Behold a Pale Baboon
The whole family is at an ebb right now, and it’s difficult to know how to shake it. We’re totally mired in our own round-robin of emotions, and they seems to circle each other, rise up, meet someone else’s confusion or pain, and go back down.
For my part, I’m having panic dreams. Two nights ago it was baboons chasing a bunch of people in a lobby, which sounds funny enough when you say it, but their grimaces of hostility and ferocity which looks so much like human grins were enough to give me the screaming fantods.
My son is a sweet boy of five; the way he’s working out his free-floating anxieties is to have aged prematurely into a rebellious teenager bent on getting a rise out of mom. And my husband has an operational level of stress which has made eating a delicate dance of “Is this too spicy?” and “I don’t think I can drink this anymore,” a real shame in someone so dedicated to the pleasures of consuming really, really good food.
And my brother, bless his heart, came down a couple of days ago. It is not too much to say that he’s in a complicated place. Again, since us locals see Dad on a regular basis, our level of surprise at his health isn’t as dramatic as it is in someone just walking into the frame. I got to see Dad through my brother’s eyes, and it’s the shock of the new all over again. It isn’t easy to see your Rock of Gibraltar worn down by the vicissitudes of cancer, and my brother is facing acutely, as if for the first time, that Dad is pretty damned ill.
And I have no words of comfort at all. Dad is busily squaring things away in his own mind, getting ready for whatever comes next; for him this includes going through five-plus decades of flat files and artwork and chucking things which don’t cut muster. Handing things off to my brother in a casual, almost efficient way. “You want this painting? I hope this one finds a good home,” he says, and moves on to the next pile. My brother is absolutely stymied by this cavalier attitude and told him so. “It may be easy for you to be so casual about all this, but it’s not so easy for us,” he said.
How do you face your Dad scurrying about (though he has no business doing so with an injured foot–an injury exacerbated by “scurrying”), making smaller and smaller piles of a lifetime of art, synthesizing as best he can what he believes to be the finest representations of his development as an artist? Making, as it were, his Ideal Retrospective as juried by him.
I told my brother that Dad very much wanted to leave behind as little mess for us as possible; no matter: it’s difficult to look at as a kindness. It’s difficult to behold your father and hero, patron and friend, busily chipping away at the past to make room for a future without him.
So we are all working through our complicated emotions in our own ways, to greater or lesser success. Mine apparently manifest as baboons.
It’s funny how little humor I find in that right now.
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