Roger O Green

Museums: African Art, Hirschhorn

Botanic Gardens

About a week after my wife and I returned from Chautauqua in early August, we, plus our daughter, took the trains down to Washington, DC, to visit museums and do the tourist thing.

The trains went from Albany/Rensselaer to NYC/Penn Station and then from Penn to Alexandria, VA. Alexandria is only one stop from DC’s Union Station, and there’s a layover there, so it was a toss-up whether we should have stopped in DC and then caught the DC Metro. But that would have necessitated schlepping our luggage. We arrived on a Sunday.

We stayed at my MIL’s timeshare, a Wyndham property in Old Town Alexandria. It was pretty decent, and it was convenient to catch both the Amtrak and the DC metro to Washington, specifically the Smithsonian stop on the Blue Line.

We took the Metro to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art on Monday, August 5. Our daughter wanted to go there, but I knew almost nothing about it. It was a very interesting place. The recently installed Benin Bronzes have an exciting history. I particularly liked Before Nollywood… The Ideal Photo Studio. It is about photography in Nigeria before the movie boom of the 1990s.

Above is a picture I took in the elevator of some of the things shown at the museum. Below is a piece called Dwellers in the Space of the Unknown, which intrigued me.

I heard music in the gift shop, which I liked. It was Kids African Party. I find most music for children insipid and boring, but this was entertaining enough for me to purchase.

Museum #2

After a meal at a nearby restaurant, we went to the Hirschhorn Museum. A couple of pieces struck my fancy: a comparison between a 19th-century white artist and a more contemporary black artist.

In this case, it’s two oil on canvas pieces. Mrs. Kate A. Moore (1884), painted by John Singer Sargent (1856-1925), is hung next to Cobalt Blue Dress (2020) by Ghanaian artist Amoako Boafo (b. 1984).

I conversed with one of the young staff members about why one would redo an existing painting. We talked about contextualization. I might compare it with the idea of watching Hamilton and revisiting American history.

I also saw this particular egg tempera on fiberboard item, a piece I did not know. But it reminded me so much of the musical/movie Cabaret that I assumed it was created in the 1930s. It is George C. Tilyou’s Steeplechase Park (1936) by Reginald Marsh (1898-1954).

The most fascinating room is Four Talks, designed by musician and artist Laurie Anderson. I don’t recall the raven, parrot, or canoe, but the room is still oddly disorienting but fascinating.

Greenery

Then we walked on a hot day in DC, probably in the 90s (32+C). We went past the Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial to the United States Botanic Garden. Two things: I had gone there in 1998 when I tried out for Jeopardy in DC, and I always thought it was the Botanical Garden.

Across the street from each other are two different gardens and a building with various kinds of plants, some climate-controlled. The place had a powerful environmental message; it was where I dropped off my recyclable but not returnable water bottle.

At one display, patrons were asked about food, specifically what food reminded them of home. Mine were pork chops, mashed potatoes, and peas from growing up.

Lydster: Ten Candles

our 25th anniversary present

This past spring semester, the daughter’s final project for her sculpture, mold-making, and casting class involved ten candles. Although the project had to include making molds and casting, it was otherwise open-ended, so one could use whatever material they wanted. It didn’t have to have a theme, but it should be a cohesive project, not random.

She decided on the topic for this project: her parents’ 25th wedding anniversary. In each piece was a bit of wax from our wedding candle. the project took about 30 hours.

Candle #1: a wedding cake to represent the marriage in 1999. The scent was vanilla, sugar cane, and almond.

Candle #2 represents my wife’s and my honeymoon in Barbados in 1999. The scent was rum cake. Why? Because our daughter asked us to give her specifics. Rum cake was one of the most tangible objects we remember from that period; it was delicious, and we brought some back home.

Candle #3 is a standard house because we bought our home together in 2000. (My wife had purchased a house earlier, and we lived there for a year, but it wasn’t OURS.) The scent was coconut, citrus, and amber.

Candle #4 is the steeple from our current church, which we started attending in 2000. The scent is golden apple and Honey Drizzle.

