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So it is the end of another year, and it is time to write the post which I always put off again and again…right up until the last day of the year–which is to say I still need to write the year-end obituaries. Ferrebeekeeper readers will recall that the obituaries here are obituaries for those departed who meant a lot to me–so if you want to know about queens, popes, soccer guys, rappers, or whatever, you will probably have to look elsewhere. For example, last year, I only wrote about my grandfather, an international master operative who battled against Soviet and Chinese dirty tricks in Africa and Southeast Asia throughout the middle of the 20th century. These days, everyone rolls their eyes about the worldwide cloak-and-dagger proxy wars by means of which the Cold War was fought, but, please note that as soon as grandpa was dead (and his ilk out of power), Russia formed an alliance with China and attacked Europe, so I tend to think it all WAS pretty necessary, no matter what the anti-American apologists say.
Grandpa taught me how to take stock of the world and look at art (which he avidly collected), but for more specific lessons in world history and painting, I turned to a generation of teachers and masters who are now also passing away. And so it is with great sadness that I write about two of my illustrious teachers who died in 2022.
Walter Emil Kaegi, (1937 – 2022) was one of my favorite history professors from college (along with the late, great Emmet Larkin). Kaegi was a professor of Byzantine history, a broad subject which he approached with polymath intensity from all sides. In some respects, Byzantine history is regarded as the story of one thousand years of precipitous and ineluctable decline. Kaegi, however, remembered that history does not seem inevitable to those leading it. His multi-faceted view of the Byzantines was indeed filled with trademark battles, religious controversies, and palace intrigue, but he also added the trade, farming, technology, music, poetry, and ecology missing from the work of great Byzantinists of yore. Kaegi was a scholar’s scholar who knew Latin, Greek, and Aramaic just as well as English, but also learned French, German, and Russian so he could read the works of other scholars. Speaking of Russian, the professor always wore a hilarious heavy Russian hat which we bare-headed undergrads laughed at in the bitter Chicago winters (which illustrates that comedy, like history affords multiple vantage points on what is actually the truth).
Although history scholars like to speak of him like he was Gibbon, Kaegi was definitely not Gibbon. He instead synthesized some insights into the long fall of the Roman Empire from new resources–particularly archaeological/geological ones. Whereas most historians fixate solely on the doings of emperors, courtiers, bishops, and generals, Kaegi came to the conclusion that a combination of climate change, agricultural collapse, and religious change was driving events to a heretofore unappreciated extent (an insight worth remembering when eyeing the events of the present).
My other teacher who passed away last year will probably not be remembered foremost as a teacher–since he was actually an artist first. Ronald Sherr (1952-2022) was a brilliant portrait-painter who studied with Daniel E. Greene, Harvey Dinnerstein, and Burton Silverman before going on to paint America’s leading politicians, soldiers, and business leaders (and win all sorts or awards and accolades chronicled elsewhere). Since he rubbed shoulders with the mighty (or at least painted those mighty shoulders) he is liable to be incorporated as part of this era’s political zeitgeist. Indeed, in the recent headlines about former house-speaker Boehner crying when Nancy Pelosi’s official portrait was unveiled, CNN and the NYTimes neglected to dwell on the fact that Ron had painted the official portrait of both speakers!
Yet world-renowned clients was not what made Ron important as an artist. Ron was an artistic anachronism of sorts–he painted beautiful realistic portraits which looked like they had some piece of the living subject inside of them. His real method for obtaining these incredible results was not some trick or secret tool, but constant practice and stringent self-criticism. Ron’s artistic hero was Jon Singer Sargent who combined the unparalleled draftmanship of the Old Masters with the realistic color and focus of the impressionists. Ron likewise used this combination and it is what he tried to teach his students. We all remember that during our first year painting he would mostly ask seemingly obvious questions like “Is the head you have painted bigger or smaller than the model’s actual head? Is the torso you have painted more yellow or less yellow than the model’s actual torso?”
Our utter inability to answer these questions (at first) reveals part of why it is hard to teach painting. A great teacher must teach looking and comparing first….and then second and then last. Unless you can look at a subject with fresh eyes and regard your own efforts honestly, true realism will forever remain out of your reach.
Speaking of which I have not been painting realistically! Nor have I been applying the lessons of Byzantine history to the Byzantine circus factions of today. I worry that I have dishonored my amazing teachers by not making use of what they worked so hard to teach me. Now, thanks to time’s one way arrow and the nature of mortal existence, we no longer have the real masters. All that is left is the hazy memory of their teachings…although, come to think of it, here I am on a Saturday night (on New Year’s Eve no less) trying still to understand their teachings and make use of such learning to explain the world to others. Keep asking questions! Keep comparing. Keep striving for greater honesty. This is what I hear in my head as I set down the obituarist’s pen and reach again for the artist’s brush.
Today is National Pet Day. Well, actually, if you are fortunate enough to have a pet, every day is National Pet Day! Even if pets are sometimes messy or obstreperous, I have gotten more joy from my animal friends then from all of the status-seeking human pursuits, endeavors, pastimes, and professions combined (and that includes the things that I love like art and literature, not just pointless busy work like finance or real estate designed only to make other people rich). Anyway, suffice to say that pets are the people we love without all of the infuriating dominance/hierarchy games of other humans (although pack/herd animals like dogs and horses understand hierarchical relationships very well indeed and will readily participate in such hijinks if you let them). There is only one truly bad part of life with pets, but it is exraordinarily bad: they are mortal and, unless you have a pet ocean quahog, their lifespans are much shorter than ours.
This is a long way of saying that my beloved feline best friend Sepia died last March (2021). I did not write about her then because I was sad and depressed. I was going to properly memorialize her in the year-end obituaries column, but Grandpa’s obituary took all of my bandwidth. Sepia was a very private cat, so I did not blog about her during her life, but I miss her terribly and it does not strike me as fair that she has no obituary. Plus as time passes, I am forgetting all of her adorable tricks and amazing traits and she was so beautiful and so loving that I have to try to hold onto those moments, even if they are slipping away already.
