Good morning Tuesday. I missed the past couple days of writing, but I'm back today. Hot and humid here. Got lots of work today and I'm looking forward to it. Jonathan has a week off of work at the end of this month and we've finally decided what to do with it, we've committed to going to Chicago. We're taking a train and meeting my friend Nancy (Ford) who lives there. The three of us are driving north along the Lake Michigan into Wisconsin to go camping, or, the other way and driving up along Lake Michigan into Michigan to go camping. Either way it's going to be great. I haven't taken an Amtrak train in a long time, it will take 18 hours from NYC to Chicago. It's basically, for the both of us, the same price as renting a car and driving, but the train will be better so that I don't have to do all that driving. What with the price of gas, maybe in the end the train is cheaper anyway. We'll be renting a car in Chicago for the drive along the lake to camping, but Nancy and I can both do the driving, so that will be nice. I'm glad Nancy can take time off of work, it's going to be a nice time.
The last time I took an Amtrak train was around 2000 or 2001 when I was teaching in Baltimore at the Maryland Institute, College of Art. I would take the train down twice a week to teach. I would get up early and arrive in Baltimore for my 9:00AM class. One afternoon, riding back to NYC on the train from Baltimore I sat in front of this husband and wife who were somewhere in their 70's. The man was sitting by the window behind me, speaking on a cell phone.
I surmised from his side of the conversation that he was being interviewed for a magazine or something. He was talking about space (as in SPACE, the space above the Earth) and rockets, Gemini and Sputnik and the space race with Russia. He also referred a lot to a man named Jack......I put all the pieces together and I realized it was John Glenn (the astronaut and Senator) and the "Jack" he was referring to was John Kennedy. Once I figured this out I got up to casually take a glance behind me, and sure enough, it was John Glenn and his wife. It was so great listening to him talk about his experience and talking about John Kennedy in a first-name and personal way.John Glenn was the first person to orbit the earth. As I listened to him speak I wondered if this supernatural feat-orbiting the earth-would rub off on me some how,
sitting so close to him, on a train from Baltimore to New York. Orbiting the earth with your own body, and being the first person to do so, must have some sort of cosmic, spiritual or witchy repercussions, don't you think? And if this elderly man is the first man of all men ever born, to actually orbit the earth, some of that cosmic witchy-ness seems as though it would follow him and his body for the rest of his life, and it also must rub-off on the people he encounters, wouldn't you think?
Anyway, who knows, because in the end he looked like an ordinary, older man, and his wife was wearing one of those ordinary, tight-fitting, pastel colored, skirt and jacket numbers that older woman of wealth wear. You know, woven with some sort of odd and expensive tweed and accented with dangling, over sized, golden buttons. So Even if he did leave the planet into the unknown from the known, he obviously came back and is just a regular elderly-ish man, sitting next to his regular, kind-eyed wife in a colorful outfit. But I still think there must be something witchy and supernatural about him because of his history with space. I'm really glad I got to use the word witchy, because its perfect for what I was trying to describe. It's a real word, I checked.
Speaking of the 60's, Lady Bird Johnson died this past week. I spoke with her on the telephone once. I was working at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture's offices in New York. I had gone to Skowhegan as a student and when I got back I worked in the offices for a summer, doing random things like answering phones, mailings, organizing slides, you know - a young persons' job with a young person's wage; a summer job in Manhattan. Anyway, Ladybird called the office one day because apparently she is or was a big donor to Skowhegan and someone at the office was expecting her call.
I didn't know it was her when I spoke to her. Latter in the day the director of the office asked me if I knew who that was on the telephone, 
I said no, and she told me it was Lady Bird Johnson. It was thrilling, even though it was only a few words. Thrilling in a "one degree of separation" kind of way. Just like it was thrilling on the train that day, sitting next to the body that was the first body to orbit the earth.I could write more about this but I should get to work. Oh wait, this reminds me of one more thing, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. I remember the day she died. I was doing my laundry at a place on Thompson Street, just a couple blocks south of Washington Square Park, here in Manhattan. I saw the news in the paper (this was before access to online news and computers was so prevalent, seeing as though I read this huge piece of news in an actual newspaper and not online) when I saw the photos and realized she had died I thought, what a drag, because I was hoping to run into her in Central Park or something, just to catch a glimpse, but now I had learned that that was never going to happen. For me, if I had gotten the chance to see Jackie Kennedy in the flesh, as elderly and beaten up and hidden behind huge bug-eyed
glasses as she would have been if I spotted her on some morning walk in the park, I would not only have been seeing Jackie Kennedy the woman, but I would also have been gazing upon all that her body has been through and all the history that her body carries around; her husband's assassination, the space race, the civil rights movement, the murder of Martin Luther King, the murder of her brother in-law Robert, the birth of her son John and daughter Carolyn, her cousin Little Eddie, every Warhol painting she was ever the subject of, the Bay of Pigs, everything. It's the same experience as sitting next to John Glenn on a train. It was more than John Glenn that I was sitting next to, it was the entire history that John Glenn embodied. And when I exchanged a few words with Lady Bird Johns, the first lady, that one summer, I was exchanging words with her, and with her husband and president, Johnson. I think the weight of a body holds more than flesh and bone and sickness and emotion, it holds all the history it has meandered through.I have to get to work. Have a great day and sorry for the lapse in the writing the past couple days.
