"And then I began to see...", A press check of a signature of "Hoop Dancing", at Arizona Lithography, Tucson, Arizona (c) Fall 2009 Stu Jenks.
["Hoop Dancing", the book, should be available for shipment upon my return from Chicago. Go to my website at www.stujenks.com to order the book. And may all of you have a Happy Thanksgiving.]
(Meditation for the day: "It is what it is, and it ain't what it ain't")
“Old Mom’s Hands” (c) 2009 Stu Jenks
“So how was your day?” Mary asks, sucking on a Tastee Freez milkshake I have just brought her.Oh, Christ. It’s going to be a very long drive.
“The New Old Mary” (c) 2009 Stu Jenks
“She said that he needs to get his ass in here,” says the caregiver, recounting what my Mother said right before I arrived. The nurse thinks it’s funny. I don’t. I don’t tell her that I don’t think it’s funny, for this is the Old Mary that I’ve known for 55 years, minus the six months recently when I had the Sweet New Mom. But I think the caregiver is reading my face pretty well. I ain’t smiling. She sees that.
VERITAS: Very Energetic Radiation Imaging Telescope Array System (c) 2009 Stu Jenks
Located south of Tucson at the base of the Santa Rita Mountains, VERITAS, as their official website states, "is a major ground-based gamma-ray observatory with an array of four 12m optical reflectors for gamma-ray astronomy in the GeV- TeV energy range." Another sister educational website states, in more laymen's terms, that VERITAS "is an observatory built to study gamma rays from extreme astrophysical phenomena in the Universe. VERITAS is now scanning the night sky searching for remnants of exploded stars, distant active galaxies, powerful gamma ray bursts, and evidence of mysterious Dark Matter particles." When Dr. Gibbs told me on Thursday afternoon, that they had recently looked at a large gamma ray emission coming from an enormous black hole at the center of a galaxy, far far away, my first response was 'Wow.' When a physicist told me on Friday night, that they were looking at a supernova remnant that night, 'Wow' was my response. When I told friends and colleagues about this night shoot, the special place and what they studied there, their responses were, you guessed it, 'Wow!'
The images in the post were taken on Thursday afternoon and Friday night, November 19-20, 2009 at or near the Array. Many, many thanks to Dr. Kenneth Gibbs, Sagar Godambe, Professor Reshmi Mukherjee of Columbia University, Arun Madhavan, and all of the staff and fellows at VERITAS. They were so helpful and very open to my shooting. And happy cosmic ray hunting to you all.
[Images from the top to bottom: "T-1 at VERITAS", VERITAS Looking Toward Mexico", "VERITAS from the North", "Red-Tailed Hawk above VERITAS", "Bozo Looking at T-1, from above The Devil's Cash Box", "Sagar Leaving T-1", " Sagar and Reshmi in the Control Room", "T-2 at Dusk", , "Pleiades & T-1", "Stars in the Mirrors of T-2", and "Stars in the Mirrors of T-2 (Detail)"]
Final Fun Fact: Veritas was also the Roman Goddess of Truth, daughter of Saturn and the mother of Virtue.
(And remember: click and/or double-click on the images and they become larger. And yes, the night shots are a bit grainy, due to the short time exposures and the high ISO, but every pinpoint of light you see is a star. All those dots of white in "T-1 at VERITAS" and "Pleiades & T-1" are stars, not digital grain. Lots and lots of stars.)
Goeff wrote a very nice piece about last weekend's Open Studio Tour. For me, it was the best experience I've had in the eight years I've been participating. Everyone (and I mean everyone) who visited my studio was smart, funny, interested and interesting, and downright great to be around, old friends and new visitors alike. Very different from the horrors of a couple years ago. It might just be me, but I don't think so. With Mary's dementia and all, I'm pretty stressed these days, so the joy (and cash in some cases) that the patrons brought was very welcome. Thank you all, and hope to see you all soon, either in person, online or through my books. Here's a link to Geoff's Article on the blog he writes for the Tucson Citizen.
[Photos of Elizabeth Frank's work and of me in my studio by Geoff Notkin. I didn't even know he took that shot of me. Very sneaky, Geoff]
"Infrared Bozo in Sequoia National Park, California" (c) 2009 Stu Jenks
From The 2009 All Souls' Procession, Tucson, Arizona (c) 2009 Stu Jenks
[All images by Stu Jenks, except the bottom one of me in a kilt, taken by Tom Willett]
“Now That’s Good”, (c) November, 2009, Stu Jenks
There seems to be no telling which way this disease, this dementia, will go. A few days ago, the Old Old Mary was back. The day after that, it’s as if she was never there. A couple days ago, Mary could hardly speak. Yesterday, her speech was clear and easily understood. Today, I don’t know."Hoop Dancing: More Journeys Through Nocturnal Photography: Book Two" is now in the pre-sale stage. The book has been beautifully printed by Tucson Master Printers Arizona Lithography and is now at the book binders in Phoenix. It will be ready for shipment by December 1st if not earlier.