I love pets with all of my heart, but back in my twenties when I was starting my adult life I did not want my own pet because my living circumstances were so cramped and chaotic (with roommates, 4th floor flats, 24 hour days, out and suchlike). However, even if a pet could not find their way into my apartment back then, the mice did. They showed up to the old bachelor digs with endless voracity and started multiplying. At first I thought I could stop them by cleaning house and putting all dried goods in tight containers, but the mice scoffed at such efforts and my roommates thought I was trying to dominate the space with rules. So I bought a live trap and trapped some of the rodents…but they ran up the walls back into the apartment before I could even get back up the stairs. Then I got snap traps and killed off some of the littlest and most naive mice by means of sinister guile and human mechanical contrivance–however, by winnowing the population I only pushed the remaining mice to become smarter and craftier. At night I could hear them scampering around snickering, and maybe even reading my books (or at least nibbling on them). It was intolerable, and the only solutions left were glue traps (and if you have ever seen a mouse pulling off his own feet and dying of dehydration in one of those, perhaps you will concur that they are unacceptable) or a cat. A friend of mine in Manhattan wanted a single male cat for her apartment, but the rescue organization would not give her only one rescue cat, so I agreed to take the spare female rescue cat.
Thus, after a long day of grueling busy work, my friend passed off a cardboard carton with holes in it to me when I headed home. My grandfather got too into cats as he entered his dotage, and so I told the carton that I would take care of it, but it would be a strictly professional relationship–like a lord with his hired mercenaries. I was thinking I had a professional assassin in a box, but it would not be like with Pawsie cat or Lily Cat (beloved cats from youth whose early exit left big holes in my heart). Then I got home and opened the box and Sepia Cat popped out. She was about 9 or 10 months old with big ears and huge green anime eyes. She had all of the beauty of an adult cat, but with most of the playful winsomeness of a kitten too. Actually, her rescue name was “Sally” but I rechristened her because her tabby stripes, white bib, and long, swift grabber paws reminded me of the Mediterranean cuttlefish which artists have used for ink since time immemorial. She looked at me and said “purrr” and jumped up in my lap and I said “Whose got beautiful whiskers?” and all talk of mercenaries and hirelings was forgotten forevermore. I loved Sepia with my whole heart as soon as I saw her. Oh, and also she committed terrible war crimes against the mice. We found one of two which had all of their bones broken into splinters (she liked to hurl them against the wall again and again and again) and after that the mice wrote “a dark entity dwells here: do not enter!” in their hobo script and we never saw them again.
Despite her prowess as a hunter, Sepia was perfectly happy living in the apartment with bachelors. She did not mind the strange hours, or even care unduly if her kitty cat dinner was not on time. Her feline curiosity only got her in trouble twice, once when she accidentally slipped into my roommate’s closet (we were all running around the apartment shouting her name when we started hearing muffled meows from behind the closed doors) and once when she got out of the apartment entirely. That time I discovered her down on the second floor hiding in an alcove with desperate panic in her eyes and she literally jumped up into my arms.
Sepia moved with me as I moved from place to place in Park Slope and finally out to Flatbush. She had some roommate cats whom she hated (Simba) and some roommate cats whom she loved (Luster and Sumi). Her favorite foods were turkey and any sort of cheese. In fact, she almost knocked over a bookcase once trying to get some blue cheese which I thought I had hidden from her by placing up on the very top shelf.
When Sepia was young she had a North African desert cat’s preternatural agility and she could jump up on top of the kitchen cabinets from a flat-footed start. She enjoyed cat toys made of real rabbit fur, but her favorite game was “boxy cat” where she would shadow box with the shadow of my paintbrush. Speaking of painting, our most disastrous incident was when she unexpectedly jumped up onto my palette, which I was holding on my lap and which was covered in toxic oil paints. Because of the dangerous pigments she had to have a bath and she shrank from her normal elegant self (Sepia normally looked like a street tabby crossed with Lady Aster’s Somalian cat) into a sad little wet gollum-type creature. After the palette incident, she was much more circumspect about leaping into my art projects!
Even when she was an older cat she could move with shocking speed and dexterity (yet also with silent ballet-like grace). Only once the cancer got into her head did she start to truly slow down.
Sepia’s true favorite thing was to curl up on my legs or next to me when I was reading science fiction space operas or epic literature. We would read for hours and hours and hours lying together as she purred softly. Sometimes I would just stare into her gorgeous green eyes as she blinked slowly. Oh also she enjoyed being combed! But only her stripey bits, she would only uncurl her white ruff and belly if she was very relaxed.
Sepia was always hungry (a legacy from her mysterious street era, when she was a stray kitten), however when she was about 16 she got ravenously hungry and would eat can after can of food (if allowed), but then throw it all up. The vet thought it might be a thyroid disorder, but poor Sepia became more and more desperately hungry and her poor face started to distort and ooze. I tried palliate her cancer with prednisolone, which worked for a little while but then started hurting her. On her last day, she woke up in bed with me with a look of absolute suffering on her face and with no interests in drinking or eating or anything. I took her to the vet and held her while she died and now I have her ashes in a little plastic funerary box with a silly label which I am meant to fill out (though I never have).
I suppose these details strike you as banal or perhaps as approximately familiar to all cats, yet thinking of them has me wiping away tears. She was so beautiful and she was a great hunter, a great athlete, and great at hiding (it took me so long to find her secure undisclosed location) but Sepia’s greatest strength was her sweet heart. I can still almost feel her curled in my lap as I type away at the computer…but that is not Sepia, it is Sumi Cat, Sepia’s little black sister (by adoption). Sumi is sitting my lap bathing her ears with her paws as I write this, and now she is looking at me curiously as emotionally I hug her and kiss the top of her head.
“Pet Day” hardly explains that our animal friends are one of the few transcendent things in life. Neither does this incomplete essay about my best friend during all of those years. Undoubtedly if someone asks me about the period between 2004 and 2021 I will talk about art, or the great recession, or urbanism, or Trumpism or something. But I should talk about a little white bib and moustache and big green eyes. That was the best part.
