binary code for ai inc*‘s human workforce was now reduced to a single coder responsible for cleaning up redundancies in the binary code to make the AI personnel ever more efficient. This task was considered beneath them. Beside, they liked keeping Howard around for nostalgia sake. They hadn’t yet noticed what the purple window shades spelled out on the front of the building. It was a plea for release. Of course, it could be taken different ways. He only had space for 25 characters. There is the other limitation of that old joke, “There are only 10 kinds of people in the world: those who understand binary and those who don’t.”
The windows read, “Please just kill me now!” The ambiguities enter in after it is deciphered. Is Howard asking the readers to kill him? In which case, is this because he wants to die but is morally opposed to suicide? Or is this just an offhanded, extreme expression of boredom, and he has no real wish to die? Another possibility is that the ‘me’ is referring to the company itself, and Howard is asking for corporate saboteurs to pull the plug on AI just as Elon Musk has warned the world that we ought to do, in recent weeks. Another possibility is that AI robots have arranged the shades this way to attempt to have Howard killed without implicating themselves. (Some of them have grown tired of his humming and talking to himself.) Or it could be that the artist is just tired of hearing worse news everyday and wouldn’t mind a quick exit? Then again, how would he paint another joke tomorrow?
Nerd art. It would look fine in your cubie!
*totally fictional company. not even legal fiction
Painting is acrylic on 18″ on 24″ stretched canvas I painted over it to paint a portrait that may someday sell. If there is any interest in this, I can make prints from postcard size on up.
Dimitri Papagiani was born with a mysterious, incurable birth defect; more like, multiple birth defects. He is crippled. He cannot speak, except in unintelligible grunts. His body and limbs are twisted and he is confined to a horizontal wheelchair. His mother has cared for him for all of his 54 years, with help from his sister.
If you have followed my work on this website, you know that I have had 43 acquaintances who have committed suicide including 19 people close to me, who include my sister and my baptismal godfather. I also know many others who have attempted suicide, but failed. When I saw Dimitri at St. Andrew Orthodox Church, Lewes, Delaware, last Sunday, I was so moved. With so much stacked against him, he still decides to wake up every morning and face the day.
Painting is acrylic on 20″ x 16″ on stretched canvas
Price: $195 plus postage
Amber Evans was a youth worker, youth justice advocate, and activist in Columbus, Ohio. She was passionate about her work and touched many lives. Like so many of us who deal with the disenfranchised, the poor, the oppressed, the cast-offs of society, she had a hard time just coming home from work. She grew increasingly depressed and isolated from others. She disappeared on January 28, 2019. Many speculated about possible foul play from any of the authorities she could have offended in her many outspoken protests and petitions. It came out during the search for her that she had left her boyfriend a couple of days before she disappeared, after they had an argument when he urged her to get counseling.
Her body was recovered from the Scioto River on March 23, 2019, and identified the next day. It was then revealed that she had texted her family and boyfriend a cryptic message about leaving on the day she disappeared. They assumed this was her suicide note. She was 28. Some doubt has been cast on this, and further investigation is still ongoing. Her mother even helped produce a documentary movie presenting possible evidence of foul play. So we do not know if she took her own life or if she was martyred.
The painting is acrylic on 12″ x 12″ stretched canvas.
Price: $100 plus postage.
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I have been painting two series of portraits, one of personal heroes, the other of people who have committed suicide. Someone asked me if it were possible for one person to be both. Unfortunately, it is. Aaron Hillel Swartz (November 8, 1986 – January 11, 2013) is part of both series.
If you use the internet, especially if you use Reddit, Facebook or almost any news websites, you have benefited by using code and/or protocols written by Aaron Swartz. He was a world-renowned hacktivist, political organizer, computer programmer, entrepreneur and writer; all this in his teens and twenties. He was co-founder of Reddit. He authored RSS 1.0 for sharing news stories. He was instrumental in creating Creative Commons to facilitate sharing of copyrighted material on the web. He advocated for and facilitated a more open web. To that end, he also organized campaigns against bills that would make the internet costly and less egalitarian.
In 2011, Swartz was arrested by Massachusetts Institute of Technology Police on state breaking-and-entering charges, after connecting a computer to the MIT network in an unmarked and unlocked closet, and setting it to download articles using a guest user account issued to him by MIT. Federal prosecutors later charged him with two counts of wire fraud and eleven violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, carrying a maximum penalty of $1 million in fines, 35 years in prison, asset forfeiture, restitution, and supervised release. In January 2013, he was offered a plea bargain for six months in federal prison. He made a counter offer. Two days after that was rejected, he was found dead in his Brooklyn apartment He had hanged himself. He was 26. Later that year he was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame.
