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20+ years ago, three ladies started art classes with our teacher Stan: myself, Regina, and Carol. Carol died a few years ago and now we have Helen.
Every Thursday we girls would drive up the mountains to an old gold-mining town and meet Stan at a park. There was an old dusty building there that we used as a classroom. The room looked out on a parking lot with a big, slouching grey dumpster.
Every Thursday as we labored and sweat together, drawing endless tennis shoes with multiple laces, a huge grimy trash truck would lumber loudly up to the dumpster, open the truck's gaping maw and scoop and dump the clanking, banging dumpster trash into the truck's belly. And every time that truck did its clamoring, shrieking business, Stan would fly into a fury. Every time.
Stan is now 80+ and cranky and as he says, he’s a curmudgeon. Regina reminds me he was that before he met his wife Annie.
Stan says that with
them both in their 60s it wasn’t a date and it wasn't love at first sight, but the second time they accidentally saw each other the two of them fell spontaneously into each others arms and hugged and he said he thought, “I will never leave this woman.”
Stan is an excellent artist. After he’s dead we assure him he’s
going to be very famous because that’s how it is for artists.
... We have to die to become popular.
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Venus
