Life Takes Time:

Earlier this month, I sat down (on Zoom) with Berkeley-based potter Niki Shelley and Atlanta-based painter and urban farmer Dianna Settles to talk about our new reading group. Niki and Dianna had invited me to read Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus with them and I asked them if we could start with a conversation about why we wanted to read that particular text, especially in the context of our making processes. 1 This may seem like a peculiar undertaking for three makers, but Niki, Dianna and I know each other first through our political communities. Niki and I met through related community space projects in Oakland, CA, and we were introduced to Dianna through our mutual friend Jessica Green, a weaver and the originator of the phrase I’ve borrowed for my title: “Real life takes time.”

Since this first conversation, we’ve been meeting regularly to discuss both the text and all of the other things that come up through our readings and conversation as we all make sense of the notoriously dense French philosophy text. From that first two-and-a-half-hour conversation—which, like any good conversation, meandered—I have pulled out a small fragment, a snippet that touched on something that is both central to why and how we meet and deeply connected to this publication’s themes of feasting, craft, and pause as refusal. What became clear as we talked, and what I hope to share with you, is the profundity of a long and considered relationship, whether with materials or in community. I wanted also to retain the flow and feeling of being in conversation: the tangents, the unfurling out and the looping back in, the thoughts only partially verbalized when you are in the flow of discussion. I hope you get the impression of sitting around a table or a fire with us, talking away, a cup of something in your hand, as I long for us all to be in the coming months.

Laurin: Dianna, you, your partner, and neighbors have this beautiful urban farm with flowers and vegetables. And the food y’all make is the most mind-blowing, ridiculous thing: You grow everything and ferment everything, it’s incredible. There’s so much about the ways that I think this vibe-entanglement of everything is connected and it feeds every other thing, and it’s not performative, it’s not for the benefit of the internet, it’s actually just that there’s space in this pause to fucking live life. And for me, that’s really what craft means: getting into that stuff of living, making life in this way, and refusing to go back to the way it was before the pause. Both of y’all are constantly on my mind because you’re both making work that gives a glimpse of how things might be, and how I want things to be. I was talking with Dena Beard a few years ago and she said this thing that stuck with me, about how if the function of art is to push the limit of what’s possible, to push the limit of the imaginary, too often you feel like, “This is it? This is the limit of what you can imagine?” 2 And it’s fucking devastating.

Dianna: I get so frustrated about that all the time! Making art feels in so many ways like the lowest-stakes version of creating, imagining another possibility. Just play with what this would look like or what this would feel like. I’m often disappointed by the interpretations that I see, “Oh, this is your ideal?” Everyone is still just trudging through things that bring absolutely no joy or meaning in any material way.

Niki: There’s a lot of that in craft as well. There’s so much craft that’s just, “Oh, you’re just over there making bowls” and, I mean, I’m making bowls too over here [laughs] but I’m also, you know, like crying at the same time. My politics are in a real state of flux right now. I was really politically engaged for a long time, and then after Rilke was born, I was very disillusioned with a lot of my community and realized that so much of it felt really performative and not like real community, in a weird, strange way. Talking about art being the lowest-stakes version of a thing you can do, there’s also this fair-weather mutual aid kind of stuff which also feels real low stakes. 3 A lot of the last couple years has been really thinking about, who is my community? How can I care for those people and support them? As opposed to, how can I perform my radical politics in a way that’s visible to everybody?

