Thomas Cave's Tattoo: Dahlia Information

"Thomas Cave's Tattoo"

I've started a blog that discusses what I call the New Great Depression - the idea that the next few years will constitute a Depression era, and not simple recession. I believe that to understand it in that way will enrich it, and encourage everyone in this country to make this era a creative period, a positive time, an act of construction, and not a cause for panic, chaos and fear. This is a chance for renaissance.

If the New Great Depression produces art, literature, theater, film, community, and a discovery of human value, as the first one did, who wouldn't want to be a part of it.

I am here to barter, trade, share, talk, listen, discuss, argue, understand, make fun, and make peace with the lack of the old prosperity. It was corrupt, and corroded, and it's gone. The dead weight of spoils has been lifted.

Thank you for listening, ma'am.

"About Thomas Cave"

Mr. Cave is the gentleman in the photograph that graces this home page. The photograph was taken by the American photographer Dorothea Lange, who so powerfully documented the country and its citizens during the Great Depression. I found this photograph at www.shorpy.com, a website with a specialty in Depression images. According to Shorpy's site, the Lange photograph, titled "535-07-5248 and Wife," was taken in Oregon in August of 1939. The gentleman is described as an unemployed lumber worker. His tattoo is his Social Security number, by which he is referred to in the title of the photograph. A public records search conducted by Shorpy's revealed that the number belonged to Thomas Cave, who was born in 1912 and died in 1980 in Portland. His wife's name, Ann Kathryn, who died in 2000, appears on their tombstone, a photograph of which is appended under Shorpy's readers' comments.

Mr. Cave is 27 years old in Lange's picture.

Thursday, August 27, 2009

Dahlia Information

Last spring, after I left the New York Times, I got it into my mind that I would investigate an interest in landscape architecture. I'd recently seen an excellent show at Yale on Gerald Murphy, the painter and 1920s bon vivant who was a friend of Scott Fitzgerald's and a model for Dick Diver in "Tender is the Night." Murphy was interested in landscape design, which is what took him, with his wife, Sara, to Europe, and the rest is history. Being on Long Island - kind of exactly in the middle of Gatsby country, with what's left of the North Shore's "Gold Coast" - big, big 20th century estates, from an era when Long Island was basically country and the North Shore was home to monumental weekend houses and gentleman farms - I decided to make a tour of what remained. It's a tour de force of landscaping - ambition writ large, aka, employing nature, as though it were a clerk.

Walking around one stupendous property on a brilliant unemployed day, deep in the gardens of the service buildings, I came across a modest, precise garden that turned out to be a dahlia garden, planted and maintained by a local dahlia society. There was a white post box to the side of the garden, which had leaflets and contact information in it, and which read "Dahlia Information" on the side.

Well, there it is. Somewhere in the world is a post box with dahlia information inside it. This struck me as the obscurest, and yet, the most common, exchange, point of contact, service, stake in the ground, I could imagine. It actually reassured me about the civilization I share, with so many many many others. It's not a blog. It's not a window with a thick plastic guard. It's not really something I need, I thought. But - I opened it and took a sheet of what was in there.

And knowing what I now know about dahlias, I feel like I've fallen down the rabbit hole. More about that later.

Thank you for listening, ma'am.

3 comments:

Anne Watkins said...: Hurray for the rabbit hole! The Murphys owned Mark Cross, and Gerald designed many beautiful things for that enterprise, too.

Your discovery of the post box reminds me of Marie Winn's description of finding the loose leaf binder in the Central Park cafe that birders used to record their sightings (pre-blogging days). Just a blue book sitting on a table for anyone to read or write in. She said that if it was possible to fall in love with an object - she did so then.; August 28, 2009 4:36 PM
Alex said...: I felt the same way about Noah Purefoy's Sculpture Garden in Joshua Tree CA. It's just there, with minimal signage,and no expectations other than being. People got together to protect the land it's on and to put out little mimeo-like sheets to explain it, but the garden itself is left as Purefoy intended -- to pass away with time.

Thanks for talking, sir.; September 12, 2009 11:35 AM
An Aesthete's Lament said...: Dahlias, ah, dahlias. I think the best thing written about them was in Eleanor Pérenyi's "Green Thoughts." Have you read that? Alas, Mirabel Osler loathes them.; December 23, 2009 4:23 PM

Thomas Cave's Tattoo