It really is time to take my search for the artist to the experts who might know or who would at least know how to know.

I think his name is Mathewson.

Why he wrote his name so differently everytime I don't know. Why we hid or edited our past so highly I do not know. Herbert is called George, Pat is really Frank, Anne Green is really the mother of the children and not the sister. My mothers mother is irnorant, arrogant and probabley suffers from what might be called a mental 'condition' but she is brave.

Growing up I did not know my grandfather was from a 'broken' family. So was my grandmother. Her father ran off to Los Angeles or something. Said he was going to take her with him but she needed to get her sweater. She runs in the house to get her sweater and he drove off. He was gone. She had her sweater in her hand. She was looking down the road. He was driving out of her life even when she had her sweater. Oh yes, the broken family term.

I have written it down, but these are not the story lines we lived by, these are tiny pieces gleaned somehow from whisps and whispers. Puffs of history captured. They are not so good or so bad, but just screaming from being unspoken. To me that's how it feels. It just has a bad fung shui. Story line is very good. The people, all of them, are brave.

And so, we felt our lives were clean, better, yes better, unseen, as to not be 'like the others'.

We were not allowed to see our own humanness, our mistakes, our failures. Our unperfect parts. These pieces of human living were not allowed to be lived in the fabric of our venier. Truly, I was told we were pretty close to perfect. We did things right. These words were not told exactly but greatly implied in what was not said, or thought.

We were nice people doing nice things and thinking nice thoughts. Nice meaning, highly edited.

Actually, my brother, sister and myself all present as if we were raised by alcaholics. Children of alcaholics keep secrets, and know what not to say. We were that. Be nice. Pretend.

Nothing was really bad it was just a bit of a lie. Lies of omission. It remeinds me of wonder bread. Wonder Bread, which we ate all the time, will not kill you, it just is not as complete as you were told it was. It won't kill you but it can cause your death.

What if the past were gone? No, I can't imagine that would work. I fell off a sweaty pony once and knocked the past out of me. I had amnesia for an hour or two. Very strange and lonely.

Maybe it is the pretending that the past is known, maybe it is not fully celebrating the unknown, leaving room for the cracks it creates, like growing moss between stepping stones. It can be beautiful.

Drake sailed by what he could not see. My own father, partaking in the tradition of not being known, sat in his white chair in the front room. Sometimes with a dog on his lap, sometimes with a grandchild, sometimes mostly with a newspaper. I sailed by him.

Stories of the fathers fathers father: my father's father's father farmed and named Larkin Valley. He came to this country via the potato famine express. His wife died when the last son was born. It is said a housekeeper stayed with them after that. There were five or six boys. It could not have been an easy life. He lived not far from where Patricks grandfather went when he did not come home from the Korean War. My friend Patrick, not my bother Patrick.

We are made of history, known and unknown. I wonder if the mandate of not being seen, fear of being noticed comes from my great grandmother Anne Green. If she was seen for who she was, divorced, she would have lost her employment. I wonder if it just comes from being immigrants?

When I was in junior high school I came home from school and tossed my coat on the bed. My mother reacted urgently, Never put your coat on a bed! Hang that up!

She had that tone in her voice of one about to yell Fire! I think it startled both of us. I sure did pick up the coat with a tone like that in the air... We sort of looked at each other. like, what had just happened... Why? I asked her. Why can't you put a coat on a bed?

I don't know , she said. Your grandmother was always insistent about that. Never put a coat on the bed.

So we called her, my mother's mother and we asked... Why not put the coat on the bed?

Once when she was a little girl she went to a friends house and put her coat on the bed. She came home and put the coat on her own bed. And a bed bug infestation broke out. Bed bugs everywhere. It was terrible. Tons of washing to do, before they had washing machines, lots of bites and it took forever to get rid of them. The bugs were in their hair. It was terrible. And there was the guilt of she was the one who brought the creatures in. Guilt and bugs in 1911.

So here we were, my mom and me, in about the same year the first painting came into the house, 1966. Urgently removing a coat from a bed 55 years later. To this day I will not put my coat on a bed. It just has an uncomfortable feel to it.