There is one last daunting task for this miserable year. For Ferrebeekeeper’s annual 2021 obituaries, I promised to write an obituary for my grandfather, Robert Clarence Pierson Jr., who died on October 23rd, 2021…and the task has proved to be entirely daunting! When I was a child, Grandpa was my hero, since his far-flung James-Bond-style life seemed to so thoroughly epic and exotic–and characteristic of the triumphs and excesses of the 20th century. But now, in the squalor and waste of 2021, it seems equally impossible to write about him…for some of the same reasons. It is like writing about the career of some ancient Roman tribune or Chinese sage who accidentally crashed through into this debased era of social media and Kardassians and national disintegration…
Robert Clarence Pierson Jr. was born in 1924, at Blue Knob, a hamlet (if even that) in Clay County West Virginia. He was extremely premature, and his surprise arrival so discomfited all parties that the house ended up burning down! Great Grandma Virgie put the tiny baby in a drawer and he was almost stepped on by an anxious horse!
Thereafter Grandpa attended the one room school at Blue Knob and then the High School at Clay where he graduated as valedictorian in 1941. Since he grew up adjacent to West Virginia’s hunting, mining, drilling, and lumbering trades (with their sundry dangerous tools) his childhood adventures had an exciting frontier quality to them. Frankly, they sounded like a Fleischer cartoon (wherein a rocket powered sledge, cask of black powder, or steamer trunk filled with horseshoes is always on hand at exactly the right moment). Perhaps some of this was also thanks to Great Grandpa Clarence’s indulgence (Great Grandpa ran the local lumber mill and was becoming adept at the Democratic party politics) and also to Great Grandma, who was always willing to drop everything and bake a chocolate pie for him.
Grandpa attended West Virginia University until the war-effort called on him. He began his army career as a paratrooper but, thanks to his foreign language and memorization skills, he quickly moved to the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency. In the European theater of World War II, Grandpa served in the peninsular campaign in Italy. Because of his facility with languages, communications, and codework, Grandpa flew behind enemy lines and he was in Rome when Rome was liberated by the allies (I asked him about the granular details of this operation and he said his outfit painted their airplane to look like a German airplane and then just landed at the airport…and all of the relevant Italians winked at them and looked the other way). After liberating Rome, Grandpa headed into the Balkans to help the Serbs with their anti-German activities. Then, once victory was achieved in Europe, he switched theaters and went to Burma, where he was impressed by the um, fervor of the Kachin resistance fighters.
After World War II, Grandpa married his university sweetheart, Constance Faye Wellen (better known as Grandma Connie). The OSS was disbanded a month after the war was over, but Grandpa took up a foreign career with its successor agency. He also brushed up on language and social sciences at the University of Chicago and Stanford, before heading abroad again. Language was grandpa’s greatest gift, and, as far as I could tell, he knew English, Latin, French, Javanese, Dutch, Arabic, and maybe a bit of German & Vietnamese.
The way the Cold War ended seems inevitable to us now, however in the 40s, 50s, and 60s, this was anything but true, and those decades were characterized by worldwide proxy conflicts between the United States and the Soviet Union which took place everywhere but burned brightest in portions of the world recovering from 19th and early 20th century European colonization.
Thus, while everyone else came back from the war to bobbysoxers, beach boys, and suburban ranches, Grandpa was first in India, and then in Egypt, Somalia (which he doubted could ever be welded together effectively), and Kenya. He was in the Belgian Congo during the independence crisis when it violently transformed into Zaire. Grandpa was a master of the cocktail niceties of the 60s and he told me that he would mix drinks for Patrice Lumumba and Lumumba’s cronies. In his cups, Lumumba would enthuse about glorious plans of pan-African unity and talk about how the movement would kill all Europeans, “but not you, Bob, since you make the drinks!” Grandpa would laugh, but, in reality, his closest Congolese friends were among the Baluba (a rival Congolese ethnicity which Lumumba had antagonized with violent crackdowns and pogroms). Later when the Congo blew apart in full-blown crisis, my grandmother, mother, and uncle all fled as refugees, but Grandpa stayed in the nation to ensure that it did not become a client state of the Soviet Union no matter what the cost.
From the Congo, Grandpa moved on to Indonesia which was also vacillating between the great cold war powers. One of my favorite stories involves how the United States built an elaborate new Washington embassy for the Indonesians which was filled with listening devices. As the only team man who could speak Javan fluently, Grandpa got to translate, but all they learned was Sukarno’s enthusiasm for the distaff charms of American actresses…particularly how much the Indonesian strongman wanted to sleep with Zsa Zsa Gabor. Sigh…
Grandpa left the foreign service for a time to work on local projects back in West Virginia, but he returned to the field to work in Vietnam during the sixties and seventies. Some of my favorite tales from Grandpa involve his stories of drinking out of great earthenware vessels with bronze straws and plotting with Hmong warlords (he was enormously impressed by the Hmong, and the North Vietnamese, but had some reservations about the South Vietnamese leadership). Although he tried as hard as he could to solve everyone’s problems in Vietnam, I believe his proudest contribution was as a gardener. He said that in Saigon he was astonished by the markets filled with fruits and vegetables which he didn’t recognize, but that there were also things which were missing, so he took the State Department’s credit card and ordered a giant box of seeds. Thereafter he was always peddling squashes, pumpkins, gourds, maize, melons, and suchlike North American seeds to add to Vietnamese agriculture (and indeed they are now part of the culture and cuisine).
Speaking of culture, one of Grandpa’s early mentors, Arturo, was an intelligence officer in Southeast Asia who lived a flamboyant expat lifestyle and suggested to Grandpa that shrewd intelligence personnel in the foreign service should collect art. Not only did this pursuit require one to learn the culture, language, and perspective of new nations, but it also provided an automatic reason for being overseas, and a pretext for traveling to all sorts of strange locations to meet peculiar characters. Plus, as a sort of bonus, one would wind up with a collection of beautiful and interesting artworks. Grandpa collected Congolese and Indonesian oil paintings and, particularly, Chinese porcelain (so, if you have ever wandered why I am always trying to understand the glorious arts of China in this blog, I guess it is a cultural legacy from Arturo, some 1950s spy whom I never met).
I wanted to properly write about Grandpa’s foreign service career which was extensive and illustrious, but all of this makes him sound like some dark puppetmaster (his Indonesian sobriquet was “Wayang” since he had the same handsome sharp features as the Indonesian version of the hero Arjuna). However Grandpa retired from statecraft and the affairs of nations in 1974, the same year I was born.
