A transcendent moment to last a whole life.

I keep trying to tell my life’s story here. But looking back over these pages, I don’t see a lot of story. I see a lot of life, but not much story.

I’ve been too distracted by Today to give Yesterday its due. I suppose it’s just the age-old puzzle: how do you do something with your life while you're also living it?

That was certainly my dad’s dilemma. As a kid, he dreamed of being an ornithological painter like Audubon. He filled notebooks with awkward pencil sketches of every bird in town. He sometimes used grass and flowers and berries and dirt for paint. The faded pictures have a strange beauty even now, like smudged portraits by Mother Nature herself.

Dad gave all that up when he discovered engines. He found mechanical beauty under the hood that almost rivaled anything he saw in nature—and it paid a lot better. So he put down the paintbrush and picked up the socket wrench.

Yet, as always happens with our passions, he never forgot. Something inside him held onto the brush, year after year. And one day, not long after I was born, he started painting again. Not birds this time, but landscapes.

His hero was the 19th-century painter Thomas Moran. Dad wanted to travel around the country like Moran and paint those landscapes he felt were too big for a camera.

Don’t get me wrong. Dad stood in awe of the national park photos of Ansel Adams. “I love to look through his eyes,” Dad told Mom. “He shows me the land’s secrets. He shows me what it is. But only paint can show me how it feels.”

I have all 24 of dad’s landscapes. Most are small oils, 2’ by 2’ or 2’ by 4’. But one life-changing May, while mom and I hiked around Yosemite Valley, dad spent ten days in camp, trying to capture Half Dome on a 10’ wide by 12’ tall canvas. He could see it right there, through a gap in the trees.

Right there, close enough to touch.

But he couldn’t capture the feeling, not to his satisfaction. How could he, with so little practice? He grew so frustrated that he threw the brushes into the campfire that night. The next morning, he was back at the canvas again, but this time armed only with a palette knife. That's all he had left.

Mom and I woke to a gentle scraping sound. We climbed out of our sleeping bags and just stood in the pre-dawn light, watching dad push long streaks of gray and white and light blue across the canvas until the paint looked like liquid rock, until dad was, for that moment, not painting Half Dome but creating Half Dome.

As the sun rose, as the warm colors climbed that rock, dad stepped away from the canvas. Like a man in a daze, he stepped back... until he bumped into mom.

And this I remember, because a son always remembers when he sees his dad cry. I remember tears streaming down his unshaven face. I remember his eyes, never closing, wide, wet shining eyes, staring not at the thing itself, not at Half Dome illuminated in the new day’s sun, but at his Half Dome, Half Dome in the pre-dawn cool, Half Dome Dreaming.

He touched, for one moment, who he might have been in another life. From that day on, Dad painted every chance he got, which really only amounted to a few hours on the weekends. He never found his way back to that transcendent moment, not even when we visited Yosemite the following year, but then most artists rarely do.

How many times did Bob Dylan make it farther down Highway 61? There were so many transcendent moments (Tangled Up In Blue, Shelter from the Storm, Sara, Series of Dreams)—but no one lives that free or true or connected the time.

I think Dad was, in the end, happy with his paintings. But there was always that ache, that question: Could I have been ...?

But to follow that question to an answer, he would have had to discount everything that came before, including my mom and me. And he would never do that.

Several of his paintings hang in my office. Most look like a beginner’s passionate attempts at something great, like a middle-aged man writing his first love poems.

But one painting, the one I call Half Dome Dreaming, hangs alone on the wall opposite my desk. I stare at it every day, and I wonder about my own life. My own unfulfilled dreams.

What transcendences am I searching for? What dreams still walk through the marrow of my bones, urging me to move?

Comments

Media Jean: Are all grown ups so confused?

Chip: What do you mean?

Media Jean: Your dad has so many dreams! He wants to live in the wild like Thoreau, walk across national parks with just a loaf of bread in his pocket like John Muir, write his great American novel--

Chip: He calls it his “small humble version of Moby Dick.”

