My Friend Lynn had the Balls

She told me come over and get them!
So I went.
Lovely house. Best garden in the gated community.
My friend has a touch with growing things.

So we sat on the polished wood floor just in the entranceway of her
home.
She pulled a large bag from the closet where she also keeps the
floral Kayak.

She explained to me as she was getting things out that her husband,
Jerry, collects discarded tennis balls he finds around the tennis
court after playing.
Jerry's balls were in varying states of playing effectiveness.
 

There is a test for good balls.
You hold them up and let them bounce.
The ones that bounce high are still good.
The ones that bounce low, she gave to me.
Jerry had about 100.
 I got 60 that day.
Cleaned him out!

And all the while we are bouncing balls together we are laughing and
enjoying ourselves like children. One of the best times precipitating
a worser time, which stayed unspoken.
(What happened when Jerry discovers his missing balls.)

What was spoken…..those balls went on an adventure.
I brought them home and my Hungarian husband (who was in a POW camp
when he was a teenager in Germany ) enjoyed slicing them in half,
giving me 120 halves.
 

Concave and convex, that is how they were used.

 I took them to school,
Citizen School in New Brunswick, NJ where myself and 5 black
American teens created a sculpture project to stick in all our heads.
The school called our 12 week apprenticeship together "What's Art?"

 Using 2 thick PVC pipes, donated to us by the Greek at the Stone
Museum, each 4 ft high, I began by drilling tennis ball sized holes
in each half, swiss cheese effect.
That was class preparation.

In class, we painted the balls…
half on the outside and half on the inside.
Home again to epoxy the balls into position.
The top half outeys and bottom half inneys, like belly buttons.

 Then it needed a crowning.

Our Polish plumber got involved.

He gave us a globe for the top. We epoxied the globe into place and went to
work using fingernail polish to write and paint on the globe so that
when we lit the pipe the colors would be illuminated.

Every class began with opening the web site as though it were a map of an area.

Together with the web site projected largely on the wall
we would navigate to last weeks session and what was done with it.
We grew things and treated what was evolving with imagination and
class to the best of our abilities and time.

What we did traveled the world first via the Internet.

Then we received an invitation to send the pipe to a mountain in Hororata, New Zealand.

A Dutch woman, Helen Langden, who owned a mountain.

Her father built a windmill in her formative years.

The pipe we made in those twelve week, low budget sessions at the
school made a leap to the mountain and now it is solar powered and
greets the sunrise and witnesses the sunset each day, anchored in
concrete to withstand high winds.

Near by is the grave of Helen's daughter who died the
year before and a small fish pond with golden fishes.
 

So how many pipes (dreams) did Lynn have a hand in anyway?

They kept coming...

Couple of years, spaces in between, a found object kicked it off out at
the curbside as she was driving in her neighborhood.

The pipe dream of many colors.

Stripes of yarn from top to bottom.

6 ft high, just a few inches wide, not very heavy.

Had to make a base for it to stand.

 

Stand it did, in every show until now it is retired in the home of my
friend Edith from Trinidad, a magic lady. Come to a good spot!

Who originally made the pipe? Would Lynn remember the house by the
curbside where she found it?

And then she made three more.

Collaged pipes, a series of three,
different heights. She didn't devise a way for them to stand so that
part I took care of and latter on in the shows added a few more feet
of white pipe at their bases to raise them up some.

Her last pipe she used accordion strips of cardboard to run from top
to bottom With her wonderful sense for design and color it was a
beautiful pipe mounted on a hubcap.