Christmas Yarns

My family lived a storybook life. I don't mean like Snow White or Mary Tyler Moore. Dad was a great storyteller. Being a Methodist minister, most of it had a religious inspiration but our family appreciated the characters that inhabited the church community. As we moved about small-town West Virginia and then to like situations in New Mexico, those different cultures enhanced our experience. Being dropped suddenly into an already thriving church community, trying to fit in could be a challenge. My father could handily make a friend and my mother and two older sisters learned to cope with the same social challenges. I came along as everybody's "little brother." I soon leanred how to fit in at school as well as church. Typically, there would be a social potluck dinner to celebrate the new preacher and his family. We were already celebrities by just being there. In the privacy of our breakfast or sometimes later, we would discuss the new neighbors and church happenings. My father had observed the whole celebration with a keen eye for personalities. Hey, that was his business - to get to know his flock so as better to address their need for spiritual comfort. As the new kid in town, I had the same experience at a different level but from the point of view of a 12-year-old. I have carried many of those observations with me through the years, adding to them at my own level while growing up. I was totally overcome by those MGM musicals and RKO westerns, and then WWII came along to give me many new inspirations. I liked the illustrations in all of the magazines from True Romances and Wings to Exotic Adventures. Particularly the illustrations, to the point that I wanted to do that for a career. But by the time I got through art school, majoring in illustration, the magazines had all gone defunct. I was lucky enough to get a position in an architectural illustration studio where I learned many techniques that I used in my approach to Americana subjects in the manner of story illustration. My particular interest became venerable houses, barns, back porches, and quilts - all representing history that I recalled from those youthful experiences of my childhood. Potluck dinners. Model A Fords. Snow sleds. Petunia beds. Jannie, my wife, and I traveled the backroads of America searching for inspiration. The results turned out to be popular in several art galleries and I still am involved in that, with the addition of the written word. I now create stories from those memories, with maybe some additional altered facts in the spirit of adventure. Yarns, I call them, after my dad's influence in storytelling.