Although the child in the painting is definitely not me or one of mine (the dog is Queenie, and she was real), and although I grew up about as far from the sea as you can get, this painting reveals something critical about who I am. My Grandpa Aldrich was a singular man of wisdom and good humor. He could tell a funny story with the best of them. He was a farmer and inculcated in me a farmer’s work ethic, that get-up-before-dawn style of thing. He never got mad, even the time I broke the plumbing in his house by playing Tarzan in the basement, swinging on the bathroom pipes in the ceiling. Everything I know about how to love, and how to act, and who to be I got from him, or at least from him through my mother who was his child. My grandpa lasted into his eighties and was alive until I finally got married at 38. He lives in my heart still, guiding my actions… even the words I am writing now.
Catch a Falling Star 