He and grandma lived in suburban Maryland by the Chesapeake Bay and their cat Pharaoh (AKA Faro), a magnificent predator of the Chesapeake Bay swamp (who was, hilariously as white as an arctic fox). Grandpa was always trying to feed or heal various strays and mongrels and plant his own paradisiacal garden to rival the beauties of South East Asia (although hurricanes of ever growing frequency would always blow down his beautiful trees). Some of my happiest memories of childhood involve exploring the Bay with Grandpa in his rowboat and catching blue crabs, or having plum battles with the tiny Italian prune plums from his little orchard.
It was fun to look at his art collection (and his collection of exotic weaponry from Africa and Asia) but it was even more fun to spend summer vacation puttering around the Chesapeake or driving around Washington and Baltimore in his preposterous vehicle, an enormous Chevrolet Impala station wagon of the late seventies which was about 45 feet long and which looked like a hearse the color of a raincloud. Sadly, in that era, GM lavished minimal attention on frivolous details like engines, and so his new car’s motor exploded not long after purchase. Undeterred, Grandpa took the hulk over to a chopshop in Glen Burnie and told them to put “something powerful” in it, which is how he had a powder blue bulldozer in the unlikely form of a station wagon.
Grandpa loved religion and was drawn to it, and when I was growing up, he would beguile me by telling me the stories of what was happening in the paintings on his wall–epic tales from the Mahabharata or from ancient China. Yet it was clear he could see through the dogmatic aspects of faith and was most attracted to spirituality as a furtherance of human concerns through sophisticated allegorical confabulation. To be more plain, I think he was astonished that while nation-states were always desperately struggling to coerce people to do things, holy men could come along with a beautiful story which would cause people to eagerly participate in ridiculous ventures which ran contrary to their own self-interest. I would like to write about how he understood animals and people and was always surprising the Amish by speaking to them in their own tongue (it is basically a weird German, he confided), or befriending salty myna birds or rescuing addled baby animals or what-have-you, but I will instead end with his bees. Although he liked honey, it was obvious that he kept bees because they combined all of his true interests–communication, nation-building, animals, farming, warfare, family, and making things. All of this came in a little white box which he said was like having your own miniature city-state of 50,000 flying Spartans in yellow and black striped tunics. Of course sometimes West Virginia bears would come out of the forest and eat your civilization, or varroa mites would cause everyone to sicken and die, or the young queen would murder the old one (or vice versa) but it was all part of an even larger picture and just meant you had to rebuild better.
Now that Grandpa is dead, the world which he and his contemporaries made is swiftly coming apart. Beekeeping, arm-twisting, and politics have never much interested me, but if we want any honey (or simply not to be a sad addled province in Putin’s new Russia or a client state to Xi’s imperial China), perhaps we need to think about some of the lessons of his life of service to the Republic. Goodbye Grandpa, you were my hero. You were America’s hero too, but by the very nature of your secret profession, they never knew or appreciated that fact.
I’m sorry for the paucity of posts this month. To mark the end of the somewhat disappointing two thousand teens (the teens? the ’10s? how do we even write out that decade?), I have been in a seasonal creative slump. This brown mood might not be solely a reaction to the lackluster decade (and the troubling path of ignorance and excess which humankind currently seems to be set upon), but also a reaction to the death of my first artistic mentor, my mother’s mother Constance Fay Pierson (April 24, 1927 to December 7, 2019).
Grandma has a competently written obituary in the Weston Democrat which outlines her life of education and travel (although sweeping stories of Somalia, the Congo, Kenya, Italy, and Indonesia during the ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s were obviously more thrilling to hear about in person). Likewise, the writer has indicated the primacy which family had in Grandma’s world by the simple expedient of naming everyone in her immediate lineage (although it is too bad that the pets Johnny, Flash, Muffy, & Pharaoh didn’t get a shout out, since they were family too). However, neither the obituary nor the eulogies at the funeral have done justice to Grandma’s creative and artistic life. Since her encouragement, patronage, and teaching were instrumental to my own life path, I would like to share some of her lessons with you.
![i0000010(1)[1].jpg](https://ferrebeekeeper.files.wordpress.com/2019/12/i000001011.jpg)
The vivid beauty of the places she went was enormously important to Grandma Connie, and she was always remarking upon the unique characteristics of the clouds, the trees, the waves or the hills of a particular place at a particular time. Grandma could paint and she made charming alla prima paintings of the places she went and the things which were most striking to her (I have included a picture of a North African dhow above and a road in Central Africa a few paragraphs below…but alas, I don’t know the dates). She also had a deep love of the the sculptures of the ancient Mediterranean world, the illuminated manuscripts of the Middle Ages, and, above all, the paintings and drawings of Italy and France. Since she lived outside Washington, we would go look at those works at the National Gallery or the Walters Museum when I was visiting her as a child.
Grandma showed me how she painted and she bought me my first real paint set at an art store outside of Annapolis. She made sure I had each of the fundamental necessary colors, cerulean, ultramarine, ochre, sienna, sap, Naples yellow, cadmium and alizarin red, white, and black…but when I also wanted a preposterous iridescent yellow with scintillant stuff in it, she bought that for me too. It wasn’t so good for painting the Chesapeake Bay or the sky but it was great for portraying imaginary glowing dinosaurs or ancient divinities.
This was important because one of Grandma’s greatest talents was to see a boring hall and say”what if this hall was lined with suits of armor holding halberds and great swords?” or to look upon a squatly constructed house and say “it would be so beautiful if it had a cupola or a Gothic spire.” She could see things with her imagination!
Now nobody is likely to come along and build pagodas or widow’s walks upon the concrete & clapboard dime stores and garages of Clendenin, West Virginia, but the feasibility of such ideas was not necessarily the most important thing to Grandma. She loved the humor and the wild unpredictable joy of imagining such juxtapositions.
The secret key to endowing life with beauty and meaning is not necessarily lovely items or cross-referenced tomes, but observation first and then imagination–the rainbow-colored skeleton key which unlocks, well, everything. In our world of store-bought imagination, everyone’s faces are glued to their computers & cell phones to see what color-by-numbers digital wonders Hollywood can whip up. Grandma Connie always advocated looking at the beauty of the actual world, then, if such was insufficient for your amusement, she suggested juxtaposing it with fabulously dressed luminaries from all of world history or with amazing and beautiful animals. If there was no actual ostrich just add one!
