MEMO

"The previous week had left me drained. I had gone back to the town of my early years in a way I could never have imagined -- to see my father laid to rest. Now there would be no way to say what I was never capable of saying before. Growing up, the cultural and generational differences had been insurmountable -- nothing but the sound of voices, colorless unnatural speech. My father, who was plain speaking and straight talking had said, "Isn't an artist a fellow who paints?" when told by one of my teachers that his son had the nature of an artist. It seemed I' always been chasing after something, anything that moved -- a car, a bird, a blowing leaf -- anything that might lead me into some more lit place, some unknown land downriver. I had not even the vaguest notion of the broken world I was living in, what society could do with you.

When I left home, I was like Columbus going off into the desolate Atlantic. I'd done that and I'd been to the ends of the earth -- to the water's edge -- and now I was back in Spain, back where it all started, in the court of the Queen with a half-glazed expression on my face, with even the wisp of a beard. "What's with the decoration?" one of the neighbors who had come to pay their respects said, pointing to my face. In the short time I was there, it all came back to me, all the flimflam, the older order of things, the Simple Simons -- but something else did, too -- that my father was the best man in the world and probably worth a hundred of me, but he didn't understand me."

Chronicles Volume I