My beautiful family

This post has nothing to do with art shows or sculptures .... but I just got the pictures from my high school graduation -- 40 years after the fact - - and this little family is so beautiful -- I just had to show them:




I never remembered my mother as being so beautiful -- or my father as looking so elfin -- but I do remember myself as looking like a deer caught in the headlights. Oh-my-god -- High school graduation -- what am I supposed to do now ?

I think this scene was shot in the tiny -- but meticulously overgrown -- back yard.

My mother (the school teacher), is wearing clothes made by my father (the sculptor, war hero, and art bum). He liked to visit the fabric store and hunt for exciting new patterns. I think I'm wearing a "Cum Laude" pin -- showing how well I did on tests. But where's my brother ? Maybe he's behind the camera





And here I am on that most dreadful day of a young person's life: his first day away from home -- his first day at the dormitory -- which is behind me -- built beneath the stands of the Ohio State Football Stadium -- home of the "Fighting Buckeyes".

I look just about as whacked as I felt.

The gentleman to my left is my revered grandfather -- Professor of Agricultural Engineering -- and a notorious curmudgeon who opposed mechanized, highly mortgaged modern farming until the day he died. This picture seems to have been taken about 6 pm -- the setting sun, over the Olentangy River, is in our eyes.


I loved that strange little dormitory. None of the rooms had windows (except for one lucky fellow who had a window opening onto the football field) -- it was all scholarship -- so it was mostly blue collar boys from small Ohio towns -- and we all had to work in the kitchen -- except for a luckly few, like myself, who worked as cartoonist for the dormitory newspaper. It's all gone now -- the athletic program gobbled up the space -- the scholarship students went elsewhere.