Looking Back I: The Lady Art Car

 

The Lady Art Car, 2005, at our home in Belton, TX

In 2002, the George W. Bush administration began spreading misinformation on Iraq to prepare for war against the regime that, in the end, while oppressive and violent, had neither weapons of mass destruction nor anything to do with the attacks of September 11, 2001.  

At the time, I was teaching full-time at Columbus State University in Columbus, Georgia, and was thinking of how to respond to the testosterone-laden messages dominating the news. Friends of mine who knew a lot about folk art had introduced me to the concept of art cars, ordinary cars modified into personal expressions of art. They told me of their friend Harold Blank, documentary filmmaker and art car artist, who drove his art car Oh My God in the Houston Art Car parade in 1988, one of the earliest parades. The annual Houston Art Car parade is the biggest art car parade in the world. I became determined to create an art car of my own and to participate in that annual event.

I turned my attention to the car I drove to campus every day. Tom's first response to my idea was horror, "You're going to ruin the car!" he exclaimed.

But once the idea was born, I couldn't let go of it. In war, the voices of men are the loudest and the prayers they lift up for vengeance are directed toward gods that are often imagined to be masculine and paternalistic. My art car, I decided, would reflect the voices of women, of hope and healing, of mending the ills of the world, and I took the image of Mary, the Lady of Guadalupe, as inspiration.  

The Lady art car, 2005

I began collecting items from women's lives that could convey the metaphor of mending: buttons, sewing needles, anything related to mending and sewing or anything related to women's "everyday arts" passed down from one generation to another. I glued these items to the car, created lips with Great Stuff molded to the front of the car, painted the car, added fragments of poetry and images from my experiences. And to the back of the car, I glued a box in which I placed pen and paper for people to leave comments. Later, I added a chalk-board surface to the trunk lid and placed chalk in the box so that people could leave comments on the car itself.

Tom quickly came to support my crazy idea, the hours I spent modifying the car, and the many trips we took to participate in art car parades, beginning with the 2003 Houston Art Car Parade. Tom and the kids always came along for the ride.

Family and friends turned out for my first art car parade in Houston, 2003 

First art car parade, Houston, TX 2003

Austin Art Car Parade, 2004

From 2002 to 2007, I continued to modify the car, and I drove it in art car parades in Houston (3 times), Baton Rouge (at least twice), and Austin (at least twice).

I added this quote and broken pottery image after a conversation with an older student at Columbus State University. 

 

A little verse I wrote

Buttons, buttons, buttons! And remnants of craft projects from friends

Mending the world

Onlookers, Austin, TX 2005

Austin, TX 2006

Baton Rouge Mardi Gras Parade, 2006

Baton Rouge Mardi Gras Parade, 2006 (a friend of the family and my daughter--in the middle back)

Our son rode along with the Lady in the 2007 Baton Rouge Art Car Parade, bravely wearing the hat I made for him as part of his costume.

Me with Harold Blank before the 2007 Baton Rouge Art Car Parade

The Lady on display in the Howard Gallery in Temple, TX

The Lady in Howard Gallery, Temple, TX

In 2007, we moved back to Georgia after a sojourn in my home state of Texas, and I drove The Lady in the last parades she was to be seen in: a 4th of July parade in Decatur, GA, in 2007, an Oakhurst Festival parade in Decatur, GA, and the Inman Park Parade, in 2008, I believe. 

4th of July parade, Decatur, GA 2007

 

Oakhurst, Decatur, GA

View of the Oakhurst Festival crowd as we passed in the Lady

Before the Inman Park Parade, Atlanta, 2008

Driving The Lady in all these parades and interacting with those who came to see the show was such a wonderful experience. People with whom I might otherwise have never had a conversation with would tell me their personal stories. Strangers at gas stations would approach as I was pumping gas in The Lady to ask me questions or to comment. Stopped at a gas station in Alabama on the way to a parade, I was asked by one woman if I told fortunes. I laughed, "No, I don't."

"Well," she replied, "You look like a woman who knows things." 

 

I have a journal full of notes people left in the box I glued to the art car

Our Natural World: Big Bend in the Crosshairs

At the end of 1987 and the beginning of 1988, Tom and I went on a short camping trip to Big Bend National Park. I fully appreciated the beauty of the place even as I worried about encountering spiny cacti if I had to plunge out of the tent at night to vomit, for I was in the first months of my first pregnancy. Fortunately, I made it through the trip without having to make such a hasty exit.

I've been thinking of that trip recently in light of what the Trump administration is doing to our protected natural places. President Trump, obsessed with immigrants, especially with those crossing our southern border, whether legally or illegally, put in motion during his first administration the building of a wall through once sancrosanct and protected natural areas. That construction continues in this, his second administration. Environmental issues are disregarded, natural pathways of wildlife disrupted, native flora destroyed. 