Dianna: Yeah, there’s often such a disconnect. One of the things that feels really beautiful about craft that goes along with this is this materiality to knowing something as deeply as you can. And that’s where all of these things really feel connected. I started building the panels that I paint on by myself a few years ago, partly out of necessity because panels are really expensive, but also I want to have a relationship to it. If I’m going to use a shitty panel, I’d rather use a shitty panel that I made than one I spent $90 on and I have no control over the way that it exists in the world, you know? And learning farming, it’s so many very, very hard-learned lessons, where it’s just failure after failure. There’s this book called Living Craft that talks about the ways that people are disconnected from the artwork that they make and how in paintings that were made in the 1500s, there’s a different quality in the materials. 4 It’s this very long set of how-tos, like clarify your linseed oil, all of these different processes. It feels really steeped in the same kind of vibes. Early on in the text, there’s this piece about painting from life—it reminds me of Pattern Language a little bit—in order to paint from life, life has to happen first. 5 That felt like such a beautiful thing; the things that we make are going to feel stale if it’s just in our head and we never get to actualize any of these means of interaction or experience it with other people. Those things are so important to feed into each other in order to have that deeper relation to our own craft, and our own way of being in the world.

Laurin: There’s something about the stakes of actually being involved and implicated in the processes of what you’re doing in the studio and in your community and in the world that is missing in a lot of politics, a lot of art, and a lot of craft. It’s about the way you interact with and have that material relationship and understanding with what you’re working on, but also that willingness to put some stake in the world that produces that thing. In bad drought years, we don’t get good fiber from the sheep because they’re too stressed and you get break points in the wool, so maybe you don’t get the stuff you thought you were gonna get. And for this kind of abstract idea of art and this disconnected, performative community, those uncontrolled outcomes are intolerable, but actually having that stake in that relationship means there’s no alternative. You’ve put your lot in with this sheep so you’re gonna get what you’re gonna get.

Niki: I love what both of you are saying about really knowing something very deeply, and the material relationships that you have. Thinking about it in a political context, I’ve always advocated for the building of relationships and said that it’s not enough to just be in the same space together, we have to care about one another. It takes a really long time to build those intimate, caring relationships. And the same goes for your craft: making a real commitment to sticking it out, going through the various conflicts and failures and whatever, but learning from it, and continuing to commit to a community or a process, knowing that, eventually, you’re going to get somewhere. And it’s not just within radical political communities. I was hanging out with some parents of Rilke’s friends the other day, and one of them was like, “Well, you know, Occupy was a total failure.” And I was like, “Was it, though? I hear a lot of people critiquing capitalism these days, where do you think that came from?”

Dianna: I mean, so much of the world around us is doing everything possible to completely exhaust our attention spans anyway, keep us so overstimulated, it helps people forget about how much potential there is in these large moments of refusal and all of the things that stem from that. That’s what I’m thinking of in terms of the pause: the power that comes from saying no to something, and the room that makes for saying yes to other things. * * *

missed connections !!!

Missing: A five-week trip to Istanbul funded by the Gulbenkian Foundation to research knotted-lace traditions and to study Western Armenian at the Hrant Dink Foundation. Both communication systems were practiced by my foremothers in the Armenian-American diaspora as markers of identity, but have become endangered under the pressures of assimilation.

—Deborah Valoma

In a providential webinar, images from the Women’s Studio Workshop W.I.N.G.S.

Flying Objects event circa 1979 flashed across my screen, a giant brassiere kite by Gayle Sasson and a hand drawn event flyer representing a copious trove of documentation in an archive I would like to visit someday. —Darrah

Bowden

You, sweeping past me, golden hour last Sunday. Me, blue lit by screen, registering you but unable, or unwilling, to look up. I know your hand was open even as mine was occupied, an occupation that turns me from you, pretends it wasn’t you who showed me this place.

—Judith Leeman

Seeking: humans who like to color outside the lines while simultaneously cutting out perfect circles, to dig through boxes of unorganized papers while creating systems of organization, to connect dots between nonlinear ideas while adding glitter to everything. Willingness to take the long road to obscure destinations with lots of stops is a plus.

—Faythe Levine

Missing: My Memories. Space, time, and sensory experience compressed to the size of four walls for so many months. So little happened. So much happened. My memories have gone missing. Do you have them?