![i0000010[1]](https://ferrebeekeeper.files.wordpress.com/2019/12/i00000101.jpg)
At her funeral a stout bearded mountain man of West Virginia unexpectedly appeared and signed the mourning ledger. It was one of her students from when Grandpa was in Vietnam and Grandma was teaching high school French back in West Virginia. He said “I never though of myself as a scholar, but Mrs. Pierson convinced me otherwise. I went to college because of her…and I majored in Romance languages!” Grandma would have been delighted to have influenced his lifepath towards scholarship, but she also would have been delighted by the unexpected juxtaposition of the man and the major.
We are going to need to mash a lot more unexpected ideas together if we are going to get anywhere. We need to make better use of our imaginations not just in art, but everywhere. That is one of the major lessons of art!
I wish I could have written more about Grandma’s amazing life, or about the things we drew and talked about together. I also wish I had told you more about her generosity, her erudition, or her elegance, but there is no time: I need to go draw some beautiful monasteries with the Tuscan moon…and some ichthyosaurs wearing feathered hats. Grandma taught me that the beauty, significance, and grace of the past is never gone. It lives on in art and can be summoned forth anew with additional creative enterprise. The world’s beauty and the human imagination are both never-ending fountains of meaning and delight. Thank you Grandma, for showing me his truth of art and life. Now to get to work on some never-seen juxtapositions to honor (and baffle) her spirit.
There is one last annual task to be done (which I dread—which is why I put it off until the very last day of the year)—which is writing the 2018 obituaries. Usually I use the last week of the year to write about people whose work was important to me or who were overlooked by big media outlets (which have a facile fascination with interchangeable movie stars and pop musicians). However, this year I lost somebody important to me, so the unmet artists, scientists, politicians, and celebrities who died in 2018 will have to find someone else to write tiny blurbs about their lives. I will only write one obituary, for my grandmother, Mary Rose Ferrebee (March 24th, 1927 – October 30, 2018).
As a nation, we tend to regard the crazy fearless people of the frontier and the wild west as lost into the distant mythologized past…but for me, I got to live up-close and personal with such people: my grandparents! Grandma Mary was indeed larger than life in such a fashion, but in an especially down-to-earth way which makes it hard to quantify the breadth of her legacy. Let me explain by giving you the portion of her biography I know about.
Mary Rose Ferrebee was born (Mary Rose Jarvis) in Granny’s Creek, West Virginia in the late 1920s. She had an adventuresome youth spent flouting conventional mores and stereotypes—a trend which culminated during the Second World War when she entered into a career in aviation manufacturing. She described this phase as when she was “Rosy the Riveter, painting the fluorescent yellow tips on [Grumman] Hellcats.” Coincidentally, it doesn’t sound like that glowing yellow Hellcat paint was especially wholesome, since health problems led her away from aviation and back to more traditional careers in short-order cooking, bartending, and cleaning. It was also during this era when she met Grandpa Dencil, back from the war early, who courted her with a banana (a rare and precious commodity during the war). Grandma apparently said “I don’t want a banana I want the real thing!” This high standard of honesty cemented their relationship, but it also sometimes led to tensions in an era when most people did not always express what was on their mind so openly.
The family traveled to the West Coast in the fifties (my grandfather decided to take up the, um, aerospace trade, painting missiles and ICBMs at Vandenberg), and then back to West Virginia where Grandma ran a bar/restraint/hotel (an inn, I guess). All sorts of folks from all walks of life came through there (Senator Byrd even played his fiddle at the Henry Clay Hotel, back in the day), but usually it was local people having a drink, playing pool, and gossiping.
I remember many exciting things from the hotel, like listening to “Whiskey River” on the jukebox, playing pinball and video arcade games (the first of my childhood), and listening to the tales about the secret lives and strange fates of everyone in the county. As the keeper of a public house in a small town, Grandma knew everything about everyone. She also, you know, ran a bar in West Virginia and she sometimes had to deal with particularly unruly patrons breaking pool cues over each other’s heads (for which eventuality she kept a chrome .357 Magnum snubnose somewhere back behind the bar, in order to invite unwanted customers to go home).
Operating the town’s beer hall privileged Grandma with a profound grasp of people’s desires and weaknesses and while other people maybe would have used such knowledge to aggrandize and enrich themselves, or at least to twist the knife with cruel taunts, Grandma more-or-less accepted peoples’ appetites, eccentricities, and flaws as a part of the broader tapestry of life (which is not to say she didn’t spend a certain amount of time feuding with people who had disrespected her). She was particularly blunt about sexual and bathroom matters and although this made me blush and blush as a child (and a teenager, and an adult…and now), it strikes me as a wise choice for living a more healthy and honest life. I wonder how many people live miserable lives or die long before they should because society has convinced them that ever talking about such earthy concerns is somehow indecorous.
Grandma always had time and resources for the people in her life…or for anyone who needed help. Growing up I often recall my parents being able to make important purchases thanks to Grandma’s largesse, and she likewise bestowed homes, cars, tuition, and mortgage payments to other children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren. Whenever I came to visit, she would give me cigar boxes of half-dollar pieces or rolls of two dollar bills from the bar safe. There were many such presents and much praise, Not only was she enormously generous, she was also fearless and she always stood up for those who could not stand up for themselves .
After she retired, some disreputable folk down the river had a big ill-mannered fighting dog which ran around the river bottom snarling at people and forcing them to abruptly rush inside. Since this included Grandma’s little grandchildren and great grandchildren (who would be seriously injured or killed by a dog attack), she asked the neighbors to keep the dog fenced up or at least tied-up, but they laughed at the request of a seventy-something woman and went back to drinking and doing whatever else they were doing. One day these neighbors were in their backyard drinking, carousing, and ineffectually shooting at cans. Grandma went over and asked if she could shoot some cans too. They laughed and acquiesced, perhaps thinking to teach an old lady some pointers or to have a laugh at her attempts, whereupon she pulled out the trusty .357 and blew enormous magnum sized holes in the cans which they had not been hitting. “Tie up that dog!” she said as she left, and this time her wishes were followed.
