The other day I received a phone call, or rather my wife and daughter received a phone call.
It was from a sculpture park near Chicago, which has one of my sculptures.
The park is an innovation of someone in the parks and recreation department who is very frugal with the taxpayer’s money. The park does not own my sculpture. Buying sculptures costs money and giving money to artists is wasteful. It rents the sculpture instead ….at a very reasonable rate, I might add.
This is all well and good and the sculpture has been there a number of years with no problem.
The phone call was from a very nice lady who works at the park and who left a very nice message on the answering machine for my wife and daughter. The message stated that she had heard from someone that I had “passed” and wanted to find out what they wanted to do with the sculpture.
Finding out people think you are dead gives one reason to pause and reflect.
My death might have occurred recently and someone failed to notify me, or this could simply be one of those erroneous “facts” that sometime make their way into the public discourse.
Whatever the case, there was a moment of shock as I heard the sad news of my passing. Not that death is a bad thing…..I’m sure there are a number of benefits to it.
But most mornings as my mind clears, I assume that I am in fact not dead.
Someday this may prove not to be the case and at that point I hope the lady can figure out something useful to do with that sculpture.
I like to think that my artwork is in fact salable, although I have no tangible evidence of that lately.
At present, however, I am somewhat content with the status quo (that being life), and I have resigned myself as best I can to the situation.
If anyone who reads this has also heard the rumors of my passing I want to assure you that as far as I know the rumor is false.
I did refrain from writing for a while, however, for which I deeply apologize.