Between Yesterday and Tomorrow

In 1966 we moved a thousand miles, to a place where we didn't know anyone. And though we quickly made friends, we had no other family here. So one Thanksgiving, in 1970 or '71, there were only the five of us for dinner. I thought it might be fun to eat out, have the Thanksgiving special at Numero Uno's. Then Eli got sick, and we had the meal delivered. We sat there depressed in our dining room and tried to eat turkey that tasted as if it came out of a can. Boy, did we have leftovers! They went into the garbage instead of the refrigerator.

That lonely Thanksgiving certainly stands out as a contrast to all our Thanksgivings since then. For we've been having potlucks, including on Thanksgiving, with the Leplaes for years. We first met them when we happened to eat at the same table at the Folk Fair about 35 years ago. Not long afterwards we were amazed to meet again over food, at a potluck for Atwater School second graders and their families at the Shorewood Women's Club. It seemed the Leplaes, with their five children, and the Rosenblatts, with their three children, were destined to eat together.

Our families have grown with marriages and grandchildren, and shrunk with the loss of Luc Leplae in June, 2000. Luc was a man who truly led two lives. In his first life, he was a physics professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. In his second life he was a cartoonist. In both lives he was a unique personality. And since we're all thankful to have known him, I thought for my Thanksgiving blog I'd include a somewhat condensed version of the eulogy I gave at his funeral six years ago:

I suspect Luc really appreciated yesterday's visitation, the warmth of the crowd, the laughter, the occasional tears, more like a party than a funeral. Laughter was his specialty, tears weren't, but I doubt that he minded them. After all, he had a caring relationship with many of us. We'll miss his warmth, his playfulness, his generosity, his humor, and you have to cry when you lose someone with those qualities.

He was part of my everyday life, so I'll miss him every day. When I check my Email, I'll know I won't be receiving any more jokes from him. He filtered them well, sent only the funny ones. Once he let a gross one slip through and said to me afterwards, slightly amused, "I think I made a mistake."

I'll miss him when I glance down the alley next to the Leplaes and know we won't be doing tai chi there every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Luc studied the videotapes and learned the tai chi forms before everyone else did, then helped those who hadn't learned it.

I'll miss him when I pass the bike racks at Schwartz on Oakland or Stone Creek Coffee and know I won't see Luc's three-wheeler. Like me, he was a biker and a cafe writer. He tooled around, seat close to the ground because he couldn't risk falling.

I'll miss him when my computer spirals out of control. He initiated many of us into the mysterious world of the internet and Email, taught me how to use my scanner, to set up a web page, send mass Emails. Whenever he found a fresh bit of computer info, he'd pass it on to me. And he'd sit at my computer for hours if I needed a trouble-shooter.

Everything I've mentioned is part of Luc's second life, and I haven't even mentioned his comics. Nor his close family. That was important in both lives.

The first time I said good-bye forever to Luc was in 1992. But by some miracle, he survived. It wasn't his best year. He tinkered around, built a model solar-powered car, was determined not to die, yet wasn't sure what he wanted to do with whatever time he had left.

In January 1993, Luc was given a new liver and a new life. I brought him a drawing pad and craypas while he was still in the hospital. I don't know if he ever used them. He definitely did start drawing, quickly found his own style and voice, became a cartoonist, and spent his second life showing the rest of us, through delightful drawings and words, the high and low points of his first life, in Europe during the Second World War, in China, in Shorewood, in his post-operative coma, always, always, with humor and playfulness.

I loved that playfulness and humor. The Rosenblatts and Leplaes have spent hundreds of evenings playing charades, writing group stories, drawing group drawings, playing dictionary, making up our own games, or just sitting around talking and laughing uproariously. Luc was always at the center. He thrived on all this. He tended to be the instigator. I'm pretty sure our alphabet dinners were his creation. We had weekly potlucks and one night Luc said that every dish we bring had to begin with the letter A. The following potluck everything began with the letter B. When we came to X, everything had to be X-rated. We ran through the alphabet almost two times.

Luc had the mind of a scientist, always curious, always anxious to get to the bottom of things, always ready to meet a

We're always caught between yesterday and tomorrow, there's nowhere else to be. But sometimes, like now, that awareness is more acute. Saturday is the grand opening celebration of Artasia's new space at 181 N. Broadway, and my mind keeps wandering to the beginning. If our son Eli hadn't washed dishes at William Ho's on Oakland Avenue in the early 80's, would he have lived in Asia, married Pauline, had four children, opened Artasia?

