PENLAND SCHOOL OF CRAFTS: CAN EVERYTHING BE MENDED?
In the morning I confessed to my old man’s group meeting in McDonalds that after talking about it for a month and trying three times to find someone to accompany me on my trip to Rome, for which I had bought a non refundable ticket, that I wasn’t going. Rob Amberg, whom I was going to accompany to Sicily, the childhood home of his immigrant parents, suddenly couldn’t go because his wife, Leslie, needed to have an operation. So I decided to fly on for a month in Greece, to stay in the Airbnb in Naoussa where I have stayed twice before, with motherly Efi to care for me, until I found she had shifted for the winter to Athens. I then offered my daughter a free ticket with Delta miles, who took me up on the offer, and was searching for an airbnb in Perugio, until over the weekend she was offered a new job and couldn’t go. So finally I gave up. At the old man’s coffee I blamed Sheldon, the one other single person in our old man’s group, who likes to travel, for not accompanying me and making me cancel the trip. He accepted no blame. He doesn’t like flying and doesn’t like walking and wasn’t tempted.
But I did discover that a nonrefundable ticket was not a dead loss. It turns out that I could cancel the $575 ticket for a $200 fee with $375 available as Delta credit for a year, which I can use to go to Mexico in January or Germany in April.
The high point of today was going to Penland School of Craft in the mountains near Spruce Pine. Susie and I went to listen to hear Celia Pym talk about Perfection: A Question of Repair. First we saw a marvelous British film, Can Everything Be Mended? which recounted a movement in England to honor and even enjoy mending things rather than discarding them and buying something new. It wasn’t about saving money, it was about preserving the soul of objects.
Following the hour long film Celia Pym talked about the concept of mending objects accompanied by a slide show of the mended objects that we were later able to see in the Penland gallery. I am including photographs of some of these objects here.
Then, the day not over, we drove back to Marshall and listened to Henry and his band perform at Zadie’s across the river.
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BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 