My father's art talent seems to have been a genetic mutation. Born to parents with fifth and sixth grade educations and the inability to distinguish the difference in artistic merit between the Pieta and a plastic Jesus that glows in the dark, his calling was evident by the age of five.
As a child in Zanesville, my collections consisted of carnival junk that was made in Japan. Shit that the joint operators would pick up for a few dollars a gross and give away as prizes to the suckers. Plaster casts of the crucifixion and painted glass cowboys adorned my room. And although my little collection of crap was nothing more than crap, each piece had a little memory attached.
My mother was raised in an environment of culture and at an early age, developed an appreciation for "the finer" things - art, opera, classical music, literature, ballet, poetry, and yet she also understood the primitive beauty of modern contributors to the arts – Robert Johnson, John Lee Hooker, Pablo Picasso. She spoke Latin and French, as was a "requirement" of all young ladies of genteel society. Her English was flawless - a grace that my father would come to master some time later in life.
My attempts at art and music have always been crude and disappointing, despite the encouragement from my parents. I seem to have been born with an analytical ability (another anomaly in the family gene pool) that apparently crowded the brain space allotted to artistic talents. A fair trade off, I suppose.
