January 31, 2009

Dominick Trifero, my high school trig teacher, has died. He was a dedicated teacher and, as one reads in the obituary and as one knew then, an outstanding citizen. He was the faculty adviser of Future Teachers of America. I won a small scholarship through FTA, and I was meant to send my first college semester’s registration in to claim the money. When Mr. Trifero sent the check he wrote, “An impressive line-up, but couldn’t there be one math class?”

LaNeita e-mails that Treva Browning’s little brother, Doug, is also dead. I remember him as scrappy and slight and hairy, a very male version of his sister. Shy, also, but I forget the reason. I have carried his image like a snapshot all these years, to be pulled out at news of his death.

Painted in the just-bearable cold of the studio with Jason and his student Merlin, a big red-haired oaf of a kid. Merlin is autistic–fairly high functioning, though startling from time to time–and through Jason’s good offices has developed a reputation as an artist. His imagination is intricate, heroic. and funnier than you’d expect from a person in that situation. Now he is doing assemblages in which he paints over a ground made of the comic pages of newspapers. Merlin paints what he wants to paint, then Jason surrounds identifiable images with thick strokes of magic marker, which makes all the difference in compositions which might look like chaos unless the eye were guided in some way. I finished my first painting in the new space, nothing spectacular on its own. Painted it on paper to remind myself of the perishability of all.