The Dead Earrings Project

Peripatetic Zip Locks

2005-10-24T11:08:00.000-04:00

In 2004 when I was sorting thru my belongings to move after 25 years in California to the North Georgia mountains, I came across a tangled bunch of earrings that I didn't quite know what I should do with them. I decided to give them to my artist friend, Joolia Jamison Harper, who might want to incorporate them into one of her projects. Instead, she paired up many of them and returned them to me in a zip lock bag! -- Holly

Loops are Handles (and sometimes breakfast)

2005-10-23T19:38:00.000-04:00

Gold loop earrings became my public trademark years ago. This was not intentional but came out of limited time, budget and imagination.

One may think loops are loops. Lose one, save the single to use again when one is lost from the replacement pair. Wrong. No 3 or 4 loops are the same.

Loops can’t be disabled. They last forever. Wrong. That is because loops are sometimes puppy breakfast and always good handles.

Loops do sometimes serve the purpose of better health for puppies because of their resemblance to Ascaris. Clue: Loops do not normally wiggle.

Loops are handles. Alpha Cat in charge of scheduling need only catch a loop with claw and give a quick yank to start the day.

Flinging loop into a dark corner, perhaps a shoe or bookcase, Alpha Cat may then proceed to morning nap untroubled by worries the house will lie quiet beyond first light.

Thus it shall always be that gold loop earrings while my trademark in public, chains and mounds of unmatched singles shall ever bedeck my dresser.

Intertwined Drop Bead Earrings, One with Turquoise Indian Design

2005-10-17T01:56:00.000-04:00

One of the admirable things about my mother is her willingness to do crafts projects, no matter how slight her training or imperfect the results. I can remember orange macrame bead curtains, mosaic table tops, shell collages. In my own adult house there are tables and dressers that she refinished in a night school class, charming the instructor into smoothing out the finish or bracing the legs. Now she is knitting and crocheting and teaching my daughter to do the same. I have a poncho they both worked on, and some mittens.

These single earrings I think she made for me one Christmas ( in pairs of course) but I am not sure. There are so many people I have known that have braved the too many choices at a bead store and had the focus and patience to string them. Even my youngest son tried beading one year, wrist bands I remember. I have never tried a single craft except embroidery, and even that was restricted to the simplest anxious cross stitch.

Lots to Think About

2005-10-15T10:00:00.000-04:00

Thank you so much - these little vignettes are so touching. Gives me lots to think about, so I may add something eventually. Meanwhile I have my memories, as we all do!

Pollyanna

2005-10-15T09:58:00.000-04:00

I have to think on this for awhile. I believe that if I spent much time thinking on the injustices of my mother I would eventually not be able to function. I try to remember the happy times and remember she was doing her best.

I have rid my home of single earrings and many other things that have been cluttering it. My criteria was if I did not love it I did not keep it. That also seemed to free me from thoughts I did not love. Now I no longer have to think of them. Is that a pollyanna attitude?

When things get bad for me I remember my mother sold corsets for a living. She did a very good job of it too so I give her credit. But at least I never had to do that.
The site made me think that perhaps I should investigate the Unitarian church.

Ha...pretty interesting

2005-10-15T09:55:00.000-04:00

For so many years (since the 70's) I have worn earrings that didn't match - I just "coordinated" them because I couldn't bear to not wear the cool earrings that I just had one of..and two matching earrings are kinda boring anyway (or at least that's what I told myself) - and that's part of why I had my left earlobe pierced again - with 3 unless you have *two* identical pairs, they won't match anyway :-)

Then again there's always my son's comment "Mom, it just looks like you put on the wrong earrings by mistake"....so, that's okay, too, I tell him, makes people feel less self-conscious about not being perfect....I'm there as a glaring example!

thanks!

Blue Topaz and Linen

2005-10-15T00:05:00.000-04:00

Contingency wear, a spare for last minute impromptu dinner or show, it was rich woolen, a dark charcoal with vague pin stripe. With reluctance out of pragmatism I sacrificed its man heat and man smell to chemical cleansing and moth crystals.