—Mara Holt Skov

Dear Doña Rosita: when I was in grade school in Mexico City, we all looked forward to the graduation trip during which we would travel with our teachers to Oaxaca after completing 6th grade. One of the highlights would be the barro negro (black clay) workshop, where we would see you make ceramic, as you are the most famous artisan of this beautiful craft. But shortly before we went on our trip you passed away and we never got to meet you in person. We did visit your workshop and saw your extraordinary works. It was there that I learned an important lesson: we often place great importance in the person of the artist, but what truly matters is their work. Your work, like that of many other great artisans of the world, indeed lives on.

—Pablo Helguera

Missed exhibition: I worked on an exhibition proposal for several months and handed it in for consideration by my museum on March 1, 2020. It was called There Is No Planet B and foregrounded expansive contemporary craft practices that understand climate and sustainability in relation to labor, health, and ethics as much as materials and process. Then the world as we knew it effectively ended. I am still waiting for a response to the proposal; we all now wait under the specter of, for some, mass famine and, for others, nuclear threat. What is craft in these times?

—Michelle Millar Fisher

Dear Forrest Bess, what do you think of the show of your work that Robert Gober put together at the Whitney? Was it everything you hoped a show with Betty Parsons would be? And what about what we’re saying about your work now? Are we getting it right?

—Cyle Metzger

More missed connections!

A few months into the pandemic, in an attempt to find something to do that did not involve endlessly scrolling news stories for information about the virus that I had somehow not seen before, I picked up my copy of Splendid Apparel: A Handbook of Embroidered Knits, by the esteemed Anna Zilboorg.1 The book had been sitting on my shelf since I bought it a year prior at a workshop, taught by Zilboorg herself, on twisted cable stitches. 2

Throughout the year since I had bought the book, I would occasionally glance at it as I rushed out the door to get to work or before crashing on the couch in an exhausted stupor after making dinner and getting the kid put to bed, all while continuing to send and answer emails and handle work-related crises. The desire to experiment with knitting and embroidery would be quickly forgotten as the next email made my phone vibrate in my hands, and I would only remember it when I saw the book on the shelf again, weeks or months later. The constant rush and lack of time to enjoy my life was not an experience that was isolated to me. Almost everyone I knew felt the pinch of financial precarity enough to commit to the hustle for almost every waking hour. Childless friends were working two or three jobs, while many friends with children were struggling to work only one job due to the cost of daycare. Even our crafting—what was supposed to be an enjoyable, relaxing hobby—was done with half an eye to selling if we could find the time to get to the craft fair or wrangle a commission from someone who had money to spare.

When I finally picked up Splendid Apparel off the shelf with the concrete intent to start a project, I had been working from home for just under six months, with no end in sight. I was finally realizing my life was not going to return to what it had been like in the “before times” (as my now seven-year-old apocalyptically calls the pre-pandemic period of his life). The bewildering, sudden changes to our collective daily lives due to the pandemic and the murder of George Floyd two miles from my house had settled into a constant, numbing anxiety that I tried to mask over for my children. Each day was the same, yet I struggled to find rhythms as we all waited for the return of “normal,” which must be coming any day, maybe as quickly as it had left, or possibly never. Writing about her experience in November of 2020, anthropologist Sarah Osterhoudt captured my feelings about the time perfectly, saying, “In these pandemic times, the days feel liminal.” 3

Existing between boundaries and thresholds, liminal space and time was an idea explored by anthropologist Victor Turner. Turner explains liminal moments as those in which one is “betwixt and between” 4 what Osterhoudt terms “more comfortable and recognizable states of the status quo.” 5 Liminal spaces and times are the strange places and moments we recognize in our bodies as being out of “ordinary” time and away from home space, like when one is standing in the empty quiet of a school hallway after everyone else has gone home. A liminal space is also found between Zilboorg’s twisted knit cables, which are simultaneously destructured, with an absence of stitches on the same level as the cables, and prestructured, having been designed to be part of the fabric as much as the cable stitches.

