Italy: Monte Cimone with Moon Laurie Fox Pessemier Acrylic/linen 9 x 13" 22 x 33 cm
Winsted: Soldier's Monument Laurie Fox Pessemier Acrylic/panel 11 x 14" 28 x 36cm
Winsted Town Center Laurie Fox Pessemier Acrylic/panel 14 x 11 36 x 28cm
Artnotes: More than a Ride
I boarded the CT Limo
at JFK airport on Tuesday last, with an Israeli soldier, a Presbyterian, a
woman from North Carolina who collects Catholic art, a Jewish girl living in
New Orleans. The driver was a Muslim man from Sudan. There is no
punch line to this joke, other than to say, where but in America can this fun
and peaceful encounter occur? Luckily it was fun, because with the
terrible traffic it took me longer to get from the airport to my sister’s house
than it did to cross the Atlantic.
I never quite get on
the time zone during these short trips so I sit outside at 3:45 AM painting the
Christmas lights on the soldiers monument, seen from my Dad’s elderly housing complex.
For the young people driving erratically by (that was me, once) I must
seem like an hallucination.
I visit my sisters and
niece and nephews. My sister and I went to Winsted native Ralph Nader's
new "American Museum of Tort Law". It is quite an interesting
place -- I never realized how important an individual's right to fight a personal
injustice was. Ralph's first big success came with "Unsafe at any
Speed", exposing the dangers of the Corvair. Later, the case against
Ford and the Pinto exposed how Ford thought it better to pay off families and
injured than to fix the car that was bursting into flames. The asbestos
case against Johns Manville was the largest ever brought. I walked away
thinking of lawyers as heroes instead of as ambulance-chasers.
Artnotes would have
gone out on Sunday at this point, with a snappy byline. My tablet, however, let
me down.
So you get to hear
more about the Connecticut Limo service: late yesterday morning I sat in a full
van with another muslim driver -- I wouldn’t mention it, but he had some Koran
quote hanging from the mirror. As we
made the transition to New York state, the man next to me said, “Oh, look at
this 34 minute delay coming up! Should I
tell him?” I said sure, he seems like a
reasonable fellow. So the guy on my left
and the woman on my right guided the driver, rather dumbfounded, but eager to
make his timetable, through the streets of suburban Manhattan. “You really need this app,” the woman told
him. “Can you put it on for me?” he
asked. The three of us plowed through
his Arabic keyboard, turned on his GPS locator, and got him set up. “What a team we make!” the four of us
exclaimed as we made our way into terminal 1.
