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a strip from another map in chartreuse this time with the first few letters of what i could quickly see was the name of the small town in suburban new jersey my family moved to when i was twelve critics have suggested that donef carefully selects the extracts that go into his compositions but the sources themselves the books and atlases from which these pages and strips are cut too it s hard to imagine that donef was looking for a map of northern new jersey to use in his work whether he had or not is beside the point his work operates on the principle of encounter not prescription even if it is composed of materials we ordinarily consider works of authority and fixed truths in donef s hand the encyclopedia and atlas become a space of wonder once again a field for imaginative play and visual storytelling that can lead us to that something new we hadn t been looking for featured image detail from antonis donef untitled 2025 from the exhibtion time s witness kalfayan galleries 10 june 6 september 2025 share this email a link to a friend opens in new window email share on facebook opens in new window facebook share on x opens in new window x like loading published on july 11 2025 july 25 2025 author sxchristopher brothers fathers friends and lovers making sons uncle gabe passed away my brother tells me over the phone gabe he says short for gabriel though i m sure when we were kids we all called him gay i m shocked by the news because i m certain he is already dead in my family the men of his generation their lives cut short by the sludge of tar and plaque their bodies accumulated through a lifetime of bad but then common habits barely made it into this century much less two decades in but then my uncle had always stood out unlike his brothers he didn t smoke and rarely drank which may explain why he lived into his 90s and had married a woman who wasn t italian or even catholic florence was a presbyterian of english stock with auburn hair and a reedy warbling voice all sophistication who played the organ and had a job in the city but what most stood out was the fact that uncle gay had no children it was perhaps his inability to father children for in my young mind fatherhood was a matter of fitness not choice that made me think of him as a meek and reserved man but no he was indeed a gentler man than his brothers i never heard him raise his voice to anyone and certainly not to his wife whom he treated with far greater respect than my uncles did theirs almost as if they were friends growing up i was certain my uncle couldn t father children i pieced together an explanation of why not from scraps of stories i believed i had heard something about radiation treatments he had undergone as a young man for an unspecified cancer i didn t think it odd that someone would have thought it necessary or appropriate to explain to a 12 year old boy why his uncle couldn t have children when they never bothered to explain to us how children came into existence in the first place but i had come upon the facts of life on my own around the same time i read john hershey s hiroshima which figured on a summer reading list my school had sent me the sex education book i stumbled upon in the town library was a curiosity of sorts nothing more i already knew about erections from my own and was intrigued by the thought of the millions of potential babies housed in my sperm but the rest held no interest for me hiroshima was another matter although my imagination had been fed with the cinematic tropes of green glowing creatures and fizzing rays of energy scary in the way a campfire horror tale would be hershey s depiction of radiation sickness gave me nightmares for weeks the books may thus have sown in my subconscious the seeds of an explanation for gabriel s childlessness if exposure to radiation could make gums bleed and skin blister and hair fall out even a measured dose i imagined would be enough to kill off the sperm his body would try to make in my 8 th grader s eyes he was a damaged man though his scar unlike the tremors and limps and dangling limbs of other more visibly wounded relatives was unseeable and like radiation and measured only in the absence of something else as a boy i felt sad for him i remembered him sitting at the immense oak table in the dining room of my grandparents country house along with his brothers and sisters and their wives and husbands as the adults sat through the long hours of coffee and cake and grappa they would be called to deal with banged heads and pleas for seconds on dessert like ministers at a council of state tugged aside by a secretary with urgent news all save uncle gay and aunt flo they were never pestered there were twelve of us cousins and none of us ever ran up to them for anything i was sad for him in a way i wasn t for myself and never would be for even in 8 th grade i was sure i would never get married and that was neither good nor bad but just the way things were i didn t know if other boys my age thought of themselves as future fathers but i knew that they liked girls in a way i didn t in the way you had to like a girl if you wanted to be a father i still don t know why my uncle had no children there is no one left but his youngest sister to ask and i will not burden her with my curiosity i find i can no longer disentangle fact from remembered experience all i have of my childhood are bits of scenes sometimes nothing more than a quality of afternoon light recalled on a quiet sunny street or the scent of boiled turnip to salvage these scraps of recollections i anchor them in a tale unwittingly supplying the missing elements so that they can bond into an indissoluble narrative daniel doesn t remember anything about radiation therapy but that proves nothing we are both evangelists writing a history years after the events took place his accounts are always kinder and more forgiving of their subject s failings than mine probably because daniel himself is a kinder more insightful person than i am he remembers for example that florence and gabriel befriended my father in a way that went beyond the obligations of kinship and this surprises me too because i rarely think of my father as having any friends like matthew and mark we do not always tell the same stories and even when we do the details do not always match like the b in gabe and the sarsaparilla soda our uncle offered us instead of coke when we visited him once daniel tells me though it makes sense it s the kind of choice a man who was not a father might make but we both remember the cars and the barbecues like my father my uncle was a negative cutter his wife a better paid color timer all three jobs arranged by my grandfather whose influence in the movie business no story of mine has yet been able to accommodate with two incomes and no children my uncle and aunt had more money than anyone else in the family enough to buy a new cadillac every two years and a sprawling split level in a leafy suburb in northeastern new jersey a town of long sloping front lawns and no sidewalks they were the first to move out of the city and thus the first to have a real back yard where as far back as i can remember they gathered us all together the whole lot of siblings and spouses and the dozen cousins for a barbecue it was held on some inconspicuous sunday in midsummer never on the 4 th of july or labor day because it was a holiday in its own right and as eagerly anticipated it