Page 55 - WTP XII #3

As he grew feebler, more dependent and docile—lit- erally unable to push us away—we grew bolder. Hug- ging him hello and goodbye, kissing a stubbly cheek as he squinched his eyes tight and craned to escape, like a child avoiding a lip-sticked auntie.
“I love you, Dad,” we would say.
Eventually, his inexpressive resolve eroded, if only to end the yawning awkwardness that followed our dec- larations.
“Likewise,” he began to mutter, as if to put an end to an unseemly topic.
A few times I called him on my own to arrange a visit on weekends when my sisters were busy.
“Oh, it’s you,” he once said. “What do you want?” “I was thinking I’d drive down, to come see you.”
“Oh really. How about you wait until your sisters can come too.”
It was more enjoyable when the three of us were together. Dour juxtaposed with good-natured wasn’t nearly so dour. Surrounded by my sisters, I could be comic relief, a foil. A role I’d learned from my father. Maybe that’s what bugged him, looking at me was too much like staring into a mirror. Or perhaps it was simpler than that. Two halting, prickly conversation- alists don’t add up to a good time.
~
I’m alone in my upstairs office. Writing about him, again. Joseph Flavius Rice (1918 – 2011).
I sense him watching, judging me, but not enough to stop digging.
I’ve spent the years since his death excavating his life, sifting the scant physical remains for clues, trying to understand what made him tick, why he made art and never shared it beyond the family.
I consider the pieces of my father in my possession—
paintings, sketches, ceramics, the few photos that have fallen into my hands, anything I was able to
beg, borrow or steal. Much of it now pinned to cork boards, hanging on the walls, on shelves in glass- fronted display cabinets, as if it constitutes some rare, museum-quality collection, as if he were the last known representative of a lost civilization.
It seems unconscionable, that all this might be lost, that he might never receive the recognition I believe he deserves. Recognition he never sought, never wanted, or at least never admitted to.
~
In his later years, as his health began to decline, I galvanized my sisters and our older children into ac- tion, organizing family missions to stage and photo- graph every piece of art I could lay hands to. On one occasion, when his wife was safely across the country visiting her daughter and Dad was hospitalized after a stroke, we seized the opportunity to photograph the contents of his home.
I created a website, even copyrighted a dozen iconic pieces in our family’s name—if an unknown artist’s images can be said to be iconic—predicting that once the photographs were on the internet, the images would be stolen, misused and misattributed. In my fevered imagination, I pictured t-shirts, postcards, dish towels and posters popping up all over the world if I didn’t do something.
Those early photo sessions proved prophetic, though not in the way I imagined.
Dad left no will, or so his wife claimed. Within weeks of his death in 2011, she sold their home and moved to Maryland to be near her daughter, taking much of their furniture and Dad’s art with her, as well as the box of his cremains. What she didn’t take was donated or dis- carded before we had the opportunity to retrieve any mementos—one of his signature cardigans or vests, his Columbo raincoat, or some of his art supplies.
A number of the pieces I’d copyrighted, paintings that hung in our childhood home in San Francisco’s Sunset District, were among those that moved cross-country. While I don’t imagine we’ll see the paintings again in this life—efforts to communicate with his wife and her children after he died proved unsuccessful—we have the photographs.
We do have the Green Man, what I consider his most iconic image. It’s been mine since college, only be-
(continued on next page)
48