THEY ARE CLOSER THAN WE THINK

When in high school, I painted portraits and painted all of the kids I babysat for.

I was to be the artist in the family or at least one of them, as my younger sister, Cynthia was very talented. I usually worked with pastels and watercolors. But then I changed over to working with oil paint and there was this one painting that I did in black, dark brown and reds. There was no subject for this picture and I did it from my imagination. My mom finally came upstairs to see what I had been painting after a week or so. She gasped, “You painted my father!” Grandpa Livingston had died the year before when I was only 14. I got really spooked and haven’t painted since!

I didn’t know that Grandpa was that sick in 1964 and after recovering from Rheumatic Fever and two months of bed rest, I went back to school for the last 2 weeks of freshman year. The first night I could not sleep and kept weeping. Mom came in first and asked if anything happened at school to upset me. I said, “no.” I didn’t know why I was crying. Then Dad came in to check on me through the night. I kept saying that I didn’t know why and softly wept myself to sleep. Dad answered the phone ringing early the next morning only to find that Grandpa had passed away during the night. They are closer than we think…

I miss Grandpa Livingston and fondly remember his “tickle torture” sessions. We laughed until we cried. I loved the old house on Polk Street in Gary, Indiana, where this picture was taken of me on their from davenport filled with knotty pine wall paneling and bamboo furniture. He was an engineer and I watched him sketch at his engineering desk with beautiful colored pencils. Grandpa Wilbur T. Livingston is pictured here in October 1954 in Danville, Illinois while taking a last look and inspection of a power station that he designed.

My grandparents relocated to Florida in 1963 after he was hired to help design the space shuttle in Cape Canaveral.

Sadly, he passed just a year later…

“Death ends a life, not a relationship.”
~ Jack Lemmon