I received an email this morning from my daughter featuring a photo of my old family house in Portland with the caption, "Look what they painted". Opening the photo, I found that the house, which had always sported a brown, natural wood finish from peak to garage, now features a bright orange garage with purplish doodling of some sort on the side and green trimming around the door.
My first thought was, "Oh my God, my Dad is turning in his grave!" My father, you see, was a basic colors sort of guy, and this looked like a throwback to the psychedelic 60s.
What I noticed most though, other than this bright new eyesore, was the weather--gray, gloomy, wet, dark. Took me right back to old Portland town, damp years of endless gloom. How accustomed I have become now to sunshine every day, interrupted by only brief fits of warm rain. They say that people who grow up in the tropics have trouble, if they happen to move to a western country, with sunlight deprivation, causing depression, lethargy, and so on. I get that. Merely looking at the photo was depressing to me!
Anyway, as it turned out, I was missing the whole point of the picture my daughter had sent. I had written back, mentioning that my father would be having a fit if he knew, to which she replied, "Never mind that! The picture on the wall is a giraffe!"
I looked again, wearing my reading glasses this time. Sure enough, there is a large purple giraffe on the orange garage wall. This is significant because my second wife, my daughter's mother, always called me a giraffe, because, she said, I was tall and slow and gentle.
Well now, that is a coincidence! Apparently my spirit lives on in that gloomy old hillside house--or at least on the side of the garage.
My first thought was, "Oh my God, my Dad is turning in his grave!" My father, you see, was a basic colors sort of guy, and this looked like a throwback to the psychedelic 60s.
What I noticed most though, other than this bright new eyesore, was the weather--gray, gloomy, wet, dark. Took me right back to old Portland town, damp years of endless gloom. How accustomed I have become now to sunshine every day, interrupted by only brief fits of warm rain. They say that people who grow up in the tropics have trouble, if they happen to move to a western country, with sunlight deprivation, causing depression, lethargy, and so on. I get that. Merely looking at the photo was depressing to me!
Anyway, as it turned out, I was missing the whole point of the picture my daughter had sent. I had written back, mentioning that my father would be having a fit if he knew, to which she replied, "Never mind that! The picture on the wall is a giraffe!"
I looked again, wearing my reading glasses this time. Sure enough, there is a large purple giraffe on the orange garage wall. This is significant because my second wife, my daughter's mother, always called me a giraffe, because, she said, I was tall and slow and gentle.
Well now, that is a coincidence! Apparently my spirit lives on in that gloomy old hillside house--or at least on the side of the garage.
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