Piece-dye by Cal Folger Day

“ You’re trying to do this project…
you’ll have to do a whole lot
of embellishing or something…
it’s your own creation ”

I met Irene (she pronounced it I-REE-nee) at a brunch – she was my husband’s mother’s second husband’s aunt, or my step great aunt-in-law. She was in her 80s and it turned out that when she’d moved to NYC from Sligo in 1958 and started temp work, she’d see a guy outside the office in a viking hat on 6th Avenue – “You’d see one of everything” she said. And I said “Oh wow that was Moondog” and she asked who he was and I played some of his music from my laptop and that’s how we became friendly.

I asked to interview her, and a few visits later we sat down in her kitchen and I recorded a conversation about her career as a textile designer with Burlington Industries. She had retired in 1991 as the vice president of the cotton blends division and returned to live in Ireland. Eventually I transcribed it and set most of that transcription to music.

Irene and I had very different temperaments, and opposite trajectories (she left Ireland for NYC, I left NYC for Ireland), but we were somehow on a mutual quest to see ourselves more clearly through our friendship. Some parts of her story fit into what I imagine as “the past” – the midcentury corporate ladder. But she also had a very brave embrace of abstraction and chaos that still comforts me. I like how surprised she was by how her own life had turned out.

calfolgerday.net