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The late Glenn May on one of his favorite rivers, the San Juan in New Mexico, circa 2010.
Photo from Facebook
My nomadic attorney Thos is planning a fishing and camping trip of major proportions later this summer, starting in New Mexico and working his way north through the Rockies into Canada.
So I wanted to reconnect with a fellow named Glenn May, who was my main fishing buddy for several years in the 1990s when we both lived in Albuquerque and worked at the same bookstore. Last I heard he was living in Colorado, which is on the itinerary, more or less.
An email bounced back so I tried Facebook, only to learn he died in his sleep in February.
He was a little younger than me, about 60 I guess.
This was disconcerting.
I was already working at the bookstore when he came on board, and we recognized our mutual interest when I found him trying to carve out a shelf or two for fly-fishing titles amid the general chaos of the sports section.
I had a Ford Escort, which was good on gas but didn’t hold much gear, especially when you factored in critical supplies such as beer.
He had a gigantic and battered Ford F350 which was terrible on gas but would go anywhere and could hold everything. It also had a long-expired Delaware license plate, which made for some tense moments.
We managed to wangle the same two days off, Sunday and Monday, and we’d often bug out after our Saturday second shift and fetch up somewhere around 1 a.m., pitch a tent and be on the water at dawn.
The bookstore did not pay much, and out West the distances (and gas consumption) are exponentially greater than in the relatively compact East.
If it was near the first of the month, we took the Escort. Mid-month when we were feeling bucks up, we’d go with the truck.
Glenn was a dry fly guy to his core. I had been trained in similar fashion but was dabbling in the dark arts of subsurface fishing, so when one of us was catching the other was often fishing.
He was also a Dallas Cowboys fan. They were suffering through a particularly bad season one year in the mid-90s, and as we drove from river to river we listened to the games on the radio. He lamented, and I privately gloated.
I wandered back east but Glenn stayed put, eventually becoming a fairly big name in the New Mexico newspaper world. He wrote about fly-fishing for the Albuquerque Tribune and about everything for the Santa Fe New Mexican, and that’s not a complete list.
Then he was off to Cameroon with the Peace Corps. And then Turkey, not in the Peace Corps. He did a stint teaching English in South Korea.
I occasionally got cryptic emails describing the fishing in places like Bulgaria, and he kept up a Facebook presence, so I had some idea of what he was doing.
More recently he was back in the Four Corners, working for the Ute tribal nation in some capacity. I think there was a wife in there too.
I’m struck — again — by how, over the years,I have spent a lot of time with fishing friends and I know next to nothing about them except they dislike fishing with dropper rigs and have a weakness for hazelnut coffee.
The other thing that stands out about Glenn was that he was the best trout spotter I have ever fished with. No scouting flies for this guy. He was almost always aiming at specific fish, where I was working specific spots. To use a sports analogy, he played man-to-man while I played zone.
I spoke to him on the phone in 2004. We reminisced about the time we were edging around a canyon pool and when he looked back all he saw was my ballcap floating on the surface. (I was underneath temporarily.)
Or the time the drunk idiots chucked rocks into the pools we were working. They were poor shots so the rocks came very close to hitting us. They also called our fly rods “fairy sticks.”
We snuck up on them later when they were cavorting in a hot spring and let the air out one of their tires. Only one. We wanted the punishment to fit the crime.
They recovered enough that we encountered them later at a rustic saloon that sold flies and had a collection of brassieres attached to the ceiling. Luckily they didn’t put two and two together, probably because they were engrossed by the decor. We prudently oiled out and made our escape.
I’ll wrap this with a story about the famous New Mexico tailwater, the San Juan River.
The first time we tried it together he was doing well with miniscule dry flies, size 24 callibaetis, and long leaders tapered to 7X.
I think this was when my antipathy for what I call “specks” started. No matter what, I could not lay out my speck the way he could.
