I’ve started a new routine recently, where I get Ross and TK out of bed earlier than they’d normally get up so we can eat breakfast as a family. Ross, in particular, isn’t fond of mornings.
Yesterday morning he had his eyes closed as he took a mouthful of cereal, chewing slowly.
Hey! No eating while you’re asleep! It’s not good for your digestion!
Opening his eyes and looking at me, confused.
What?
The courier handed me a parcel, so TK figured, that since I was getting parcels, it must be my birthday and started singing Happy Birthday at the top of his lungs (I could hear the courier driver laughing as he ran back to his van).
When TK asked where my cake was, I tried to explain that it isn’t my birthday so there wasn’t a cake, that my birthday is in 11 more sleeps. He told off for being greedy and for wanting two birthdays.
You can’t have two birthdays, I only get one, it isn’t very fair if you get more than everyone else. Stop being so greedy!”
I saw a story on ‘BBC World’ about an art curator from the World Trade Centre, he was talking about losing his Jamaican friend in the tragedy, I didn’t hear his friends name was, only that he was an artist.
They showed his work, these amazing sculptures which were oddly prophetic. Tall black men, apparently modelled after his own body, wide flat noses and burnished bronze skin. Men, dressed as pilots, some wore leather aviator helmets others had planes ploughing into them, other sculpture’s were just limbs.
Out of everything that I’ve seen, out of all the horrible images, the people free falling, the fire balls, the twisted metal, the plane being swallowed by the building, it has been these sculptures that haunt me most, these towering sculptures that are now somewhere, mangled in the wreckage of the World Trade Centre.
The one that haunts me the most is a man, he is dressed like an airforce pilot, overalls and helmet, with these planes, these little planes … some just buzzing at his skin with propellers, others burying themselves into his body…
With the little information that I had, I did some research. The artists name is Michael Richards, he was born in New York but grew up in Jamaica, his work won him a scholarship that provided him with a studio space with a view, a studio on the 92nd floor of WTC 1.
Michael Richards (1963-2001) may you be at peace.