Thursday, March 4 This is the day of Melissa Manley’s Neptune’s Necklace workshop. So exciting! We just met Melissa and already love her. She’s calm and energetic, laid-back and excited–everything all at once in a personality that makes me feel right at home in her classroom. Then I notice that Earl is sweating. Beads of sweat are glistening on his head. My husband is not a sweaty kind of a guy, so I’m immediately on alert. I mouth across the room, “What’s wrong?” and he shrugs and points to the camera with a look of both alarm and bafflement. Oh, no. The camera has had another temper tantrum and, once again, refuses to power up. Why couldn’t it have done this on either Tuesday or Wednesday, when we had nothing we had to do at a certain time and so could have dealt with it? But no. It was fine then. It waited until today to conk out on us, and now I have to try to fix it. I call the guy at the camera shop, and he recommends cleaning the battery contacts with alcohol. Nobody has any, so I hand Earl my little Canon point-and-shoot and snag the shuttle driver to take me to Walgreens for rubbing alcohol and cotton swabs. David drives the shuttle for the hotel. As he’s navigating Houston traffic, he talks about art. He’s from Colombia, where art and crafts are a very important part of the culture. “Art is the expression of the culture of a country,” he says. I realize how exactly right he is. And it’s not just the art in the museums and the galleries. It’s also the art being made in studios and workshops and basements and garages. The things people make are the indicators of what they value, of the tools and techniques that are important to them. Someday a historian may look back at the first few decades of the twenty-first century and note that there was a renaissance of metal working, of people hammering and shaping metal into pieces of wearable art.
We head back to the hotel with a bottle of rubbing alcohol, and I think back to a conversation I had with Dale. Her purse was stolen earlier in the week, right after she arrived in Houston. It was horrible and then it was wonderful when everyone at the retreat helped her look for the purse and drove her around to get a go-phone and gave her lots of sympathy and hugs. “Am I the luckiest person alive?” she asked. And I’m finding that that attitude is so common among the people who attend art retreats, and it’s key to having a great time. Things