Plastic Sleeves for Matchbooks
I stumbled into an amazing cacaphony of matchbooks about three years ago. Michael Cable’s Woodside Antiques, an auction house in Farmville North Carolina, offered box loads of stuff at the end of a large estate sale. Cable is a marvelous auctioneer who inserts bits of trivia with every round of bidding. I hesitate to admit how much of my household detritus and ephemera was purchased through his auctions. Lots of decapitated dolls and schmucky bric-a-brac which somehow became art…
Responding to the “Who’ll start at twenty? Twenty? Ten? Ten? Five? Five? Five?” and jumping in at FIVE with no competition, I won the mixed lot. We’d arrived late at the auction and didn’t go through this box of joy, so imagine my surprise when what I thought were cigar boxes were actually fruitcake boxes. Ten of them. Filled with matchbooks. And another large Mason Shoe box filled with matchboxes. International in scope and copious in number, this collection is astounding because of its diversity. 
So — I searched around for a way to contain them since I needed the fruitcake boxes for an assemblage project. I bought plastic archival quality sleeves from HobbyMaster. Great products, good service, quality — and I don’t get a kickback from the link. If you check the matchbook gallery, you’ll get a pretty good idea on just what came in those fruitcake boxes.
That particular auction was the estate of a woman who saved everything, but not in a hoarder, styrofoam container kind of way. There were letters, boxes of personal correspondence and buyers really snapped to attention when bidding for those. I think one boxful went for over $85 which shows you ephemera is going for more than it used to. Marty was there from ECU’s Joyner Library – he represents the NC Collection, I think. I knew him decades ago when working on a graduate fellowship for Special Collections. His presence signaled “worth something” because his sniffing around means real history is on sale.
So, all of the sudden I’m rambling on about an auction. That’s because I’m trying to figure out what came in through the front door over the last 
seven years and what needs to go out the back. There’s a yard sale to benefit our local dog park and it’s next week so this gives me the incentive to sweep the halls and closets clean of some of our EXTRAS.
Back to this auction – I bid on another “lot” of items and it turned out to be a boxful of handmade lace, linens and a couple dresses from the Victorian era. Incredibly intricate, beautiful … breathtaking. There’s a photo in here somewhere of the lace, let me find it and post it.
Shelter Island vs Rodeo
Well, the rodeo won out, with Shelter Island viewing coming in on Monday instead of today. We’re going to the Bob Martin Agri Center and I’m hoping the sights and scenes will provide much artistic fodder. Artists and writers must get out of the studio and observe, duh… of course you know that, but for me the real treat is in observing and photographing those who dwell outside my comfort zone.
Horses were a part of my life for many years.
thinking about horses, rodeos, Arkansas, and pecan groves makes me melancholy. I dug through my 1990s writing files and found this:
The Airstream and the Suburban
Part I
At first I considered combining lives I knew with lives I’d imagined.
I would make a kaleidoscope of characters,
mirroring one segment into another,
forming new
images
of
scattered
fragments.
Then I realized the people I made kept turning true;
fiction left the room.
In my twenties,
with toddlers scribbling nonsense papers
attaching them with magnets to refrigerator doors,
I believed the notion of another to be greater
than the reality of myself.
Twenty-four hour days,
three a.m. silent walks to and fro,
self-analysis required infinitesimal retrospect.
A mother,
a wife, a daughter,
a simple life
somehow filled with a sense of grace,
taken for granted.
And it went on for years, quietly taking up space.
I knew it for the short breath that it was.
I felt and mourned it.
Babies learn to walk,
children dress themselves
leave for school,
and even when they don’t take the bus and you drive,
you’ve lost control.
I fought becoming a cliche’.
I would not grieve for their independence,
I would exalt in it.
But still–
I kept them with me as long as I could,
not even allowing kindergarten to take one away.
But I couldn’t slow them down,
make them play My Little Ponies,
Strawberry Shortcake,
or dress up in their grandmother’s pre-war clothing.
They left without me…
We moved from the comfortable womb
grandparents,
aunts and uncles,
friends from high-school and college.
When we started this new thing,
this cliche’ of upwardly moving careers
fast-paced transitions,
we
lost the continuity
became
fragments
ourselves.
Pieces
began
to
fall
from
the carefully glued
puzzles
my father put together.
Everytime we moved I tried to reconstruct the security of those puzzles,
until at last,
they couldn’t
be
whole
any more.
I stopped trying to overcome my father’s leaving me.
