A MAYOR'S DEAD EARRINGS

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

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

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

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

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

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