In Splendid Apparel, Zilboorg takes the playfulness of twisted cable stitches even further by using embroidery to create puddles and splashes of color and texture in the otherwise empty spaces between the twisted stitches. Although the em- broidery is on the same plane as the twisted cables, sitting on top of the knit fabric below, it is not inherently a part of the fabric. It is instead done after the garment is created. I started with the same socks I had knit during Zilboorg’s workshop a year prior and soon found myself in a meditative practice of filling in the spaces with tiny stitches of contrasting colors, which brought a new depth and richness to the cloth. Within an extensive, uncertain period of liminal time, I had chosen to explore a small, limited liminal space with my needle and thread.

7 Tony Lesser Wolf, “Goldsmith, Silversmith, Art Smith,” Metalsmith , Fall 1987, 21.

8 Turner, “Betwixt and Between,” 124.

Liminal Period in Rites de Passage” in The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967), 115.

I am hardly the first person to have made such a choice. In his excellent book, Creativity: The Perfect Crime, French high-wire artist Philippe Petit (an expert in existing and creating within the liminal space) explained both the draw and importance of the liminal state, what he called “the oft-neglected void”:

5 Osterhoudt, “The Pandemic and the Process of Becoming.”

6 Philippe Petit, Creativity: The Perfect Crime (New York: Riverhead, 2015), 26.

[T]he space between chaos and order gets my full attention … Why are we mesmerized when we look at the stars? Because of the space between them! Can music be in part defined by the void between the notes, as the supreme wire-walk proves dependent on the ever-so-brief suspension between the funambule’s [tightrope walker] step? Yes! 6 ric, knit at the same time, and often with the same yarn as the stitches they appear to dance on top of.

Crafters return again and again to the space between chaos and order, the betwixt and between, often creating new objects from materials that did not exist in those forms before. A clay block becomes a pot, or wool becomes a strand of yarn. As a knitter, I was often in a position of guiding yarn into new forms. I would joyfully engage with the periods when the yarn was no longer just a ball and not yet a garment, appreciating how the material of the yarn— the texture and color—engaged with the needles to create different garments with different properties based on how I manipulated the yarn within those between moments.

1 Anna Zilboorg and Alexis Xenakis, Splendid Apparel: A Handbook of Embroidered Knits (Sioux Falls: XRX, Inc, 2015).

3 Sarah Osterhoudt, “The Pandemic and the Process of Becoming,” SAPIENS , November 12, 2020, https://www.sapiens.org/culture/pandemic-liminal-state/.

4 Victor Turner, “Betwixt and Between: The

2 Twisted cable stitches are a style of knitting that creates an effect of connected stitches trailing up and down a garment, intersecting and coming apart to create patterns seemingly on top of the knit fabric below. In actuality, they are part of the fab -

This craft, however, was different from what I was used to. As I stitched within the spaces created between stitches, I created something new on top of an already completed garment. I worked within liminal spaces, stitching embroidery floss with a sewing needle between stitches that I had already created with a knitting needle. In describing his work using negative space, jeweler Art Smith said, “… I use [space] very accurately, very concretely… You can find it and make it tangible.” 7 This summed up the work I was doing. These new stitches, out of a different material, made the space tangible and, in doing so, changed the importance and hierarchy of the cabled stitches within the garment.

“Liminality,” Turner wrote, “is the realm … where there is a certain freedom to juggle with the factors of existence.” 8 Just over a year into the pandemic, I realized I had had enough. I did not want my life to be one in which I was tied to my cell phone and computer, waiting for the next email to detail the next crisis—a crisis that would be created by the unfortunate intertwining of government bureaucracy and individual trauma. I would then need to provide inadequate support to help alleviate the harm already done. I was tired of not

Jennie Alexander called her book, Make a Chair from a Tree: An Introduction to Working Green Wood, “more than a how-to-manual and less than a learned treatise.” 1 It was first published in 1978 by Taunton Press, which publishes woodworking books, magazines, and videos that fall into the genre of “how-to” literature. There is a plainness to the language of both the chair—what she calls a post and rung chair or “a stick chair with a fiber seat”—and the book, which claims nothing more than to describe a process. Sentences like “Keep the rungs light and slender” or “Chop, don’t swing” 2 have a pared-down beauty that I can learn from. If Jennie Alexander’s book teaches me something more than how to make a chair, it is that poetry does not need something lofty to hang its hat on. It often comes from the most ordinary and mundane things: a wet log, the clamor of four chair legs dragged across the floor, a dash of pencil on wood.

