Aspen Times Weekly book review: ‘Ahead of the Flaming Front: A Life on Fire’ | AspenTimes.com

Aspen Times Weekly book review: ‘Ahead of the Flaming Front: A Life on Fire’ | AspenTimes.com



Review of my memoir.

Portrait of an Artist as a Single Dad – Powder Puff : JDMathes

Portrait of an Artist as a Single Dad – Powder Puff : JDMathes

Portrait of an Artist as a Single Dad - Easter

Fake grass in baskets. A rainbow’s assortment of colored eggs. Chocolate bunnies and chocolate eggs and chocolate kisses. Lots of chocolate latent with fertility. Peeps in their crusted sugary goodness, but keep in mind as Maddie found out that roasting a peep over a fire can be hazardous, yet pretty as the sugar ignites and pops in wavering flames like electricity. I don’t tell her roasting a peep on a stick reminds me of heretics burning. So much for resurrection.

Here is an essay I wrote about some Easters I knew.

Stay safe, everybody, have a good weekend and spare the peeps the flames.

Portrait of an Artist as a Single Dad - Birth

April 11, 2000

In the darkened hospital
a baby cries fresh cut
from her mother.
I, new father, whisper
over the girl’s fragile
head. A blessing for her.
“Oh me, Oh Life
of the questions ever
recurring.” Walt Whitman
old man with butterfly eyes.

Old man who gave me answers
to questions I didn’t think
to ask. All those years
I spent masked from the world.
Had I conjured a vision of me
like a mirage out of desert
air? Leaves of grass–

Did I know you? Now I do,
but not until then, the moment
of birth, of awakening. In the blood.
In the heated night air.
The infant girl, blind
as an ancient seer, quiets
in my arms. In the gurgle
and beeps of the emergency room,
I meet myself for the first time.

Soon we’ll come down
the mountains, snow melt
watering flowers in spring.
I will shed the old life,
go back to school.
I need to do it for
her, for me. For the powerful

play. But on her birth day,
we held on in the hospital
where a new born had arrived.
What good amid these indeed.

Portrait of an Artist as a Single Dad - Pencils

A great crash from Sophia’s room. An avalanche like distant trees toppling in the shock wave ahead of a meteor. I know I should be more diligent or insistent or some other force implying word about the cluttered space known as her room. But I am not in a position to point fingers. In my room teeter stacks of books, papers, drafts, bills, junk mail, envelopes, receipts, empty beer bottles, boxes with their gutted contents spilling out from earlier searches, something that is either an animal pelt or an overgrown slice of pizza, computer stuff and other flotsam. And that’s just my bed. Sophia comes whirling out of her room, sketchbook in one hand a fist full of pencils in the other, asking if I have a particular shade of colored pencil. I do not.

This off peach shade has a name and I do not remember so as to log it here, but to be sure, she needed that one and the sound of a forest being leveled earlier an attempt to find said pencil.

Now I know many artists have particular habits and needs in relation to their surroundings and can be quite specific or the whole project can come to a halt. Ernest Hemingway typed standing up as does Gunter Grass. James Joyce clad in a white coat on his stomach with a blue pencil, Friedrich Schiller let apples rot in his desk, Gustave Mahler retreated to a cabin in the woods, Twain’s writing room, Flannery O’Connor wrote in the same place at the same time and Agatha Christie wrote anywhere she could set her typewriter and on and on. Sophia’s triggering domain a part of her creative process. Lord knows I don’t want to be responsible for stifling creativity.

But now there she stands with a fist full of pencils, and many more scattered in her wake, and none the right color. “I need it” she says. I know as any fine actor who has studied his lines that this is my cue to offer to drive out into the Saturday for this pencil. I also do not want to be the known as the guy who stifled her Off-Shade of Peach Phase anymore than be known as the guy who got in the way of Picasso’s Blue Phase. What one father must do to keep art moving forward and free. Give me colored pencils or give me death. Okay, not death, but maybe a nasty head cold.

I do understand. I myself have become fixated and searched for the one specific thing to help bring my project life. A breath of some detail that I searched for in stacks of books (No not everything is online to call up with a keystroke), looking for that one book in a stack of boxes still prisoner from my moving about the country. That one thing I remember Antoine de Saint Exupery said or a fragment of an obscure poem in a collected work of which I can only remember the cover’s color and on what side of the page the poem was printed. All work ceases and the search becomes the work.

“Thanks,” she says as I put my book down and get up. I find my keys and head down to the local art store and buy a pencil and drive on back. Before I can shut the door behind me she has materialized. A spirit of art. I hand her the pencil and she kisses me on the cheek and disappears into her room/studio/den/chaos.

Well, I think. Ain’t that a peach.

