Armadillos and Ghosts
Dad’s illustration of The English Armadillo
Mom is moving in with me in a few months. We’ve been working on organizing and going through Dad’s remaining belongings. To Mom’s great credit, she had done a great job of simplifying and does not have much to go through. She saved much of Dad’s stuff so that I could take some time to go through it. I’ve learned and re-learned a couple things about my Dad in this process.
Dad was a constant doodler and the boxes and art folios he had are filled with his random drawings, doodles, schematics, art he was trying to sell, art he was building on, and tons of half-done projects.
He was proud of the work he did for many different companies, and he kept some of the samples from across all that work. He was constantly quitting/getting fired from those companies and for some reason saved A MILLION copies of his resume. I think I’ve seen every iteration of his resume from the 80’s and 90’s.
He tried to publish a children’s book in the 70’s called The English Armadillo. I have not found a full, final copy but I have many of the illustrations. He saved several letters of correspondance from a publishing company in New York that he tried to sell it to. The letters were on the best kind of old fashioned stationary, total Mad Men vibes. They wanted about $3500 up front (in the 70’s!!) to publish it for him and he could not get the money together.
Dad was obsessed with ghosts, and he has an outline of a book that is basically a catalog of ghosts and how to deal with them. According to him, there are five types of ghosts: low level poltergeists, high level poltergeists, historical ghosts, nurturing or loving ghosts and malevolent ghosts.
I also came across a ridiculous number of receipts from the Chevron on Ina in 1995. All of them are for gas, “concessions”' and cigarettes. The cigarettes are listed at $1.99. WHAT.
Dad had a cartoon called Mr. Blobbo that he wrote many, many strips for. Dad’s Blobbo humor is relatively gentle, irreverent, absurd and also very everyman. Many of Mr Blobbo’s adventures were about working a boring job and thinking of ways to escape or rebel in small ways.
I have so many complicated feelings about my Dad. Spending time with his creativity feels like both a gift and a frustration. I can see how Dad struggled with being stuffed in a corporate box and forced to turn his artistry into something that paid the bills. But as a kid, I felt the overwhelming anxiety of Dad being in and out of work all the time and my parents constantly fighting about money. I wish Dad could’ve lived his artist dreams and I also wished my parents didn’t have to struggle as much as they did. Despite his many corporate boxes, my Dad found a lot of ways to express himself creatively. That is a lesson I can take for my own life.
