I am playing the numbers and casting my lot with the mystery

K           I          S           M         E          T
Kismet

And if you are lucky 
one night 
a jerk will break into your 
apartment  
while you are sleeping  

and you will wake to find 
a foot creeping through your window 
but your screams 
will summon the neighbor  
and scare the jerk away 

but you will never be able to return to that place  
and so you will call your Parents  
your tail between your legs 
and reluctantly 
say yes to your Father who will borrow a van 

and will drive eight hundred and twelve miles 
to move you home 
and then for the next six weeks you will work with your Father 
and he will get to know you again 
and you will get to know him again 

and you will both discover 
that all is as it ever was between you 
but now at least 
your Father will not be so worried about you 
and you will know that nothing that you ever would do 
could ever make him stop loving you  

but then on a lousy Tuesday in March 
your Father will die 
all at once from a heart explosion  
and you will just want to thank that jerk 
who tried to come through your window  
and ended up sending you home. 


"Kismet" was many, many months in the making.  And on some level, this piece took years. When I was finished with the piece, I had the sad feeling that maybe "this was it" --- maybe I had nothing more to say. This was the piece that referenced the key event and memory of my life that wanted me to become an artist. What more was there? Thankfully, that feeling has faded, but my feeling of satisfaction in having at least finished this piece has not.

​I struggled with this piece on many levels --- the technical and the corralling of the content into a place where there was a center, or at least a spot of coherency. The technical difficulties manifested themselves in the actual engineering of the piece --- getting it to a place of strong construction. That is how/why the chevron type shape on the top appeared. I had no problem, however, with the color and in fact, had a good time making that aspect work.

​The Die / The Pinnacle
The idea of chance was a big part of my memories of childhood. There was a quasi constant reference to betting and  gambling, the numbers. There were important numbers in dreams and good numbers and bad numbers, for me, growing up.​​
Oh, what a balm it was to learn about the Fibonacci sequence! --- how comforting its formation. I delight in the mystery and the certainty of how a mathematical sequence underlies the formation of the natural world.
​Perhaps.
"doors opening windows slamming shut a sometimes yes a sometimes not"  / "I am playing the numbers and casting my lot with the mystery
​
When my Father died suddenly, the first words out of my 89 year old beloved Grandfather was, "When God closes one window, He opens a door". Or maybe he said, "When God closes a door, He opens a window." This is the kind of thing my mind jumbles, not only in memory. But that was my Grandfather, and that was in essence his wisdom that he was trying to impart. I loved him even more for that.
This door, the portal in the middle, is a photograph (taken by me) from Picinisco, Italy, my paternal grandparents' hometown.
And then, the next morning after my Father died, my Grandfather could not wake up -- he had had a massive stroke that robbed him of most of his speech and all of his mobility and independence. He died 3 months to the day, after my Father.

One of my Grandfather's favorite expletives was, "Oi, Oi, Oi!". He was the only person that I knew who said this. His "Oi, Oi, Oi's!" are preserved throughout this piece under broken shards of one of his schnapps glasses.
Kismet.  When that word came to me --- totally out of the blue, while speaking on the phone with  another human being  and I had the  absolute urge to gratuitously interject that word in our conversation, that is when the piece found itself. That one word, Kismet, unleashed  the other words of the poem that are displayed in the eight yellow rectangles.  And that word changed my focus from the topic of resilience, or that which we use to rebound and that we can harness, control and activate, to the more passive acceptance of fate or chance -- maybe something beyond ourselves.
Picture
detail "Kismet" classic Greek and Roman wave pattern under Matt's broken car glass
I need to thank the people who supplied some of the crucial materials, as this was a piece that initially took its direction from those materials and from the idea that we really don't control the important bits of life. We make do with what is cast our way.

Thanks to Matt O'Callaghan (check out his wonderful waves) for his broken car window glass. That is what got this mosaic rolling! Thank you to Jen Levinson for her beautiful, broken ceramic bowl that was given to her by her  Mom. Thank you to Donato Rossi, my Grandfather for his yellow schnapps glass and for his words of wisdom --- "oi, oi oi" and of course the real test --- his making sense of losing his son . And thank you to my cousin Drew Kordas for packing Poppa's schnapps glasses so badly that a couple broke. Thank you to Claudia Marlowe and Bill Grubaugh for the lovely oriental vase that did not last intact with me for more than 4 months. Thank you to Babci, for her broken dipping bowl from her elaborate set of china. (And thanks to Cousin Kathryn for saving Babci's china and to Matt for driving it to me.) Thank you to my daughter, Rosa, for her lucky no. 2 pencil and thank you to my son, Arturo, for posing for those photos, the re-enactment of feet coming through windows!
And lastly, but never leastly,  thank you to my Dad -- Arturo Lorenzo Rufino Giuseppe Rossi.  Did I get it right? Or is it Arturo Laredo Rufino Giuseppe Rossi?