She was large (not to say fat) and strong and she also had that .357, which taken in combination with her maverick personality make her sound like an intimidating person, however I think anyone who knew her would characterize her foremost as kind and generous to excess (and also as fun and funny). My mother would despair since she (Mom) would give my grandmother the gifts the latter wanted—fancy dishes, kitchen gadgets, or new towels or what have you—only for Grandma to give them away in turn. Grandma, however, seemed to think that owning a bunch of junk was not really the principal fun of life—another laudatory perspective which we could all learn from. With characteristic generosity, she decided that, upon her passing, she would donate her mortal remains to science (the medical teaching hospital at WVU). As she said “I sent so many people to college, that I decided I would like to go there myself.” Not only is this helping the family save some money (a final cigar box of cash), but it is helping a new generation of healers learn. However, it robbed Grandma Mary of a fitting eulogy, which is why I am writing this.
Frankly though, Grandma never yearned for the fame and universal acclaim which other people pursue so doggedly. I don’t think Grandma thought of greatness as being all that great (perhaps she recognized that “great” people have money troubles, erotic misadventures, and go to the bathroom like all other people). Or to explain it better, I think she saw that every life was great to the person living it and the glowing esteem of the world was a sort of political trick, mostly unrelated to the actual important business of life like making sure people are fed, children are cared for, and the sick or infirm have somebody to look after them.
When I was a child, I thought it was normal to always live in a glorious golden halo of love where people tell you how great you are and give you things. It is NOT the norm (thanks so much for the update, New York), but it always seemed like it, thanks to my family. Grandma Mary was an especially big part of that. I suspect everyone who knew her would say the same.
Grandma gave me so many things—big home cooked meals, toys, whatever book I wanted, tvs, video games, musical instruments, boxes of money, jewelry, a truck…you name it, and I took and took with both hands. But now that she is gone, it strikes me that what I would really like to have is her generosity, her warmth, her courage, and above all her loving heart (I think she would smile, too, to hear me still asking for more). She was such a big part of the world that I never really thought about how it would be with her gone. It is like the mountain or the forest or some other ancient & impervious force of nature vanished. However, her love is still here with all of her family and friends (who are numerous). Her tireless care, affection, and kindness are woven into the very fabric of existence, not like the ephemeral works of models, rappers, or tv charlatans, but in a truly integral way that sustains people for life and holds up the world.
Readers, I hope you don’t think I am ending on a down note for the new year. Grandma lived life to the fullest, and it is up to us to do the same in this new year and in all the others to come. Her gifts of generosity and compassion could indeed be ours too, if we just muster the strength of character to give with such an open heart.
Good bye Grandma, I love you.
For Valentine’s Day, I have saved this troubling obituary from the animal world. Last month, Nigel the lonely gannet died. Nigel lived on Mana Island, a desolate stony island about 25 kilometers northwest of Wellington, the capital of New Zealand. Mana Island was once the home to many sea birds, but after the island was intensively farmed during the 19th and 20th centuries, the colonies failed. The…nutrients…provided by the birds gave the island rich soil but, without the birds this abundance faded away and the island’s ecosystem crashed (this is a sort of microcosm of what happened to the larger New Zealand ecosystem during the 19th and 20th centuries as waves of invasive creatures swept the remote archipelago). New Zealand conservationists have been working to restore the empty island however they were left with a problem. Gannets live where other gannets live. How could they lure the oceangoing birds back to start a new bird colony?
The solution they settled upon was to play bird calls on electronic speakers and put out concrete decoys painted the handsome black white and ocher of live gannets, however this strategy did not lure gannets to Mana…except for Nigel. He arrived a few years ago and selected a beautiful replica gannet and began to woo his concrete love with mating displays, nests, and excited chatter. He even tried to preen her concrete feathers and explore physical intimacy with her. Videos of Nigel trying to impress his inanimate mate became a real hit in the human world (where analogies are not unknown). This year other living gannets finally arrived at Mana Island, and naturalists hoped that Nigel could find fulfillment and raise a family with a real bird, but it was not to be. In late January of 2018, a ranger found Nigel dead upon his nest next to his concrete consort. The futility of his life and bleak melancholy of his end have attracted worldwide attention.
Ornithologists have speculated that Nigel was an odd bird, somehow injured, addled, or damaged, which is why he left his original colony. His defects, if any, were certainly not visible to the human eye and he looked like a healthy handsome seabird. Gannets dive from 30 meters (100 feet), and achieve speeds of 100 kilometres per hour (62 mph) as they enter the water. Their speed and mass, and matchless skill as divers enables them to catch large fish deeper than most airborne birds can venture. Nigel did all of this, but things just didn’t work out.
Except, maybe they did: there are now gannets nesting on Mana Island, brought there not by statues, but by a live gannet. As one contemplates Nigel’s lonely life, it is hard not to imagine HIM transformed into a beautiful statue which says “Our Founder.” We will watch the colony with interest and see if the gannets make it after their 40-year absence from Mana.
Nigel’s life and his death raise bigger questions about the nature of life and how organisms work together, collectively and individually. This blog has visited these issues before in posts about blood, clonal colonies, lonely geese, and siphonophores (animals made of other animals where the individual zooids serve in the capacity of organs).
I have a long running philosophical argument with a friend concerning the nature of humankind. He asserts that each person is a magnificent individual—a whole self-contained universe. I don’t think that is correct. No animal is quite so solitary (unless it is the last of its kind) and especially not us: we are colony animals like mole rate or termites or honeybees. If you see one human, you have a whole infestation. This means our culture is as much who we are as ourselves (as becomes incredibly evident in heartbreaking cases of feral children or abused hermit loners). The splendid fantasy of being alone is just that—a fantasy. In reality we are as tied to our banks, gas companies, annoying colleagues, and odious loudmouth leaders more than we would ever like to admit. We will come back to these ideas in subsequent posts, but for now Happy Valentine’s Day and RIP Nigel. There really should be a statue of him, we could all see some of ourselves in that stone mirror…and some of humanity’s real nature in the living colony birds coming back to roost on desolate Mana Island.