Jennie Alexander was born in 1930 and lived in South Baltimore brick rowhouses all her life. 3 She was a divorce lawyer for many years and hated it. She describes herself in those years as “grandiose and self-motivated,” living in “a man’s body” in “a man’s world,” being what her father was: a lawyer. 4 Her father had wanted a big and manly son, and Jennie 5 failed at being what he wanted; she was small and female. 6 She taught herself music and played New Orleans jazz and be-bop in clubs. Later, she became curious about chairs and wood while lawyering in the 1960s. She visited a Shaker village in Maine and came home inspired to make a one-slat dining chair using 17th-century methods. She had a firewood dealer deliver some six-foot hickory logs to the pavement behind her rowhouse in Baltimore. She axed them up and turned her first pieces of wet wood on a lathe she bought from a neighbor. For the next 13 years Jennie built chairs from green wood in her backyard and basement—trying, failing, and learning from experience. 7

There is a pleasure in shaving green or wet wood. There is a crispness to how my tools slice its fibers that goes away once wood has dried. In wet wood the grain hasn’t ossified into the unforgiving paths of dry wood—the stiff spikes that feel more separate from each other, stuck in their positions, less bound to what’s around them. It may be that the water in the wood gives a feeling of cohesion. Water is fluid and attracts itself. Under my tool, wet wood feels pliant, more like flesh than stone.

Jennie wanted her chair to be a chair for anyone to build; she called it a “simple chair” made with the “simplest tools.” 8 Her book proposes a kind of democratic making, something anyone anywhere can do. Making a chair with green wood allows for more joy in the making and less need for expensive machines. Jennie’s tools fit on an old chair frame that could be one of her failures. She says, “You could get by with an ax, a saw, a drawknife, a whittling knife and a brace and bit.” 9 She makes a scraper from an old carbon-steel kitchen knife that takes shavings like curls of tissue paper.

I have tasted wet wood and I know that it tastes like earth when you saw it or cleave it. There is an aromatic burst of water-born particles that hits me in the back of my throat. It is juicy like an apple; driving an axe into its end might push droplets to the surface.

“Work while the wood is still wet.” 10 It is a refrain in her book. She reminds us that the moisture in wood is in a constant motion, even after the tree has been felled. Wood is hygroscopic, forever balancing itself with water in the surrounding air. 11 Its design is porous and open to the world. It has fiber for strength, but also as vessels that circulate water. “The vessels are long, hollow, fluid-conduction fibers that run vertically in the growing tree.” 12 The chair is built around the inevitable loss of moisture from wood, using the shrinkage that happens as it dries to make a strong chair.

12 Ibid., 23.

13 Ibid., 116. 14 Ibid., 69. 15 Ibid., 81. 16 “Limber the slat before bending it.” Ibid., 96. 17 Ibid., 97.

“Green wood works easily and beautifully. And because of that we’re only going to have to use simple hand tools. There will be no power tools involved.” Anatol Polillo and ALP Productions, “Make a Chair from a Tree” (video), 1999, https://lostartpress. com/collections/dvds/products/video- make-a-chair-from-a-tree.

7 Ibid. 8

5 I will call Jennie Alexander “Jennie” in this essay because that was what she was called in the last 11 years of her life by the woodworking community. Using “Jennie” rather than the last name “Alexander” honors the fact that she was a transgender woman who lived in the gender assignment of her own choosing.

