Father Time

A gift from my father, Lennart Anderson, has me considering Father Time.

Two Houses is a newsletter of stories about art, feminism, grief, and Time excavated from the Soho loft where I grew up. Posts are free and illustrated with the work of my long-divorced parents, the painters Mimi Weisbord and Lennart Anderson.

Last December, our 19-year-old son Atticus took one look at our Christmas tree and declared, “It looks exactly like last year’s. It’s like we just did this. It’s like no time has passed at all.”

I knew just what he meant.

In childhood, time is slow, and Christmas always seems so far off.  Then adulthood arrives, and, if you’re lucky, time begins moving fast. But it does not feel lucky.

Instead, it’s increasingly alarming.

Since the death of my parents, time has barreled forward ungrounded. There’s this after-them era that lacks a certain gravitational pull.

This is not an expression of grief. I’m writing in awe of Father Time. And to be in community with readers who are also experiencing it, particularly in this season.

Grief is Time’s bedmate, however. Sooner or later, living becomes coping with loss and losses. If we’re very lucky, it doesn’t start early.

My youngest cousin lost her father first. She was the baby of the cousins, but then I saw when my father died that she was older in this elemental way. After you lose someone, time passes differently, especially birthdays and holidays. It’s inevitable. The same is true of my younger half-sister, Jeanette, whose mother died when she was an adolescent.

This is a small observation. Even obvious, though we rarely acknowledge it squarely. “I’m not trying to make too much of it,” my father used to say about some musing or some influence on one of his paintings.

I loved his delight at small observations, his small notes of wonder. He slowed time down. Although his priorities could be disturbing. Once, observing the mushroom cloud of an atomic bomb on television, he demanded, “Watch this! Watch. See how it keeps billowing? Isn’t that beautiful?”

And so it is with the nature of Time. Awe-striking physics. Unstoppable.

When I was twelve, my father painted me a portrait of Santa in the style of a great master (and Coca-Cola’s Haddon Sundblom). He was procrastinating in his studio, and I’d needled him to do it, never expecting he’d take it up. But then he did this small grand thing which has since offered another dimension to Time.

Lennart Anderson. Untitled. Oil on panel. 11.25 in. x 11.25 in. ©Estate of Lennart Anderson/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

As a twelve-year-old, I did not anticipate how that picture would follow me — on our walls each December through Atticus’s childhood — printed as a holiday card to friends and family after my father died — as a bit of holiday goodwill for something called Substack.

Now, it helps ground the season.

How do you cope with Father Time?