I've talked to so many interesting people lately and the word "legacy" keeps popping up. What was your father's legacy? What was your mother's legacy? What is your legacy? A word that always felt so weighted with gravitas and legal documents and morose salutations now seems filled with a lightness of being. We all are descendants of people who wove marvelous threads.
I'll stay with the metaphor. My mother kept a sewing machine in our family room, the machine her mother, my German Nana, bequeathed her upon her wedding engagement. My mother used the well-oiled, "White" brand sewing machine not to conjure couture but to patch holes. I, on the other hand, caught a whiff of the grandeur of sewing back in the 1970s and ate at the counter of Butterick and Vogue at my local House of Fabrics store (accessible after a five-mile bike ride, zooming past L.A. freeways.) To this day do I appreciate the scents of the sensuous I caught from the covers of those patterns, those sophisticated women who no doubt gathered at The Algonquin Hotel, a place I'd one day saunter after moving to New York City and working at The New Yorker. Counting the advertising revenues--that was my day job. But at night, it was art meets architecture. The angularity of the city intersecting with eternal circles of my own family history in Manhattan.
Here is another piece of recent artwork celebrating the weaves of our legacies. Okay, right brain (creative) meets left brain (analytical.) Being informed, form-fitting, measuring grains, loosening diaphanous edges. What the heck--wishing upon an evening star in high heels. The poetry lingers on.
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