Secret Lives

Having been friends with Glen doesn’t make me a hero. And yet it occurs to me now that, in the pieces I’ve written about him, it’s possible I’ve portrayed myself as such, as if my survival of his death from cancer at the age of eighteen, were somehow more important than what he suffered and the price he and his family ultimately paid. And, other than the fact that he painted almost to the very end, even while lying in bed, I have never really properly admired his work in those pieces. That would be an unforgivable oversight, were it not possible to rectify before I, too, shuffle off this mortal coil.

How, and when, did this boy, this young man of seventeen, become so adept in the art of oil-painting? Like me, the bulk of his time was soaked up by attendance at school. He had friends and girlfriends. He drove his car around town. Yet somehow, it came to him by the inspiration of a tiny black and white photograph of an old man in a magazine, to paint another old man, one he imagined, and frame it, and bring it to our house to show to my parents, in the hope they might buy it for forty dollars. It’s as if, all along, he was living a secret life, even when he was helping his father, who was a milkman, load his truck at the dairy for his early-morning route through town. And when a stack of full crates toppled and landed on the leg he would eventually lose, setting the grand finale of his life in motion, I doubt he knew how many paintings also lay before him, and how much they would come to mean to so many people. If nothing less, this is a reminder that we all have secret lives.

It would be true if I said he painted as a way to help pass the time. But his work was timeless. While he painted in a small bedroom in the family’s modest home on Cedar Lane, time was somewhere else — in the other rooms, perhaps, in the kitchen where his mother was making supper; or on the clock in the living room that reminded his father he must go to bed early because he had to get up in the middle of the night to make his milk deliveries. As anyone engaged in something they love doing knows, as long as the work goes on, time in the ordinary sense does not exist. That is how and when he learned. The rest — the vision, the talent, the urge, the movement towards perfection — is a mystery. This is something we all must explore, while we’re still here, and while we still can.

[ 1962 ]