His death,
the pivot point for everything lost,
assumed more responsibility than it ever should have.
Part II
I am
a cartoon character
with a thought bubble over my head.
What he says
and what he means,
two distinctly different conversations always go on when I talk to Frank.
He thinks madness aligns him with us,
puts us somehow on his side.
He couldn’t be farther from reality.
“Judicial Ethics Complaint Board…
they thrive on this kind of thing…
got her ideas from Lois who issued one last summer.”
Now I begin listening in earnest.
“Lois claims I hit her,
physically abused her when we were married.
Now she’s written her own letter,
Elizabeth has.
Told the board she could not,
in good conscience,
let me continue in the manner in which I lived my life without reporting it.
Elizabeth says the boys witnessed me hitting Lois.
…claims that she can’t be hypocritical while teaching Emerson and Thoreau to young minds…
they learn ethical behavior,
she wrote that in the complaint.
Accused me of betting with bookies,
using campaign funds to go to the horse races…
I don’t deal with bookies,
I just send bets with friends,
you know that…
and I converted my campaign funds to private income
and paid income tax on them.”
Frank’s voice becomes plaintive,
almost whining.
He thinks I’m sympathetic,
this man who represents all that is despicable,
loathsome
in the universe.
“It’s strange,
the complaint is dated August 11,
that’s the same day I filed against her
for violating the custody agreement
because she wouldn’t let me see Bobby this summer.”
I notice my hand shaking,
the one not holding the phone,
so I start making the bed while I listen to him.
I keep hitting the phone with my chin
and it beeps
as I try to balance it without holding on with my hand.
Anything to keep moving…
I fold clothes after straightening the covers.
I talk to Frank,
“I haven’t even laid eyes on Elizabeth
since two days before Christmas last year.
I can’t tell you anything about her.
I don’t know what she does
or how she spends her time.
Bobby is afraid to talk to us,
he hides from us
even if he’s in the same grocery store.
This town has only 9,000 people
and I never see her…
I don’t even catch a glimpse of her,
let alone talk to her.”
I sensed he wanted some dirt on her, wanted me to tell him she was a drunk or some sort of fallen character. He rambled on about small towns and his dog having puppies…I thought about Elizabeth
and the abyss.
Something in his tone of voice caught my attention again.
“Lucy talked to Tiffany,
you know,
my new wife.
It seems she spoke with Elizabeth recently.
Well, she told Tiffany that when she asked about your mother,
Elizabeth said
‘Flo has outlived her usefulness.’
Lucy,
tough as she is,
couldn’t believe it.
Lucy gets along real good with Tiffany, they talk a lot. A lot more than Elizabeth ever would talk to her.”
I begin loading clothes into the washer.
Trying not to think of Elizabeth
and the abyss.
Take a load from the dryer
I fold,
then
walk to the bedrooms
put the clothes into drawers
that I straighten as I put away.
Phone on my shoulder, neck crooked,
basket on my hip.
Still listening.
And thinking of Elizabeth
and the abyss.
Frank kept on talking for a while longer,
I’d finished listening
way before he hung up.
I thought about Elizabeth
and the abyss.
Fell straight down into the chasm,
recognized reality,
saw truth,
and wept
because
my sister was still in the abyss
and I wanted to crawl out with her.
Part III
The conversation hung around me for hours.
Just two days before,
as I drove home from work,
I’d had an imaginary conversation with Elizabeth.
I thought of myself
dialing her phone number
and when she answered
I’d just say,
“Do you ever think of me?”
She used to have an answering machine,
back when they first separated,
in Arkansas.
Circles,
more circles
thought spiralling out from the past,
and Arkansas in the middle.
You never saw the word Arkansas around here until Clinton began campaigning.
I don’t think anyone really knew quite where it was.
Didn’t Bush think the state between Oklahoma and Texas… or was that some other confused politician?
Spirals of confusion, trying to figure out where the center begins, my life’s grace has become a double-helix with no end and no beginning. I trace the pattern and get confused, I can’t find my origins anymore.
Daddy died in 1987,
must have been,
we bought a mini-van to drive from South Carolina to Arkansas for the funeral.
We knew it would be soon,
his leaving us
and we sold his Chevy Suburban because it had over 160,000 miles on it.
We got rid of it for more than just old age,
it sat in my driveway
like an open wound,
mute testimony of everything my father could no longer be.
The trailer hitch left vacant with the sale of the Airstream,
the Yukon Territory license plate,
and the compass from Brookstone,
bitter monuments to traveler’s dreams.
