street where I lived with my parents. My father owned a filling station on East Main Street and started what is now Bob’s Car Wash. They would be amazed to see all the new things in Spartanburg now! I miss them. Margie and I went to the movies, the Quality Bakery, Aug W. Smith and the Deluxe Diner and Woolworth’s (all right here on Main Street!) It’s sp fun to see all the activity here again

*Napkin drawings from a family who stopped by on their way to and from dinner.

*Alix’s response to the prompt: “love at first site.” Brian Hits (former AIR) response: “Deep down, everything I do is for them. I know it.”

As they say in the South: “Appreciate ‘cha.”

Overheard in the box:

Woman walking by, confused: “I think it has something to do with something or something.”

Tidbits from New York:

From Noelle in New York: “i can’t help but wonder what would happen if you took this project to the south bronx or bed stuy. i wonder how bodyguards or police protection would effect things.
regardless, as you are fullly aware, new york city needs a little life injected into it too…..i draw a distinction between life and culture. nyc is full of culture but life keeps getting sucked out of it. its gone sterile.”

What Cliffy and the crew were up to in New York while I was in the box:

Slept like a rock last night, with no interruptions at all. Rachel was not so lucky. To the drunk hecklers who hit the glass so hard last night that things were falling over in her little room: YOU SUCK.