Being Frank

I don't like wind-chimes, they're not natural and they skew my hearing, but I've achieved an arrangement of cast iron pans that rings just a short dense set of harmonics. They're hanging from nails and hooks off the inside of the main beam through the kitchen area, and when I come in and shut the door, they ring, and sometimes, when it's very still and quiet, my walking-by is enough to set them off. It's a lovely sound, distant and complex, like something Paul Winter might try and find in the Grand Canyon. The best wine I've ever had, and it's not a zin but a cab. Frank Family Vineyard '04. Full and dry and fruity and exploding through the mouth, from front to back, leaving no area untested. Extraordinary. The '05 is almost as good. To the work at hand, we must set the ODC show, with limitations of space and pedestals and plexi bonnets; I'm sure I walked 10 miles, every piece handled at least twice, but this is a hard show to install. There is no theme, no continuity, merely the best of the best in every different medium. Several ways to approach the task. Form and color win out. Jewelry must be spread everywhere, among the more 3D pieces that will be covered. Lot of money on display, whatever value means. If I had disposable income there are a couple of pieces I would buy. I've always bought art, even though I make less money than anybody I know; it continues to give me pleasure, which can't be said about everything. Almost nothing, in fact, continues to give pleasure. Which, of course, is the test. Would you want to live with something. Like anyone without a maid I stand in front of the kitchen sink a fair amount of time. It's not an outside wall, with a window onto kept gardens and a grape arbor, but a blank wooden surface between ingenious shelves for dishes that I built from dogwood poles and cheap, natural edged planks. A surface (my water-wall is always interior, exterior walls freeze) where I tack up a poem or photograph, something I want to see. Sometimes something will stay there for months, but I rotate things around, I don't really believe there's a perfect arrangement. I'll probably tweak my own funeral. Snip, snip. Memory is so arcane. Smell, alone, could drive you crazy. I was wearing the white gloves, most of the day, handling things, they'd call on me to move something, and I'd move it, from, one place, you know, to another. I absolutely do not want to go there, with what you or I might have said. My attention is completely on three crows. Or seven or five, I'm sure it was an odd number. The deuse of spades, something spades. I probably have that wrong, what was intended. I think it was a tarot reading, something that made no sense, someone said something.