5:00pm - 9:00pm
This First Thursday includes complimentary Barbecue!
Please join me at the gallery/studio to talk, eat, drink, and view two new paintings.
July 3rd is also the birthday of my late mother. I invite you to join me to quietly celebrate that with me as well in whatever way we see fit...
On March 19th, 1996 she committed suicide one month after a heartbreaking episode with her current husband. What can I tell you that would be worth reading? The experience gives me first-hand experience with the depths of human existence. I understand rage, loss, confusion, depression, sadness, abandonment. All of these are so close to happiness, passion, forgiveness, love, and bliss that the understanding of one extreme informs the other.
The most incongruous part of her untimely death and seemingly sudden spiral into depression is that I knew her as such a vivacious spirit and feisty maverick. She was the black sheep of her family - the youngest of three daughters. When she came from Quebec at 19 years old she spoke very little English and faked her way through the interview process when she wanted to get a job as a stewardess. She would tell me that she worked so that she could take time off and all my life I knew her this way. As a stewardess she learned English, traveled the world, and eventually met my father in Tahiti.
As a child she played in the woods a lot - caught bullfrogs, kept them as pets and dressed them up in doll clothes for tea parties. She climbed trees, slept outside, and didn't notice boys until she was in her twenties. Her family thought her strange, and she would eventually pass on the weird genes to me. My sister got her good looks and similar vibrant personality - I just got the weirdness and the inclination to eat a lot of salt. She would eat raw rhubarb with salt and passed on this habit to me. She had a taste for oysters, fish, scallops, and wine. Well, maybe not a very distinguishing palate for wine as her penchant for Franzia White Zinfandel could attest. While I hate the White Zin now I actually enjoyed her permissive nature as a child and drank it with her.
Seriously, she was strangely permissive - she would leave the house so that I could have raging parties, and actually booked a hotel room and packed a cooler for my prom date and I in high-school. Anyways, about the weirdness: she just enjoyed things that were so foreign to most of her suburban contemporaries. Aside from having a nice little house and mini-van we were anything but similar to the other suburban larvae living in Metro-Detroit wasteland.
She had this inclination towards dead things, old things, and odd esoterica. A nice list of some of her oddities ought to be interesting:
- She joined a rock and fossil hunting club and took her two children to quarries to mine for crystals
- She was a garage sale antique fiend and would bring home taxidermy specimens
- She collected artifacts, furs, teeth, bones, and elephant hair bracelets
- She collected giraffes and snow babies later in life which is so heinous and was seriously scarring to me
- She couldn't properly pronounce H's or contractions like can't or won't
- She couldn't say "worm" without it sounding like "warm"
- She allowed me to have a pet raccoon when I was six, and a checking account at 14 years old
- She virtually denounced the Catholic church but thought I should endure six years of a private school run by nuns
- She had a huge and very heavy fur comforter-like-thing that was made from the thick dark fur of Chinese dogs.
- She brought a six foot African giraffe carving onto the plane as carry-on
- She dealt out no punishment when the neighbor caught me making and detonating bombs in the backyard - when I was in middle school!
- She let me play with electricity as a child
- She encouraged my desire to create a museum in my bedroom when I was six and helped me build my collection by buying me a horse's skull from a garage sale
- She liked tent camping and long road trips with two young children
- Before my father she dated mountain men
- She ate raw egg yolks with salt and put the egg-whites on her face as a mask
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3 comments:
Enchanting story Patrick! I'll see you the first Thursday in August, assuming you will be in the cities.
Reading those stories about your Mom was wonderful. It brought me back to a simpler time in my life. Your Mother was a wonderful woman, and I am proud to have known her.
Thank you for sharing, Patrick.
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