TRUE STORY IN THE NEXT PARAGRAPH! (to be followed by a excerpt of my novel, Death at La Osa: A Pueblo Tribal Police Mystery).
In ca. 2018, my daughter, Wendy, and I stopped for a light dinner and drinks at the Adobe Bar at the Taos Inn, in Taos, New Mexico. I had written Death at La Osa and was editing time and time again my writing. Knowing that David Gary Suazo’s paintings were on my mind when I was writing pages 47-48, I had decided to let Wendy read those pages, sitting in the bar with Suazo’s paintings on the wall. I wanted to let Wendy see part of the process in creating a scene. She read the two pages and was smiling and complimentary (hard to critique your father’s work in a bar after a Margarita…or maybe not). Wendy looked at Suazo’s paintings on the wall and smiled again. When we paid our bill and were walking out, she said, “Wait a minute, Dad.” She walked back to the bar, took ‘Midnight Star Ladder’ off the wall and went to the front-desk clerk at the inn and said, “I want to buy this painting.” Wendy bought the painting right then and there, and it now hangs in the living room of her home in Taos. As a writer AND father, I try to comprehend writing, art, and father-daughter relationships. The simple truth is this: Wendy purchased the painting in an act of love for me and my writing. When I first saw her at birth through the labor room window in Amarillo, she changed my life forever. Yo te amo, mi hija–siempre, siempre, siempre [1].
“The table of six at Ojo Verde Inn began to eat their food and those facing Paseo de Norte looked out of the window next to the street and saw eighteen wheelers carrying logs from fresh cuts in the Carson National Forest. Snow had frozen to the bark of the fresh cut logs…. Those at the table that faced away from the street glanced upward at vigas in the ceiling and at artwork for sale on the wall. The prices for artwork of local Ojo Verde artists were priced to sell and the Pinion-Buttermilk Pancake woman eyed the brilliantly-hued painting of the Tulona Pueblo….
“I will buy that painting and make a place for it in my living room,” the Pinon-Buttermilk Pancake woman said to herself. When brunch was over, she went to the front desk of the Ojo Verde Inn, and out of her billfold she carefully placed seven-hundred dollars on the counter, buying the painting outright. As time went on in her life, she never regretted the purchase and her children rotated the painting amongst themselves after she died…. The Pinon-Buttermilk Pancake woman gave an additional tip to her server at the Inn because she wanted to remember and enlarge the morning at brunch as a generous morning, a time punctuated with giving, and with art.
An excerpt from the novel by Jack Matthews, Death at La Osa.
[1] Translation is, “I love you, daughter–always, always, always.”
Sage to Meadow ~ Jack Matthews 