Sera's Toast

       

      The sun sets on his east Texas pasture, taking the day with it in a silent blaze. Wayne rambles over bumpy roads, rounding up memories as if he could drive them all home and park them in his driveway for show. Retelling his heroic past from a Lazy Boy chair, his wife of 65 years, Judith, nods respectfully, though she's heard it all before. His thoughts are now comfortably scrambled in vodka and Coca-Cola. His best friends these days, two Aberdeen Terriers, herd him toward the bed. His farmer-sized hands steady him against thin walls. Wayne leans against the bedroom door shutting it with his weight then hits the mattress with a thud. Like centurions, the terriers file in, surrounding Wayne's long, lean body.

      Judith puts her ear to the door. With the sound of his snore, her shoulders drop and her back straightens. She lights a Virginia Slim and sits down to enjoy the first quiet moment of the day. A halo of smoke gathers around her head when she hears a knock at the back door. Placing her cigarette in a crystal bowl, an ashtray souvenir from Germany, she lifts herself from the easy chair. Seraphina has come to return the lilies Judith had placed on the New Year's altar. Sera, that's what Wayne called her for short, is a widow, an old friend.

      He had once said to her, "Listen sweetheart, that’s a pretty name but it's longer than you are tall. Can I just call you Sera?"

       

      She was a "good-natured gal" he had always said. She had to be, married to Sonny, his partner in a Venezuelan oil drilling company in the '60s. They made the deal one night over a bottle of Jack, in a thatch-roofed bar in Caracas. When they stumbled through the door together, arms over shoulders to tell Sera, she raised her glass. In a mixed accent of Portuguese and Spanish she proposed a toast, "Well, eef we loos it all tomorrow, we jes start over. Sheers!"

      They had a hell of a run until Sonny started stealing and Wayne sent him back to Texas on a second-class charter.

      As the bouquet passes between Judith and Sera, a quaking blast from the garage shakes red pollen from the stamen onto the white, wilting petals.

      There are not many unpredictable night noises so far out in the piney woods. Dogs bark at owls and every now and then, a coyote. Exxon/Mobil trucks occasionally rumble on and off of the property to check their wells. But when the dogs are asleep, there is only the lowing of distant cattle to suggest waking life.

      Before Judith can gain a grip on the flowerpot, she sees fire clawing at the back door. Startled, she stumbles over soil and shards from the shattered lily container shoving Sera toward the front door.

She yells for Wayne, but there is no reply.

      The terriers scatter, disappear as the bedroom door flies open. Wayne lay still and quiet, but for the snoring. He blows air through his nose and lips, like a horse nicker and rolls onto his side.

      The two women struggle with all six feet and two inches of his dead weight until he flops to the floor.

      His eyes peel half open as he sits up. Grabbing him under his shoulders, they drag him outside, just as flames overtake the home.

      It is only a prefab house, not like the handsome homes they had known before retirement. But it held nearly every reminder of their combined 140-some years of life.

      Coatless and shoeless in the cold January night, the three are now monoliths in the field. Sera's stature is noticeably diminutive next to Wayne, her arms outstretched to wrap and warm the couple.

      Flames burn, blot out the stars.

      In minutes, the home is reduced to cinders. Indifferent to their loss, the flames turn and begin to feed on surrounding tree branches. The fire department calls. They are lost. The small dirt road turnoff is not visible in the night. A short red truck follows the glow on the horizon, getting there in time to save a few Venezuelan trinkets but not in time to save the two tiny terriers. The three watch the horror with tear-stained faces, imagining what must have become of the loyal companions — staring, glassy-eyed, no tears left.

      The final flame is exhausted. A blanket of pitch dark covers the now open field, like an old quilt with stars for pinholes.

~end~

~end~

Robert Rauschenberg, 1925-2008: Port Arthur native reinvented himself and art

Port Arthur native Robert Rauschenberg spent the last hours of his life in the very place he had wished.

"When I die, I don't want to go anywhere. I just want to work in my studio," said the internationally known pop artist at a news conference in 2005 in Lafayette, La., where he had an exhibition dedicated to his late mother, Dora.

