: About Me

DRAFT VERSION

I'm a highly creative individual with a great curiosity about the world around me. When something attracts my attention, I want to learn more about it. As a result, I often teach myself many skills by reading and observing.

Born in upstate New York, I'm the son of a lumberjack and a former roller derby queen, and I lived in a cold water flat above my Polish immigrant grandmother. My mother died of tuberculosis when I was nine years old, after infecting my older brother and me. We were cured shortly afterward. My father was disabled from an accident, and was a friendly, lovable drunk, spending his money on liquor. He often didn't provide me with shoes or a warm winter coat, but I still loved him.

After my mother's death, my newly married twenty year old sister took me in to live with her. She didn't appreciate having a nine year old to raise along with her newborn son. Her apartment had hot water and good heating, and felt much more comfortable to me. I felt like an unneeded addition, though.

No one provided me with any direction or encouragement for my future. I was repeatedly told I'd end up digging ditches and in trouble, or in jail. Instead, I lived in my own version of the world - one I created in my head.

In 1960, a modern art museum was built not far from my home. I used to cut through the building on the way to the public library. Inside its severe granite facade were many amazing statements of imagination - of splashed colors, unfamiliar subjects, and strange worlds that others had created. I looked at works by Jackson Pollack, Mondrian, Miro, and Klee - without judgment or analysis. I simply accepted and enjoyed them as worlds made of ideas and pigments and canvas.

The museum became my favorite place to linger in. It was a place for me to stay away from home, but closer to my imagination. With time, I began to understand that all the art in front of me had great value, and that there was another, bigger world where art was created, and bought and sold, and appreciated. I could get to know it if I wanted to,

That kernel of understanding of a bigger world slowly led me along a path that I only sensed with my intuition. It took me out of my poor environment, and somehow got me into college - despite my lack of money for tuition or expenses, my mediocre grades, and my unassertive nature. Eventually, I learned how to learn, and then how to teach myself. Then, slowly, how to be myself.

Since then, I've curated art exhibits featuring nationally known artists and have even received a grant for curating from the National Endowment for the Arts. I've traveled extensively and have seen a large share of the world's museums and masterpieces. Today, my sister says that I can do anything that I put my mind to - I think that's almost true, but not quite correct.

I've lived in two of America's most interesting cities: Boston, and now, San Francisco. Two different coasts, two very different cities, with distinctly different mindsets and attitudes.

I visit the modern art museum in upstate New York every year, taking my nieces & nephews with me, hoping that it'll ignite something in them. I don't think it has the same affect. The entire city is severely economically depressed, and the museum seems out of place among the derelict houses and vacant lots. I think it's a beacon, a bright spot in the gloom.

I often think curators of museums and other similar cultural places can only see the role of their institution as educational for young people. I doubt any curator or administrator would stop to consider that walls with art and sculpture can provide a young person with a glimpse of a different world that is about cherished imagination and creativity. Could they conceive that the world of art, but not quite the art itself, would have the power to lead someone onto a better path for themselves?

My passion is ...

the quirky, unusual and unique.

I know too much about ...

myself, and not enough about others.

My parents always told me ...

to go to bed so they could go out drinking. (I was left alone).

My childhood ambition ...

to live in my own world - or be a forest ranger..

My favorite memory ...

the flowers in my grandmother's garden.

Why I write ...

Who would believe my life otherwise?

My first job ...

Attendent in a psychiatric hospital at the age of 16.

Creative Writing > Memoirs Memoirs: Grandparents

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Her paisley print house dress was a blur as she slipped in and out of the sunlight, kneading dough, tasting cabbage soup, or mopping the floor. Preparing for Easter Sunday, she was in five places at once. She knew that solid Polish traditions held a family together. Ignoring the rush of the 1950's outside her door, my grandmother, then over 70 years old, ran her city home as if it existed on a piece of Poland's countryside. She had a coop for tasty pigeons, a pen for rabbits, fruit trees, vegetable beds, medicinal herbs and mounds of firewood for the cast iron stove. Science and technology...

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