The Good

And now for something different, another side of Helen. Not to impress everyone with my outrageous depth and sensitivity, although that would be fine, but because it’s about time. It also occurs to me that maybe it really is. About time.

The boy in that photo below didn’t spring out of nowhere. She who gave me birth is 88 now, but when my father took that shot, she was probably not quite 26. That’s Tolchester Beach in Kent County on the eastern shore of Maryland, where my father was from. Helen was born on the other side of the Chesapeake Bay in Middle River, just a little east of Baltimore. I’m guessing that the year is ‘47. (Couldn’t be ‘46. That’s not a one-year-old, right?)

That’s what it looked like in those parts back then. There were probably stretches on the western shore just like it, too. Pulling my father into this, what both of them gave me or pointed me toward was was this identification with a certain landscape, or waterscape, as the case may be. It lasted for a long, long time. I know what bay water and fish parts smell like in the hot sun in the bottom of an old wooden boat. The sound of Canadian geese stirs a deep, old puddle. I can’t just now remember what blooming honeysuckle and fresh-cut grass smells like in the evening, but it’s in there somewhere.

So this is there, with Helen, although she was a Baltimore girl. Maybe that’s where she got her attraction, however halting, to the arts. Though she never went further than high school in her formal education, she was always doing something extra to improve herself and because she enjoyed it — taking painting lessons and learning to sing, mostly. She painted for most of her life, in fact, up until the last ten years or so. She has a detached studio at the other house, the double-wide she doesn’t live in any more, and both of those are filled with landscapes and wildflower paintings, all of them quite good. Some would go in a high-end gallery. I was always really proud for her, that she did that, that my mother was an artist. She frequently ran herself down, though, and I don’t mean in a bantering, self-deprecating way, but in the way one sabotages oneself. She had a talent, if not sufficiently let loose to become its own reason for living.

That’s the trick with art, and it wasn’t her fate to go that way. And while her later years filled with the accumulated toxin of guilt and self-denial, I got a strong dose of whatever spirit encourages creativity in the early ones. (Along with the other stuff, obviously! — but this is not the place for that.) No, back then there was, at least for a time, a taste of something much more pure and true. Along the shore, the water was still clear.

More soon, in this new moon of November. It feels safer now to tell the whole truth, necessary for understanding the gravity of a single life. How incredible is it, that we can cover such vast distances of the heart in such a short span of years?

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1. The Most Precious Thing