Pacific Sunset

We're getting ready for a quick trip to California which will include two nights in Monterey. I have been there before.

After consultation with my father, let me share a timeline. In 1962, MoM saw an ad in the local paper for a teaching job and went back to work full time. My brother was 9 (soon 10), I was 8 and my sister 4. Hypothesis: The extra income allowed our family to travel. In the summer of 1963, our family including MoM's mother, Grandma P., went across the country in a Chevrolet station wagon pulling a trailer. We first went to L.A. and saw Disneyland and then up the coast headed for family visits in the San Francisco area where my grandfather on my father's side was born. Along the way we stopped in Monterey. Hypothesis: Grandma P. and I have looked out on a sunset at Cyprus Point. The next August I visited Grandma P. Hypothesis: MoM, driven crazy by my sister and me fighting all the time, sent me packing. She was distraught over having to go back to work but felt trapped at home with the kids.

I was named after my Grandma P. She sewed and knitted. She liked to travel and chatted easily with people she met. When widowed in her fifties, she learned to drive and took up painting. She painted china and went on to oil paint landscapes. Sitting in the comfort of her own home, she copied postcards from places she loved and artists she admired.

So in August, 1964, at the age of nine, she taught me to oil paint. I can't be sure, but I suppose that she picked up a postcard while we were in Monterey the summer before. Although my name is on the lower corner, this picture is without doubt in the style of Grandma P. I have included the label from the back of the canvas. It is in her recognizable penmanship, each line running into the margin.

I loved my Grandma P. She was the sort to relieve her daughter from the care of one of her unruly children. She was the sort to make that child feel special and talented and creative. I went home with a painting of a memory and memory of a painting.