Big Bend National Park is now a target. While construction seems to have been halted for a bit in response to public outcry, we can't be assured that the pause will be permanent.  The Trump administration has demonstrated that it is willing to defy legal constraints on its actions. 

Our camp in the foothills of Nugent Mountain, Big Bend

 

Our natural treasures are under attack. 

Our camp at Paint Gap, Big Bend

 

Clearing has already begun in Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument in Pima County, Arizona. According to the Center for Biological Research, the clearing is in preparation for building a second wall to run parallel to the already-existing 30-foot wall. Endangered species at a nearby spring are threatened as well as native flora found only in these wild, protected places. The government has closed roads to vehicle and pedestrian traffic, an action that defies public transparency.  Staff for the Center for Biological Diversity had to hike for miles to investigate and document the damage done to an area that is part of the historical homeland of the Hia C-ed O'odham and the Tohono O'odham.  

In April, wall construction workers plowed a 50-foot-wide swathe through an ancient fish-shaped geoglyph in Arizona's Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge. 

Those who take care of our public lands have also been affected by the Trump administration's bad governance. The National Park Service has lost about a quarter of its permanent workforce. Money that would be going to pay Park Service employees, to maintain visitor centers, trails, and camping sites, to protect native flora and fauna is being rerouted to the President's vanity projects, such as the botched $16 million "repair" to the Reflecting Pool, the White House ballroom, the changes to the White House grounds and the National Mall. The money funneled to such projects has ballooned from $7.5 million in 2024 to $423 million in 2026.

Public outcry to these actions should be more widespread. The bipartisan response to construction in Big Bend is a model, for environmentalists, local land owners, local sheriffs and judges have all voiced their objections. Their arguments against the wall construction are supported by the fact that the rugged terrain of Big Bend already acts as a fairly effective barrier to migrant incursion, with only about 1% of border crossings. But our national interests go beyond illegal immigration and should include maintaining for future generations the biodiversity of public lands, their archeological artifacts, their cultural significance to settlers--ancient and more recent- who also were once immigrants to this continent. 

View from summit of Lost Mine Trail

View from Lost Mine Trail

  

Sotol Vista Overlook

Memories are made in places such as this.

Remembering Tom

     Last week Tom would have been 68 years old, and every year on his birthday, I think of how much older I am now than he will ever be. Some years have passed with my noting his birthday with grief but no tears. This year hit me harder, and I'm not sure why. Maybe it's just that emotions are high now with so much going on in our country that is cause for alarm, situations that would have angered and saddened Tom as they anger and sadden me. I so miss the comfort we provided one another during tough times. I miss his humor, his puns (!), his intelligence and knowledge, his kindness, his love.  The following photos are in no particular order, as jumbled as the memories that rise unbidden from a past we shared over 46 years.

(Click on--most--photos for a clearer view.)

 

1975-1976, our senior year in high school

on the C-6 Ranch with our son in Bryan, Texas (circa 1989 or 1990)

Tom and the kids at our home in Bryan, Texas, 1993

  

camping on Goat Island, Caddo Lake State Park, Texas (2008)

 

minus the beard

Belton, Texas (2006 or 2007) with the kids

Caddo Lake State Park, circa 1988

New Orleans marathon (2013)

planting onions in our Arizona garden (2016 or 2017)

Lake District, England, 2006

building a kayak in Abita Springs, LA (2013)

the shed Tom built at our home in Abita Springs, LA (The kids helped, and I later painted it)

with our kids in Cloquet, MN, where we lived from 2003-2006

gathering plants for his aquariums, near Abita Springs, Louisiana

camping in Big Bend National Park, TX (1988--quite a trip; I was pregnant with our first child)

overlook of Zion National Park, Utah (2009)

 

with our daughter at Cafe du Monde, New Orleans (2011 or 2012)

among tomato plants in our Abita Springs, LA, garden

with our daughter at the University of Georgia (2010)

with our son, 2018

In Nova Scotia with me and a distant Acadian cousin

Mardi Gras in Abita Springs, LA

4th of July, Eagar, Arizona, 2016

at a nephew's wedding (2016)

Seattle, Washington (2017)

our Arizona garden (2016)

Tom's 8th and last marathon (Petrified Forest, AZ, 2016)

We spent the fall of 2017 gathering firewood in the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest, wood which Tom chopped and split himself; enough of that wood was left to keep me warm the winter of 2019-2020, after Tom died. 

cooking at Christmas 2018

Christmas 2018, Eagar, AZ

Christmas 2018, Eagar, AZ

March 2019, Eagar, AZ

May 2019, our 41st wedding anniversary, MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, TX

August 2019, on a trip back to our home in Eagar, AZ--Tom was no longer getting cancer treatment and was under hospice care in Texas

December 2019, Tom's ashes, his marathon medals, his hats and the walking sticks he crafted from sotol plants. He also crafted fine walking sticks from the trunks of a couple of our Christmas trees. He finished for me just a couple of weeks before he died a walking stick he made from a hackberry sapling.