Month: February 2023

One of my memories of Pop is that he used to play the guitar and sing. We would sometimes sing as a family and sometimes pop would just entertain us. That is the memory.

It turns out that Pop wrote songs too. When he was young, when he was dating mom, apparently he sang them. From what I hear, though the accounts are definitely biased, they were pretty good too. I never heard any of those. That is the mystery.

As I dig and rummage, I find so many things that pop did, some I knew about, and those bring up memories; others I had no idea, the mysteries.  Mysteries bring up questions. How come Pop never played his board game with us? What was the book that he wrote about?  How come he never told us about that either?

I have no answers for the mysteries, but I have many great memories. Perhaps that is the point. 

The night was thick and hazy… The fox went out on a chilly night… Memories.

How was I so fortunate to have such an amazing father… Mystery.

My thoughts today relate to the picture. Jaques the monkey is not King Kong. He isn’t even a 600 pound gorilla. There is a notion that bigger is better but that is not always the case. For a tiny monkey a regular sized banana is like winning the lottery. And Jaques is feeling like the luckiest monkey ever.

Pop will never have his memoirs published. He won’t ever have a life remembered by millions. I think that he would want it that way. This week, Pop would have turned 89. In nearly 9 decades he didn’t change the world, at least not in any flashy manner. He didn’t do anything that would end up in the 24-hour news cycle for weeks on end. His life was quiet and mostly unassuming. That doesn’t make it a life not well-lived or worth living.

Pop would never have been an influencer. That being said, he was substance not appearance. While the things he did will be unknown to the world at large, they weren’t inconsequential. For much of his life he worked with teenagers. Perhaps that alone should win him accolades and fame. Many of those young people who he worked with have grown into fine responsible adults. And some of them have shared those lessons that they learned from Pop. One Halloween, one of the young men that Pop advised as a scout leader shaved the top of his head. His costume was Pop. He said he was dressing up as his hero. 

Pop spent many hours making scenery for church productions. He build numerous floats, award winning floats. In the days before social media, and the three second attention span, he was able to put things in a healthy perspective. While working on a set, one of the other volunteers was worried about whether they were doing a good enough job. He took them aside and they stepped back from the set where he pointed out that the details that they worried about weren’t even visible from the audience. It was the bigger picture, the overall thing, not the minuscule details that mattered. With floats he pointed out that people would only see them for 15 or 20 seconds. This wasn’t meant to imply that good work wasn’t important; he always did good work. It was a lesson that there is a point where things are good enough for the purpose for which they were meant and worrying about things being perfect is unnecessary. In fact, sometimes the things you are stressing about aren’t even noticeable by the outside observer. 

When working with youth he tried to make them successful. He got permission to work a few hours a week with some at risk youth. The project that he worked with them on was a model of a bridge. He spent the time building jigs for the pieces so that the kids couldn’t fail. It was a project that ended up as something that not only the kids, but his company and the school were all proud of.

Pop didn’t know anything about fiberglass, but that didn’t stop him from figuring it out and helping build 8 canoes. Canoes that were used for over 20 years for numerous river trips, family vacations and weekends at the lake. He helped maintain them for years so that they could be enjoyed by generations of people. Few people know the amount of time and effort that were spent on that project.

Perhaps the most important thing that Pop did, though, was that he was a true friend to many people. He was widely loved by the people in the neighborhood in which he lived. When he couldn’t look after them, they took it upon themselves to look out for him. Neighbors often mentioned how they saw him out walking, and if he ever seemed to be in trouble, someone was always there to make sure he was looked out for.  It says a lot about a person when a whole community keeps an eye on them. He befriended the girls in the hair salon who said that when he started being a regular visitor that it made it feel like a real shop. 

Little things matter. A good life is made up of little things. Day after day they add up. While there may not be fanfare for those who only do thousands of small acts, perhaps those are the lives that are most significant. They touch others in a positive way and leave marks that are unseen, but are passed on to others and live on long past the original act. Mother Teresa said, “Not all of us can do great things but we can do small things with great love.” In the end, isn’t doing the latter thing the key to doing the former?

When Pop passed, it came with more relief than sadness. His decline at the very end was rapid and lasted only a few days, which was a blessing in itself. That it was expected, to the degree that Pop wasn’t going to live forever and his older brothers had passed at the age of 85, I suppose, made it somewhat easier. As a result, I didn’t cry when I heard. If I believed that I would never see him again, I think that my reaction would have been much different. But I do believe that I will see Pop again and the separation is only temporary. 

Separation, however, can be painful, there is no denying that. At the time, though, I felt relief for him. He was no longer hindered by a body, once strong but weakened by age. His mind was now back to the sharp and capable mind that I still see evidence of in various projects that are part of the house or that are still present here. Maybe best of all, Pop was back with mom. After many years of loneliness and grief, that was now a thing of the past for him.

The morning of the funeral, I arrived before everyone else. It gave me some time to just be alone with my thoughts and, for the final time in this life, to be with Pop. If I hadn’t been alone I never would have done this, but with no one around I took a few moments to say goodbye. Something about the act of speaking just broke something loose, and for the first and only time since Pop died, the tears just flowed. And for a minute I just wasn’t ok.

I left the room to go to the bathroom to compose myself. On my way I passed a neighbor in my broken down state and he asked if I was ok. I think that we are so used to just saying things are fine when anyone asks that we rarely let anyone know what is really going on. I think normally I would have just nodded or said that I would be, but in that state, I was wholly and vulnerably honest and I said, “No.”