Candle #5 is three candles tied together, representing the three of us. The candles are three different shades of green in honor of our surname. The scent is vanilla, buttercream, and marshmallow, which she feels smells like a newborn.

Candle #6 is an adenoid. The daughter had an adenoidectomy at the age of two and a half, which was very traumatic for her parents. That candle is unscented because the procedure involved her nose.

Felines

Candle #7 is the cat Midnight, who we got in 2013. The scent was sandalwood and clove, which smelled like fresh kitty litter. At this point in his life, Midnight was always covered in kitty litter, so she thought it was very fitting for him.

Candle #8 is the cat Stormy, who we got later in 2013. The scent is called Warm and Welcome. Both cat candles use the same mold by casting them with different colored crayon waxes. Neither of them came out exactly how she envisioned. Midnight was too gray, and Stormy needed stripes, so she painted them, giving each more texture.

Candle #9 is the daughter graduating from high school and attending college. The scent is warm spring sunshine. The wick from our wedding candle was used as the tassel.

Candle #10 commemorates my wife and my 25th-anniversary trip to Chautauqua Institution. This is the CHQ tower; she made it before we went. The scent is sparkling sugared berries.

Unfortunately, the box of candles was lost when she moved back home at the end of the semester. Nevertheless, it was a wonderfully inventive effort. I LOVE these SO much.

Dad’s cousin Ruth

tracking Walkers

Here’s my dad’s cousin Ruth (R) with two of her children. My sister Leslie and I saw her in October 2022 at the church we all grew up in, Trinity AME Zion in Binghamton, NY. She pointed out a room that used to be a Sunday school classroom where my paternal grandmother Agatha Green used to teach Sunday school to me and a bunch of other kids. It is now a room of noted members of the Trinity family, and she asked us for large photos of our parents for the wall, which we still need to get for her.

The most recent time I saw her was in August 2024, in Horseheads, NY, at the Elmira Jazz Festival. She and her two daughters went to see my niece Leslie’s daughter Rebecca Jade in concert.

She told the story, which I had heard before, about how, after I was born, my father was at her house. He was furiously scribbling on a piece of paper, but she had no idea what the heck he was doing. He was trying to figure out my name, and he wanted to get it to spell out something with my initials and name. Hence, ROG = Roger Owen Green. So she witnessed my naming.

Walker clan

In July 2024, sister Leslie was in Binghamton for her high school reunion. She went to see Cousin Ruth. Ruth gave her a whole bunch of information about the genealogy of the Walker clan. Ruth’s father was Earl; Earl was my paternal grandmother’s brother, so Ruth was my father’s first cousin. She was over a dozen years younger than him, so she didn’t know all the early stories about my father, but she knew him like a big brother.

She has kept track of the Walker genealogy, knowing all of Earl and Agatha’s siblings’ birth/death dates and those of some of their descendants. This will be very useful once I get a chance to work on it. She is my oldest living relative, so I’ve known her even longer than I’ve known Leslie.

I want to thank Ruth for the opportunity to delve into my father’s history. Had he been alive, my father would have been 98 tomorrow. He died in 2000, yet he remains a mystery in various strange and subtle ways.

Ask Roger Anything sans pumpkin pie

Dickinson cultivar

From Snopes: “On 23 September 2016, Facebook users began sharing an article which claimed that the pumpkin typically used in pumpkin pie is in fact a multi-squash blend containing little to no pumpkin.” I remember reading about it at some point and shrugging.

As it turns out, the truth is a bit more nuanced. “According to botanists, however, asserting a clear distinction between ‘pumpkin’ and ‘squash’ is difficult because there is no strict botanical definition for pumpkins. Semantically, pumpkins are a type of squash, and the Dickinson cultivar is listed as a pumpkin.”

The pumpkin can you get from a can from Libby’s and other manufacturers is a blend of squash and pumpkin. It’s not the pretty pumpkins you expect to see on porches at Halloween, but they’re arguably more edible.

The topic is no big deal to me because I’m not a big fan of pumpkin, specifically pumpkin pies, pumpkin cookies, pumpkin muffins, and the like. In the 1990s, I baked two or three pumpkin pies for some fundraising events at the cajoling of my late friend Darby. But my favorite pies to eat tend to be apple pie or maybe a blueberry pie.

