On Art & Rust: A Celebration of My Grandma Thel
... and the beauty in trash
My grandmother, Thelma Esan Kandel, passed away at 91 years old in February this year. What a force she was to behold. She was as sharp as a kitchen knife, funky and elegant and quirky. She was a vicious liberal, feminist, and Trump hater to her core. She brought a creativity to her life that so deeply seeped into mine. What others wrote off as rust and trash, she valued for its beauty – she was, and is, and will forever be, the greatest artist in my life.
I suppose this is a eulogy of sorts, but I’d like to think of it more as a multimedia collage of how she has influenced my life. I think she’d like that – as a fantastic visual artist, she would collect seemingly incongruous odds and ends and piece them together in Joseph Cornell style dioramas (scroll to the very bottom to see a sample), always with a quippy inscription as the title. For her, there was art in everything: the Scrabble tiles she arranged again and again to spell her motto, “art speaks with no words” (stylized below); the dozens of clocks she hung like some sort of temporal shrine (pictured below); the “rust wall” she and my grandpa created on the outside of their house in Connecticut (featured in an article in Connecticut Magazine by my Aunt Bethany and shown below as well).
She loved portmanteaus – during the Trump presidency, she called me to reveal a new word she had made up to describe him: ignoranus (of course, the combination of “ignoramus” and “anus”). Quick with a quip in the best and worst of times, she never ceased finding the humor in a situation. Even in the hospital, skinny as a stick and struggling to speak, when the nurses needed her to undress for a scan of sorts, she told them, “Don’t get any ideas – I don’t want to star in any pornos.”
In a poetry class in college, we were assigned to write epigrams. My mind jumped to Grandma Thel – exactly the kind of assignment she would love. For her 85th birthday that year, I wrote a series of epigrams (fashioned into epigrandmas, a portmanteau worthy of her wag).
Epigrams for Grandma Thel on her 85th birthday (Epigrandmas)
My “T-H” comes from Thelma,
As do my bark and bite;
And she’s no dog, I tell ya,
But she’ll still put up a fight.
Collecting rust but never rusty:
Grandma Thel, the Artist.
While other folks are getting dusty,
She remains the smartest.
Her brain is like a kitchen knife –
The sharpest wit you’ll find.
She’s Grandma, Mom, and loving wife,
With perspicacious mind.
At eighty-five and going strong,
Creative to a T,
She’s taught me right, what’s right from wrong
And shown me how to be.
And though she falls, and breaks a hip,
And feels a bitter weight,
My Grandma Thel, with pistol grip
Will set the whole world straight.
110 Riverside (Written for Thelma’s 90th Birthday)
For Thelma’s 90th birthday, my Grandpa Myron asked me to write a song. We would always celebrate her birthday, November 22nd, during our Thanksgiving Dinner, so that’s where I played it for my family the first time. Here’s a recording of it.
I cannot sum up her life in a few words, or pictures, or poems, or songs – 91 rich years of life are more than I can comprehend, and I just knew her for my 27. I can only tell you about my slice of Thel, minuscule in comparison to the great pie that she baked and gave out through her years, but delicious all the same. Everything ends and all metal rusts, but hopefully there will always be someone like Thelma to see it for its beauty.
From February 22nd, 2024, the final entry of my previous journal
Grandma died last night – an ending that, while not unexpected, came far quicker than I thought it would. It was a fast deterioration over the last few months, after we found the ulcers on her legs and the bladder cancer that just wouldn’t quit. We all went to the rehab facility last night – me, Mom, Dad, Greta, Bethany, Gary, Jared, Ryan, and Grandpa Mike. We knew it was goodbye. And yet, despite all that looming death, there was something beautiful in us standing around the bed, sharing our favorite things about her, our fond memories and funny tales. She cursed, she snapped, she cracked jokes, she loved art and kitschiness and cheesy things and beautiful things, not because others said so, but in spite of it. She loved rust and junk and trash and treasure, and made them all into something greater. She is in me so much and I can’t imagine who I’d be without her. I’ll fill up a wall, I’ll overcrowd a shelf, I’ll use my hands to make something great and new or sometimes just new and stupid. The world is filled with art for me because it was for her. She loved gazpacho soup, which was served every time I’d come over to her house. Turns out it was just V8 with some watermelon chunks in it.
It is fitting that this be the last journal entry in this book because it feels like the closing of one big chapter. Or perhaps more so the beginning of a new one (cheesy!). I don’t know what death is, or forever, or nothingness, or reincarnation, or heaven and hell, or even what life is. I do know that life is worth living because it feels good (sometimes) and feels bad (sometimes), and it is often everything all at once and is in fact changing before my very eyes. Grandma Thel was born in 1932, and the world that she saw, the life that she lived, changed so drastically that it is impossible to fathom. I’ll leave the last page open, just as I left the first. However hard it is to begin something, I always find it harder to end, so let’s leave it at that.
I don't know whether I loved the photo of you and Thel or Theo;s song more. Both made me cry -- She was everything he said and it is clear from his song that her consciousness had joined with his in the way that only a wonderful mother can become a part of her son.
Made me sad but think she left a wonderful legacy.......