The Grandchildren Know Nothing

 April 27, 2023

   What is it about linen postcards that give off a soothing feeling? Is it the softness of the colors? Is it the dreamlike effects? Is it the damn linen?

   Clines Corners On Old Route 66

   The rains came and the wind blew. That's how I knew I was home.

The Head of Railroad Canyon

at El Trovatore Hill

   This is a scene, above, I looked at almost every day when my father opened a new Phillips 66 service station across the street from the El Trovatore Motel, on Route 66, in 1963. And, here is a painting it took me 15 years to finish of this same scene, only a century earlier. It was commissioned by my Kingman compadre, Toby Orr, but it sat unfinished in my slacker file until this morning when I spied it and finished it off. My 66 mentor, Jim Hinkley told me how Toby was doing so much to help the Kingman restoration cause and I thought to myself, well, if Toby can work for a good cause, so can I!

The Beale Expedition Heads

Into Railroad Canyon

Got the following from my son, Tomas, in Japan.

   "A story happens and fades and no one tells it. And yet somewhere, someone lives on, afternoons are hot and Christmases come, that person dies and there is a new slab with a name on it in the graveyard. Two or three people, a husband, a brother, a mother, still bear the light, the legend, in their heads for a few more years and then they die too. For the children it remains only like an old film, the out-of-focus aura of a vague face. The grandchildren know nothing. And other people forget. Neither a name nor a memory nor even an empty space is left. Nothing.

   "But sometimes fate is fortuitous. The burning of a barn in Alamos leads to the discovery of an old safe. And in that safe, a diary. And just like that, a legend is reborn, brought back to life to travel once again amongst the imaginations of the living." 

—"The Bass Saxophone", the preface to a novella about Jazz in German occupied Ukraine