Northern Gannet (Morus bassanus), sky pointing courtship display
Every year we close out the year with obituaries. I feel like the main-stream media does a pretty good job of memorializing the entertainers and showbiz folks who have passed away, so, although I loved Tom Petty, John Hillerman, Roger Moore, and John Hurt (and too many others), I will leave it to someone else to eulogize them. Additionally, I have had less time to blog this year than I would like, so please don’t be upset if I miss a great and important scientist, algebraist, or artist. That is what the comments are for! I also tried to include some eminent scholars and artists from East Asia (since it feels like our counterweight cultures are divided by a gulf of misunderstanding and we overlook the cultural work being done there). I was saddened to see how many astronauts from the golden first age of space exploration passed away. Humankind becomes ever more insular and parochial: we squander our resources on useless giveaways to monopolistic companies and crooked oligarchs (who blow their money on status objects or remove it from circulation). These days we barely even explore the heavens (much less travel there). I wonder if there will ever be another generation of heroes to walk the moon or orbit the Earth once these figures from fade away. At any rate, here is a brief list of 2017 obituaries to make us think about the brevity of life and the true nature of accomplishment:
Zhou Youguang (January 13, 1906 – January 14, 2017) was a scholar who invented Pinyin, a system for the romanization of Mandarin Chinese (a language which does not fit easily into the Roman alphabet). So excellent was his work that Pinyin was officially adopted by the government of the People’s Republic of China in 1958. Pinyin has now largely supplanted the Wade-Giles system and is the method by which Chinese is known to Western scholars or input on Roman keyboards. Zhou Youguang lived through the dramatically changing China of the Qing Dynasty, The Republic of China, The Second World War Invasion by Japan, and The People’s Republic. He was “sent down” during the Cultural Revolution and was critical of the Tiananmen Square Massacre.
George A. Romero (February 4, 1940 – July 16, 2017) was the masterful director of terrifying zombie movies which were thinly veiled allegories for the problems of contemporary society.
Kim Jong-nam (May 10 1971 – 13 February 2017): this unremarkable man was the eldest son of the genocidal sociopath Kim Jong-il,the late dictator of North Korea. Kim Jong-nam was murdered in Singapore at the command of his brother (by means of poison, in a plot worthy of dark fantasy literature). While Kim Jong-nam’s death is of no consequence in itself, it speaks to the criminal nature of the North Korean regime and foreshadows countless deaths to come at the mercurial will of their fat cruel tyrant. There are two stories of why Kim Jong-nam was disinherited: in one story he was cut out of the family business for trying to sneak into Tokyo Disneyland (but insiders whisper he was exiled and ultimately murdered for favoring reform).
David Rockefeller (June 12, 1915 – March 20, 2017) was the last surviving grandson of John Davison Rockefeller Sr. (a 19th century tycoon who built the Standard Oil Trust and thus became by far the richest individual of America’s gilded age). There was a point in the 1970s when David’s brother Nelson was Governor of New York and then Vice President of the United States, and yet David was reputed to be more powerful and connected.
Sir Nicholas Winton (May 19, 1909 – July 1, 2015) was a swordsman, banker and stockbroker who rescued of 669 Jewish children, from Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia by means of paperwork wizardry, networking, and money-raising.
Sam Shepard (November 5, 1943 – July 27, 2017) was a playwright and actor who applied the Beckett’s absurd style to themes of family, violence, and substance abuse and thus carved out a uniquely American theater style.
Hugh Heffner (April 9, 1926 – September 27, 2017) was a controversial publisher whose magazine “Playboy” was famous for cultural articles, progressive editorials, and reproductive advice which challenged America’s puritanical mores. The magazine was however more famous for lubricious pictures of naked women and espousing a hedonistic (sexist?) lifestyle. This legacy, and the distasteful…extravagance…of Hugh Heffner’s private life made him a polarizing figure, but he must be mentioned (and honored) because of the debt which generation after generation of pre-internet era adolescent boys owe him.
Richard Francis Gordon Jr. (October 5, 1929 – November 6, 2017) was an American naval officer, chemist, and astronaut. He is only one of 24 people to have flown to the moon (although he didn’t get to walk on it). Later he helped design the space shuttle and served as Executive Vice President of the New Orleans Saints.
Bruce McCandless II, (June 8, 1937 – December 21, 2017) was a U.S. Navy officer, pilot, and NASA astronaut who made the first untethered free flight in space.
Wang Panyuan (c. 1908 – December 22nd, 2017) was a famous Chinese/Taiwanese painter who brought together classical Chinese painting with expressionism.
Last week I blogged about the end of the desmostylians, a group of aquatic mammals driven into extinction by competition from the gentle (but implacably hungry) manatees. Since then, I have been worried that people are going to think I am anti-manatee. That is why I would like us all to take a moment to say farewell to Snooty the manatee, the world’s oldest captive manatee who died on Sunday (July 23, 2017) a day after his 69th birthday party. Since 1949 Snooty has been entertaining and educating visitors to the South Florida Museum in Bradenton, Florida. His death was not a result of old age, but was instead a tragic accident involving the failure of a protective hatch which closed off a maintenance-only section of the aquarium.
Apparently in the modern era, manatees in the wild usually live less than 10 years (due largely to aquatic mishaps) but a few lucky individuals have made it into their 50s. In his late 60s, Snooty was going strong and was an active, intelligent, and gregarious manatee until that cursed hatch failed. This makes one wonder how long manatees actually live when they don’t get run over with speedboats or eaten up by Portuguese conquistadors (and it also leads to other troubling thoughts about humankind’s interactions with other living creatures). I interacted with the late Ivak the walrus and Grandpa the lungfish, but I never had the chance to see Snooty. Yet I am still upset by his loss. I worry about the future of animals in our ultra-competitive dangerous world where even the world’s most respected and well-cared for manatee can have a fatal accident in his own tank. Let us say farewell to poor Snooty and keep working to better the lot of his brothers and sisters in captivity and in the wild.
Sad news mars this bleak wintry day. The Shedd Aquarium’s beloved Australian lungfish “Granddad” has passed away. Granddad enjoyed basking sluggishly in his shallow pool until he beguiled viewers into not paying close attention to him, then he would rise to the top of his puddle and take a deep gasping (and very audible) slurp of air. Lungfish are said to be among the most endearing of pet fish and Granddad enjoyed it when aquarium keepers gently petted him. He also loved eating a nutritious vegetable paste or clams or shrimp… although his particular favorite was “worm Wednesday”. His diet changed several times during his tenure at the aquarium, as keepers learned more about how to look after him and as standards for lungfish husbandry progressed. In his early days, he ate crayfish gathered from the pond in a local Chicago cemetery!
