Happy Birthday Dad!

[Davey Do]

My Dad would have been 92 years old today, but passed away in 2013 at the age of 84.

Dad was great: hardworking, easy going, great sense of humor, and built like a brick wall. Dad's profession was a welder, but he was a great farmer, mechanic, architect, carpenter, artist, and bowler.

This is one of my favorite photos of Dad, an excerpt, taken in the Summer of 1979:

He and I were sitting on the porch playing our guitars. I was dating a young lady who was into photography and she snapped this picture.

Last Summer, I really got into paintings and sculptures. I had a piece of heavy old black tarp and stretched it across a frame made out of used treated lumber from my old porch.

I painted Dad's likeness on it and exhibited it on an easel I welded out of some old rusty metal fence posts.

 

 

This painting/sculpture symbolizes Dad, in that Dad was the Original Recycler. He could make anything out of junk and he loved the outdoors.

I see Dad just about every day now, as he sits near a tree next to the driveway at the entrance to my property.

Happy Birthday, Dad!

[meanmaryjean, DNP, RN]

My dad would have been 92 last week. He passed in 2016 - I miss him every day.

Good memories are priceless, right?  

[Davey Do]

Wow. Our Dads were the same age!

Oh yeah. Lots of priceless good memories!

I grew my moustache when I was 22 years old and didn't shave it off until I was in my 40's. I've shaved it off a couple of times and every time I looked into the mirror, I saw my Dad.

I did not realize how much we looked alike until then. Sometime shortly after Dad died, my Aunt gave me a picture of Dad that I had never seen before of him taken in 1944 at age 15. 

I compared it with my senior high school picture when I was 17, taken 30 years later, in 1974:

 

 

 

[amoLucia]

Belated birthday wishes for you & your Dads. I don't know if it's just something that's seasonal or 'pandemical' but I've been thinking & missing MY Dad quite a bit. He died in 2007. He'd be 97.

Davey - I really like that tarp photo of your Dad. I think he'd be impressed. Handsome man. I'd move it inside though.

 

[Davey Do]

8 hours ago, amoLucia said:

Davey - I really like that tarp photo of your Dad. I think he'd be impressed. Handsome man. I'd move it inside though.

That is all so sweet of you to say, amoLucia!

And thanks for the comment about the tarp painting, because it brings up some symbolism behind the art:

Dad was an outdoor person. He loved the outdoors, and I could go into great detail, but won't bore you with the particulars. But I do want to say that every piece of that painting/sculpture is, at the very least, 15 years old. The wood frame is at least 28 years old, and the fence posts maybe as old as 40. I found the tarp in a dumpster around 2000.

And everything, except the paint, has been outside that entire time.

That painting/sculpture, even if left outside, will most likely outlive me.

I must apologize, because I am so into this stuff, that I could go on and on about it. But let me end with something on the art of decay and my in depth studies: I once had a art junkyard  at the NW corner of my property, where it took six years for an upright piano to decompose to the point of falling apart.

For the last several years, the heavy bracket that held the hammers and strings in that piano, has been in my vegetable garden to support, mainly, cucumber plants.

That piano lives on, and serves a purpose, after about 25 years of being left outside.