1 Jennie Alexander, Make a Chair from a Tree: An Introduction to Working Green Wood (Newtown, CT: Taunton Press, 1978), 12.

Wet wood is like a thing that has come in from the rain. It is full of weather. A piece of wet wood might have tufts of moss attached or delicate frills of lichen decorating its bark. It is cold in my hands. It feels heavy with the weight of water, water that is stopped in its tracks, cut from the vertical flow of earth to sky, sky to earth. It will never be this heavy again, weighted with the weather it has come in from.

Jennie makes extra rungs which must be dried before being driven into the vertical posts. It is this careful observance of moisture content in posts and rungs that makes the chair hold together. As it dries, the post wood, which is left wetter than the rungs, will grab tightly the more stable rung. Jennie plans for this symphony of wet and dry but knows there will be failures. Wood can split and distort as it dries. Circles become ovals; squares become diamonds. Moisture in wood follows unpredictable lines, not fixed to plotted points. She says, “Broken chairs should not just be thrown away—they are our best teachers.” 13

Each of the book’s black and white photographs is a portrait of some minute action. There is a close-up of a hand whittling wood in which the details of skin, thumbnail, and the tiny hairs on a finger are as present as the reflection of wood shavings in the mirror surface of the knife. Elsewhere, there is a picture of a common utility knife laid open in four acts, showing how the shape of a store-bought blade can be altered for the purpose at hand.

9 Alexander, Make a Chair , 37.

10 Ibid., 47.

11 Ibid., 101.

6 “My father and I never got along. He knew that when I was a child I wasn’t going to be manly, because I was little. And he sent me to the greatest doctors at Johns Hopkins. As a result, they hung a swing set in the passageway between the kitchen and dining room, and I was supposed to swing on it and stretch.” Uhl, “Meet the Author.”

Jennie’s chairmaking is a carefully timed and watched observance of water in wood, not an exact science. She heats her rungs over a hot-water pipe in the ceiling of her basement. “Before forming the tenons, be sure the rungs are drier than they will be during the life of the chair.” 14 Jennie uses sound rather than science to tell her when the right dryness has occurred. “When the posts have reached a stable weight, strike them together. They should make a sound between the dull thunk of tree-wet wood and the sharp ping of dry wood.” 15

2 Ibid., 56, 38.

Kara Uhl, “Meet the Author: Jennie Alexander,” Lost Art Press Blog , May 25, 2017, accessed April 10, 2021, https://blog.lostartpress.com/2017/05/25/meet-the-author-jennie-alexander/.

3

4 Alana Madden, “029 Jennie Alexander: Women in Manual Work Oral Histories,” 2018, accessed April 14, 2021, https://vimeo.com/275457548.

I am relieved by her words; they tell me that I can make a chair intuitively. That there will be no math. I can listen for a tone change in the wood, watch for wood’s shrinkage, listen for dryness.

The chair’s back slats are thin, only three-sixteenths of an inch, so that they give under a body’s leaning weight. Jenny bends a straight stick of hickory with just the strength of her arm. She cuts the slats thin and “limbers” them—bending them back and forward in her hands. 16 Limbering loosens the grasp of fibers, stretches them for bending. She curves her slats without a form or press, but with the weight of her chest, some twine and sticks to coax a curve. It looks like she is stringing an instrument. It may sound complicated, she says, but “it is simple in the flesh.” 17

There is a picture of a spinning metal bit, blurred in a long exposure, that hovers above the dark hollow of a hole in a stick of wood. The caption says, “Drill the mortise tangent to the line that marks the seat plane.” Looking closely, I see that there is a line, a faint one just above the hole, and that this relationship, a circle that is tangent to a line, is the meaning of the photograph. The line is the thing to see. The line told the operator of the bit where to make a hole. The line was the prompt—the dash, the mark, the cue for where and when the circle would happen. The drilled hole, or mortise, meets the line and tries to kiss it with its outermost edge. It is this meeting described as “tangential,” as barely touching, that for me becomes more than the boring of a hole in the right place—it is a small rendering of someone trying to hit their mark, acting with intention. This accuracy in all the flux and change of wood. I see myself hovering and spinning like the drill bit in the space above the stick of wood where all things are incipient. * * *

COVID has altered reality. Two years in, Zoom and other video platforms are part of our lives. We are grateful for technology, but a screen of little faces in Zoom squares is hardly a substitute for the togethering we no longer do for birthdays, weddings, baby showers, and everything else.