Simply go to my website at www.stujenks.com, and pre-order the book there. You can use Paypal or if you wish to pay by check, just send me a check to my P.O.Box, listed on my site, and send me an email at stujenks@gmail.com to let me know you have bought a book and I'll reserve a specific numbered copy for you. If you pay through Paypal, I'll get all of your information for shipment through them.
The first 30 numbered edition can be ordered and reserved, by a specific edition number.
I tried to keep the cost as low as possible to y'all, but I am publishing this book through my own house at Fezziwig Press, and beautiful lithography costs money. You truly get what you pay for, when it comes to print quality. The book is not coffee-table size but rather an intimate 6 x 9 inch book, cloth-bonded, and dust-jacketed, with a 4 x 6 inch signed photograph included with each book. All books are numbered, signed and shrink-wrapped.
This is the first in a series of at least five books by me, from Fezziwig Press. Not to beg, but the more I sell, the greater chance of I have of producing the other books. My first book, "Flame Spirals" is no longer available through Lulu.com (The print quality was not up to my standards.) but will hopefully be available as cloth-bond, lithography book, in the Summer of 2010, God willing and the creek don't rise. Master Book Designer Gail Cross has almost finished the book design of "Flame Spirals" and it looks stunning, if you ask me. And she designed "Hoop Dancing" and I've been brought to tears, more than once, from the amazing care and love she has taken with my images and text.
So, just in time for Christmas, you can purchase 'Hoop Dancing". Truly, it would a great gift for anyone on your Christmas list.
And it goes without saying, that I appreciate all of y'all's support: financially, emotionally, and spiritually.
Love and light,
Stu Jenks
p.s. I got Mary some Scotch last night. She had a bad day. She either thought I had died, or suddenly remember that her husband Stuart was dead. We're not sure. But her seeing me did help. And a wee dram of Dewer's really did the trick as well. Two fingers, over ice, with a splash. After taking a long draw on the straw from her bed, Mom opened her mouth, said "Ah..." and then said, as clear as a bell, '...Now that's good!"
"I...Don't...Know...What..." (c) 2009 Stu Jenks
Mary’s come back to us a bit. Not all the way from where she was a month ago, but enough that she can speak some. She still gets lost in her words, but on occasion, a fully-formed sentence will appear out of nowhere. It’s shocking and delightful, all at the same time. It happened tonight.
I show Mom the back of my Canon 5D Mark II.
“I like this shot,” I say.
“I don’t,” says Mary.
“Really? How come?”
“I look ugly,” she says. I think she looks peaceful, kind, pretty, but I’m not making the artistic decisions tonight.
“I think you look great, but I won’t use that one. How about this one?”
It’s a shot of her looking up from her wheelchair at the nice hospice worker this morning. It’s a OK shot. Looks a little out of focus. Not great, but OK, if you ask me.
“I like that,” she says, with a bit of exuberance to her voice. You may not call it exuberance if you didn’t know Mary Jenks, but a slight rise in his faint voice means she’s quite excited and thrilled.
“Really?” I look again at the shot. She does look awfully sweet.
“OK, Mom. I’ll use that one. By the way, I’ve been writing about you and I, and I’m putting pictures of you and such on my weblog, and I’ve got more hits on my blog, than I ever have before.”
“Is that right?” she says.
“Yea. People really care about you, Mom.”
She has this look I’ve never seen on her face until she got sick, but I’ve seen it a lot in the last couple months. A look of being humbly touched by the love of others. No expectations. No demands. Just touched by the Love.
“I’m going to write about something you said yesterday, and put it on my blog.”
“What’s that?” say Mary.
“Well, yesterday morning as I was getting ready to leave, you said very slowly ‘I don’t know how...” and you had a hard time finishing the sentence. I said, ‘You don’t know how to die?’ You said, ‘No, no, no...’ and started over. You said, ‘I don’t know what...’ and then I knew what you meant. I said, ‘You don’t know what you would do without me?’ And you smiled and said yes.”
The smile tonight wasn’t as big as the one yesterday, but it was a very lovely smile, nonetheless.
“And then, later in the day, I called C____ , and while we were talking, I told her the story and, out of the blue, she said, ‘I don’t know what I’d do without you either.’ It made my day, Mom.”
We’re both smiling now.
It’s great to have Mary back, even if just for a little while: Able to listen, able to respond, able to talk just a little. More times than not, she can’t get the words out but tonight, she’s doing pretty good.
We talk about this and that. Some sad stuff, but mostly it’s light and breezy. Then I hear my mother use a word I’ve never heard her say before. In my life.