General Mills

Since I don’t drink coffee, I don’t drink a pumpkin spice latte. I don’t eat Pumpkin Spice Cheerios, available only for a limited time; I don’t need dessert for breakfast. I like regular Cheerios, and I have eaten Honey Nut Cheerios for breakfast, which negates my point about dessert for breakfast.

What I really like, though, is when you Ask Roger Anything. You may ask Roger about his taste in pies, cakes, music, movies, or politics; it doesn’t matter as long as it doesn’t involve pumpkin spice.

I would love you to ask in the next few days, and I will be sure to reply in the next three or four weeks. As always, I promise to be as honest as I can be. It’s fun to hear what you want me to talk about. When you come up with very clever questions, a change of perspective is always helpful.

As usual, you may leave your questions in the blog’s comments section or my Facebook page (Roger Owen Green); look for the duck.

Day in the life: 20240915

lunaversary

Occasionally, I write a day-in-the-life post. This one is for Sunday, September 15th, 2024; I designated it 20240915 in a year/month/day formula, which makes sense to librarians and computer geeks.

My wife stopped at the gas station and I tend to fill up the gas tank because I’ve been doing it since I was a kid. I don’t mind it but my wife doesn’t like to get gas on her hands.

While I was doing this, a guy asked me for change. I waved him off and said, “When I’m done.” The thing about the process is that it’s pretty easy, but I need to do it in a methodical order: credit card in and out, type in the ZIP code, pick the grade of gas, and then place it into the tank. Because he continued chatting, I missed a step. “Do you need help?” “No, I need you to stop talking to me.” I didn’t realize that pumping gas was a bit of a zen experience for me until this guy was harshing my mellow. Yes, when I was DONE, I gave him some change.

The thing is, I LIKE helping people when I can. A couple of days earlier, I was sitting at a bus stop. A gregarious young adult male, 20 to 25, came up to me and asked, “Could you tie my shoe for me?” I replied, “Can you put your foot up on the seat?” because my knees and back didn’t want me to bend over. He said OK; I tied his shoes, and he thanked me, by which time the bus was coming.

Food

My wife and I stopped at the co-op to get sandwiches for a luncheon after church, and then we went to church. I got to attend choir rehearsal, the first week the choir sang since the spring. I missed it terribly. Even though we had a couple of rehearsals it’s not the same as singing in front of the congregation.

After church, we partook in the aforementioned luncheon. I was talking to one of the pastors who is particularly good at remembering names. There were a couple of congregants I could not identify. She said, “Tell me where they were sitting, and I could probably tell you their names. So, I noted that along with a general physical description. She knew their names even though they were newcomers to the congregation.

A couple of people around us were fascinated by this, not that the pastor knew their names but that I knew where they sat. If you’re sitting in the choir loft, you tend to notice where people are. Most people sit in the same place so it wasn’t that difficult for me.

We helped clean up, and then we went home for a couple of hours. My wife visited her mother while I was on a Zoom call with my sisters.

We try to have a lunaversary dinner. It often falls by the wayside, but we still attempt to go out to eat on or around the 15th of the month because we got married on the 15th of May. I checked the website of a nice restaurant in Watervliet, and it showed that it was open, so my wife drove us over there, but it was closed.

More food

We went to an Italian restaurant in Albany where we had been before. There was a football game on the TV (Chiefs/Bengals). A short time later, another couple came in and sat down not very far from us. They looked very familiar.

After dinner, we acknowledged seeing them in this restaurant some months ago. I said, “Oh, yes, it was the game between the Green Bay Packers and the Dallas Cowboys.” The woman said, “How do you know that?” “Because you hate the Cowboys, and our fathers were big Giants fans in the Binghamton area.”

My recollection was partly aided by my writing about it at the time. Still, the details of that meeting were fresh in my mind even though it had been eight months and a day since that earlier game.

My wife and I went home, and soon, my wife went to bed. About an hour later, a police officer in a cop car was in front of the house across the street directing someone to get out of their car. I brushed my teeth, did some reading, and went to bed.