Bill Ho's brother was about to open up a language school in Taipei and offered Eli and his friends jobs teaching English. So Eli, John L, and Mike R all moved to Taiwan! Adolph, Sarah, Joshua, and I visited him there a few months later, then the five of us, CHINA SURVIVAL KIT in hand, meandered around, off the beaten path in China.

Eventually Eli married Pauline, whom he met in Taipei. Their first step towards Artasia was selling Chinese rubbings at the Someplace Else Fair. And now it's Artasia Gallery and Museum, 12,000 square feet of art, crafts, furniture, altars, musical instruments, a collection of Buddhas that scholars come from all over to study, everything imaginable from China, Tibet, Nepal, and Mongolia.

Okay, I'm the mother and somewhat partial. Being the mother also gives me an inside track, for I've tagged along with Eli, still off the beaten path, as he seeks out artisan workshops in his quest for whatever is unique and beautiful.

And Saturday, November 11, will be your inside track. The party's from 3 to 11 at 181 N. Broadway in the Third Ward. You can also get a sneak preview of Rosenblatt Gallery, right above Artasia. We'll have an opening party especially for our gallery once we've worked out the details, but Adolph already has about forty years worth of sculpture set up there, and I have a few of my paintings, drawings, and prints from the 60's, 70's, and 80's.

10/31/06 4:30 AM, and I've been up for an hour, haunted not by Halloween howls but by occasional howls of wind. Yesterday's temperature was in the 60's, today's should be low 40's and windy, 25 to 30 mph, and in three and a half hours I'm biking downtown with friends to hear Barak Obama, Doyle, Kohl, Moore, the Democratic all-star team, in Pere Marquette Park. Can you blame me for lying here listening to the wind?

11/2/06 We got there early so we could be up close, and even the body heat from hundreds of others didn't warm me up. Still, I'm glad we went. Although I'm just a clapper, not a cheerer or a chanter, I like being there to show my support. And I always prefer to see the candidates in person. It makes them human, not mere images on a screen.

Gwen Moore and Obama energized the chilled crowd. Obama spoke about the audacity of hope, but what worries me is what candidates don't talk about, though I'm finally seeing coverage in the mainstream media. It's the integrity of the election process. It's been clear since the election of 2000, that our system is fraught with problems, and the process hasn't improved. In fact it's gotten worse. Yet the media has waited until right before the election to cover the issue. Unreliable voting machines, no paper trail, increased gerrymanders, new rules for voter identification and other techniques aimed at keeping the poor from voting, purges of voter rolls, I hope our democracy isn't beyond repair. The discrepancy between the exit polls and the results in the Ukraine told the world that that election was a fraud. When there were similar discrepancies in our 2004 elections we were told the exit polls were flawed.

I'm thankful that when I vote in Shorewood I personally fill in the blanks between the tips and the backs of the arrows on a paper ballot, and that the paper ballot is scanned and saved. This is supposed to be the most reliable method for voting. Why isn't it used nationwide, with special accommodations made for the handicapped?

We're back from a two-week journey to the East, Eastern US, that is, back to the bouncing temperatures and changing winds, to the realities of home. Some realities are annoying, thousands of spam Emails, snail mail which is also mostly spam. Some are a pleasure, reading the final 250 pages of SATURDAY by Ian McEwan in time for book club, seeing family and friends, biking, finding broccoli and arrugula still growing in my garden.

We missed the first eight days of the Milwaukee International Film Festival, would have missed it all if a friend hadn't given us tickets to Sierra Leone. Seeing that film made us realize, almost too late, that we wanted to see more. Only two days left, we saw So Far, So Close, an Iranian film that drew us right into a neurologist's relationship with his dying son, and Encounter Point, bereaved Israeli and Palestinian families who have joined together to try to stop the bloodshed. All three films looked at serious issues with artistry and empathy. And made me comment on how much better these are than the usual Hollywood films. Edie B. said we owe a lot to Robert Redford and the Sundance Festival, which is definitely true. I'd say that also these films aren't commercial, aren't created solely to be money-makers, but as works of art that make people think about the world a little bit differently after seeing them. And I think I'll make sure I'm not out of town next year when MIFF is in town.