Blue topaz wrapped in linen handkerchief rescued by the cleaners were handed over when I retrieved the suit. I took them home, placed the plastic cocoon among coats and dresses not likely to be used ever again. The handkerchief with its contents went into the dresser drawer with the spare underwear and socks, in the corner under the links tray.

We had both agreed when he left it was time. In later months extending into years It was good to occasionally embrace and relive, if only in imagination and memory those unique interludes of excitement and contentment.

The other day I found the jewelry still as he had wrapped the pieces. I shed tears, blue in joy for their beauty, perfectly preserved.

A MAYOR'S DEAD EARRINGS

2005-10-14T11:00:00.000-04:00

When I conceived my deadearring project, I visioned it as a women's piece. An article in today's New York Times reminded me that men also have pierced ears and can lose ear ornaments, or confront their death in other ways:

The story(10-14-05) was in the National Briefing section, between an article about four children from an Amish community who are infected with polio and one about a federal agent bust in Georgia of 28 people holding 1,300 pounds of cocaine.

Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick has decided to stop wearing his trademark diamond earrings. "That little insignificant thing in my ear gave off a bad spirit of rebellion," says the mayor, who is locked in a tight race for re-election. He showed up without his stud on Wednesday at a church event to announce his endorsement by several religious leaders.

The article also noted that Kilpatrick stopped wearing the earring during his 2001 campaign after a poll showed that women ages 40-55 did not like it.

Necklace

2005-10-12T10:50:00.000-04:00

Go and buy me a necklace to clasp ten years.

I don't want diamonds or gold.
A junkie snatched my wedding band
for an hour's grace.

Bypass the pearls
for the high school proms
I fingered my mother's cold like hail
pellets against my aching collarbone.

Don't pick out turquoise.
We quarreled in Santa Fe.
I walked the Plaza
and bought myself
blue
for resolute

like the Hopi Old One.
Find me moonstone
milk-white.
I need nourishment
and smooth
for all the hollow places
and silver links
to solder our lives again.

Marti Keller-November 1978

About Dead Earrings

So much has been written about false memory, usually in connection with accusations about or assumptions about adult recollections of childhood abuse. This is not one of those, but it sits there accusingly: if you can not be a good steward, a faithful scribe of even the smallest and least essential events, then how is it possible to bank and thendraw from your larger story?

This is one such incident: I recall being given a piece of jewelry, perhaps a ring with a tiny ruby, perhaps my grandmother's-- who I never knew-- and then losing it under some piece of furniture or down a heating grate. It may have been the beginning of the story that is told in my family, a story that i tell myself about being careless and distracted, spending more of my time losing things than living forward.

it is true about me that long before coming into the age when not finding things is the collective sigh that I have misplaced and then lost so many things, small things mostly, some trinkets, some valuables, and scoured the house, my drawers and closets, the car for them, wailing their loss, many halves of pairs of earrings, those tiny pieces of metal and glimmer that have been handed down, passed on, purchased on foreign vacations, given for birthdays and holidays, and those hoping to mend one relationship or another.

not wanting to believe them lost forever, i have sealed the remaining halves: the turquoise, abalone, clear glass, and diamonds into sandwich bags, or left them scattered across the bottoms of dresser drawers, or in pockets of wool coats. each one of them had an intention in my personal history and deserved better.

