My earliest memory involves my mother and father at the dinner table. I am sitting in a high chair. I cannot distinguish any voices, it is all visual. My father suddenly looks up from his plate, mouths some words, and then throws his plate across the table as he gets up and goes to his reclining chair to smoke a cigarette. My mother does and says nothing in this memory. The only other memory of this moment is my mother bringing my father a cup of coffee as he sits in his recliner watching television.

It was not the last time a scene like this would occur. Always ending in a similar manner.

The other early memory of around the same period is me sitting on a billiard table as my father laughs and drinks with his friends. It appears to be a dark bar or billiard hall. I remember not liking this place, and feeling the cigarette smoke as it covered everything.

I do not remember my father having any friends we would frequent often. He avoided long term friendships, preferring to use people as he needed and then discarding them. My mother on the other hand, loved to meet new people and to create long term relationships.

My mother came from a prominent family with Jewish heritage. Something I would not know until much later. She was educated in one of the best Catholic boarding schools in the countryside, She had long curly black hair and an olive complexion. She had an easy smile. What she did not have, by choice, was knowledge in the kitchen.

My father was from a rural area, with only a third grade education, a strict Catholic upbringing, and an arrogance that made everyone believe he was either a consummate renaissance man, or a poorly educated first rate wannabe. My mother believed the former, initially.

My father was not a bad person, he was simply a product of circumstance, or so I wanted to believe. He was capable of great generosity, genuine happiness, and tenderness. I would believe later to have experienced this tenderness first hand. Father was orphaned at the age of thirteen when grandfather passed away of an apparent stroke. I say apparent as there was no way to know in that rural area what really had occurred, stroke was a common conclusion. He was not the oldest, that honor would go to my aunt Rachel, he was however the first born male. He was made to take charge of the family affairs by my grandmother. This had given him responsibility and authority like never before. There is an image of my father before grandfather died that shows the entire family. In that image my father has a prominent smile, and no moustache as of yet, I would never see him smile like that in real life, and to me he always had a moustache. Aside from aunt Rachel there were three younger sisters Ana, Elisa and Abigail, along with one younger brother, Fernando. Father was a very financially savvy individual, who would watch every penny with the precision of a well trained accountant. He had managed to purchase property at the edge of the town where his mother, my grandmother, lived, and another property in the city of Guadalajara that he developed into two apartment homes on the second level and commercial space on the first floor. He had moved the family into a house big enough that he could rent part of it. Through it all he did not allow for any meddling in his financial affairs by my mother. Everything was in his name and it would remain that way.

My mother had graduated from her finishing school with a degree in accounting. She had left her town to follow my father to Los Angeles, where they initially rented an apartment. Her family had been against her marriage to my father, she chose to ignore them, they did the same to her from then on. My maternal grandmother had died of pneumonia when mother was five years old. It was after this that her father had placed her in a boarding school run by nuns, from this time forward she would spend all her time at the convent, until she graduated. She knew little of the world outside the convent growing up. Vacations were spent with the nuns and she would travel with them wherever they went. My maternal grandfather was still alive when I was born, but I have no memory of him, we never met.  Mother had one brother, my uncle Manuel, he had grown up with my grandfather. There are two images I remember of my mother when she was a small girl. In one image she sits besides my grandmother, dressed in a native outfit and looking rather sad because they did not let her eat from the basket of fruit she carried. In another image she sits with uncle Manuel, behind her one can see the figure of a woman holding her steady in the chair, a woman with long flowing black hair. I was told this was one of her aunts, as the image was taken shortly after my grandmother had died. In both images she is a cheeky round faced beautiful little girl.

My parents met by chance, as I suppose all couples do. My uncle Manuel was dating aunt Rachel, and often my mother would accompany him on a visit.  My father, I would later find, had asked my mother out on a dare. A dare he would later would tell me, took him all the way to the altar, but that story, would come later.

No parents are perfect, and the parent child bond is many times a forced one. At times the bond is a well coordinated dance, at times a chaos of emotions and misunderstandings, always, however, a necessary connection.

art is anything but a supernatural process, and is anything but easy, it is work. and if it is meant to be displayed or shared it is even more work. so called art, even from artistic “naturals” that does nothing but stay within the walls of their own space, does nothing to elevate the spirit, or at the very least the questions, of anyone but its creator. art is meant to be criticized, admired, questioned, derided, but most of all shared.

and sharing art requires not only work in preparation but mental preparation for everything that it entails. it is after all a piece of ourselves we are offering to the world. a hard fought piece of ourselves that took work to get here, not through some magical trance, but hard work late at night and while your eyes are tired, while your mind says ‘write. paint. photograph, create!’ and your body says ‘rest. sleep, tomorrow’.