I drove from Arkansas
to South Carolina in the Suburban when we moved.
I drove the Suburban back to Arkansas
to live in my in-law’s motel
while I helped my father forget he was dying.
But the Airstream and the Suburban
seem to have become symbols
of my parent’s generation,
of snowbirds driving south from Chicago to Padre Island,
from New Jersey suburbs down I-95
to hundreds of thirty-foot slabs of concrete nestled side-by-side
somewhere in Florida.
My parents never joined the snowbird set.
Instead
they travelled by flat-car through the Baja Peninsula,
sitting comfortably in lawn chairs
as the train carried Airstream and Suburban through Mexico.
The dog, Barney,
on my mother’s lap as she smoked Winston’s
and waved at locals drinking grape Nehi’s while roosting in the doorways of abandoned boxcars.
My father coveted Alaska and my mother gave him his dream.
Mount McKinley,
the Bering Strait,
and huskies pulling sleds,
they walked on glaciers,
ate bread baked in kitchens beside the Alcan highway,
and saw the things my father knew he’d see…
Mr. National Geographic with his Minolta.
The Airstream and the Suburban
and my dad,
thirty feet of silver bullet housing
and one determined man,
travelling together through Nova Scotia
and across Canada.
They drove on.
I busied myself with babies and pre-school.
Every few months,
my parents would camp at Lake DeGray, some 45 minutes away
and we would go down there.
Loading up strollers,
diapers,
God knows how many boxes of Cheerios
and graham crackers…
and spend the day watching my father and baby Caroline
lying in the hammock together,
a six-week old human
fitting in gentle repose across a seventy year old chest.
He had a brief affair with a small sail boat,
a Folboat,
and he’d take then two-year old out for short rides.
They’d stay in the shallows,
she wore a red hat and big orange life-jacket
and he wore brown saddleshoes with white socks
and under his shorts
flashed freckled legs.
I could hear them laughing and eating apples
while they drifted slowly around,
close to the shore.
And I remember this
no one else is here that saw it,
because Daddy’s gone
Jane’s the player in the play.
Participants in the scene don’t remember the same way the audience does.
Looking in,
instead of looking out,
changes the shape of things.
Thoughts occurring during the quiet before Christmas.
None of us will really go gracefully into that dark night. You should know we will kick and scream and try to stop death. You should know it’s not always visible — the struggle and yearning to stay right here in this very moment. It’s hidden sometimes, just behind the eyes, the fight to remain in this stage and not to transition to the next.
You should know how to tell someone it’s alright to leave. How to say you’ll be fine. How to say good-bye.
Momma used to tell me, “I plan on sticking around a while.” In the darkest of hours, she would massage my neck with fingers made strong from needlepoint and winding woolen thread around spools, sorting it by color and strands. “I’m not going anywhere, Val. Relax… Give yourself a break. Bob will still be there when I get there. He was a patient man.”
She would tell me to close my eyes. “Envision a sheet. A white sheet. Hanging on a clothes line on a still afternoon. No breeze. Think of absolutely nothing else.” The trick, she told me, is to keep the sheet white, not to let anything else onto the sheet. And she would shush my questions with “tsh tsh, keep the sheet white” …
What I couldn’t ask her then is what I can’t ask her now. How do I live without your poetry? And what is Christmas without the stories?
She stayed here with me to stop the silence from covering the house with a deafening shroud, thick and strong, opaque enough to let in sunlight but woven tightly to keep out the noise — of her unsteady footsteps, of her opening a box of cereal, upside down, of her wispy night breaths while she slept a shallow sleep filled with dreams of my brother and father.
You should know there are three dogs here now. Scrambling and barking, wrestling… panting… and challenging each other for top pillow position on the couch nearby. The television gives me Cary Grant, the stereo in the kitchen mumbles Public Radio news, tinny sounds of Andrew Bird come from earphones of an iPod charging, plugged into a laptop chiming with email sounds, the cell phone beeps as a text message arrives, a microwave oven hums as it warms my coffee while the ice maker crashes two dozen cubes into the bin, the washing machine and dryer chug along with domestic efficiency, the dishwasher churns, one neighbor uses a leaf blower while the other mows her lawn, cars drive by, there’s a bi-plane following the Pamlico River, and a pile driver two blocks away slams pylons into the marsh as a new generation replaces a CCC-built bridge over the creek nearby.
And the silence is deafening.
Don’t close this browser window until upload is complete.
