Sunday, 9 March
 |
| I think I can . . . |
Good Morning Jacob…
Life is often experienced with powerful emotions pulling you
in one direction, then another, when you are a young artist. You rarely pause long enough to appreciate
knowing a middle ground. You love
intensely. You hate bitterly. You fall for beauty. You face, stupefied, the bleak. And since you are an artist you attempt to
depict it all, in your own fashion. There’s
the glimmer of sun peering beneath the window shade drawn tightly down. The room is smudged in unsettled blue. The door is the color of a promise – soon it
will open and she will be there. In
pictures of the heart, promises need not be kept. I’m glad you are an artist but life is a
precarious moth swooning round the candle flame.
I’m drawing on my own ambivalence to create a picture headed
nowhere. That’s the theme: ambivalence – intensely contrasting. How does mine hold up to expression? What degree of passion is revealed? What imagery from life will be depicted and
in what fashion? What sort of caring results from my own ambivalence
about most everything?
It was a cold rain for Friday’s funeral. Lewis was the man next door. He had a small, ink black dog with big bug
eyes and incredibly long thin legs. She
looked like a whimsical character out of an old Betty Boop cartoon. She
found my very presence anywhere in her vicinity annoying and she would always
come yapping after me. Lewis would yell,
“Miss Dale!” to call her off. Lewis kept
his red Ford Ranger pickup clean and usually parked it facing the street under
his carport. He had worked at least the
last ten years at Sam’s Club when he
died. There was a stunning splash of
flowers atop his casket when I went to see him at Whitley’s Funeral Home. The suit he wore was perfectly tailored and
he had the appearance of a highly regarded member of the business
community. His nails were expertly
manicured and placed in lasting repose.
He looked dignified but gracious.
His wife, Kay, had slipped a small toy car, precisely centered, in the
breast pocket of his suit jacket. It had
the number ‘3’ on the car’s doors… the number of Kannapolis, North
Carolina’s home town hero – Dale Earnhardt.
Lewis was a lifelong NASCAR fan and he was always true to Dale and his
son, Junior – number ‘88’.
The toy car was the one thing his wife chose for him to take with him to
his grave.
The skies cleared the following day, Saturday, and
temperatures rose into the sixties. Birds
everywhere made their appearance. Maybe
they sense the onset of spring. The
flocks of robin have been breaking off into couples and disappearing into the
surrounding trees and brush. The male
cardinals are all dressed up in stunning new vermilion feathers to dazzle the
local females. Soon the ladies will be
working dawn to dusk gathering material to build a nest, laying eggs, protecting
their eggs, hatching them and then flying about the landscape gathering food
for incessantly demanding youngsters, mouth wide agape and squawking. Such is the price paid for giving in to the
male’s display of love.
I think I see bits of green breaking the ground into
sunlight here and there. A Carolina Wren
searches eagerly for its first meal of insects, the precocious ones that will hatch
and bravely step forward. High up in the
still bare branches of trees are large clumps of nesting material where soon
the squirrels will give rise to another generation of families. It will be sunny and clear once again today
and I am set, ticket holder for a new season of theater brought to life by the
lengthening days and renewed warmth of an ever climbing sun.
Love,
Dad
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