Portrait of an Artist as a Single Dad - The Dark Hours

I knock on the door. Rap a tapping tap like some musty raven to wake Sophia so she can get ready and go to school. “Ugggg…” like the not quite so dead discovering she is on the wrong side of the crypt door or sealed up behind a wall. Or worse yet the dead being forced to face the light of day. A curse worse than facing the light of day. Groggy and head filled with webs, I go to make breakfast.

A usual morning of telling her to get out of bed a thousand times and her dragging her way from bedroom to bathroom to bedroom to living room to bathroom to truck and finally off to school with the dragging heels not sparking the winter’s day.

Later when I tell her it’s bedtime, she will tell me no matter when she goes to bed her mind buzzes and spins until the dark hours. She draws, reads, draws, and journals and draws until she falls asleep. I know it is true as I hear her moving around the house in the night.

I consider her plight. I have laid awake hours with my mind not stopping as PM gives away to AM and the click between minutes a span of universes. The mind fires images bam bam bam. A kind of manic skipping and careening from thought to thought like a band of mosquitos at a nudist colony. Nights I’d get up and start writing, trying to channel whatever force filled my mind. I’ve had to get up and leave warm blankets, lovers, and wives to find a pen, crack a laptop, or sit staring into space because not even a canvas can hold my spilling mind. I feel her pain. So I sit on the edge of her bed and tell her how to quell her mind. To go to sleep. To switch off the outside world. Not counting Heffalumps or sheep, but meditating and clearing the mind to bring voices to quietness, to sleep. Listen to her own breath and slow it.

She smiles and says thanks. I shut her door. Shut off the lights in the house, except for the one by my bed. I stretch out after tossing my clothes on the floor in the clutter of the day to day. On the bed I have a notebook with a pen, Patti Smith’s memoir Just Kids, and a bottle of beer on the nightstand. I always go to bed with the intent of sleep, but soon give up on it. I read. I write. I know I have to get up early and know by the afternoon, like all the other afternoons, be barely able to keep my eyes open, but as the evening progresses my eyes will widen as if hit by the beam of a cop’s flashlight.

I wonder at the exhaustion that weighs my body down and the mind that doesn’t stop. I wonder at the sleep that will not come until finally I wake up not knowing when I passed into that other world. Mostly I wonder about my artist girl in the other room who struggles with the nocturnal ramblings of a mind never at rest.

Portrait of an Artist as a SIngle Dad - Sleep Overs

The incoming texts bleep both girls’ phones. Heads down, thumbs dashing off messages. They both look up and ask, “Can we have sleepovers?” At first I am leery. The last multi-girl sleepover entailed me losing at least two years off my life just due to casting spells to reassure youngsters that no witches could get into the house. “No, I have mad magic skills, kiddo, and have established a dome over the house which no witch can breech even while riding a switch.” One fearful youngster asked, “Have you ever killed a witch?”

To which I said, “That is not a question to ask, but no. My magic is soooo powerful that they don’t get close enough.” Relief in a child’s face is like coin of the realm.

I am sure great Diogenes would pass me by with his lamp, but he never hosted a sleepover like this. But that wasn’t all! Dinner and then breakfast and all the snacks consumed could have supported a village in some foreign country like Texas. Damn, but girls can pack away the food. My youngest will say, “I’m not hungry,” and then consume an entire flat of strawberries.

My girls stare. Thumbs hovering over respective phones as if repelled by magnets. “Who?” And then it comes out that they want to go over to someone else’s house and have a sleepover. Each girl to a different house. I pause for 7/11s of a second. Just enough time to visualize me alone in the house for just one night. OMG as the text goes.

I have visions of #BourbonForDinner #PantsoffandWriting #BlastingRachmaninov #RratedMoviesonNetflix. “Yes!” I say, trying to contain my exuberance of being lost, drunk and naked in the dining room eating steak and swilling fine Kentucky spirits as I type out a memoir of misspent youth of trying to do the right thing. If there were a gold medal for artistic debauchery, I’d be trying to win it.

So, “Yay,” they say and the thumbs fly. Thumbs like that could kill a fella. “Yay!” I say in my head so as not to let it out, planning a trip to the supermarket. For my diabolical plan to come together all I’ll need are charcoal, bourbon, steak, and coffee. Shopping list done. So little for such a grand scheme. The Ockham’s Razor of evenings.

But then part of me goes, “When was the last time you went out to a bar?” But no! Alone in the house within earshot of the train’s distant horn like the muse of travelogues and instability. I go back and forth. Bar, home, bar, home. But nothing will get written in the bar and one must keep one’s pants on, but noise and clatter of adults clinking glasses and the faraway laughter like the buzzing of neon lights from which I might create some story, some tale not yet told. Home, bar, home. I really want to write.

But comes the call. Maddie says she and her friend can’t have the sleep over at the other girl’s house, but if it’s okay with me, they can sleepover here. Oh those small twists in the pursuit of creating art. #GiggleBoxes #GirlsDancetoMozart #WritingAnyway #Home.