Are we ever really finished uploading the celestial orb? Can life become so ornately disorganized that we forget to download our distress and trust in the almighty — the leftover Thanksgiving, fight for it, wake up in the middle of the night and find it, warm it for one minute in the microwave, get me some vanilla Breyer’s ice cream, forget the fork – I’ll use my fingers, the one and only, most important of all
last piece of
PIE?
We had pecan pie. We had Tar Heel pie. We had cinnamon scones for breakfast. We had sweet ‘taters with pecan crunchy topping. We had a spiral cut ham from Fresh Market. We brined a turkey a la Alton Brown recipe. Smashed potatoes with an entire stick of butter and some whipping cream mixed into it. Ubiquitous green bean casserole. Cranberry relish. Scratch yeast rolls. Cornbread – the sour cream kind. Bourbon sugar glaze pecans for nibbling…
It is my favorite day. An American holiday centered around food. Eating. Just a day of eating. And most of the family except the Mathematical One Who Must Remain Afar. She will return to the fold soon enough.
So, for the day, at least, Assemblage means the chemical properties of flour when mixed with egg, of salt and poultry… and family. Some of it.
Vintage MatchBooks size C8 — ISO paper size.
Do you ISO or do I?
Found out something truly fascinating today when I perused a knowledge lidbit (which is slightly more than a tidbit) concerning what the dimensions of a piece A4 paper is. Come to find out, standard paper sizes are based on a single aspect ratio of the square root of 2 or [√2 = 1:1.4142] The way to figure out dimensions is to fold an A4 size piece of paper in half, do it again, again, again… ad infinitum. Wikipedia puts the explanation of paper sizing standards thusly: “The main advantage of this system is its scaling: if a sheet with an aspect ratio of √2 is divided into two equal halves parallel to its shortest sides, then the halves will again have an aspect ratio of √2.”
ISO paper sizes. A is most common, B follows, and C brings up the pulp rear. Oh, I do love me some square roots. They’s hard to find, though, most of the ginger we dug up was roundish. Reminds me of Granny Legless who used to tell us “cornbread are square. Pie are round.”
Squaring is so fluxus. Rounding out? Not a chance.
According to Wikipedia, again, C is only used for envelopes. But I have found another size C function — matchbooks. The standard matchbook is 2.2″ x 3.25″, according to the Atlas Match LLC website. (Betcha’ thought them blue words was links, din’t ‘cha?)
Want to figure out the dimensions of your B or C ISO paper?
Read this and weep:
The C series is used only for envelopes and is defined in ISO 269. The area of C series sheets is the geometric mean of the areas of the A and B series sheets of the same number; for instance, the area of a C4 sheet is the geometric mean of the areas of an A4 sheet and a B4 sheet. This means that C4 is slightly larger than A4, and B4 slightly larger than C4. The practical usage of this is that a letter written on A4 paper fits inside a C4 envelope, and a C4 envelope fits inside a B4 envelope.
We’re seriously considering printing Dead Mule School of Southern Literature matchbooks. Then, in 2035, the matchbooks will be vintage and we
That lobotomy sure worked swell, Bob.
can sell them and make a gabillion-trillion dollars US. Now I wonder if the Dead Mule could be the ISO standard for literary excellence?
The latest collage with vintage matchbooks required the removal of the dead/flattened matches themselves. It can’t be good to leave flammables in my art, although that is a rather interesting concept – a visual feast for the ears. Listen to what I see, you won’t believe your eyes. One of my altered books required small wooden dowels (are sticks still dowels if they’re square? Is there an ISO for sticks?) so I cut the ends off wooden matchsticks, glued them together in a row (think South Pacific island raft) and then created the desired effect with paint and chicken gizzards. It seems nothing else can achieve the effect you get from a dozen chicken gizzards. A rare artistical moment, truly inspiring.
I took some ART lessons from Juanita down to the gas station. She was well-versed in chicken collages, made assemblages, 3-D as well as two dimensional pieces that sold for nigh over $2,500.00 a pop. But the sad thing is, the classes ended before we’d been taught as to how to attach a gizzard in a functional manner so’s I had to come up with my own recipe for a good, stiff chicken glue. Tried ox blood with Elmers, PVA combined with apple cider vinegar and toothpicks … after 17 years of experimentation, it turned out Armour Star Lard worked best of anything. And there began a whole new set of problems on account of Daddy Legless has these seven beagles what have a penchant for lard-related art and they ate my assemblages.
Nowadays, I tend to use only vintage matchbooks when filing my nails or tending the herds.