On Sunday afternoons in my teens, my father and I would set out to explore. We would tell Mother we were going “driving around” …. she never minded because she’d have the house to herself, and give us her shopping list. Driving around was exactly what we did … sometimes talking, sometimes listening to music, sometimes we would stop at a greasy joint for a hamburger. We’d often visit a building site …. usually something significant like a bridge or skyscraper. Charlotte was then, like now, one big construction project.
At fourteen something happened on one of our drives that crystallized in my mind, and is still as real to me as the moment it happened. We were on the newly opened Brookshire Freeway, which we had watched take shape, so we loved driving it. With no fanfare my father said: “I will probably die at about the same age my father did (60), and I expect you to be the man of the family.” I said nothing, and knew two things with absolute certainty: 1. he was right and 2. I would never speak of this for many years.
He died at 62. It was one year from the out-of-the-blue cancer diagnosis until the funeral. Like me, he had always been in amazingly good health … seemingly indestructible. We both went to doctors only when my mother made us. During the year of the cancer he worked every day … in fact, most people didn’t know he was sick.
A couple of years before the illness, I took a job in Charlotte and moved back to my hometown. It was a great time. The family was together, and Daddy was surrounded by "his girls” — Mom, my sister Terri, her daughter Aubri, and me. For every occasion requiring a gift, and many that didn’t, he gave us each one of four identical objects ….. jewelry, cards, little boxes … all in the shape of hearts. It became a silly family ritual … “what kind of crazy heart-gift can Daddy come up with this time?”
That is why I hide hearts in my paintings.
Now I wear three talismans on a gold chain necklace, pretty much all the time, certainly when I work. Hard to put into words what they represent … and that is the glory of symbols … they embody what we could not possibly express. They hold worlds. There is a little crystal heart, monogrammed, one of Dad’s many heart-gifts. There is my cross from Jerusalem. And there is a little red canoe. They hold my story, and my heart, and magnificent worlds to come. One of these days, hopefully soon I'll start a new self portrait. Can't see the composition just yet, but I know these guys will be in there somewhere.
