found
tod and i like walking around huntsville. we find little scrappy things, like this smashed paper cup holder(?) that appears almost rusted and metallic. we almost always see someone we know or someone sees us. not a day goes by we aren't out there walking and something seems to happen. i marvel. it's a little place considering it is a city. it feels like 2 major streets with little dinky alphabet signs filling in the gaps. little neighborhoods. little houses. little life.
last week we went walking and out of the blue someone called my name. 'paulaaaaaaa' i looked. it was a woman i had just met a few days ago who is in charge of the angel show. kristie at the phoenix commotion told me about it and said it might be a nice little venue to do at the sam houston museum gallery, katy and don walker building. believe me, its a small table show and my work probably will stick out like a sore pustular thumb, and i'm doing it more to meet people and just be out there than anything else.
anyhow. tod and i walk up to her vehicle at the jiffy lube and are introduced to her husband and before you know it we are passengers going off to her friends storage unit to see about a bed she thought might be there. she is helping her friend sell off the stuff so it was perfect timing. her husband is an artist who works in the art department at the sam houston university. it was great to meet people who live outside of huntsville (she is from new york but been in texas 20 years) and who understood completely our culture shock and incredulousness about the lack of good food in grocery stores. i felt an immediate kinship with her. i felt even closer as we were later driving down the main drag with a box spring loaded onto their vehicle and it blew off into the middle of a busy intersection. it was a white trash moment that somehow failed to mortify us.
not a car honked. not a single person got angry. no accidents occurred. it was surreal. she and her husband were completely non-nonplussed. it was a debacle. i think i left my body and just observed. i can't imagine that happening in too many cities without something untoward happening. at least someone giving us the finger. nothing. it was as if it never happened. tod and her husband went and retrieved the box spring and i ran out and picked up the strewn bungee cords. we re-bungeed it and off we went.
they came into our loft and looked around at my art and actually looked. it was very refreshing. we've even been invited over later in the evening on thanksgiving. kind of blows my mind. we found huntsville via a blog reader sending us an article. but huntsville has found US. in vermont...honestly...we didn't seem to have any impact on anyone or anything. tod drove for the taxi place (me too but not much), i showed my art in the gallery. we hung out in the house we care took for and little ever happened. we were getting stale. we couldn't connect with people there and it obviously wasn't where we were supposed to be.
fast forward to huntsville. it isn't like any place we could have ever imagined. we imagined the worst and in many ways it has been quite the opposite. so too are we are left dangling and wondering. suffice to say we have found a place to be that for now, for us, works. we are embarking on a new life where there exists possibility. much more so than where we fled from. maybe its best we are in a place that feels so 'unformed'. how perfect, as too are we. i'm glad we found each other. huntsville and me.
My friend Maggie in MA just sent me a link to an article about Steve Tobin. After reading the article I googled him to find his website. I was shocked at how much work he has made, and how much variety exists between the bodies of work. Then I saw this video on his 
