Demolition Dad

I always thought I could draw, but it wasn’t until I got older that I found out that looking at a picture and recreating it did not make you an artist; it made you a thief.

My father is an artist. If you ever met him for the first time, he’d tell you he’s a cheese maker, a warehouse manager, or even a bull shitter, but, who my father really is is an artist.

Jenny and I would sprawl ourselves over the hood of another $100 junker, the size of a row boat, that my father had picked up from someone who got sick of repairing that car. It was perfect for the demolition derby that was held every year at the Fond du Lac Fair.

We’d watch him paint the car with familiar faces—cartoons, always cartoons—Goofy, Mickey, Donald, the classics. He’d sketch using pencil, then tuck the #2 behind his ear and outline the characters in black Magic Marker, working intently as if Picasso was peering over his shoulder. Jenny and I would have to move an arm here, a leg there as the marker got closer and closer to us. We couldn’t get close enough to “this” Dad.

Then came the color—reds, blues, and of course yellows since that what stood out from the stands. Color gave Goofy a soul, especially when Dad colored the pupils in black against the white. Nothing seemed more alive than when given eyes.

Dad always had the best dressed car in the pit. It was always a shame when after the run we couldn’t even tell that Goofy had ever been there—the hood crushed so far in that his body became accordion-like. Hours of creating gone in just minutes.

My “real” Dad can be seen through what he makes with his hands: demolition cars, ice shanties, tree stands, sand boxes, swing sets, hitches for Ford Focuses. . . . Some people may say, “that ain’t art.” And, I would tell them, you have never seen an artist at work then. It is not the product; it is the process—that feeling of what will happen next.

I Didn’t Steal that Candy

(Written in my moleskin note pad at Popcorn.)

Honesty is an idea that is man-made: “Truth.”

Yet in reality it is truth that saves the individual not the group. Honesty, therefore, has many definitions. I used to steal candy out of the big clear plastic bins in Pick’n Save when I could finally reach them. Mints, butterscotch, Tootsie Rolls, whatever my small hands could grasp fast enough before my mother turned around. Only months later did she find a blue mint in my jean pocket while doing wash. You better believe I deserved a cuff for that one. “You know that is wrong,” she had said. (I knew.)

People do a lot of wrong, and they know it. But, it only hurts and becomes dishonest when we get caught; caught taking something that is not ours and then trying to change the definition of truth so the line is so fine that you can’t even see it like a string of fishing line.

Love is a synonym for truth; one cannot survive without the other. . . . Love is also another word which has a definition that is intangible but many believe can be held. Things, things, things are what people think they need. But then they “get” and find that they have been given one thing, one feeling: boredom not love.

Boring is that stale feeling in the morning, that dry taste coffee leaves in your mouth after too many cups or getting that one toy you wanted for Christmas which you play with for a couple of hours then wish for something else.

Love can be dull, but truth is never boring, for it cannot be defined when you’re young or when your old. You just have to believe in it.

Milk Man’s Child

My mother insisted I take all my photo albums from the house the last time I visited.

“Why? What am I going to do with them?”

“Well, look at them of course,” she had said.

This idea of looking at photos of the past doesn’t make much sense to me. Photos are not real. You cannot taste or feel anything from them—they are paper. The people in those photos no longer exist; they are not real; they have changed: gotten older, cheaper, or lonelier. I don’t want to be remembered as who I used to be but what I am. And, even that is debatable. We can never know truly “who” we are, just how other perceive us to be.

My mother told me once that she has not one baby picture of herself. “Grandpa and Grandma didn’t have time to take pictures,” she had said.

I have many baby photos. They are me—dark skinned, bug-eyed, thick limped—they called me the milk man’s child. Yet, they are not me at all. Time is what is captured in photos, nothing else.

As we get older photos become more and more important to us as though if we don’t document our life, we never existed.

I’d rather not exist than to be remembered at a shot in time. . . . You want to remember me? Remember my smile in your mind and your mind only. That is where I want to live.

Garbage Bag or Halloween Costume?

My mother is not the creative type; she will be the first to admit to this, so our Halloween costumes were either hand-me-downs from cousins, repeat offenders, or something my mother threw together last minute.

We never won a prize at the local costume judging in Oakfield. (Andrew Greshhammer always won; his mom was good with a needle. I remember how jealous I was when he came out in his full head-to-toe scarecrow costume from The Wizard of Oz.) Nothing my mother dressed us in could even compare. I had been . . .

a ghost, yes, just a white sheet with two holes in front (more than once)

a hobo, Dad’s plaid shirt and old cotton Grande factory gloves with the finger tips cut off

a punk rocker, Mom’s black leather bike jacket and a whole big can of pink hair spray

a hunter, rolled up Dad’s camouflage, painted my face, and Jenny put a fake bullet in my head . . . this was probably the most elaborate costume just because of the bullet . . . I carried one of my sister’s old bows, without the arrows of course.

The best costume my mother ever put one of us in was Jesse. I remember walking up to the first house in Oakfield as the old woman clutching the large bowl of candy stared at my brother, 2 or 3 at the time, as he shuffled up the drive, holding my mother’s hand. With each step he made a swish swish sound as if someone was following him closely from behind sweeping up his foot prints.

The old woman glanced from my brother to the corner of her lawn and then to my brother again as if she was trying to distinguish between two things. As my brother dipped his hand into her bowl for a candy bar, she looked at my mother, “That is a very interesting costume. I would have never thought of that.”

“Didn’t cost a thing,” my mother replied, proud of her so-called creativity.

“No, I would say not,” the woman said.

Jesse was the perfect size for the pumpkin printed garage bags that people used to put their raked leaves in to use as lawn decoration, the ones sitting the old woman’s lawn.

“And I may not be able to reuse the bag, but the newspaper inside is still good, a little wrinkled, but good,” my mother smiled. . . . My brother was a garbage bag, but a cute, cheap little garbage bag none the less.

I laugh now, but I will probably wrap my kids in tinfoil and have them go as leftovers; oh, and then still reuse the tinfoil . . . a little crinkled but still good.