Painted in Brooklyn, NY and Painesville, Ohio during the spring and summer of 2023.

The fireplace from my grandfather’s house, my mother’s father. Returning to Ohio from California in the late 1960s he bought a century old farmhouse on Euclid Avenue in Willoughby. He sold books and antiques out of the front room and called it The Jug and Mug House. After awhile he concentrated more on books, specifically poetry and rare children’s books, and saved the antique stuff for local flea markets. He had a large sign painted and put up out front, The World of Books. Half the house was filled with books, the downstairs front room and two rooms upstairs. The paper backs he kept in the garage were spread out on folding tables on the front lawn and sold on Saturdays. There was a sign beside the front door printed with the days of the week he added the opening and closing hours in red marker; Monday thru Friday - MAYBE, Saturday - ALWAYS, Sunday - NEVER. He was a project manager for Tishman Construction and later worked for United Way Services—selling books was a hobby and a social outlet.

The fire in his living room was going all the time, even on cooler nights in the summer. When I was a kid and well into my teens he and I split wood together, trimming trees and piling the logs and kindling onto the porch. Those were my work gloves there on the floor in the left hand corner near the little bull terrier door stopper. I’d throw them there after the days work was over. The kindling we’d gather got the fire going, small logs kept the fire going throughout the day, larger logs he called “night pieces” burned throughout the night.

He used to pull the mantle off the fireplace and paint it every so many years but toward the end of his life he let it go. The flue in the chimney didn’t work right and smoke would fill the house. The smoke was so thick there were times visiting him my eyes stung and watered so badly I could hardly keep them open. He’d sit in his easy chair staring into the fire without it seeming to bother him at all. The nearer things were to the fireplace the darker and more soot stained they were. All of the books reeked of smoke and so did he—we’d walk into a McDonald’s down the street for lunch and I’d hear people ask each other if they smelled a fire. A doctor friend of his at the funeral told me he was sure that the carbon monoxide from the smoke was what made him sick.

The portrait of the young woman on the mantle was my mother, it’s her high school graduation portrait. The relationship between my mother and her father was complicated to the extreme. He was physically and verbally abusive, but as she put it he could also be a lot of fun. In ways they were sort of similar, and there was real love between them but his abuse of her was cruel and unrelenting, no good he ever did for her offset the bad. Every object surrounding her is familiar to me from my earliest childhood, a theatre of masculinity, absurd bachelorism and macho insensitivity, relics from a bygone era. I’ve kept these things of my grandfather’s all these years, almost a quarter century now since he died, despite whatever more obvious meaning these things do or don’t have and as absurd as I can see it all is put together, it’s all a part of my childhood in that contextless way a child accepts their surroundings and eventually applies only a mysterious nostalgia to it. The stupid manliness of it all is obvious, the simmering darkness beneath it all that tormented my mother is maybe less obvious, but there’s also a certain eccentric charm that could make anyone smile or at least view it with some curiosity, which many visitors to the house did. After my grandfather went into a nursing home my uncle sold the house and it was leveled by the city. The property is now paved over with a parking lot and a cheap retail chain store called Dollar General. The mostly monochromatic grayish brown coloring was meant to reference ashes, the powdered residue left by only the strongest materials, wood for instance, or bone.

The text written in long hand across the bottom of the painting is in my mother’s hand from a letter she wrote to me on her mother’s birthday—her mother had died two years earlier and she had just gotten her father’s cremated remains from the funeral home the day before.

October 6, 2001

Hi Tom,

Today is Gram’s birthday and of course I got her the usual yellow Rose with Heather. I picked up Grandpa yesterday and he and Gram are together with Gus in between them as a buffer zone.

Now I can talk to Grandpa and Gram.

Uncle Mike told me a saying that he wonders if you could somehow fit in your next magazine

“Ashes to Ashes

Dust to Dust

If the Lord won’t take you

The Devil Must.

Lots of Love from “Sue and the Girls”

A John Singer Sargent painting in the collection of the Brooklyn Museum was printed on the front of the card she sent. A watercolor titled Melon Boats, dark ships with light golden sails float in blue shimmering water somewhere in Haifa, Palestine (present-day Israel).

I was living in Brooklyn, New York then as I do now, the terrorist attacks now referred to as 9/11 happened less than a month prior to this letter being written. I vividly recall that beautifully sunny September 11th day and the terrifying images including watching from my apartment window business people walk back int the neighborhood from the World Trade Center covered in ashes, moving slowly in a shocked daze. I drove to my grandfather’s funeral that same September and as we crossed the Brooklyn Bridge the mountainous debris pile from the fallen towers was still smoldering on the horizon.