He liked to paint pretty beach scenes and pictures of little boats bobbing on the water, which he named after his grandkids. One time he even painted a picture of this graceful ballerina in the midst of a pirouette.
The irony of this well-muscled tough cop painting a picture of a ballerina was lost on us at the time. He was not the cop who won 35 commendations for busting down doors on drug busts and other various acts of bravery. Not to us. Not inside our home.
I rarely saw my father depressed or angry around us. He was always a reassuring presence, ready to wrap us in his arms. He had these super masculine arms with solid muscles covered with dark hair. And he had this tattoo of a boxer on one arm.
Somehow I knew I would never have arms to match the masculinity of those arms, even though I checked my muscles in the mirror every day. I felt the terror that many young boys feel deep down in their gut – that I was born to disappoint my father. But here he was using those powerful arms and hands to paint a picture of a ballerina.
Painting pictures was a way for him to escape the difficult reality of living with my mom, who was bipolar. He never complained about her depressions, never blamed her. He would slip quietly down the basement to his paints, and his canvas, and his pretty ballerina.
His painting was a particular comfort to him once he retired from the force. Mom’s illness had made retirement a necessity after 20 years of patrolling the mean streets of this town, seven of them as a narcotics detective. He always talked wistfully of having wanted to put in that last 10 years. But painting pictures kept him going.
He was a dreamer. He was always certain that big things were on the horizon. Maybe they were just out of his reach right now, agonizingly outside his grasp, but he would snatch those dreams before they disappeared.
Mom was the practical one. She had to be to keep the house running, to make sure Dad’s dreams didn’t get us all into trouble. So she was stuck with the task of pouring cold water on those dreams sometimes, but even when she did it, her voice snapping him back to reality, I think she admired him for his dreams.
You see, no matter how silly and outrageous some of those dreams were, he made you believe they just might be possible. Sometime he got himself to believing that maybe he could sell one of his paintings for big money and then we’d all be rich.
That was how the four of us – Mom and Dad, my wife and I – went to the Cape May boardwalk one weekend, where local artists were displaying their pictures for sale. At first Dad was shy about the whole thing, and Mom might have thought we were encouraging what she regarded as just this side of insanity: the idea that Dad could actually sell one of these things that had been hanging in her basement.
As for Dad, I think he was scared – scared that maybe, brought face to face with the reality of whether his painting was any good, his dream would look kind of ridiculous.
It was the bluest of skies that day. The clouds were like big fleecy powder puffs overhead. There we were, the four of us, up there on the Cape May boardwalk surrounded by Dad’s paintings of beach scenes, still-life fruit and the ballerina. The boardwalk was filled with dreamers like Dad that day, all sitting nervously by their paintings, waiting for something to happen.
The minutes went by agonizingly and I was afraid Mom was going to say, "I told you so." But suddenly some people stopped to look at Dad’s paintings, and they asked him questions about them. That’s when I realized that my wife was right: Dad didn’t have to sell any paintings; he just needed some folks to show some appreciation of what he had turned out with those hard, gruff hands.
And that’s the way the rest of that afternoon went, with folks stopping and asking questions – and the fact that nobody bought one of Dad’s paintings, well, that just meant the dream was still just out of his reach, not that things weren’t going to be different next time.
He’s been gone over 20 years, and that picture of the ballerina is hanging in his granddaughter’s living room. And so how can we say his dream really didn’t come true?
Like Van Morrison once wrote about one of his dreams:
I close my eyes and sleep for love comes flowing streams of consciousness
Soft like snow, to and fro,
Let us go together, darlin’, way from the river to here and now
And carry it with a smile, bumper to bumper
Steppin’ lightly, just like a ballerina.
