Wednesday, October 8, 2014

Dry spell

As any follower of my blog can see, I've not been very active in posting these past two years. Neither have I been so active in creating art in general. The illness and death of a parent can tend to have such an effect on one's life. In my case, I think this has been greatly amplified by the fact that there are so many things that I don't know, and indeed that the children of many war veterans do not know, about our fathers / parents who have served in combat. I've taken on the large project this year of tracking down some of the men my father served with in Vietnam. Today I received in the mail two polaroid photos from one of my father's former commanding officers. The photos were taken in Mang Yang Pass (Central Vietnamese highlands) in early 1970. The young man in the photo below is my father, at age 24, about two years before he and my mother met. Part of me feels like I will never know the young man in this photo. Another part of me knows that, of course, it is the man that he became who raised me. 
EDIT UPDATE 4/25/20: Good to look back at this now and to know that puzzle pieces have been falling slowly and surely into place. Though this blog is primarily about art, obviously it takes in other strands of life. It's in learning to balance the strands of life that an artist creates their best work, and I'm glad to have documented the time when I first received this photo.