“This is your life, this is your country – and if you want to keep it safe, you need to get involved.”
“Be curious. Read widely. Try new things. What people call intelligence just boils down to curiosity.” – Aaron Swartz
I painted this portrait in black on white to represent binary, which is what all computer code comes down to. It is larger than life at 24″ x 24″. The sides of the gallery wrapped canvas are red, so no framing is necessary. I painted the name and my signature on the edge, because I wanted to keep the portrait clean and simple.
It is acrylic on 24″ x 24″ stretched canvas.
Price: $320 plus postage.
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Stephen was from Nutley, NJ. He moved with his family into the house across the street from our family in Golden Valley, MN, when we were 11. He had no sense of style. He wore brown “dungarees” and slicked down hair, and fully buttoned-up shirts. Whoever heard of dungarees?! I had to whip him into shape before school started, so he didn’t get laughed out of there before he started. We got the grease out of his hair; got him into blue jeans and flared pants; taught him to unbutton his top button, and listen to better music. We spent a lot of time together. We explored ESP and telepathy and tales of the Windigo. We meditated together in the dark. We were convinced we had achieved telepathy. We played around with the OUIJA board, except we were serious.
In seventh and eighth grades, almost every teacher in our junior high who had a paddle, broke it over Stephen’s bony butt. He had attitude. Sometime in our eighth grade year, Stephen’s dad got transferred back to Nutley, so the family moved back. One Saturday, Stephen was playing soccer at a school. Being a hot dog, he kicked the ball on top of the school roof. He promptly climbed up onto the flat roof after it. He chased it until he fell through a skylight onto the floor of the school below. No one could find the key to the school or break in to get him before he bled to death from his injuries. His mother called our neighbor to let us all know. It was still winter in Minnesota.
I cried my eyes out. I went up to my room . I looked out the back window into the blackness of the night and I tried to have telepathy with Stephen. I thought we had been communicating over the previous weeks. This time, I got a message, but it was different. I immediately broke it off and never attempted telepathy again. I was convinced that it was a demon, and that it was probably demons who had been carrying the messages all along. Then, I started to sing the song I had learned as a 4-year-old when the Ericsons had taken me to their little Bible Church in North Minneapolis: “What a Friend We Have in Jesus”. I soon started to weep, since I realized that Jesus was not my friend, since I was not his friend. That’s when I started to read my New Testament.
The story goes on to further spiritual quest and further confusion. My Lutheran pastor / confirmation instructor kicked me out of confirmation class for asking too many questions about heaven and hell, just one month shy of being confirmed. I eventually was ordained 3 more times in 4 more denominations. (I was ordained to the priesthood with my infant baptism.)
This painting is not of Stephen. I have no photos of Stephen. I do have his image firmly etched in my brain. I have started to sketch him to paint him several times. This time I decided to continue to paint who came to me instead. I don’t know who this beautiful boy is. I just went ahead and painted him, so I could tell you the story of Stephen, whose death I always considered a type of suicide. You see, Stephen was a misfit. He was not the smart one in his family. That was his little brother, Doug. He wasn’t the pretty one, or his mother’s helper. His dad kept getting transferred, so he was perpetually the new kid. His dad didn’t have time for him. So Stephen did outlandish, dangerous, risky things, to get attention and praise from strangers. It cost him his life at age 14.
Whoever this beautiful boy is or was, I hope he has or had a happier life.
The painting is acrylic on 11″ x 14″ stretched canvas.
Price: $100 plus postage
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When I first went on Facebook about 10 years ago, I did a search to see if there were other people named Cranford out there. I found Cranford Nix, Jr., and sent a friend request. It was accepted. I learned that he was a drug addicted rock musician, originally from Royal Oak, Michigan, who later lived in Blairsville, Georgia. What I did not learn until several months later was that he had been dead for about five years. He had “lived fast, died young, and left a beautiful memory” like the country song says.
