336 Days until the Big Five-0

I have spent my life wishing I was an artist like my father. He was a painter. He knew how to make beautiful pictures. He could also draw faces that looked exactly like the people he was drawing. He did not leave much behind in the way of work since his desire to be a painter did not meet up with the circumstances necessary to see his dream come true. I know very little of his life. He died before I got to dig into his stories the way I dug into my mother’s life stories. She and I had the benefit of time, but more importantly the benefit of her desire to tell, to let someone know as much as she was able to bear to speak of hard times, rejection, disappointments and abuse. She occasionally will share a happy memory or two as well. She may not be introspective and does not have the need to analyze or explore all of the reasons for how and why things happened the way they did over 9 decades, but damn the woman has a great memory.

What did my father remember when he crossed the Atlantic and brought his tortured soul to America. My mother did not have to carry her memories across an ocean. I wonder if memories are heavy. Could my father have told me how his father treated him? Could he have told me what it was like to see his mother miscarry numerous babies before finally giving birth to his sister who was 10 years younger than him? What is it like to be 10 and having to share your mother with a new born? Did my grandmother mourn the loss of the children she miscarried? How many were there? I know there were some because my aunt told me about them, but that was before she was born so she had to be relying on stories her mother told her. My Aunt was 18 when she was separated from her mother. My father was 28. Obviously they did not share much of their childhood together. My aunt’s memories of my father are locked away in a vault deep behind a thousand other stories so terrible and heavy it would be impossible to move them out of the way. Most of my father’s family stories and all of his relatives except his younger sister went up in smoke in World War II.

I wish my father could have taught me how to paint. I never did well in any art class in school so I assumed I had no talent in this area, but I wish I did. I think it would be easier to paint on a blank canvas, mixing colors and making images of the things I see in my imagination. Would a blank canvas be less intimidating than a blank page? See, I have always thought I picked up the pen because I could not handle the brush. Perhaps that is why I never got very far with my writing. I treated my writing like a step child, a second choice, a runner up in a beauty contest, not good enough. Ahhh, the theme of my life automatically returns to me like the carriage on my old electric typewriter, “not good enough.” Perhaps my father left me more than I realized…. To be continued somewhere in time. It is the novel hiding in my mind….