Dad has always served as a touchstone.

A stone crazy colorful rock

Through his eyes I can judge the value of a thing and weigh the quality of an experience. I think the most important lesson he taught me was that there is something to learn every single day.  Even a bad experience was what he called, “tuition”. As a young dad, when he came to wish my sisters and me goodnight, he would ask us to tell him something that we had learned in the course of our waking hours. We had to come up with something. It could be grand, such as being nice to people is important, or trivial like the way a frog would change it’s colors between states of wet and dry. It was a demand to be awake and aware, and to never lose the curiosity of new people, places or things. He taught us about the stars, and took us around the world and read Rootabaga stories by Sandburg and recited the Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by TS Eliot.

I have learned much today at the Vermont Studio center…

In the room people come and go

Talking of Michelangelo