So while he was horsing big fat rainbows into the net, I was fumbling with tackle and cussing.
Finally, I tied on a big gaudy Royal Coachman fly with a pink post and about twice the normal amount of hackle. I think I bought it at the brassiere bar.
Shortening my leader to something around seven feet and 3X, I heaved it near the streamside vegetation while Glenn watched. He may have smirked a bit.
A nice rainbow, probably rejoicing at the prospect of a square meal instead of nibbling on specks, smacked the ridiculous fly and we were off.
It was big enough, and I had consumed enough beer, that Glenn kindly assisted in netting the beast. He looked at it, the fly and at me, shook his head, and said “Now that is some raggedy fly-fishing.”
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Ingrid Freidenbergs at her studio in Lakeville.
L. Tomaino
From July 12 through August 8, the David M. Hunt Library in Falls Village will host “Collage Redux!,” an exhibit featuring the collages and box constructions of Lakeville resident, Ingrid Freidenbergs.
A highlight of the exhibit will be Freidenberg’s Art Talk on July 24 at 5:30 p.m., featuring a screening of “Cycles,” a short film by her son, Paul Feder, who also co-composed the score with fellow musician Sam McCoy. The film presents the photography of Freidenbergs’ late husband Jack Feder, whose photos appeared in “Life,” “Newsweek,” and “The New York Times.”
The film is an important piece of the show.“This is my first show without Jack here. A way to bring Jack in is to show the film.”
Although both Freidenbergs and her husband were psychologists, they also pursued and loved the arts. When they first met and throughout their years together, “Art was the thing we communicated about,” said Freidenbergs.
Freidenbergs recalled a trip to the British Museum.She’d been studying watercolor with painter John Hardy and with a letter of introduction from him, she and Federal went into the vaults and spent the day looking at cases of Turner watercolors. “I loved it,” remembered Freidenbergs.
She and Federal traveled the world together, bringing home pieces of art they loved.
Freidenbergs’ art was — and continues to be — heavily influenced by her family’s flight from Latvia when she was just an infant in 1944.In her personal statement she says, “World War II changed my life, so little wonder that collage has become my mode of expression as well. The family farm disappeared; fortunes were buried and scattered. So, we too were scattered around Europe, then America, picking up pieces of culture and cast-off debris along the way.”
She and her family spent seven years in displaced persons camps in Europe before emigrating to the United States.
Freidenbergs began her pursuit of art with watercolor but after her son’s birth, she found collage to be a perfect fit for her. “It was something I could do with the many distractions of a young child.” She developed a method of working that she still utilizes.“I could put things down, walk away, go back, move things, look at them upside down and all ways, and walk away again…” until she arrived at the perfect composition.
Collage also combined her love of cloth, paper, color (red being a recurring theme), feathers, buttons, old books, and other found materials.
And most perfectly, collage gave her an outlet to “make sense of a shattered world. Form, line, texture, and color are joined to balance the disparate parts. Through the process of assembling these parts I can once again start to feel in control of my life,” she explained.
Of one show Freidenbergs participated in, “The New York Times” wrote “there is no doubt as to Freidenbergs’ gift for conveying atmosphere thick with something, be it guilt, intrigue, death or simply a relish for the forbidden.”
The David M. Hunt Library is located at 63 Main Street in Falls Village and Collage Redux! will be on view during library hours.
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Revolution reenactment
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Approximately 1,100 living history soldiers participated in the 250th anniversary reenactment of the Battle of Bunker Hill in Gloucester, Massachusetts, June 21 and 22. Warren Stevens, of Cornwall, at right, was among the militiamen. Stevens reports he stayed in the military encampment with more than “500 tents, cannons and five schooners and period authentic longboats used to land the British Army.” He added, “It was truly a once in a lifetime experience... We get to feel a part of what the heroes who made this country went through. It is in their honor and memory that we do this and I am proud to be a part of it.”
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Tom Brown
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