Artaware's Blog

The First Art Aware Calendar on the Art Aware Website,thanks to B.J.

I first met B.J. at Robert Wood Johnson Medical School Library in the 1990s. Without her I would be computer illiterate. It’s not that she took my hand and gave me lessons. She just inspired me to learn on my own. She adopted my Art Aware non-profit organization onto her own website in 1999 and shortly afterwards gifted me with my  website – artaware.org – and managed it.

In 2006, I officially became a Senior Citizen and rather than dropping me and treating me like a child (many youngsters do that to oldies), she continued our relationship and the management of the website with an eleventh Newsletter. Now it’s ten years later, I’m ten years older and she still manages the website and inspires Art Aware’s Blog – artaware.wordpress.com.

Many computer-articulate whizzes, like B.J., do not promote the confidence of pedestrian Seniors like myself on the Internet. She is different. Perhaps that is because, as she says on her own website, she is a librarian, philosopher, poet and well on the way to becoming a Senior herself. Check it out – KeltasKavern.com!

The animals I live with teach me about the world.

Their interpersonal relationships are not so different from humans. They vie for attention, establish hierarchies, discriminate between ages, sexes and species, are jealous of each other and put up with each other. Most important, they all love me. But my six-year-old pit bull doesn’t love me as much as she does her twelve-year-old shitsu brother and twelve-month-old Great Dane brother.

They feed my ego as “savior,” since they’re all rescues. They come from a long heritage of my 30 years in Camden, N.J.

I  am never lonely. I never feel afraid. It isn’t in their cat or dog natures to harm anyone. I’ve never even heard the dogs growl. However, they’ve never been tested by anyone trying to harm me. But if an assailant came around I don’t think my dogs would be kind.

A little black, mixed breed dog, Patsi, helped my mother, at age three, recover from the death of her mother from brain cancer in 1915.

And my dogs and cats help me survive the craziness of our world in 2016, one hundred years later!

The last time I wrote a blog for the woman I live with was on August 10, 2014.

Living in Camden Iron and Metal’s War Zone

She doesn’t know I sneak onto her computer and write when I’m upset about something.

It’s a zoo in her house with four dog housemates and three cats. Recently she added another feline to the family – a six-month old black male.

It was sheer persistence that got him admitted. It’s cold outside and he wanted in. He actually pushed his way in despite being greeted at the door by two canines.

My lady quickly ushered him upstairs into a room of his own.  This was five days ago and he has been meowing every since – as if he owned the place.

I am the oldest in this family. In order to keep my authority, I will ignore him and maintain my dignity.

This lady I live with is a little nuts. We don’t need another animal in the residence. And how pushy will this boy get as he gets older.

God help us!

Donald Trump, a Nobody in Modacius

In Modacius Donald Trump is a nobody because there are so many people who know more than he does about reality. We are a small city of people who know about hardship. We are multi-racial, multi-cultural, multi-national, multi-denominational, multi-income, multi-everything that DT is multi-not.

Drug Suicides in London. Bell Ringer in Camden.

Yesterday, for my Rutgers-Camden film class I saw a heartbreaking movie about drug suicides by young addicts in London.

Today, for four hours,  I was standing outside Walmart ringing the bell for the Salvation Army.  Talk about contrasts!

I needed the joyful faces of Americans of every stripe and age dropping bills into the Red Kettle after their shopping and making comments.

“As a child, my mother always had me drop money into the bucket and now my daughter and I are doing the same thing.”

“My brother is an addict in Florida and he’s getting help from the Salvation Army to break his habit.”

Two very different verbal contributions to me that summed up my last forty-eight hours…

It’s so quiet in Liney Ditch Park at 7:30 a.m. The dogs lead me across the open space to the berm where forty-foot evergreens grow as well as a great variety of other trees.

My Great Dane mix puppy will be one year old on Christmas Day. He dwarfs my six year old pitbull mix. The neighbors are asleep and safe in their row houses.  The Philadelphia Inquirer was just delivered with a million shining ads for Black Friday and I have no desire to look at even one of them – for which I’m grateful.

I have an abundance of gratitude for the roof over my head, my family, the neighbors, the government, schools, churches, organizations, police and all those

who support a good life for so many in Modacius (the mostdangerouscityinU.S.)

Post Election Conversation in Hot Tub     11/12/16

Setting: A white senior female (WSF) and a black senior male (BSM) friend are sitting in the hot tube at the Salvation Army Kroc Center in Camden, New Jersey. After a short while, a black middle-aged female (BMAF) friend of the male joins them.

WSF: Have you recovered from the election?

October, 2016:  86 Degrees in Besieged, Polluted, Industrial City

Writers from Nick Virgilio’s House, Fireworks Art House and Center for Environmental Transformation! You can’t come soon enough to document what’s happening in our besieged Waterfront South neighborhood and in our whole nine-square-mile city of Camden, N.J.

It is 3:00 a.m. and I can’t sleep. My dogs and I are coughing from breathing more-than-normal polluted air yesterday. Right outside my row house workers are laboring to dig deep enough – 9′ – to bypass underground pipes in order to replace a cast iron 9″ gas main with a 12″ steel natural gas main. Help!

Holtec is coming. Eastern Metal Recycling is here. Yesterday downtown Camden had unbreathable air in 80 degree October weather. Today it’s going up to 86.

We must balance with our writing, the realities of over-industrialization, with the pure air of poetry and prose celebrating a universal, soaring spirit of sentient beings.

More later…

View of Petty’s Island & Philadelphia from Cramer Hill, Camden, NJ

A Sacred Place

A sacred place – a state of being – between the past and future:

on a path in Cramer Hill Nature Reserve where one isn’t afraid of being shot by a teenager…

in a presidential election in a country fueled by freedom and bondage…

in a church with images of a crucifixion and resurrection…

in a synagogue unveiling texts of horror and bliss…

in a temple where silence is broken by music and dogma…

on a street where young and old are shouting and laughing…

in a world which is neither evil nor perfect but is just HERE – being realized.

Cocktail Parties: a great prompt for writing, a great prompt for establishing a life style

Fresh out of college – a Manhattan apartment.
Cocktail parties where competition was fierce
and wall flowers aplenty.

I’ve always cheered for the underdog
probably because I’ve been one myself.
Foreigners are underdogs at cocktail parties.

I love talking to foreigners.
I love hearing them manipulate their second languages.
In Japan, I praised my elementary school students for their creative English.

I can compete now, in old age, at cocktail parties
by talking about The Far East.
No one has been there but me.

And so people walk away – I win.
They don’t want to hear about The Far East.
And I don’t want to hear about their newest condominiums.

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This Artaware blog is running the gamut of my life, starting in my fifties – and
now going back to my twenties.
It’s all about art – art aware and life aware.