Legacy Writing 365:91

I have paintings in various stages of progress. I’ve been a little surprised by how happy I am to be painting again. It’s not as if I couldn’t have been painting. I decided to take a break while I was doing the designs for Project Runway All Stars. I wonder if when I have the self-discipline to write fiction again that feeling of happiness will be magnified many times over? Because when I define myself by what I do, then I am a writer who takes photos for fun and paints because I enjoy it. Not writing is not a result of having no ideas or characters. I have plenty. I think what’s happened is that I’ve let outside forces have too much influence over the writer in me. I need to clear away that noise and find a silence to fill with my own voice instead of other voices.

As I wrap up the first quarter of these legacy writing posts, I know that I’ve learned a few things. Many of these photos have a strong impact on me. Sometimes a photo evokes a lot of memories or stories that I simply can’t share because they are too private to me or to other people. Even when people are dead, there are lines I won’t cross. I think writers need to have a certain fearlessness. I struggle with that in fiction, but I simply can’t do it even in this most limited memoir style of writing. It makes me admire memoir and autobiographical writers even more.

I also have to place limits on how long I work on organizing or reviewing pictures. If I spend too much time with my mother’s collections, my heart and stomach literally begin to hurt, and I have to step away from it. Or… here’s another example.

While looking for the photos below, I find this one. I think I’m at my parents around noon and my father has come home from work for lunch. I’m fooling around with my camera while we sit at the kitchen table. My mother is probably there making him a sandwich, not because he wouldn’t make his own, but because they both still like doing things for each other. He’s talking to me about something when I take the picture.

I look at the photo and think, What wouldn’t I give for just one more chance to sit at the table and talk to him?

And when I do that, I can be crying in nothing flat. My father died in 1985. I don’t dwell on it. I don’t think about it all the time. Most days, even if I think about him, I don’t think about his death at all. But in certain moments, that loss can be as sharp and fresh as if it’s new.

So sometimes writing here is emotionally draining, but that I’m doing it reassures me that I’m still a writer, because as satisfying and enjoyable as it can be, fiction writing is also emotionally draining for me. I don’t know if this is true for other writers. Because other writers say things about their process that are just about as foreign to me as speaking Russian would be. (I don’t speak a word of Russian, unless “Smirnoff” or “Dostoyevsky” count.)

That same day in my parents’ kitchen, my father paused to work on a painting he was doing for a former student of his. She’d married a veterinarian and they had a Doberman. Daddy was doing the painting as a gift, I believe. When I look at this photo, several things come to mind. Like how he would steal minutes here and there to expend some creative energy. He always loved his jobs–whether in the military, education, or politics–and he didn’t paint as often as he should have. Even when he finally retired from everything and had time, he spent more time writing than painting. This makes me smile. My father was an artist who liked to write. I’m a writer who likes to paint. Do we have some weird gene that makes us this way?

Also, my father was missing the little finger on his right hand. He was right handed. He trained himself not to need that finger. (I don’t know how old he was when it was amputated except that I believe he was already married to my mother, and he married her when he was thirty-two.) He had blood poisoning and almost lost his arm, but they were able to reduce the infection down to that one finger.

Then, in the period after this photo was taken, tremors caused by Parkinson’s disease progressively affected his right arm and hand. He retrained himself to write and paint with his left hand. I think “indomitable” is a good word to describe my father.

This last picture is taken at my house. At first, I thought it was the same day at my parents’ house as the others. Then I realized that based on the year, the piano behind him had already been moved from their house to mine (this was after I graduated from college). And then I spotted Frisky the dead fox squirrel on the wall to the right of him. My first husband was a hunter. I didn’t particularly want a dead animal mounted on the wall, so I named him and pretended he just liked hanging out in our living room.

I digress. Here’s the finished Doberman.

A few years ago, the former student got in touch with me and we corresponded for a bit. I always liked her, and I appreciated her kind words about both my parents and what they meant to her. I never had the nerve to ask if she still owns this painting.