I wish I could remember what he told me verbatim, but in the moment I wasn’t looking for words of wisdom, I was looking to escape and recover, but he said something like, “We feel this sadness because we had great love.” That is a great truth to think about. We hurt because we care. Grief can seem like a debilitating disease, at times the loss feels so great that we can hardly get out of bed or put one foot in front of the other. As I reflect on things more, perhaps I am gaining a different perspective on the matter. Of course it hurts, sometimes tremendously so, and I think it’s meant to. What value would love have if its loss came with only some nominal amount of discomfort? 

It is easy to wallow in sadness. Perhaps it is better to consider that grief is the memory of love. Even though it can be like an arrow to the heart, would it have such power to wound if it wasn’t backed by the force of joyful memories? This life is fleeting and temporary and none of us will make it out of here alive. And if that’s all there is, more’s the pity, but wouldn’t it be better to savor the good and beautiful memories that are the echoes inside that grief? Consider grief a protective blanket that reminds us to wrap ourselves tightly and bask in the warmth within rather than a weight that covers and suffocates. 

Maybe that is what grief is for, to pull our minds out of the mundane and force us to ponder the good times and meditate on the experiences that taught us to love and the lessons we learned from so doing. Most things end badly, that’s why they end. Endings are a natural part of life. Even good things don’t go on forever, if they did we would grow used to it and eventually become bored. Then that thing would come to an end too. Chapters in books often end with a cliffhanger and no matter how many times we re-read the chapter the circumstances won’t change. It isn’t until we move into the subsequent chapters that we get to see the resolution. The great stories have twists and turns and unexpected events. 

Grief can turn our lives from a page turning adventure story into a stagnant story if we don’t turn the page and move forward, but like a good mystery, we may need to re-examine the clues to put the rest of the story together. Even as I write this I know that there will be times I choose to wallow in grief and pity. Maybe, though, I will be able to recall the past with fondness and keep moving forward, whatever the challenge.

If you were expecting an ad, then you will be sorely disappointed… or perhaps filled with glee. 

I have been thinking about what to say this week and I haven’t landed on a great idea. I do need to say something though, because that is the pattern I am developing with this project.

The pictures and the posts are pretty disconnected. I considered adding backstories to the animals that could highlight things about Pop. In the end I decided against that, but decided that I should talk about this project as a whole. Everyone who creates something has their own unique process. Some gain inspiration through nature or meditation; others force themselves to work and get inspiration through perspiration. I’m not sure what my process really entails except to say it usually ends up with a lot of stewing and fretting followed by some frantic work to hit my own self-imposed deadlines. If I was a professional artist, I suppose that I would have to have some more consistent motivation to produce, but I don’t have that. I enjoy photography, I love trying creative new ideas and I relish making, and let’s be honest, sometimes breaking things. Oftentimes the work happens in fits and starts, sometimes going through long periods of inactivity followed by frenetically paced creative spurts. 

For me, projects take a different tack. When I start a project I give myself a framework that I operate within. Sometimes the rules I set and parameters are well thought out and sometimes they are just guidelines. I will (probably) never undertake a project that includes 300 pictures in a year. I think I learned my lesson on that one. But a 52 photo project seems manageable. I like to set projects that take up a year, although since Covid started, I haven’t had the will, for lack of a better word, to always stick the projects out. As an unknown, that hasn’t caused me much of a problem, and I think that sometimes just sticking out a project that isn’t working for you and isn’t bringing you any joy is the smart thing to do. 

The Change of Mind project had its own hiccups. It was supposed to be a one year project in which I would do something with pill bottles followed by a weekly picture and then I would document it in a blog post. That turned out to be far from reality. The something became clear early on — animals. That was where things got hung up. It was bad. On the one hand I was producing the figures. On the other, I was broken. Pop’s death wasn’t unexpected. He was nearly 88 and anything after 85 was kind of bonus time. I wasn’t sad for Pop to pass, not like when my brother died, I knew I would miss him, and I do and did, but I believe he is happier now on the other side and, frankly, better off than he was. Grief is an odd thing though. I don’t think you can really predict how it is going to affect you. So 2022 just ended up being a bad year. 

At the beginning, though, I felt like it was time to do another project. This one was for Pop. That is really a big part of why I just pushed things forward and decided to finish what I started last year. Some projects just need to be done. Not because anyone will see them, but because they do something for you. A Quarter for Cancer was therapeutic for me. It was incredibly stressful, but it kept me busy and at the time I needed that. Maybe this kept me from really shutting down and pushing people away last year. This falls into the category of something I needed to do, though few people may ever really see it. 

This was an art project, from its inception. The point of it was to make something artistic with the pill bottles and funded by the spare change that was contained within them. The words weren’t originally part of it. I intended to add some thoughts about the pictures, which would have made them relevant, but emotions get tied up with things, and even though the animals weren’t directly tied to or related to Pop, except that the raw material came from him, they really are related to him. Because, while I spent hours working on new figurines, I thought about Pop. When I cut pieces of wood, it was Pop that taught me to use power tools. I cut my teeth painting from watching Pop make scenery. What little I know about sculpting or model building came from spending time with Pop. He is woven into the fabric of every picture in some indirect and perhaps inexplicable manner. 

The result of this indirect connection is that the picture is a picture. It is an animal doing something that an anthropomorphic miniature animal just might do. That is what the picture is. What I write isn’t necessarily tied to the visual. The picture is my way of using things that Pop taught me to, hopefully, delight someone or maybe even many someones. But I hope that the words will also have value.