Media Jean: Right. And that’s just for starters!

Chip: That’s true. He’s full of big dreams.

Media Jean: He wants to be an architect who designs low cost, zero-carbon-footprint houses.

Chip: He wants to be a folk singer, a little like Bob Dylan and a lot like Woody Guthrie.

Media Jean: Ha ha! Remember when we recorded him singing in the shower?

Chip: And it went viral, too. Good thing he doesn’t watch YouTube.

Media Jean: He wants to be an adventurer, the kind of guy who climbs Everest, visits rain forests, and follows in the steps of Darwin.

Chip: He still dreams about living a life of service. Helping Habitat for Humanity build houses, traveling with Doctors Without Borders.

Media Jean: Those are all great dreams. But shouldn’t he separate the reality dreams from the fantasy dreams.

Chip: What’s the difference?

Media Jean: For example, I dream of traveling to another planet. For now at least, that’s a fantasy dream. Unless bioengineering makes me immortal and we Star Trek beyond the speed of light, I’m not going anywhere. That’s a good dream, but it’s a fantasy dream.

Chip: Like my Jurassic Park dream of cloning a real T-Rex.

Media Jean: Right! You could spend your whole life longing for that dream, but it’s never going to happen in your lifetime. It’s a fantasy dream. On the other hand, my dream of becoming a digital artist, someone who uses pixels the way Van Gogh used paint, that’s a reality dream.

Chip: Like my dream of creating the first honest-to-goodness artificial intelligence. Not like Chat, but a real AI lifeform that’s different from us, not just more like us.

Media Jean: Exactly! That’s a reality dream. You could make that happen in your lifetime.

Chip: So ... you’re saying my dad has too many fantasy dreams?

Media Jean: I’m not saying he can’t fulfill any of his dreams. They’re all doable. But there’s no way he can fulfill them all, not with the time he has left. That means some of his dreams are fantasies.

Chip: I suppose that’s true. A folk-singing bio-architect-activist working on a small but still great American novel does seem kinda unlikely.

Media Jean: He has to pick one, two at most. He has to work within the time he has.

Chip: Or ... get more time.

Media Jean: What do you mean?

Chip: Remember when we took all the junk food out of the house?

Media Jean: I forgot about that! Increase your dad’s natural lifespan in the hopes that he’ll live long enough for science to step in!

Chip: Right! His generation may be the last to live less than 150 years. I feel pretty confident that you and I can expect at least 150 or more.

Media Jean: OK, so what’s the lifespan of the average American male today?

Chip: I just looked it up. Depending on the study, 76.5 years.

Media Jean: That puts his death around the year 2060.

Chip: Right. But if, through heathy eating and exercise, we can extend that to 105...

Media Jean: That puts him at 2090!

Chip: And if we extend his life to, say, 140?

Media Jean: He’ll be alive in the 22nd century!

Chip: That’s only one century short of Star Trek!

Media Jean: Anything can happen by then!

Chip: Nanobots resetting biological clocks!

Media Jean: Neural mapping to download your consciousness into cloned bodies!

Chip: Even simple DNA-repairing technologies could add a hundred years to my dad’s life!

Media Jean: So we’re back to where we started. We have to get your dad healthy, fast. He needs to live to at least 140!

Chip: Right! To the 23rd century and beyond!

Media Jean: Ha ha! All our problems seem solvable now, even Death.

Chip: Sure! In the future, everything will be possible.

Media Jean: I love tomorrow.

Chip: Me, too. There’s so much to look forward to.

Media Jean: Well, I better get to bed. I’ve got a lot to do tomorrow.

Chip: Me, too. See you in the future, Media Jean.

Media Jean: See you in the future, Chip.

​​Comic strip from the series "Earth Backup"
(Kid, Inc. Volume 2: The Batcave of Childhood)

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