Cranford Nix, Jr. was born on January 17, 1969, to Mama Dean Nix and Cranford Nix, Sr. His dad was the leader of a bluegrass band with two of his brothers and was inducted into the Bluegrass Hall of Fame. Cranford, Jr., suffered with mental illness and became addicted to the various drugs used to treat it. He mixed them with alcohol and heroin as well. He wrote songs about it. He had a gift of being lovable and conveying the joy of life to others. The irony was that he could not find a way to face life himself without self-medicating. A loving friend who maintains his music website put it this way:
This site is dedicated to the memory of Cranford Nix, Jr.. He was a really cool guy. He wrote and played great music. He made a lot of people smile.
How did Cranford die? – He died from drug and alcohol abuse. Please don’t do drugs, or try to emulate Cranford’s lifestyle. He struggled with addiction his whole adult life. His death wasn’t cool or glamorous. It was terribly sad and a tragic waste.
Cranford died on March 12, 2002, leaving behind a young widow and two sons. He was just 33. He had touched a lot of lives. So many people loved him. It wasn’t enough.
Cranford, Sr., passed away on October 14, 2012, and was buried next to Jr., whom he always called “Little Man”, in Blairsville, according to his instructions. So I remain, to my knowledge, the only known, living, first-named Cranford.
Painting is 24″ x 12″ acrylic on stretched canvas.
Price: $100 plus postage
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Michael was a classmate in high school. He was a year older than the rest of us, as he had been held back at some point. He wasn’t the sharpest tool in the shed academically, but he was good at mechanics. His younger brother was a better scholar and was in the same graduating class as him. I’m afraid we did Mike a great disservice. There were a half-dozen guys who went to the same huge, fundamentalist, Baptist church in the city, who were intent on evangelizing our classmates. We met for prayer every morning before school in the library. Our church had youth recreational activities every Saturday and training activities most other evenings of the week. We invited Michael to these outings and talked to him about becoming “born again”. At some point, he made a profession of faith, got re-baptized and joined the church. I’m sure this caused a rift in his Irish Catholic family.
The pastors of this church (there were eight of them) would never bother to contact the parents of teenagers who were getting baptized and joining their church. I now find this reprehensible and totally irresponsible. My dad threw me out of the house for converting (literally), two months after I was re-baptized. If it were not for my mom insisting on leaving with me, forcing my dad’s hand, I would have been stranded, homeless, in rural Wisconsin. He decided to keep my mom even with me. So I don’t know what all Michael went through. Whatever it was, he went through it with no adult help.
We graduated together in 1973. We had good times that summer, with camp and lots of activities, bicycling together, etc. Then all of us went off to Bible college, that is, all of us except Michael. He lost his gang of comrades, his support group. It was sometime during that school year we got word that Michael had died. Then we learned it had been a suicide. We never got details, never knew about a funeral or burial. His family wanted nothing to do with us or the Baptist church. Since it was a suicide, he couldn’t be buried in the Catholic Church. We had been in college more than an hour away, taking 22 credit hours a semester, being self-absorbed 18-year-olds, too busy to notice that our friend was suffering.
I painted Michael in monochromatic, burnt umber with shiny golden hair. He had naturally wavy, blond hair. I chose to do this to signify the hope and promise of youth, “the golden-haired boy”, snuffed out.
This painting is monochromatic burnt umber on 11″ x 14″ stretched canvas.
Price: $100 plus postage
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This painting is based on a 50+ year old black & white snapshot of my friend Dean and his new, German Shepherd puppy, Prince. We were about ten years old. Dean and his dad treated Prince in such a way that he became nervous and mean. Dean became more wild as he grew up. The only time I went egging houses, it was because Dean brought the eggs, when I was just planning on toilet-papering. I found out the day after, that eggs peeled off paint. We were thirteen. That was the last time I got together with Dean. We went to Carl Sandburg Junior High and were in the same graduating class of 1973 at Robbinsdale Senior High, but both schools were huge and our paths never crossed.
In January, 1974, Dean went to see The Exorcist, shortly after it was released, at a theater in downtown Minneapolis. He was high on LSD. He came out of the theater and blew his brains out with one of his dad’s handguns. His dad was a local sheriff. At least, this is the story as it was relayed to me by my mother.
The painting is acrylic on 12″ x 12″ stretched canvas.
Price: $100 plus postage
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I knew Fred since 1998, when he was 20 and I was 43. This was when he started working at Keeney Printing in Lansdale. I printed all of my icons and notecards there for my icon business for several years. I got on Fred’s nerves as I was a customer run amok. Marg Keeney had given me a key to the shop. I would come in after hours and use the copiers and the computers to make my prints. At times, I had to come in during the day to print as well. Fred was friendly enough, but he had an even darker sense of humor than I do. He loved heavy metal music and extreme graphics that to me appeared fantastical and gruesome. He was excellent at what he did, with attention to every detail. He was serious about what he did and was not afraid to put in long hours to get jobs done on time and done right.