I’m a Jewish textile artisan. My life is making things that are literally woven into Jewish lives, things that are worn and wrapped around ourselves in their creation. Yarmulkes, tichels, tallitot, chuppahs, and tachrichim are all things Jews can’t live, or die, without.

I didn’t believe there was a way to replace the personal connections we all took for granted in the Before Times, until suddenly it happened.

Tal Chaim, TC, is a beloved friend who’s 26 years old and terminally ill. TC holds incredible grace and radical acceptance, fueling the determination to live every moment with as much gratitude as they can. TC uses the word “joy” as a verb.

Last Wednesday, TC’s prognosis was changed from “multiple months” to “maybe a couple of weeks.” Plans were swiftly made for TC to discharge from the hospital in three days, on Saturday morning, and admit into hospice that afternoon. After leaving the hospital before entering hospice, TC planned to attend morning service at our synagogue—for the very last time.

I had already started making TC a tallis, a traditional Jewish shawl with knotted fringes on the corners worn for morning prayers, to give to them for their birthday a few months away. I was pretty sure I could get it all done to give to TC in a couple days when they were at synagogue.

Things were going well on Thursday evening as I dabbed the last bits of paint on the silk. Steeped in symbolism, Torah, and amazing color, it was one of the most beautiful tallitot I had ever made. About 7:00 p.m., I tossed it into the dryer to shorten the steaming process, like I had done countless times before. At about 8:00 p.m., I casually pulled the tallis from the dryer and nearly fainted. It had snagged while tumbling and was shredded.

Rather than cry out in disbelief, I was overcome with laughter and the joyous realization that TC’s perfection is in their imperfections, and their timeline is tightly packed and rushed. Nothing different would do for TC, so I took a deep breath and got back to work.

10:00 p.m. My living room was covered in newsprint to catch the inevitable mess, my silk stretcher set up and a fresh piece of silk in my hand. I threw out one last prayer and began anew with only the tear-misted memory of what I had done previously in mind.

10:30 p.m. I was slapping and slopping paint all over the place with more abandon than I had ever dared before.

2:30 a.m. Friday morning. I set up fans to speed the drying.

4:00 a.m. I glared at my demonic dryer and tucked the painted silk into my steamer.

10:00 a.m. The silk was rinsed, dried, and pressed. Somehow at 11:30 a.m. the embroidered collar and corners were re-done and by noon on Friday, everything was sewn and the new tallis was done.

Hopped out to grab a friend who had jumped on a train at 6:00 a.m. with wool tzitzit strings they spun themselves from wool roving. We returned to my house by 12:45 p.m. It was then that the magic truly began.

1:00 p.m. Community members started coming to my West Philadelphia porch. Some alone, some in groups of two or three. Each embraced the tallis, whispered their love and grief and joy and sorrow and soul and prayers and tears into it. Then each made a special blessing and carefully tied a knot.

One after another, beloveds came. A few folks joined on Zoom, making a blessing and watching their knot be tied for them right close to the Zoom camera.

Somehow, before Shabbos fell at 5:43 p.m. on Friday, all the knots had been made, the corners finished and the tallis complete.

TC loves purple and stars, and the rainbow edging is all that TC is—a promise of G*d’s care and an uncountable diversity of who TC is. The collar has a Talmud quote declaring power in the knowledge of the sick upon their own bodies. And a three-wicked havdallah candle—painted crooked on purpose, because TC is not straight in stature or being—centers it all. This candle is lit just at the end of our Shabbos every week.

