Coming and Going . . . And Everything Old Is New Again!

You know those little clumps of dust and lint and stuff that seem to magically collect under beds and dressers and behind TV's and hundreds of other special, out-of-the-way places? Well my mother had a name for them: Dust Bunnies! I have no idea why she (and, therefore, we) called them that. I'm sure you call them something too, probably what your mother called them, without even understanding why or really thinking about it. Some people, I know, call them "Dust Devils".

I've always been fascinated by words, phrasing, idioms, and the like but for some reason I have never taken the time to research where or why we have different names for those dust and lint balls and where ever or however they came about.

The dust-balls come to mind because I have been cleaning and re-arranging the Gallery, moving the free-standing walls, re-hanging and re-displaying artwork, during this quiet time. And as everywhere else in my life in the corners and under things (literally and figuratively) are all ilk of magically-formed things, cob-webs (whatever they are), and dried-up empty shells that may have been some insect critter at one time, lots of other blechs and drecks, and of course not a few "dust bunnies."

I grew up in Massachusetts, where I have lived most happily for the greatest portion of my life, but I did spend a wonderful period of eight or nine years living in Chicago. Chicago is where I met and married my wonderful wife, initiated what would become my long-time museum career, and had a great many formative and life-expanding experiences. Chicago is where I lost what little Boston-drawl I may ever have had (I never really did say "Pahk yaw cah in Hawvahd Yahd . . . I did take several speech and drama courses, acted a lot, and studied languages and that helped clear me of the whole local or regional accent thing). But Massachusetts is home and even with the best training, I still have a bit of the regional flavor to my speech. Moving to Chicago and the midwest was a pretty easy transition, at least in terms of my "accent". I will admit that there are several key words that I did and still do struggle with, especially because of the dramatic difference in how the spoken word is pronounced in the northeast versus the midwest. Words like "quarter" (quahdah vs. Kwartar)and "sugar" (shiggah vs. shurgerr) and "potato" (badayda vs. pitaytow) are amazingly different, dependent upon the peculiar locality of the speaker. These specific words (and a few others) gave me a lot of trouble! Still do, in fact.

Interestingly, and I'm getting back around to my earlier point, some more rural areas of the upper midwest have a particularly peculiar name for what I grew up calling "dust bunnies." Think about it for a minute. Little swirls of collected dust and stuff under beds, behind furniture. In an old house -- perhaps a rural farm house built generations ago by sturdy folk -- all you have to do is crack open a door against that nasty, cold wintry wind and these little swirls of dust will come alive, seeming to dance around and out they come from their hiding places. What do you think? Their name in some parts of upper midwest are "People Coming and Going." I just love that. Clearly a strongly religious people, solid, of the earth, good hearty pioneers of the prairie. "People Coming and Going" is so clearly a reference to the scriptural "from ashes to ashes, dust to dust." It's clear (but also a little scary) that your old family homestead where great-grandpa Jeremy died and old auntie Annabelle was born is filled with "people coming and going."

And, so it is with the Gallery these days. A few of the artists, particularly those whose work hasn't really sold that well in the past year, are leaving us, moving on we all hope to greener pastures or at least to some gallery where their work will be more successful. And, we are making room for a few additional artists we are adding to the Gallery now and over the next few months whose work we think will augment that of our other artists and appeal to our visitors and customers.

While I'm re-hanging artwork, moving sculpture and glass and furniture, I've gotten my old friend the mysterious Dr. Doo (Or is it Du? Not Fu-Manchu, but someone much more dangerously secretive) to help me shuffle and move and reconfigure those free-standing walls we have in the Gallery.

And now, the dust is almost all cleaned up or at least seems to be settling back into comfortable corners. Overall, with nearly all of the artwork re-hung in a different way, especially with the center walls re-arranged and re-configured, with some new artwork from new artists and some new pieces from our existing artists, and with the place a little cleaner without so many dust bunnies -- people coming and going -- everything old is new again and Gallery is refreshed!