Fritz Swanson profiles his artist friend Jason Polan
My wife Sara held black olives out to our son, Oscar (age one). He took another olive tentatively. He had just gagged on an olive that came right off the pizza we had bought, and it had been too hot for him. “You feel better now?” Sara asked Oscar as he examined the olive. “Gah!” he said in the affirmative.
Jason Polan, whose illustrations have appeared in The New Yorker, on test-design bags for Jack Spade, in marketing material for The Criterion Collection, and most recently in the museum store of the Museum of Modern Art (in a book honestly titled The Every Piece of Art in the Museum of Modern Art Book), nodded a floppy-headed nod to encourage Oscar. He then got up and pulled another slice of pizza from his box. “I think it was a good idea, each of us getting our own pizza,” Jason said. “That way we each get more.”
Jason had come out to Manchester, the village where I live with Sara and Oscar, so that we could talk about profiling him in a New York magazine. We had even met the week before at an Ann Arbor burger joint in an abortive attempt to do a straightforward interview. Now he was out in my little country village and we were going to try again. But before we did that, he wanted to walk down to see our water tower and take a picture of it. He’s working on a project that might be called All The Water Towers in America.
We got Oscar into a red spring jacket and loaded him into a jogger stroller with big knobby mountain bike tires. First we pushed Oscar north to the old town cemetery. The big wheels of the jogger allowed us to pilot the stroller over the March slush past raspberry canes and rose briars to the top of the hill where only one fragment of a grave marker remained. The River Raisin curled around the hill where the cemetery once stood and we listened as the ice broke. We admired the view.
“What should the profile be about?” “It should say, ‘Jason is from Michigan.’”
We walked back down the hill, past Dr. Eccles office in the old green Methodist church, and up along Main Street. Beyond the gas station, the bakery, the antique store and the pizza place we stood on the bridge over the river and Jason took a picture of the water tower. Oscar kicked his legs in the breeze, and Jason took a picture of that too. “Where’s your grocery store?” Jason asked.“Do you need something?” “I just want to see it.” So, we walked back west on Main Street, past our house, toward the setting sun.
Oscar kicked his legs and huffed, rubbing the sun out of his eyes with his fist. We tried to arrange a blanket over the stroller, but Oscar refused to be shrouded. “I can walk backwards,” Jason offered. And he did, casting a shadow over Oscar’s eyes. Oscar beamed up at him and we marched slowly to the Spartan Store. We walked up and down the rows of the store. Jason pointed out a pile of Entenmann’s Pastries. “These are good,” he said.
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