It burns in the moment when Jews cling to the last moments of the holiness of Sabbath, until we extinguish it in a cup of wine, our joy, to begin waiting for Shabbos again—much like we were all clinging to TC and each other.

And just like that, longing for the Before Times was extinguished with the sacredness of this community-created tallis, with some blessings said over Zoom. The tallis wrapped TC when they were called to Torah for the last time.

Tal Chaim died a few weeks later and was buried wearing traditional plain linen garments wrapped in their tallis. The last moments anyone saw of our beloved friend on earth, as they were placed into their casket, was the sacred glowing luminescence of their tallis tenderly embracing their physical remains as their soul reached for G*d. * * *

“It’s November 25, 1997, and this is Jeff Keith, interviewing my grandfather, Buddy Keith, in his kitchen, on Chestnut Street, in Bowling Green, Kentucky.”*

Buddy Keith recounts his life to me for the first time, sharing the essential details of our family’s unspoken history. He explains that his father had an affair. This led to the birth of a son, and that lightning bolt splintered our branch from the family tree. Buddy tells me about being among the first Allied troops to enter Rome, and describes a private tour of the Vatican. I imagine a young, battle-worn soldier from rural Kentucky standing alone in the Sistine Chapel. Buddy recalls a therapeutic leatherwork program that rescued him from shellshock, and then he talks about facing down alcoholism. He remembers returning home to become a tombstone salesman. The company has been in our family, he notes, since the mid19th century. He points out that my father is the fifth generation in the trade, and Buddy tells me that my great-grandfather’s second family is also in the business. I consider how odd it is that I don’t know them at all.

It’s March 3, 2020, when I hear that the first case of COVID-19 has been reported in Durham. I’m there, in that city, listening to Clarice Thorpe, the 87-year-old grand daughter of Will Love. She sits in her den and describes her affection for her grandpapa, who I had learned was the only Black person to record “Swannanoa Tunnel,” a song about the deadly work of incarcerated laborers who built a rail road tunnel near Warren Wilson College. Clarice has never heard the recording of her grandfather, so I play it for her. His voice fills the room, joining our interests. Afterward, Clarice opens up about family history and the state of society, sharing stories that unlock new understandings yet introduce further mysteries. She re counts the exact location of Will’s tombstone. Clarice has a brief coughing fit, and insists she doesn’t have COVID. Unaware of the society-wide pause about to take place, we talk into the night.

I review the control panel to make sure everything is recording. On July 18, 2020, I’m in my office for the first of what will be many online classes in the MACR pro gram, and I begin by describing the different meanings I find in the craftwork left behind by some of my maternal ancestors. The disease is rampaging as I get to know my students. They provide me with a helpful focus during a chaotic time. Over weeks, I encourage them to take up oral history, and they encourage me to purchase stone-carving equipment. As more time passes, we sort out how to do this despite shutdowns, spikes, and insurrections.

The phone rings on March 7, 2021, and lightning strikes again. Buddy Keith’s half-brother Roy, now 93, says hello to me for the first time, and asks me to turn on a recorder. The essay I had written about my oral history with my grandfather Buddy had made its way to Roy. He reveals that my great-grandfather was an al coholic, and that his second family suffered as a result. Then my great-grandfather found religion and got sober. At times in tears, Roy implores me to understand that my great-grandfather had three acts in his life, and that the last one was a beau tiful story of redemption. I ask Roy to describe the original Keith stone carvers. Listening, I think about the importance of writing, fast and slow. I imagine stone dust flying as my great-great-great-grandfather makes his first monument.

*This is an imaginary quote from the author’s first oral history. He didn’t write down the date or keep the tape. He has taken similar liberties throughout this short essay. Does something have to be

On October 17, 2021, there was a dedication ceremony for a monument to the