Ava Gulassa

Dear Ava,

This is a letter from one of the many many people who had the privilege of working, traveling and playing with your father David. He was my best and closest friend.

My life and his were so intertwined for so many years that I will spend my whole life knowing what it feels like to have David at my side, feeling encouraged, admired and embraced by him, and of course inspired, challenged and educated by him. We were boys together, and after many journeys, became men together.

By the time I first met him, he was already determined to seek out what was magical and inspired in the world. In finding objects of inspiration or in making things, he enriched his life and those of all of us around him. In that way, he matured but never really changed.

There are so many stories, so many images. Too many to include in this short note. As Lise and I and her friend Dan went about some of his childhood places in Oakland on the night of the day he died in lake Union placing candles in his memoiy, we left one burning in a small inner-city park in what was once the temporary home of a circus troup, camped near our school, With elephants tied to the trees, David, and us other kids were taught soccer by the circus acrobats who spoke little or no English shouting ‘goalie-man’, 'goalie man’. That little piece of ground in the edge of industrial East-Oakland was transformed into a colorful world of talents and skills, full of promise and possibilities. That was the world we lived in.

Somehow our lives were also effortlessly full of history. The past was all there for us to touch, and handle, and try on for size, like the costumes we wore for secret midnight walks in the gardens of a local monastery. Or much later, when we would climb into the attic of an abandoned home of 19th century immigrants to Northern California and amongst the old bottles and tins we would read the letters and cards written a hundred years before. For David, the things of the past were there to be studied (collected) and understood, and then used and incorporated into something new. Again in Oakland, when we where probably already 15, we stole into an old Victorian house in East Oakland after dark and ‘rescued’ a sash window made of curved glass. The ingenuity of that curved glass, so intrigued him that he was later - with a surprising level of tolerance from his Cyril and Harriet in allowing us to cut a hole in the roof of their family home - to build a truly inspired dormer around it. Eventually completed, it was truly miraculously never broken.

The Dark
The night was always a place for risk-taking and a search for past and promised adventures. From the time of watching late-night Black and White B-movies as boys in the attic of their Harwood Avenue home to walking through the ruins a Welsh castle in Pembrokeshire talking of faeries and watching shooting stars. One night when he was about 18, while drawing Spanish tiled rooftops from atop the moorish ‘Giralda’ in Seville, David claimed to have overlooked the time and the night watchman and to have been mistakenly locked in the Cathedral overnight. He returned to the pension he shared with Lise and myself telling stories of how he climbed down the flying buttress to the Cathedral and spent the night climbing down to the dusty crypts and chambers deep below with dusty books and manuscripts to be read by the moonlight. Moonlit or star-filled nights were favorite - like our birthday climb up the Golden Gate bridge to share a glass of champagne from the North Tower. These night-time exploits were a kind of head-on confrontation with our fears and insecurities, and a kind thrill-seeking, but I also think these midnight runs were a form of communion. A communion that was somehow completed that night in the dark arms of Lake Union.

Work and Play
David’s life philosophy which was never set in stone was somehow rooted in the physical practice of his work and the exuberance of his play. Amazingly, he articulated that vision in the many things he made and worked on. And you only have to speak to anyone who knew him to understand his power to play.

And Ava, despite the enormous pedestal we have all constructed for David - with a certain amount of help from the man himself - he was not a hero or a saint, and he had a certain belligerent tendency to infuriate and frustrate. For me, he will always be very much flesh (often unwashed) and blood. He was an imperfect man. To love him was to forgive his imperfections. Or maybe that is not right - his imperfections were as much part of him as the cracks and holes in the dug-out canoe from which his casket was made. To love him was to appreciate the authenticity of his imperfections. His death was an accident, but the paddle across the lake an adventure.

Your father was my brother, and that is for life. So though you have other wonderful Gulassas, it would be an honor to remain your uncle too, though from a greater distance. I promise to be a source of many stories of the history of your father.Your loving Uncle,

Andy Carl 26, Leigh Road
London N5 1AH
United Kingdom