For You, It's Love!

20" x 16"

oil on panel

If I could distill my childhood into one image it might be this one. My grandmother's favorite flower was lily of the valley. We had them in the backyard and after she died my grandfather would pick them for me, as well as other flowers from the garden. Her name was Lillian and his Mundy, a nickname, as he was born at 11:59 on a Monday night and his twin at 12:01 on a Tuesday. My grandparents called each other "Pest" and I remember him being scolded for tasting tomato sauce on the stove from the cooking spoon. Even though I was six when my grandmother died, her warning to him regarding other women was etched in my brain, "You can look, but don't touch." She died on their anniversary at fifty-five and he missed her ever after.

It is his hand in the painting, a construction worker's hand, so much bigger than mine and so familiar. We lived together and when I was a little girl I held it whenever we went places together, which was often. The hand is painted in a way that shows human suffering; its mass is in contrast to the delicate flower. There were thirteen children in his Italian first-generation family. His younger sister was run over by a trolley in front of their home at the age of five, and his twin brother died of a burst appendix at fifteen. My grandfather always said that his brother was the smarter one and neater, describing the way Bobby parted his hair just so with his comb. A picture of the two of them when they were about five shows them with their arms around each other, my grandfather easy to spot with his tongue sticking out. After those deaths, my grandfather was the youngest. I think he always missed the noise of living in such a full house and maybe tried to make up for it by being so loud himself. As the only grandchild, I was the apple of his eye and I have never heard anyone introduced with more pride than when he introduced me as his "little granddaughter". I can't remember even one time when he wanted me to leave him alone. As a parent, it strikes me as rather remarkable. The painting squeezes all this narration into one image with feeling, part memory, part personal icon. Without the back story, it is an allegory that small acts of tenderness matter.