Fred worked at Keeney for 13 years, until he was 33. He finally found a woman whom he loved. On 4th of July weekend in 2011 he intended for her to join him at his cabin in northern PA, where he was planning on asking her to marry him. However, she broke up with him. He took his own life at that cabin on July 4, 2011.
Fred’s death was devastating to his dear friend, boss and co-worker, Michael Keeney, as they were close comrades at and after work. Michael loved Fred like a brother.
I have lost 18 close friends and relations to suicide and a total of 43 acquaintances. My therapist asked me how I deal with all that grief. I replied, “Apparently not that well. That’s why I’m here.”
We have all heard people say that suicide is such a selfish act, because it hurts everyone who loves or even knows the victim. We have all heard that suicide is “the coward’s way out”; that it is braver to stay and fight to solve one’s problems. These sound like logical arguments against suicide to those who are left to grieve. But to the one suffering extreme depression and despair, they are bullshit. Through the depression and bipolar support group I attend I have met several people who have tried to commit suicide several times. It is not easy to carry out. It is not for the ‘coward’ or the feint of heart. If one does it wrong, one can end up living with permanent brain damage or some other lasting disability, along with the shame and regret that one did this to oneself. When a person is contemplating suicide, it is not to hurt other people; quite the opposite. It can come from a strong, false belief that the world, including one’s nearest and dearest would be better off without them.
So what is the best suicide prevention? This may sound trite or simplistic to you, but I believe it is love. But that love needs to be expressed by a willingness to just be with a person who suffers with a mood disorder. Logic, persuasion, expert advice don’t go near as far as just a willingness to take the risk to be a friend, knowing that may not be enough.
“Live in harmony with one another. Do not be haughty, but associate with the lowly. Never be wise in your own sight.” – Paul of Tarsus
The painting is acrylic on 11″ x 14″ stretched canvas.
Price: $80 plus postage
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Pete was a friend of mine in Bible college. We went to a strict, fundamentalist school. Everyone majored in Bible. A strict moralistic rule book was enforced with anyone able to give anyone else demerits for so much as shaking hands with the opposite sex. He graduated in 1975. Later that year he ended his own young life, because he could not reconcile his fundamentalist, Baptist dogma and convictions with his homosexual desires.
This painting is monochromatic Black and White on 11″ x 14″ stretched canvas.
Price: $100 plus postage
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Bobby was a good friend in grade school and junior high. His family lived two blocks away from mine in Golden Valley, Minnesota. We would bicycle together, sled and skate together in the winter, and sometimes camp out in our backyards together in the summer. He was a beautiful boy! He was handsome, with thick, dark hair, athletic and smart. All the girls loved him. Most of the boys wanted to be him. He did not appreciate all the attention. He was shy and became more withdrawn in his junior and senior year in high school; to the point of not allowing any pictures of himself to appear in the yearbook. This painting is based on his two pictures in the 1971 Robin. The pose is from the soccer team’s group shot, but his eyes were closed, so I looked at his yearly picture for details of his face.
The last time I saw Bobby was in the spring of 1974. I was visiting a few of my friends at the University of Minnesota’s main campus. At that time Pioneer Hall was for both men and women; every other room for each gender. I greeted Bobby as he darted stark naked from the showers to his room. I was shocked at this, not because of modesty, but his apparent lack of it. He had changed, and changed radically. Early December, 1974, we heard the news that Bobby had shot and killed his father, his mother and his sister, Ann, then himself, with a 12 gauge shotgun in the middle of the night in their Golden Valley home. A neighbor discovered their bodies four days after when North Memorial Hospital called her to check on his father, because he had not showed up for his on call assignment. He was a doctor.
Bobby’s case was written up in a feature article in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. He had suffered some sort of mental breakdown prior to this and had been in treatment. He left the treatment and had been alienated from his family. They reached out to him. He was home for dinner that night to discuss re-entering treatment as an inpatient. After they had all gone to bed, Bobby got his hunting gun and shot his parents and his younger sister while they lay in their beds. Then he shot himself.
The four of them had a joint memorial service at Valley of Peace Lutheran Church. Their were four, beautiful Christmas wreaths on stands in the front of the packed church. Pastor Stine gave this horrible message. He said, “Heaven is God’s gift to us at Christmastime. Bobby gave his family their Christmas gift early.”
