A Big Anniversary

The entire month of May was very difficult for me for years, as my father spent the month in the hospital, then died on May 29.  Tomorrow will mark 30 years since that terrible month.  It's still sort of unbelievable to me, because I can summon and feel his presence and voice.  I miss him, as I was too young to be without him or to have achieved any kind of adult relationship with him, and he was too young to die.  He was 51; I am 53.  I have questions, lots of them, and the wish we had had time to overcome the emotional barricade we had up to hide our very real love and like for each other.

I've been working on my new Web site for weeks, and knew I wanted a meaningful launch date.  It was only in the last week that I realized the site is close to ready, and of course it's no accident that this anniversary was right in front of me.  So my new Web site will launch tomorrow.

My father was complicated.  He was charismatic, quick and smart, funny as hell, a late-blooming sailor, and scrappy.  He was also angry, frustrated, sensitive, and a bit rudderless.  He didn't finish college and had no career as such, but applied his inborn entrepreneurial spirit to what seemed right at the time, from the bar in Harlem to a mysterious company that made him rich, to semi-retirement in his early 40s, to some investments that drained his resources, to buying a small wire company that had nowhere to go but up, which he ran fairly happily (or so it seemed, though I'm sure he would've liked it to be more lucrative) until he died.  I've been told he felt he lost his touch after he emerged from semi-retirement, and my feeling is that he gave up in some fundamental way.

I note this because I'm a lot like him and I've run a somewhat parallel course.  While I did finish college (twice, actually, plus two master's degrees), I also earned a lot of money way before my 40s, and have been struggling financially ever since allowing my artist-self to live.  (I don't, however, have a family with four kids.  Thank GOD.)  I'm at a point where it feels like I either declare myself the artist I am and put that first or give up and be a hobbyist.  The latter is so repugnant that it's helping me overcome my fear of the former.  The new Web site is my symbolic and practical claim to my identity.  It's a gift to my father, but also a refusal.

I'd be remiss in not mentioning my mother here, since she was a gifted painter and as much an influence as my father, but her story will be for another day.