One sunday morning (or was it a saturday) this september, my brother doug and i lay these dead earrings, singly and in deliberate groups, on cloth backdrops (old dinner napkins, many also orphaned) on our picket fence. he shot and made digital photos, and expert webmistress lorraine made them page-ready. it is my project now to reconnect with them, to remember them whole again and dangling together, to match them to memory.

i invite you to do the same. to add your pieces of lost pairs, to tell me about carelessness, loss, regret, relief, and reconstitution, as much as it is true for you.

yours faithfully,
MartiOct. 2005

Collage from photgraphs by Doug Greenberg

Black and White Drama Masks

2005-10-11T09:41:00.000-04:00

These may be some of my oldest earrings, dead to me now not because one is missing or they are broken, but because I can’t imagine putting them on. They are so over-sized and so set in that time in my life that began when I was nine years old and took my first acting class, and when I tried out for Children’s Theater productions and didn’t get cast as Dorothy and had to sing a solo in the chorus. They were what I might have worn when I stopped eating and wore black turtle necks and a girdle even when I weighed 74 pounds and hung out with the other drama kids and was the president of the Thespian Society.

I started off as a drama major at Berkeley, but soon dropped back and changed from wanting to act to wanting to be a critic, which I did for more than 20 years no matter what else was happening. There was the life I lived nursing babies or working on abortion rights, and then the life at night when I sat in the fourth row center and got up at 3 a.m. to write what I had seen.

I can’t imagine wearing these now, because no one here in Georgia would have a clue.

Digital Photgraph by Doug Greenberg

The Single Wooden Bead

2005-10-11T09:19:00.000-04:00

This is the saddest one,

this piece of a piece of jewelry that he brought me from India.

I went to the airport where his ex-wife met him, and he said he didn’t want me to be there but I went anyway.

This piece of a piece of jewelry, a wood bead, plain and clunky without the waiting for him that came before.

The four months when I created our homecoming,

him glad that I waited, happy to come home to my bed and that pink stucco house on Stuart Street.

This saddest plain and clunky wood bead piece of jewelry

and him telling me he was

sleeping across the country with a woman who wanted to start a fish farm.

And him calling from a house he borrowed in Noe Valley saying he was feeling close again to me that night,

Come and I will give you these beads from India.

Digital Photograph by Doug Greenberg

Rainbow Earring on Grey Background

2005-10-11T08:56:00.000-04:00

I worked for this one non-profit in Georgia for almost three years. My birthday is in September and one of my staff members, one of the only ones who seemed to like me at all, gave me a pair of rainbow earrings. I don’t remember much about her other than she was an identical twin and she and her sister drove home to Pensacola almost every weekend. I had not been there yet when she used to tell me about her drives down to Florida, but now I know that it is a long ways to go and turn around in a couple of days.

All that summer before my birthday the board chair had been watching me. She went to the beach for a month and when she came back I said that things had been quiet. I didn’t think she believed me.

By the end of the summer, I was weeping in my office every day with the door closed or taking off in the middle of meetings.

By the end of that year I had resigned.

Digital Photograph by Doug Greenberg

My Mother In Law's Last Earrings

2005-10-10T10:21:00.000-04:00

She was 90 when she willed herself dead, committing herself to hospice and then ceasing to breathe three days later. Her only daughter had already chosen the diamond pendant and the gold earrings. I went through boxes that had already been stacked for give-away and found the remaining earrings in their original packaging, labeled “ sterling silver” or “ silver with onyx.” Like the silver service her son inherited, the pieces were tarnished, which surprised me since she was so meticulous in scrubbing her kitchen down with ammonia after each meal.

I picked four or five pair, including a pair of floral Laurel Burch enamel drops that we picked out at Macy’s for one holiday or another and mailed to Phoenix, before she announced she did not want one more pair. It was hard to find her gifts after that, but we picked out opera CDS and coffee table books of impressionist part.

Within the year, I had lost the halves of these two pair.

Marti Keller, © September 2005

Photograph by Doug Geenberg
© 2005

Fake Pearl and Fake Gold Earrings from the Mall

2005-10-08T11:56:00.000-04:00

When my husband told me that he had been depressed for two years about working in our Marin County California garage and only getting out at the lunch hour for pizza and a drive to the beach, and that we were going broke paying those kinds of mortgage payments, I said I would move to Atlanta if I didn’t have to work anymore. I was 44 years old and had been commuting an hour and 40 minutes each way across the Bay for as long as we had been married.

