Tote bag
With this bald eagle tote bag you take John with you, a bald eagle with a white head, a yellow hooked beak and a leather jacket, from my Animal Kinhood series. The black handles finish off a design made for carrying — and, along the way, keeping — what's yours. A design by Yago Partal.
Foto: Joshua J. Cotten / UnsplashHaliaeetus leucocephalus
I don't shout, I tune. I give half the city a voice and keep my own on the workbench, in a guitar I've spent years not finishing. Someday I'll play it for Carol.
Coasts, estuaries, large lakes, rivers and reservoirs across North America, from Alaska and Canada down to northern Mexico, always near open water rich in fish and with tall trees to nest in
John kept the tin box that belonged to his mother, Ruth, the one she used to fill with buttons, old strings and mending scraps kept "just in case." He opens it every day in the workshop for the small things: a screw that turns up right when it's needed, a button that gives something a second life. He doesn't talk about her; he uses her buttons and carries on. Keeping the small things is his quiet way of not letting anything be lost for good.
He does the same with everything that comes his way: when someone gives a thing up for lost, John looks it over slowly, sees the fix in it and leaves it good as new. He doesn't throw out what still works; he fixes it, keeps it, finds it an owner. A bag like this goes with that way of being: it holds the day's things, what you pick up along the way and what you don't want to let go of. The black handles take the weight, and the full-color portrait, against the almost-black background, travels with you. If you take to this bald eagle, there's more of him in his biography, and more pieces in the rest of the collection.