seemed to me that the house was built with this single day in mind at the back of the ground floor next to the music room was a utility room that led through sliding glass doors to their spacious backyard the room housed their washer and dryer the latter one in a long series of gadgets and appliances they were always the first to acquire but it was also outfitted with a refrigerator a sink and counter space it was a makeshift kitchen that served as supply point and wash up station between the yard and the serious kitchen upstairs for one day in the year their yard filled with the rare squawks and laughter of children playing as if a band of migratory creatures had alighted on their immaculate turf for a brief and noisy visit and here in their yard they would finally be pestered and my uncle pleaded with to take us for a ride in his cadillac daniel tells me that as a boy he wished at times my aunt and uncle would adopt him he says he sometimes prayed that he would be left behind after one of our visits and thus ensconced him in the privileged world of an only child i tell him i too fantasized about being raised by them not for the privilege of being their only child but for the chance to be part of their quiet elegant world where music was played and no one fought and in the place of argument a discourse of affection and civility reigned i would learn to play the organ and go to a better school a place where no one would know about jamie marsh and the names he called me but my fantasies never lingered unlike daniel i was wary about being the focus of attention and the thought of being an only child and indeed to such eager long deprived new parents unnerved me at first they d ask me after school how my day went but soon they d move on to why i was hanging out with anne who wasn t the kind of girl a boy would want to take to the school dance and besides why wasn t i going to the dance anyway and then later on they d ask me about jamie for i was sure they d find out about the bullying and their questions would raise this accident of fate into a problem a thing to be investigated and dealt with and the last thing i wanted was to be scrutinized for though i told myself i was queer only in jamie s twisted mind i knew i was different i couldn t help feeling that there was something in me that jamie saw that i couldn t and that my uncle and aunt might see as well it was better to recede unobserved into the chaos of my own family my parents attention distracted by their own constant skirmishes and the more pressing needs of my younger and unrulier brothers though i silently resented my father for not protecting me from what i did my best to conceal from him i was relieved he didn t pry a more attentive father in more tolerant times would have noticed how often i was sick on gym days or how i sometimes came back from school hungry because i had missed lunch at the cafeteria he would have helped me feel right about myself and deal with my nemesis a father like daniel he tells me i m selling our father short he says yes he wouldn t have understood but that wouldn t have changed his love for me or his desire to keep me safe he s right of course when i came out to my father years later he told me he loved me and just wanted me to be happy and then added but it makes me sad to think you won t have children don t you want to share this email a link to a friend opens in new window email share on facebook opens in new window facebook share on x opens in new window x like loading published on june 23 2023 july 11 2025 author sxchristopher language the man behind the table i remember my first dutch lesson as if it were yesterday i felt like a teenager daring a flirt at a bar all awkward and inadequate but eager to make a good impression as i tried out sounds that had equivalent to the ones i ordinarily used i even wondered for a moment or two whether it was a mistake to start on this project at all he s out of my league why am i bothering but my sense of inadequacy was outweighed in the end by the pleasure i had of actually saying something in the language even if it was very simple i described a picture of a man sitting behind a table with a book in his hand een man zit achter de tafel er heeft een boek in zijn hand i remember all my first language lessons vividly even now many years later i can recall the dialogue from my first french lesson in high school which began with a child asking his mother maman dînons nous en ville ce soir the phrase made a huge impression on me at the time i thought the french must be terribly sophisticated if a 12 year old could ask if they were going to have dinner in town my family and i rarely dined out which was a word we didn t use anyway and only on special occasions like a grand aunt s birthday or my jockey cousin winning at the racetrack and then i didn t need to ask where we were going because we always went to the same restaurant this initial exposure to the foreign language this first dialogue seemingly so innocent so lightweight with the most basic of words and expressions always seems to leave a lasting impression on students i only know because i used to teach english and would ask my students if they remembered many did the beginners textbook we used started with a dialogue of a rock climber who had lost his footing and slipped to a narrow footing there was a picture of him perched on this sliver of a landing his fingers wedged into the rockface as he held on to life and limb the first word in english my students heard was help i still wonder what image of america this communicated to my students curiously enough the textbook we were using for dutch is called kunt u mij helpen can you help me my first dutch lesson began differently but even more dramatically or rather more theatrically my teacher held up a pen and announced to me dit is een pen she said it as if she were revealing a sacred object the relic of a saint perhaps or an obscure surgical instrument used in esoteric rituals dit is de tafel she said pointing to where we were sitting she made it sound as if it were an altar making me forget for a moment that we were in her son s bedroom and the item of furniture wasn t a table but her son s desk in her priestess voice it was a table ik wijs de tafel aan dit is de tafel this was the table no doubt about it the table where it is all going to happen she laid the pen on the desk ik leg de pen aan de tafel she fell silent for a moment and added de pen ligt op de tafel she made it sound as if the pen that lay on the table had gotten there by an act of teleportation she reached for a small bag not really a purse more like a zip up vinyl pencil case it may have been her son s she opened it and put the pen inside ik doe de pen in de tas and then out ik pak de pen uit de tas like a magician at a children s party she repeated the process of situating and de situating things with other objects each time adding a few more motions this was plot development then it got personal she announced her movements one by one as if reading directions from a script i am sitting in the chair i am standing up i m walking toward the door i m opening the door ik zit op de stoel ik sta op ik loop naar de deur ik doe de deur open she walked out of her son s room toward the kitchen i tried to be polite and not look beyond the door into more of her family s private space but i was thinking maybe i should look because if she disappeared into the kitchen i would certainly want to hear wh...