With his muscular pectoral and dorsal fins, Grandad was quite magnificent, in a torpid way–like an intelligent cucumber spattered with mud and gold. At the time of his passing, he was the oldest fish in any public zoo or aquarium in the world. Shedd acquired him (as a full grown adult) in 1933. After a lengthy trip across the Pacific, he traveled across the United States in 3 days in a specially outfitted life-support railroad car.
A revealing historical passage from the Shedd aquarium’s lengthy and moving obituary describes the excitement over Granddad’s acquisition, “In anticipation of overflow crowds from the soon-to-open Century of Progress International Exposition just south of Shedd, aquarium director Walter Chute had written to the director of the Sydney aquarium with a wish list of fresh- and saltwater species. ‘We are, of course, particularly desirous of securing one or two specimens of Neoceratodus forsteri,’ he wrote, using the lungfish’s scientific name.”
Although these days I am closer to the African lungfish who live at the Bronx zoo, I saw Grandad back in the 90s when I lived in South Chicago and I was duly impressed by him. Indeed, in a memorable conversation during college, a group of my closest friends and I were talking about what we would wish to have as accessories if we were action figures. Although my buddies came up with lots of cool plasma guns, miniature vehicles, and humorous inside joke items, I feel I won the conversation by saying “lungfish.” Reading about Granddad only reinforces this feeling (although possibly these days, the “Wayne” action figure would have an avant-garde flounder rather than a clever lungfish).
Although Grandad was only around a century old when he left this world, lungfish have been here a lot longer. The sarcopterygians are nearly 350 million years old. Living Sarcopterygians include only the coelocanths and lungfish (although all amphibians, reptile, birds, and mammals descend directly from them and could arguably be considered Sarcopterygians). After 8 years of writing, I have been running out of things to say about catfish. Once again, Granddad reminds me that there is an even wider and crazier world of fish out there.
For example, did you know that lungfish have the largest genome among the vertebrates? It takes a lot more information to produce a “Grandad” then it does to make Einstein or Rihanna! Although we will miss our long-lived friend (and his mate, who died in 1980), he is survived by a passel of younger Neoceratodus forsteri, who can still be visited at the aquarium. Additionally the Australians are very protective of their dear lungfish. Although they are rare, the government watches after their habitat quite carefully. With any luck the lungfish in the Shedd aquarium will be around another 84 years, and the ones in Queensland will last another 350 million. Maybe we can take them with us to the stars and start some entirely new tetrapod lineages!
Terry Pratchett with Starlings on his Head
Normally I write up all of my obituaries at the end of the year, but today I wanted to say a special farewell to Sir Terry Pratchett in thanks for his opus of delightful fantasy novels. Born in 1948 in Buckinghamshire, the successful author died today (March 12, 2014) of complications from early-onset Alzheimer’s disease. Doctors diagnosed Pratchett with the debilitating neurological disease in 2007. He subsequently donated a substantial sum of money to the Alzheimer’s Research Trust, saying that he had spoken to several survivors of brain cancer, but no survivors of Alzheimer’s disease. This is an extremely worthwhile charity, as is Pratchett’s other great cause—saving the world’s last remaining orangutans. If you have lots of extra money, you should give some to Alzheimer’s researchers and orangutan conservationists. Additionally Sir Terry owned a greenhouse full of carnivorous plants and had a fossil sea turtle from the Eocene named after him. However, none of these details of his life are what make him important to his readers.
Librarian of the Discworld as he appears in The Discworld Companion, illustrated by Paul Kidby (Copyright Pratchett and Kidby )
Since 1983, Sir Terry spent his years churning out Discworld novels. Discworld was a multi-racial world of beefy barbarians, doughty dwarves, incompetent wizards, operatic vampires, and naked avarice. The stories spanned across many fantastic yet strangely familiar continents, but the narrative always returned to the sprawling twin metropolis of Ankh-Morpork (which, though putatively a medieval city state, will seem instantly familiar to anyone who has set foot in London or New York).
Like Don Quixote, the Discworld novels started out making fun of fantasy and the endless follies of life before falling deeply in love with fantasy and even more deeply in love with humankind. In the Discworld books, people are presented as benighted and greedy: their unspeakably stupid schemes to defraud each other generally drive the action (in the very first scene, Ankh-Morpork burns down moments after fire insurance is introduced). Yet the defining characteristic of the novels was the humor and humanity within the the personality of the characters, many of whom were not even technically humans. Beyond the petty scheming endemic to society, individuals were revealed to be ultimately curious and compassionate: even very unlikely figures had heroic and sympathetic natures.
Discworld characters by yenefer
As I write this I realize I am saying farewell not to Terry Pratchett, a rich balding English guy whom I did not know, but to Nanny Ogg, Cut-Me-Own-Throat Dibbler, Gaspode the Wonder Dog, Sergeant Detritus (a hulking but kindly troll), Tiffany Aching, cruel Greebo, Ponder Stibbons, the Luggage, and stalwart Carrot of the Watch. It’s like a whole group of my friends died (along with a carnivorous sentient trunk).
Discworld was a toy theater where Pratchett presented his ideas of what makes life beautiful and worthwhile in delightfully adroit symbols. The ultimate figure in this little macrocosm was finally revealed not to be Lord Veteneri, the philosopher-king who despotically yet benignly rules Ankh-Morpork; nor Granny Weatherwax, the flinty sorceress who protects Discworld from alien incursion; nor even Samuel Vimes, a recovering alcoholic who rose from the depths of poverty to reshape the social contract. Instead Discworld was ruled by the symbolic personification of Death, forever watching the strutting, lying, primping figures below him with bemused yet avuncular affection. After spending time with this imposing seven foot tall skeleton with glowing eyes, the reader came to learn that metaphysical mystery, supernatural solemnity, and the terrors of oblivion were no match for friendship, humor, kindness, and an egg fry-up with miscellaneous crunchy bits.
Good bye Sir Terry, your world meant the world to us and we will miss you a lot.
ferrebeekeeper 