The Gift of Your Brush

The Gift

When I was a freshman in college, I wrote a rather florid and grandiose essay that impressed the instructor and garnered an A. My father was working as a painter at the time, not the on-canvas type, but the house and wall variety. Much of it was pure drudgery, but murals were his specialty and in these he created art.Anyway, he looked at my paper and read all the comments and was so proud of me that he took it with him the next day to show it to the man whose walls he was painting -- an educated man, someone he respected.The essay came back to me (in those long ago days before post-its) with a note to my father still taped to the cover sheet. I remember all this with astonishing clarity because I kept that note, and I came upon it recently while clearing out old files.

Here it is. See the fold lines? I actually carried it in my wallet for a time. It says ‘God has granted the gift of your brush to your daughter’s pen.

’‘What he doesn’t know is that I can write too,’ said my father, in his paint-splattered coveralls.

And that was true, for he was a writer, and so much more, and in one sudden stroke I saw how much of himself he had forfeited for survival. He was proud of me, of course, but I saw, too, that a tiny bit of envy inhabited his pleasure, and even a sort of competitiveness, for he coveted the praise and prospects that might await me but which he knew were no longer within his reach. My father had not met his own promise, and life had landed him far from where he wanted to go.

So I may have been granted the gift of his brush but with it came a gash to the heart, a sign to mark my membership in the tribe of humankind.And the real story here is about lost dreams and potential unmet, about talent un-nurtured and great hopes interred in unmarked graves.Here's a moment of silence for those.Followed by that old familiar sadness for which there is no remedy but defiant optimism and the courage to change.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the agave that never bloomed in thirty years has suddenly sprouted gloriously. Things come to fruition in their time. If I still hold that brush, let the painting begin, may its colors be bright.