After two boys (the youngest already 8), my surprise of a father was the girl his parents had never dared hope for. Susan, she would be named. And he was pretty enough to be a girl with his dark curls, big blue eyes, and unguarded, dimpled smile. Here, they compare him to a car—if only he'd had that Two Lung Power at the end...
Later they even had a portrait of him painted. This was 1945 and the painter German, so we got to find out that he also would have made a great blond, and I’ve always wondered what it must have been like to grow up with that obviously expensive, utterly erroneous picture of oneself asking whether you were going to believe the painter of the master race or your lying eyes.
My sister just reminded me that my Dad wrote about this painting in a mini-memoir he wrote for a friend some years back:
"What the war gave me was an oil portrait of me that hung on the wall at home long after I left. My father had convinced some German prisoner-of-war in Ogden, a painter, to create this masterpiece working from a black and white, fuzzy studio photograph. The German did a good job; it was me, but he had insisted I be Nordic, had given me golden curls, and refused to change his version or vision of what kids should look like..."
No comments:
Post a Comment