Posts Tagged ‘parents’

Father’s Day was last Sunday and tomorrow would have been my father’s birthday.  I feel really bad that I’ve never talked about him.  Not that I would have talked about my mom, but since she killed herself it eclipsed everything on the family front.  I’ll relink that story here for newer readers but I took it off the menu because it’s not something you want in your face all the time.  Anyway…

Both my parents were New Yorkers and architects.  They moved to Vermont, then DeSilva Island, CA, where I was born.  When I was 4, my dad got a teaching position at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, so my parents, my brother and I moved to the bible belt – a strange place for a family of Jewish athiests/agnostics.  But it became home.

Btw, it’s funny that when I talk about my father, I call him “my father” or “my dad”, but he was neither of those things, he was always Papa or Pop.

He became a professor of architecture; I loved visiting him at work, hanging around those giant marble halls where everything seemed so important and at the same time intensely creative.  He loved technology and I remember him being thrilled when the University got one of those humongous computers where he, the 2-finger typist, could happily entertain himself for hours.  It’s safe to say I get my humor and technological curiosity from him.

His students loved him.  I still have a t-shirt made so many decades ago when his entire 5th-year class surprised him by wearing his face across their chests – the “Mort” shirts.  His friendships were deep, his personality self-deprecating, loving and kind.

When I was 12, my parents divorced, ending that screaming match of a marriage.   He moved just a few blocks away so we were still able to spend quality time together, but abbreviated as it is when you’re not living with a person anymore.  I didn’t notice it at the time, busy growing up as I was.  The suck of it is that I moved to NYC when I was 17 and didn’t go home that often, so my memories are cloudy and mostly through the eyes of a child.

He died in 1988 at age 61 of a heart attack.  He’d been remarried for less than a year which was heartbreaking in its own right.

But I’m not writing this with sadness in mind.  He’d have gotten a huge kick out of all the adventures I’ve had, am having.

Anyway, that’s about all I wanted to say, just to acknowledge him.  Love you, Pop.

My mom, Eleanor Karp, was an original. A weird, crazy, difficult, deeply intelligent woman born and raised in NY, she was an architect, writer and amateur scientist with an impressive list of achievements, though “painter” is what best describes her contribution to the world.

A hermit, mom rarely left her apartment. Every 3 weeks or so she’d get groceries, or sometimes she’d go on a hunt for something odd to make a slide for her microscope (the acquiring of a sheep’s brain was the last big event), but she was generally always at home. So on Thanksgiving 2006, when neither me nor my brother could get ahold of her to wish her a happy holiday, we knew something was wrong.

The next day, cops entered the apartment and found her on the bed, where she’d stabbed herself in the stomach several times.

Me and Nick, my boyfriend at the time, hurried down to Arkansas where we met up with my brother and nephew to take care of her belongings and clean the apartment.  The awfulness was confined to a small area – anatomy was one of her interests; she knew what she was doing.

She left behind 90 panels of large paintings, 4ft. x 6ft., all done in oil on masonite (she painted on both sides of some) that she’d been working on for decades, stacked thick against the walls of her tiny apartment.

The paintings are incredible. I made a website for her with the intention of getting representation or gallery interest but I’ve since changed my mind.  I don’t have the energy or heart to think about something that large, I’d rather forget about it and the responsibility.  So aside from the pieces my brother and I have displayed in our homes, the rest will probably stay in storage forever.

Here is a 4-panel piece and my favorite of all her paintings, I always just called it “The Subway Painting”. The little girl and the woman sitting on the train are my mom and her mom. My grandfather’s in it, my brother and I are in it, even my father (whom mom divorced and never spoke to afterwards) is in it. This photo doesn’t do it justice, it’s pieced from 4 photos because the whole thing is 16 feet wide.

Closeup inside the train

After it happened, I began re-evaluating my life, looking for something to jump wholeheartedly into, something to keep my mind occupied and at the same time, clear my head.  So I bought a bunch of exercise DVDs and two months after that, for no reason I can fathom, a pair of running shoes.  That’s how it began.