We got scared about selling our house in a down market and being stuck with balloon payments, so I called someone I knew who used to work for a congressman, and she said there was an opening to head up a child advocacy group.

I wore a navy blue suit with fake brass buttons and low navy heels to the interviews in mid-town Atlanta. I bought the fake pearl drop earrings at Lenox Mall, I can’t remember which jewelry counter.

I took the job, even after the woman who recommended me said I had to talk slower and asked me to come up with a plan to lower teen pregnancy and solve child poverty in five years.

When Governor Zell Miller was inaugurated for the second time, I went back to Lenox and bought the fake pearl cluster earrings with the dark blue beads inset to match a black sleeveless dress I wore with my mother’s old blue fox fur. No one told me it was a country theme.

Digital Photograph by Doug Greenberg

Three Ethnic Earrings on a Flea Market Napkin

2005-10-08T11:46:00.000-04:00

My father and mother have both traveled all over the world, but that was before and after I was an adult. When we were growing up the four children and the dog and my parents made three trips across the country ( the dog only once).

We went to Tijuana and to Victoria, but that was before I had pierced ears and before suburban mothers ever did. So our gift shop purchases were things like small soapstone seals, or decorative blankets or for my mother, bottles of duty free Tabu perfume.

When we moved out and they divorced, each one of my parents found ways to go to lots of places where ethnic jewelry was available, but I don’t remember getting any as gifts. Each time I have gone to Mexico I have bought some silver earrings, all of which have disappeared.

When I went to China, I didn’t see any earrings to buy that January I flew,to Beijing. Or maybe I just wasn’t interested since it was as cold as I have ever been. I brought back a down jacket from a street stall and the feather leaked immediately; an old gourd and ivory cricket keeper from an antiques market that has been bull-dozed; and a Chinese Opera figurine from a hotel gallery.

All the earrings from foreign countries that remain, including most that have lost their mates, were purchased at Cost Plus or Chico’s or at garage sales, especially the ones held by churches. These seem to be the ones that are given away.

Photograph by Doug Greenberg

Mother's Crystal Earrings

2005-10-08T08:59:00.000-04:00

On the twigs of her wrists, my mother's hands
bobolink, titmouse, linnet, finch

Flutter in her lap, peck her blouse's buttons
wagtail, waxwing, solitaire, brambling

Curl into nests, shivering fists
rose finch, siskin, tanager
............
My mother's wings rise in her silent room, a dance of ashes and light diamond starling, vesper sparrow, alabaster seraphim

I touch them" *

Music
Mother's Crystal Earrings

One of, if not the, last times/time I was with my mother in Tulsa in happiness she awakened me at dawn to shimmy up the mimosa tree to return a baby robin to its nest.

The treasure and beauty of her children, nature and Emerson were her life.

In fact she so valued me that soon after that event she had begun to take on my identity, an attempt to replace the torture of her own ego.

The tardive dyskinesia began almost immediately following the poisonous injection of fluphenazine and the motion never remitted.

The progressive exchange for identity never remitted. On the day she died, 15 years later, she had become convinced that indeed I was the imposter.

Viewing her finally quiet, now in death, filled with joy I share her peace.

* Excerpt from "Tardive Dyskinesia"
by Michael Mack, Cambridge, Ma.
© Poetry and Medicine
JAMA, March 10, 2004 ; Vol. 291. No. 10

True Story -- Time Stamp

2005-10-08T00:10:00.000-04:00

The summer of 2000 on the Turner Turnpike to Tulsa the rearview mirror peered into the oil pungent fog. Just after Cushing it captured the 1952 Nash, a ghost, rushing. It overtook my car and blended into the mists ahead.

In February 1958 Charlie came home from Korea and sold the Nash.

He bought a white Jaguar coupe and drove into the oil fields.

I moved to Atlanta in July.

In October he married an artist.

That Christmas Mother gave me tubes of oil-paint, brushes and canvas in a wooden box.