Smoke Rings, Deccaphonie, Fine and Dandy.
Strolling along Main Street in Sag Harbor one luscious summer day, I spied a rosary made of onyx beads in the window of Terry Bagley’s shop. I always make a point of stopping by when I’m in town because her taste is so exquisite. She gathers together aromatic candles that infuse the shop’s interiors with scents of lavender and rose, vessels made of watery-hued Portuguese glass, creamy hand-milled European soaps, and hand-woven French linens.
The rosary’s beads, which reminded me of the coffee-colored seeds of some exotic fruit, were wound around the frozen reach of a large, crude cross that had once been painted teal and then a flaking layer of white. Noticing my interest, Terry’s assistant Hérmes lifted the rosary from the weathered plank and slowly curled it into the palm of my hand as soon as I entered the shop. I was of half a mind to buy it even before she told me it was an 18th-century antiquity from France.
The country of origin mattered because I’ve charted the genealogy on my father’s side of our family to discover that I am eight generations removed from the French countryside of Normandy near St. Sauveur. My ancestors there had fled to Jersey Island off the British coast in the 17th century, long before this rosary felt the nimble caress of anyone’s fingers. It was Jean Gosset—the most remote name penned on my family tree—who had first turned away from the rosary to become a Huguenot, essentially making vagabonds of most of his descendents.
As the rosary spilled into my lap on the train back to Manhattan that day, I listened to what had become my greatest Francophile obsession, the plunky rhythms of jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt. The first time I heard his music, I concocted a fantasy that he could have been my grandfather. It was early fall and the windows were open. A buoyant breeze ruffled the leaves on the trees in the garden behind the bricked brownstone I called home, creating dancing patterns on the ceiling that mimicked his rhythmic strumming.
Why did I surmise that Django could have been a relative? It was nonsense, of course, but I reasoned that my father had similar dark good looks, which could have been handed down to him from this mysterious man, a smoldering cigarette protruding from his pursed lips on the cover of the CD case I was holding. Django and my father’s father were born only five years apart—John Thomas Gossett in 1905 and Django in 1910. By then, my relatives had embraced the Southern Baptist religion, which is about as far from the Catholic faith as one can turn. The Reinhardts had never embraced an organized religion, though their superstitions as fetish worshipers influenced them to adopt Catholic symbolism as a safeguard against evil spirits.
As I watched the beads imitate the train’s vibrations on the taut surface of my denim skirt, I wondered if Django had ever run the knobby length of a rosary through his sensitive fingers “just in case.” I imagined that he would have known how to handle each bead with effortless dexterity given his talent with his instruments. He had received his first banjo-guitar at the age of twelve. He learned how to play it by mimicking the fingerings of the musicians he watched, astounding everyone with his nimbleness and his sense of rhythm. Before he was thirteen, he began his thirty-year musical career, which brought him a precarious run of fame and fortune.
The fact that he was born into a band of wandering comedians, who had traveled from Germany through Belgium and into France after the war of 1870, was part of Reinhardt’s charisma. He remained a gypsy to the core throughout his boisterous career. Even when he was wealthy enough to afford a mansion, which he bought, he gathered his Romanies around him, setting up camp in the home’s large salon and on the lawn surrounding the house. Django turned away from his music only once. It was during the last day of his life when he died of a stroke at the age of 43. Just before he passed, he told his wife that something was wrong with his fingers but he wouldn’t allow her to call a doctor. He hated their needles, felt superstitious of medicine and science. These beliefs did not serve him well in the end, but what convictions formed in unruly childhoods ever do?
Like Django’s rowdy life of traipsing from place to place, my early years were spent on the move. I never trundled along in a horse-drawn caravan with pots clanking and beads swaying, but I was traveling by the time I was six months old—a standard issue Air Force brat. I have black-and-white photographs of my mother and father that were taken during a five-year stretch that found us living in places as diverse as Texas and Great Britain. My parents were twenty-something’s in the photos. Dad was trim in his skimpy nylon swimsuit, tanned skin gleaming as he lounged on a beach in Africa with the ocean stretching out behind him. Mom poses on a small divan in our tiny house in England—a glam shot à la 50’s pinup girl, her long legs gracefully crossed at the ankles and a mischievous look in her eyes. I have always loved these photographs: my parents when they were young and beautiful, not the tyrants I had made them out to be from puberty into young adulthood nor the aging, fragile beings they have now become.
As the train lumbered toward Manhattan that day, I thought about how the rosary and the photos are proof that the emotional import of a thing is not inherent in the thing itself, but in the association it evokes. When we entered the weak light of the tunnel that would shunt us into Penn Station, I studied Jesus’ limp form draped on the crucifix in that terribly graceful death pose. I can let it rest in the palm of my hand with no reaction other than the pure enjoyment of the craftsmanship that produced its delicate beauty. But as I study the photographs of my young mother and father, I feel emotions that no one else would feel when looking at these nostalgic figures from another time—my parents when I was a precocious toddler.
When the train loped to a stop, Django’s snappy rendition of “Minor Swing” was playing, a song he co-wrote with Stéphane Grappelly. I applauded that he never settled down, even as I think I know what it must have cost him. I didn’t realize until after I had become a fan of his music that he played with a handicap. He saw his infirmity as a challenge that he was obligated to overcome. One of the ways he did this was to redesign the harmonic system of his instruments so that the weakness of the fingers on his left hand, which had been maimed in a fire, would not be noticeable in his music.
Fire is such an important element in a gypsy’s life. Sometimes it burns for good, sometimes for ill. I closed my eyes as the doors of the train whooshed open, imagining Django’s clan preparing to dismantle their camp nearly a century before, their urge to burn some other ground heeded once again. There would have been sizzle when they doused the fire, the splatter of water reducing flame to char. There would have been the stamp of restless hooves on clotted dirt—the acrid air all the horses needed to know of moving on.
An astrologist once told me that I am a phoenix; that I burn down lives and arise from the ashes, born anew. I have come to see this as my own form of gypsy-like sabotage, which keeps me on the move far too much. Since that weekend in the Hamptons, which brought the rosary into my life, I have traveled far in many ways, still corrupted by wanderlust and a desire to burn down all that is not working, which often takes with it all that is. I take Django with me when I’m on the move. It’s as if his lively cadences create the perfect score for a life lived in constant motion, even after so many years and so many miles have gone by the wayside. The rosary travels with me, too—tucked away in a soft silk pouch in my purse, “just in case.”
I've started a new blog to explore creative writing, as I find I'm hungry for the deeper work that writing about design and architecture doesn't bring. I hope you'll stop in and collaborate with me as I paint pictures with words and try to plumb the depths of our collective imagination.
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