“Stu...What...I...want......What...I...want....”
She gives a heavy sigh. She really wants to get this out.
“What...I...want....is....is...a highball.”
“A highball?”
“Yes.”
“Like a glass of Scotch?”
“Yes.” She looks hopeful.
“Well, I don’t know. I know you’ve had wine in the past here. I don’t know if you can have Scotch, but I’ll ask. Would a glass of wine in a sippy cup do?”
She rolls her eyes, as if saying ‘If I have to have wine, I’ll drink wine, but what I really want is some Scotch.’
“Mom, I’ll ask Jessica.” I don’t know if hard liquor is on the OK list, but I sure hope so.
We talk a little more. Mary’s starting to wear out. It doesn’t take long these days.
“I’m going to go, Mom. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
Then suddenly, out of her mouth, comes a perfectly formed, perfectly articulated sentence.
“Stu, do you ever get scared?”
I pause. I’m taken aback, not by the question, but by how clearly she spoke it.
“Yea, I get scared,” I say.
“What do you get scared of?” she asks with perfect diction.
I think. I know right away.
“I’m scared of being alone,” I say.
“Me too.” The light in her eyes says, ‘I’m not alone, thank God.’
I kiss her goodnight, tell her I love her, and head out to the kitchen to talk with Jessica about the High Ball Request.
“I’ll give it to her, if you go buy it.”
“Really? You’d do that?”
“Sure. It’ll help her sleep.”
I’m surprised that my eyes mist up so fast, but they do. I’m overtaken by unexpected joy.
“Thanks, Jessica. I’ll go get her pint of Scotch tomorrow or the next day.”
As I get in my truck and drive away, the joy doesn’t subside. I call a friend or two or three and tell them about the High Ball Request. One is worried about me buying it. One laughs at the irony. Another is helpful in telling me where the liquor stores are, (For I’m completely out of the loop these days, having not drunk any alcohol in almost 25 years. I was a big Scotch drinker myself, back in the day. Most of us Jenks’ are Scotch drinkers. No bourbon or gin for us. Give us Scotch, single malt, cheap, expensive. We don’t care.)
I’m home in my apartment. It’s getting late. Tomorrow’s my birthday. A big box with an unopened “Heritage of Scotland” kilt inside sits under my Christmas stick, ready to be opened tomorrow morning. I’m having breakfast with a friend, then helping another friend with a problem in the afternoon. But somewhere, in between all of that, I’m going to a liquor store and buy my mother a fifth of Dewer’s Scotch. I’ll try not to cry at the counter. I know I’ll cry on the drive up to her house.
-11:22 p.m., November. 5th, 2009
"Two Sisters & A Daughter" (c) 2009 Stu Jenks
[Top Image: "Pamela, visiting from North Carolina, talks with her mother about who-knows-what; Mary's a little confused."; Bottom Image: "Virginia compares her arm size with her sister Mary's, to see who is the thinnest Belle at the Ball; Virginia's nurse smiles; Pamela comments on the comparison."]
Photog's Note: Being real skinny isn't the best thing when you're in your 80's, but these two sisters have been competing with each other ever since they were teenagers. Mom has always felt like Virginia was the Pretty Sister. Perhaps. But Mary was the one with the rocking figure, back in the day.
“Mary Gazes At Her Hand” (c) 2009 Stu Jenks
[Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009]
It’s after dinner. Mary’s sound asleep. I wake her up. She’s happy to see me. I’ve been told that she has rallied.
“We think it was the Depakote. She been off it five days now. We have to puree all of her food but she ate three meals today. I have to feed her, though. Then again, she may have had a little stroke...” Sounds like Jessica thinks she's getting better. I pray Mom’s not.
I thank the caregiver as she leaves Mary and I alone. I close the door to her room. I reread her birthday cards to her. I read them to her first, on Halloween, but she was completely unaware of them, and me, that day. It was just four days ago. She turned 83. Tonight, she knows the names of her friends, at least for a few seconds or so.
"Mary Talking With Stu: October, 2009" (c) 2009 Stu Jenks
[My favorite portrait of my mother, taken one night a month ago, before she peacefully fell asleep. The warm light from her bedside lamp fell so lovely on her face.]
"Mary Sees" & "I Want My Momma..." (c) 2009 Stu Jenks
Mary sees things that are not there. Dad. Other men. Her mother. Her grandfather, Daddy Saum.
Mostly it doesn’t scare her, these visions. Mostly she just looks at them with wonder. Frankly, I don’t know all she sees because I only ask her when I’m there and when I think the time is right to ask. I’m sure she sees a lot more people and things than any of us will ever know.
