Kathy Ewing

The other afternoon I had a moment — the good kind. I was chopping vegetables in the kitchen when a wave of contentment washed over me. I had an awareness that I have pretty much everything I need: the vegetables before me, the sharp knife, all the accoutrements of my American kitchen. Only a few steps behind me was a faucet that would endlessly pour forth clean water. My modest middle-class American life provides me more than most of the world’s people now or in all of human history could ask for.

Then I recalled all the doubts and questions that would sometimes plague me in my youth. Would I graduate from high school? From college? Would I get a job? Would I ever get a job I liked? Would I marry and have kids? Would I own a house? All these questions have been answered in the affirmative.

There I was, standing in my own kitchen, chopping vegetables for a soon-to-be delicious soup. I couldn’t believe my luck.

I’ve never written about art and don’t know how to, but when a piece of art stops you up short and sends your mind off somewhere away from the gallery, it’s worth noting. That happened to me the other night at the opening of Terry Durst’s “The Carter Excavations” at Arts Collinwood Gallery.

Amy Sparks does know how to describe art, so I’ll quote what she once said about Terry’s work in The Free Times. “Durst uses rough and scarred found objects, recombining them in new, mostly formalistic relationships. Sculptural wall hangings, they hold power by the sum of their parts. There is a lovingness about these objects – castoffs that find new homes via Durst’s shepherding.”           

As I looked at Terry’s wall hangings, I was admiring and enjoying, but I was also thinking, verbalizing to myself about how so many of the pieces were in twos, for instance — two boxes together. I wasn’t feeling so much, though I was enjoying the objects’ beauty and puzzling over their meaning. Then I came to the large piece in the center of the room that looked (to me) sort of like a fence, called Exterior Wall.

When I saw that fence thing, I felt. I stopped and, and my mind went careening off somewhere else. Nostalgia is a cheap word for it: what I was feeling had to do with our attachment to objects in our lives. In the present [all these words for the feeling have come later, of course], we live with objects and get to know them intimately – their texture, their nicks and flaws and colors.

I’m aiming for this feeling when I write about my parents’ house in Missing. Here’s a passage where I’m describing how a hall closet in our house never seemed to change. It was a place that was never cleaned out, where nothing was ever thrown away.

The linen closet upstairs contained a dozen pairs of high-heeled shoes from the thirties and forties. In my lifetime, my mother suffered from corns and other foot ailments and wore big orthopedic shoes, of which she complained bitterly. I loved dressing up in her old fancy shoes, but I would have preferred to see her wear them herself. Shelves of the closet were filled with bottles and jars of old ointments and soaps and lotions, in addition to the sheets and towels stuffed onto shelves. I thought of this closet as a drugstore that could be raided for shoe polish, shoelaces, Vick’s Vaporub, conditioners, shampoos, permanents, hair rollers and clips. Stuff sat in that closet for years and years – if you reached in far enough, you could find whatever you wanted.

The nicks and chipped paint on Terry’s “Exterior Wall” made me think of all this. The things, the items surrounding you, the flaws and chips that you live with, that you notice but then stop noticing because they’re so much a part of your everyday life.

Donald Hall’s poem (The New Yorker, 1/4/10) called The Things, whose title I stole, gets at this also, I think. It’s not the artworks around his house, not the de Kooning painting he’s gazed at over the years, not the objets d’art, but just the objects. Little models of baseball players, a dead dog’s toy. The “trivial” things lying around are what his eyes return to.

When my dad died when I was 19, my first death, I was bewildered by how all his stuff remained behind. It seemed strange to me that his wheelchair sat empty in his room and that his pipes were still in the rack when he was no longer there to smoke them. I hated throwing away the old envelopes he jotted notes on, because they contained his handwriting.

I’ve often wished I had written down the titles of my parents’ books. The mantle held a few, and we had two other bookcases. The books on those shelves remained untouched for decades. I saw them every day. Richard Armour’s humor books. The Egg and I. The Thurber Carnival. Mark Schorer’s biography of Sinclair Lewis. Books of an era. I wish I had photographed them. They seemed unchanging, but, of course, now I know they weren’t.

I’ve often complained to John (who else?) about movies that give short shrift to women characters: buddy movies or comedies or action films where the women are merely decorative, warmly supportive of their men, and/or sexually available at convenient times. They get no funny lines and have no particular personalities. Talented actresses are always complaining about this — so few meaningful roles. 

I argue that creating weak minor characters should go in the debit column when we’re evaluating a film. It’s the screenwriter’s and the director’s responsibility to make all the characters as interesting and individual as possible. Vapid, cardboard cutouts in the place of living breathing women weaken a film, but too often critics and viewers don’t seem to notice.

Two recent movies demonstrate what I mean by developing  secondary characters effectively. It can be done! George Clooney is the centerpiece of Up in the Air, but the two female supporting characters, played by Anna Kendrick and Vera Farmiga, get lots of screen time, and they’re funny and individualized and complicated. They help make the movie as entertaining and effective as it is.

Julie and Julia has, of course, two women characters at its center. Here the men take the supporting role. I would argue that in a typical popular film, where the men take center stage, their wives would be either treacly-submissive or witchy and unsympathetic. Nora Ephron’s screenplay (and, I assume Julie Powell’s book, though I haven’t read it) offers supportive spouses with amusing lines; they’re sympathetic, and they also have their own issues. This isn’t an art film with lots of complications, but these minor characters are beyond one-dimensional. They help make the movie partly about marriage. They’re not cliches, and male screenwriters could take a lesson from Ephron’s example.