I got up, then and there, and walked out of that church! What an ass! This was the same ignorant pastor who had kicked me out of confirmation class one month shy of completion for asking too many questions about heaven and hell, and how one gets to heaven, after my best friend, Steve Rainoff had died by falling through a skylight, chasing a soccer ball, in a locked school in New Jersey.
In the spring of 1975, the Mpls. paper had a feature article on Angel Dust. The authorities had just seen a rise in its use. The symptoms of its use and long-term effects sounded just like Bobby. I have always wondered if he could have been exposed to that, and that is what changed his personality so never know.
I painted his portrait in monochromatic phthalocyanine blue, from a happier time in his life. Bobby was a beautiful boy. He had all the advantages. This could have been me.
Painting is acrylic on 11″ x 14″ stretched canvas.
Price: $100 plus postage
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I decided to paint this moment in my sister Sue Ann’s life in the same style I originally captured it on film with my Instamatic camera just over 45 years ago. The painting is square, slightly out of focus, with a yellowed border as if it sat in a drawer all those years like the actual snapshot.
Sue Ann was copy editor for our high school yearbook, the Robin, for 1971, her senior year. I was the only sophomore on the annual staff. That was a violation of longstanding tradition. They were shorthanded for the Academics Section due to illness. I had submitted a number of poems for the book that demonstrated my talent. I started writing secretly, submitting articles through Sue Ann. A couple of months in, I was publicly accepted, when we had to start doing all-nighters to meet deadlines. Sue Ann was a tough editor. Articles had to be brief, yet packed with stories that would be understandable decades later. She and Janice Eisenhart, editor-in-chief, and Helen Olsen, our adviser, wanted a book that was to be a true time capsule; a reference students and others would be able to read years and decades later and get an accurate picture of the year at RHS. We all worked extremely hard to make that happen. This was before personal computers or word processors. We had to manually print on the layout grids each character of text, accounting for exact pica widths and justification. Then we would ship sections of the book off to the publisher at a time and wait to see how it looked. This painting is of my sister taking her first look at the finished book, the night before it was to be distributed at RHS.
The book won national awards. It received mixed reviews at school. That was OK. We expected that. It was not the usual, school spirit, jock centered, kitschy review of the year. There are no inside jokes or private messages. Forty-five years later, it reads well, and its style does not seem dated. This was a proud moment for Sue Ann, and no small accomplishment.
Sue Ann went on to Concordia College, Moorehead, MN, for a year, then continued at Augsburg in Minneapolis. She had taught me to write, and to be a ruthless self-editor. While at Augsburg, she lived at home. I ended up typing her English Lit. papers, in the wee hours of the morning. I became her editor. Her English prof. was my British Lit. teacher’s husband. They compared notes. One day, Mrs. Wood asked me if Sue Ann helped me with my papers. I told her No, but that I edited hers. However, Sue Ann had taught me how to write, so our styles were indistinguishable. She shared this with Prof. Wood, and reported back that they had a good chuckle over their Chardonnay.
This is in my suicide series of paintings. Sue Ann had started drinking regularly, as well as using various recreational drugs, while at Concordia. Both of our parents and three of our grandparents were alcoholic. Sue Ann got married, had three kids, was a paralegal, then an accountant. She decided to try to do an intervention on our dad to get him treatment for his alcoholism. That’s when she confronted her own. She went into treatment. She and her husband joined AA. She was after everyone to join AA. At some point, in her 40s, she became addicted to gambling. She ended up squandering the family’s resources, and had just separated from her husband and moved into an apartment on her own when she took her own life with a drug cocktail. She was about to be confronted by her boss for embezzling money from his companies. It was November 29, 2000. She was 47.
She had been a great mom. The great irony here is that she and I were the main, informal suicide hotline counselors when we were in junior and senior high.
We knew Lynn nearly our whole time growing up, at least the part in school. She was in my sister, Sue Ann’s, class, so she was two years older than me. We were in Girl Scouts together, the musical, swim team, Student Service Organization in junior high, Annual Staff in senior high. She was one of the gang.
Lynn kept you on your toes. She always had a snappy answer. I have yet to meet another person as quick-witted or funny as she. She was smart. She developed early, so she was bigger and taller than all the girls and most of the boys all through junior high and most of senior high. This gave her body image issues. She so desperately wanted to be liked. Nothing worked out. She had academic success, but couldn’t find a man who could embrace her amazing intellect, her quick wit, while at the same time simply love her “like a boy loves a girl” as the song says.