Mary’s condition has worsened. For a few days, she had a very hard time eating anything. Now, she can eat a little. For a few days, she slept all the time. Now, she sleeps about 20 hours a day. Just a couple weeks ago, she could follow a conservation, and respond with kindness and attention. Now, at best, she just goes away as I talk, to some place where I can not follow. This morning was especially sad.
I walk into her room. Mary’s asleep. Jessica told me earlier, she has eaten some pudding. I said, “Good,” but I didn’t really mean it. (If she completely stops eating, she will be dead within a month.) I grab the old wood chair from the kitchen in Virginia, move the thick blue pad by her bed, that’s there to break her falls if she rolls out, and place the old chair right beside her bed. I raise her bed with the electric controls, so I can talk with her easier. She doesn’t really wake up. Her eyes open, but she doesn’t really see. I say, “Hello, Mom,” but she doesn’t really hear. Then she begins to say one phrase over and over, very softly, in her strong Virginia accent. Most people wouldn’t understand her. I know exactly what she’s saying.
“I want my Momma. I want my Momma, I want my Momma....”
I touch her hand. I start to cry. I cry hard. Her bedroom door’s closed to the rest of the house, so I let fly. I cry for her, for me, for everything. Everything. I don’t know where some things end and where others begin anymore. My deep grief at realizing (finally) that I’ll never share a life, a home, a love, with that fine woman in California is all wrapped up in my sadness at watching my mother die, a very slow and scary death. My own fears of being self-employed, spending thousands of dollars on my art and writing careers, with not enough money coming back in right now, to even come close to breaking even, combines with managing Mary’s money and making sure there is plenty there, just in case she lives another couple, three years or more. My own loneliness with having no one to share my bed mixes with my sadness at losing this sweet kind mother I’ve had for the past few months, who I’ve shared so much with, but who is here no more. My anger at the withholding of important truths by other people in other parts of my life joins with my rage at the mystery of ‘Just when will Mom finally die?’ But at the same time as all of this fury of emotions fills me, day in and day out, I feel this incredibly gratitude: that I have money to draw from, for Mom, for me and for some other good folk in my life; that I have real friends that care about me and I for them, and who are really there for me, as I go through all of this; and that I have this strong faith that this will eventually end, be it my Mom’s long suffering or my grief regarding this huge hole in my own broken heart. That even though it’s not OK, not even close to OK, I’ll be OK.
“...I want my Momma. I want my Momma. I want my Momma....”
“I want my Momma too,” I say to Mary. I chuckle. That’s not going to happen. I’m Mary’s parent now, not she mine. But maybe, just maybe, her Momma, Nannie, will cross from the other side and lend a hand too.
“Mary Loves Milkshakes” (c) 2009 Stu Jenks
(From a few weeks ago)
Mary loves milkshakes. Has for years. Today, I brought her a Starbuck’s Vanilla Bean Frappucino. She liked it OK, but I could tell she would have preferred something from McDonald’s. I made a mental note.
"Double Rainbow at Dragoon Springs, Arizona" (c) 2009 Stu Jenks
[Happy All Souls' Day, and Day of the Dead, y'all. May the ghosts of your ancestors and loved ones find you happy and free, today, tonight and always. My father just whispered a piece of advice in my ear. I'm not going to share it with y'all, but I plan to heed it. ]
"Love, Let Go, Love Some More; Cathy's Fault, Arizona" (c) 2009 Stu Jenks
"Bozette went shopping..., El Centro, California" (c) 2009 Stu Jenks
After she and Bozo broke up, Bozette went shopping to ease her pain, only to find that the Mervyn’s Department Store had closed down. She stared at the boarded-up storefront and wondered, ‘What do I do now? Not about the shopping, but about Bozo and I. What do WE do now?’
The hot desert wind picked up, blowing her red hair into her face. She listened hard to the wind but it gave her no answers. She bowed her head and cried.
[From the upcoming book, "Bozos In Love"]
"Beaufort, South Carolina, 1955" (detail) by Robert Frank
[Taken by me at the MOCA in Downtown Los Angeles in September. I had permission. Sadly, the images from "The Americans" series were very poorly lit, not like the same images I saw in August, at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. There, they were exquisitely lit. This, and others in the series are perfect photographs: The woman's radiant face, the sun behind her, the light pole that echos the Cross. Perfect. Other memories from MOCA: LA that day, were a class of tweens taking a tour of the museum and having their teacher or a docent tell them that the poorly-crafted, arrogant, nightmares-on-a-wall they were seeing, were actually good paintings. The look on the kids' faces was priceless. Remember, it was a child who told the townspeople that the Emperor had no clothes on. Sadly, the schoolkids weren't in the room with "The Americans." I bet they would have looks of awe on their faces, not wrinkled-up noses. Hopefully they got to see them before they left.]
"When people look at my pictures I want them to feel the way they do when they want to read a line of a poem twice." - Robert Frank.
