An Artist You Should Know

My dad is my favorite artist. Let’s face it: in many ways, he’s my favorite person. Of course, he’s up there with my mom and husband and children as being the best people in the world. As a parent, though, he has the distinction of knowing me longer than the rest of the best people, except my mom, of course.

I say he’s an artist you should know, but he’s much more than that to me. He’s my life mentor, and I don’t happen to be an artist. In other words, he’s not just a summation of the various media he works with. For a start, he’s the one who taught me to be a jack-of-all trades. I’ve discussed this subject before; while I admire the type of people who can focus on one skill and master it, I can’t imagine limiting myself that way. And I learned this from my dad.

On the job front, he worked his way from night janitor at Tektronixs to electrical engineer. On the home front, he gardened, canned, explored different cuisines when cooking, built many things and repaired others. On the artistic front, he carved things from wood, painted in oil and watercolor, did cartooning and pen-and-ink illustrations, and wrote poetry — often in calligraphy. He also played the guitar and harmonica. On the exercise front, he had a pullup bar in the garage, jump-ropes, various weights, and that’s not to mention that we did a lot of hiking and biking and fishing and camping as a family. On the education front, he took the occasional class for his job and read everything. And I do mean everything. He read fiction and nonfiction of all varieties and then take handbooks out into the wilderness to identify vegetation such as wildflowers, trees, berries, etc. He still does all the above, by the way.

As a child, I thought my dad knew everything and could do anything. In a sense, I was correct, despite that no humans can know and do everything. He has always had a zeal for doing and learning. He’s a Rennaissance man born into the postmodern world of James Joyce’s Ulysses. And, yes, he did read that, but mostly because he thought it was edgy when he was a teenager.

He introduced me to so many poets and writers and artists and musicians. Because of him, I can still detect when I’m listening to Mozart vs Handel or Vivaldi. I fell in love with Willa Cather and Coleridge and Christina Rossetti in high school…because of him. I browsed through art books with beautiful paintings because they were all over the house. I read the works of St. Augustine of Hippo and St. Thomas Aquinas, as those passed for bathroom reading in our house growing up.

If this sounds like a fan-girl post, wherein I wax poetic about my father and don’t have any other point, yes. Yes, it is. It was just Father’s Day, after all, and I want the world to know how blessed I was as a child. This is what happens when you aren’t perfect, and yet you live with the desire to do what is right and experience the joy of God’s world: you bless those around you. There is so much wrong with the world. There is so much that could make me very angry every day. But I was blessed with a father who loves God, and that’s something to be grateful for, despite that so many of my generation were harmed by their parents’ divorces and selfishness. It’s something to be grateful for owing to the selfishness of my generation’s parents. There will always be envious people in the world who can’t stand other’s good fortune when they haven’t had it themselves, but there is nothing I can do about that.

There is also nothing I can do about the fact that clown world just added about a thousand cars to their crazy train and is driving that train right over a cliff. I read in a news article just the other day a quote from the executive director of the Global Fund, in which he states that his little group is working on putting together billions to “strengthen” medical care systems to cope with the effects of the starvation that’s coming to the world. Think about that for a minute. The Global Fund doesn’t really care that we are headed into a purposefully created food shortage, only on lining the pockets of the medical community as the world’s weak and impoverished lie dying in their beds, probably with tubes jammed down their throats, as that seems to be the preferred method since Covid. Add to that all the rainbow flags waving as though life is some kind of eternal party, where we’ll dance right into our graves. So, we have a world of clowns who are members of the Global Fund, but really they are more akin to Killer Clowns From Outer Space, while the rest of us are ordinary clowns who will go for their candy cotton floss.

Or some of us will. Shudder. If that turned dark, it was only because a good writer always provides a contrast: those people who want others to starve and those who can’t or shouldn’t be fathers contrasted with good fathers who grow their own food to care for their families and create beauty at the same time.

https://3cranesart.com/gallery/stream-in-the-desert/