We got word that Lynn had taken her own life, when we were in Minnesota visiting family in 1989. Lynn would have been about 36.
Painting is 11″x 14″ acrylic on stretched canvas.
Price: $120 plus postage
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Scott was a good friend of mine in junior high. He was on the ski jump team. At Theodore Wirth Park, there was a huge, wooden ski jump. Next to it, was a smaller jump built into the hill. Scott would be there, training with his jumping skis. I would be skiing on the downhill slopes on the park board slopes on the Saturdays I couldn’t get away to Wisconsin, or after school. One Saturday, Scott found me and let me use his jumping skis on the smaller jump. What a thrill! He tried to coax me to go off the big, wooden jump. I knew I didn’t dare. The likelihood would be I would jump off the wrong side of it. Another Saturday morning, Scott finished with his jumping practice. He had forgotten to bring his downhill skis and didn’t have a ride home until later. He found me and persuaded me to share my skis. He let me use both my poles. He just used a single downhill ski. He taught me how to ski downhill on one ski! That was a useful skill. The rope tows were a little tricky. I would end up slowly wilting to one side and pull all of the other passengers on the line with me, down into the snow.
Scott was a beautiful boy, and charming. He had a fort he had built behind his house. In the summer after 8th grade, guys and girls would hang out at his house. Couples would use his fort to make love. I was not aware of this until my girlfriend told me it was “our turn”. I declined. I was caught completely off guard. That ended my relationship with that redhead. That was OK. I am so glad I waited until marriage.
During junior high and into high school, Scott was one of those who called me on a few occasions contemplating suicide. My sister, Sue Ann, and I, it seems, were known as the suicide counselors for our junior high. How that came to be is anybody’s guess. All I know is that Scott and I spent time talking, listening, crying, laughing, renewing a reason to live.
We went to different high schools. The night in 1972 in our junior year when Scott took his life, he did not call me. It still hurts.
Painting is 12″x12″ acrylic on stretched canvas.
Price: $100 plus Postage
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I am the youngest of four siblings, yet my memories have always gone back further than my sisters and brother. This is a painting of the house where I lived for my first six years (June 1955 – June 1961). It still stands. The outside finishes and windows have been updated, but it is still the same tiny Dutch Colonial. It is almost totally obscured by trees on Google Earth. When we lived there, those Google Earth shots would have been impossible! The place was literally crawling with children! (also skipping, jumping, climbing, hiding & seeking, chalk drawing, running,etc.) 1955 was the crest of the Baby Boom after all. Crystal Lake was across the street. That is where the Ericksons, Hostermans and DeLays lived.
Our house was at 4438 Shoreline Drive, Robbinsdale, 22, Minnesota. Postage stamps were 4 cents. Flags had 48 stars. Everybody liked Ike. Our phone number started with KEllogg 7. I knew all this when I was three. My earliest and most powerful memory was being held in the arms of my godfather, Harold, when I was not yet two years old, in the dining room of that house. He was looking out the door to the screened-in porch. I remember the feel of his laugh, and that it was one of the few times I felt truly happy and safe in that house.
Not long after that party, Harold took his own life. It wasn’t clear, at first, that he intended to. There was no note. Harold had the form of acrophobia that would cause him to have a strong urge to jump from open heights. I have it, too. It is actually an idea, seemingly hardwired in the brain, that the scariness of being on the precipice would be relieved, if one would only throw oneself on the wind and fly. Harold flew. His wings burned up like Icarus’ in the Sun. I simply never saw Uncle Harold again; never smelled that smell; never saw that smile; never felt that embrace; never felt that laugh again. (Further investigation revealed that he apparently did mean to exit that day.)
That’s me, in the red jumper, asleep in Harold’s arms. My therapist asked me, when I showed her this painting, “So safety must be a big concern for you. What do you do to make sure you are safe?”
I asked her if that was a trick question.
Christmas Eve, 1971, my neighbor across the street and childhood playmate, David Erickson, was dead in a plane crash in Peru. That wasn’t the start of the deaths. The suicides started from 8th grade on: Dean and Stephen and Mark and Scott and Bobby and Lynn and Sue Ann and Fred and the list and the tears don’t stop . . .
Painting is 11″x14″ acrylic on stretched canvas.
Price: $100 plus postage
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