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There’s this photo with a certain rarefied air about it that I keep looking at these days. It’s one that depicts my great grandmother wearing some sort of helmet that looks like it might have been better suited for an astronaut. The photo exudes a mystical quality, both in look and sentiment, as though it were a scene fabricated in a dream.

In the photo, my 90-year-old great grandmother is only moments separated from boarding the back seat of my Uncle Jimmy’s motorcycle for a last free-spirited ride along the northern California coast. Jimmy, donning a floral shirt befitting of Santa Cruz, California in its early 1980’s splendor, sits perched atop his motorcycle, seemingly waiting for my heavily bearded uncle John, camera in hand, to finish delivering a last instruction to my great grandma about mounting the bike.

But the thing that always catches my attention about this photo isn’t the majesty of the scene unfolding around its bottom right-hand corner.

Dad the Artist

Rather, it’s the image of my dad that gives me pause—him standing secluded off in the upper left-hand corner of the photo, his face marked with a look of patient observance which demonstrates that he was acutely aware of the unspoken significance of the moment that was about to unfold before his eyes. My thoughts have been consumed of late by imagining what must have been passing through his mind at that exact moment.

As I examined the photo more closely—past the faces of my relatives in their youthful exuberance, I began to recognize the face of the dad I had always known. From the first moment I can remember, I have always known that look of patient observance. You see, my dad is an artist by trade, but to know him well, as I do, is to find art in his life, even before it became his profession.

It’s found in the exotic coast of Northern California and the lights and bustle of Brooklyn, New York, both of which he left behind in order to form words into vows and attach them to a once farm girl from small-town Nebraska. Art is found today in the relationship he still has with the once farm girl, now turned incredible woman and selfless mother whom he has called his wife for nearly 35 years.

His art is found in the lives of two boys he continues to mold with each passing year, oft despite their stubbornness and unwillingness to be shaped.

Dad and Andy

It’s found in that patented patience observance with which a dad who loves the multifarious splendors of art so dearly helped his son with countless art projects—a son who then and still now at 27-years-old considers stick-appendages as his most accurate portrayal of the human figure.

As I sit at my desk today, six days separated from a father-son road trip up that regal and poetic California coast my dad once called home, I look with far-gazing eyes out my window—eyes filled with visions of the few days we will spend alone together retracing the steps of his youth, eyes ready for watching and gleaning the surely innumerable future lessons he will teach me in the art of patient observance, and eyes which remember a childhood with the artist I am so blessed to have had.

Here’s to you, dad.

Happy Father’s Day.

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