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I don't take pictures or paint, but I guess I do write a bit. This is a true story from my life, from a few years ago.
The Story About The Horses
My step-dad married my mom when I was 2. We did not hit it off. Our relationship was strained at best for most of my life. I used to dread Father's Day, because I'd have to go read all those cards... "thanks for being there for me, Dad", "thanks for all the times you..." and try to find one that just made a joke about some vague thing. I always felt so gypped. For four years in my 20's, we didn't speak at all.
After that, we kind of started over. We still had our issues, and my friend Robin and I had long talks about our crazy parents. She was working on a play about her relationship with her mom and we were planning to do a staged-reading at one of the theaters in Hollywood. The play was called "Lift" and one of the characters was a little girl who dealt with her abusive mother by retreating to her attic room and drawing horses on the walls. The little girl could never get the legs right though, and they always appeared unfinished. I thought this was a brilliant metaphor for that feeling of not being able to move on that can haunt you long after you leave an abusive situation.
In January of '01, my mom had been having serious health problems and finally was diagnosed as having had a fairly impressive heart attack. She was life-flighted from their home in Az to Phoenix for an emergency quadruple bypass. I dropped everything in LA and went to Phoenix. Even after all the crap years, I couldn't stand the thought of Dad sitting there alone while Mom was in surgery, or if something went wrong.
We stayed with 'internet friends' of mine in Phoenix, and had a lot of time to talk during the week after the surgery. One morning in the car, he asked me about my acting and was saying that I needed to get back to that. I told him that as a kid, I had really needed acting, because it was a way of getting approval from people, but that as an adult, I had outgrown some of that, and I just didn't feel the drive to do it anymore. At that point, he said something unlike anything he had ever said to me. He told me that he knew that I didn't get the approval that I probably wanted from him, but that he had always been proud of me. (I damn near wrecked the car from shock.) I told him about the play that I was in, and that Robin had been gracious enough to let me play 'her' in it. He liked the horse metaphor, too. He was glad to hear I was going to perform, and that 'approval' stuff.. what do you know? It's ok.
Mom got better, they went home, I came back to LA... and 8 weeks later, Dad was fixing the plumbing under their house and died of a ruptured anneurism. I again dropped everything and went back to Az to help my mom get her things together. I called Robin on my way out of town to give her a heads-up, because this was only 3 weeks before the show. She called me mid-week to see how things were and if I thought I'd still be able to do the show. I told her I thought it was the thing to do.
Going through a box of old stuff, I had found, among Dad's things, a painting of running horses, their legs obscured by the dust, looking unfinished.
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