With his only sister, Janet Begneaud, by his side, the artist known to many as the Pope of Pop, for his kindness and optimism, died of heart failure at 10:53 p.m. Monday in his studio on Captiva Island at the age of 82. At the artist's behest, his ashes will be spread on the beach in front of that studio Sunday with only his family and loyal staff members present, said Byron Begneaud, Rauschenberg's brother-in-law of 52 years. Memorial services are being planned for New York and Florida at a later date, as yet undecided, Begneaud, Janet's husband, said.

"He and Janet had a special bond," said Begneaud, speaking with soft R's and a slight drawl by phone from Lafayette. "Janet's been holding his hand for about six weeks. He had been in intensive care, but they moved him to his studio and cleared a path for him to see the bay."

Rauschenberg spent most of his life near the ocean, including many years in New York. But it started in Port Arthur, where he was born in 1925, at Gates Hospital. Rauschenberg often talked about his humble beginnings in Southeast Texas. His family, like many other American families, fell on hard times during the Depression, but using their wits, his family scraped by. In the Rauschenberg household, nothing went to waste. His mother used to sew remnants of fabric together to make clothes for the family. In an interview with the New York Times, Rauschenberg admitted his mother went so far as to make a skirt out of the back of the suit that her brother was buried in because she didn't want the fabric to go to waste. It was that culture of transforming trash into treasure that ultimately made Rauschenberg a star. He preferred to create his pieces out of second-hand store finds, items he found in the street and in trash bins and objects he had on hand, versus canvases or anything store-bought.

Raised in a fundamentalist Christian home by parents Dora and Ernest, he left Port Arthur and the idea that he might become a minister, to attend college in Austin in 1943. But he was expelled within a semester because he had trouble reading.

"Milton was not a scholar," remembered Dovie Horton, a member of Thomas Jefferson High School's Class of '43. "I later found out he was dyslexic."

Rauschenberg said he was "spared the shame" of returning home from college when he received a letter from the draft board. The U.S. Navy trained him to be a neuropsychiatric technician. He was to bathe and wrap corpses.

"No, I was not forced to fight. What I saw was much worse," Rauschenberg said in the Lafayette press conference. "I got to see, every day, what war did to the young men who barely survived it. I was in the repair business."

After the war, the young man, still known as Milton, hitchhiked home to Port Arthur only to find his family had moved to Lafayette.

"Janet wasn't there in Lafayette very long before she was named Sweet Potato Queen. She was a beauty and Milton was always sweet and gentle," Horton said.

And Milton wasn't there long before he left for art school and renamed himself "Bob."

"When people got to know me better and just assumed that I had some dignity, it became Robert then. So now I'm known as either Robert or Bob," he said.

Reinvention was the hallmark of his career. He worked in every medium---in theater, dance and even engineering, he created set designs, lighting designs and costumes while reinventing what the entire world thought of as art. Rauschenberg attributed much of what he learned about creating and reinventing to his time spent at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. He collaborated with art world giants Willem De Kooning, Franz Kline and Josef Albers; dancer Merce Cunningham; and musician John Cage.

In 1953, he moved to New York City, where he met aspiring artist Jasper Johns and designed window displays for Tiffany's to make ends meet while exploring the New York art scene. Their work in the 1950s would become the link between abstract expressionism, which dominated the art world in the '50s, and pop art of the 1960s, and is still influencing artists today.

Rauschenberg became the first American artist to win the Grand Prize at the Venice Biennale in 1964, a prestigious contemporary art exhibition. (Mark Tobey and James Whistler previously had won the Painting Prize.)

Amid fame, he did not forget his hometown, visiting several times in the '80s and '90s for benefits for Lamar State College-Port Arthur and the Museum of the Gulf Coast.

"He was a very generous person," said Sam Monroe, president of both LSC-Port Arthur and the Port Arthur Historical Society. "He liked people. He met people. He showed interest in everybody."

In a previous interview, celebrated photographer and Beaumont native Keith Carter of Lamar University agreed. "His approach influenced everybody in my generation," Carter said.

Donna Meeks, chair of the Lamar University art department, puts Rauschenberg in the same league as Picasso and Duchamp. "He is one of the three most significant artists in the 20th century," she said. "I don't think artists today work without knowledge of Rauschenberg."

Rauschenberg is survived by a son, Christopher, 56, a Portland, Ore.-based artist and photographer.