melina Gac Levin reflects on her time with Parts & Labor
When I was seven years old, my dad left my mother, brother, and I home in Georgia to go do a theater residency at Texas Christian University. In my memory he was gone a month, maybe more. This was before the internet, before FaceTime, in a time when calls could still be long-distance. I remember talking to him on the phone briefly. It might have only been a week. He was gone long enough to stage a play with the theater students and for them to have inside jokes, later immortalized behind glass in a signed frame they gifted him at the end of his stay. I was jealous of the jokes, resentful of the time he was with someone other than me. My dad returned from Texas with cowboy hats, rubber band guns, and, because this was in the 90’s, some troll dolls for my brother and I. That was the closest I got to Texas until last month.
This past February, I loaded my daughters into a taxi on a snowy day in Brooklyn, herded them through airport security, adjusted their headphones and snack trays, stepped out into the warm air of San Antonio, and released them into their father’s waiting arms. We were catching up to join him at the Parts & Labor family artist residency. Unlike most residencies, Parts & Labor welcomes families to join. This is what made it possible for us to participate at a time in our lives when having small children makes these kinds of experiences challenging if not impossible.
During the residency: Mike produced a painting a day and put together a show. I got back into writing after a hiatus of a few months during which words felt distant and unimportant. We reconnected with dear friends, made new ones, read poetry, heard poetry, saw art, visited the river walk, ate homemade enchiladas and kimchi, and so much more. But the unexpected gift was how much our children got out of the experience.
Living in NYC has many benefits, but our children don’t have access to the freedom they experienced in the backyard in San Antonio. It was a freedom I recognized from my own childhood years in Georgia where I spent hours inventing, building, and exploring in the dirt. In a single afternoon, they made quick friends with our hosts’ children, and got to work building a house. Deaf to our suggestions that this might be too big a project for one afternoon, they hauled left-over bricks around the yard. Taking a note from Mike’s studio, where he was using limestone dust to lend texture to his paintings, they used hammers to crush stones. They scooped resulting dust into plastic cups leftover from the previous night’s poetry reading. Mixed with Elmer’s glue and dry grass, they managed to make a workable cement to bind their bricks. It turned out to be a small house. To their eyes, it was just right. What a gift to have your work facilitated.
