Well, a bit late- but here’s to a happier year in 2024! This is our holiday card from this past season. Our kid wanted to have us in an elf toy workshop, and while I was really wanting to do a holiday Star Wars card (maybe next year?), I realized that my step-dad’s hardware store would make for a perfect toy-making studio, so we elf-ed up.
It was definitely a bittersweet year-end since we had lost my step-dad this past May, and I’ve been scrambling to deal with everything in the wake of his passing. Even though my dad was and is still very much my dad, my step-dad was a father-figure for me growing up with him and my mom.
He owned a hardware store that he had for two decades at the center of my hometown. I grew up working there at the age of nine, running the register, loading and unloading straw and concrete fountains, and building wagons. He made his own wreaths (hence Alli making the wreath) and sold Christmas trees (never cut- always balled) that I would drive over to North Carolina with him to get in the winters, rolling down the window so not to breathe too much smoke from his ever-present cigarettes while writing and drawing in my notebooks.
Over the years I drew his shop a couple times for him in pen and ink. The first was a Christmas present I made in high school and the other was one that he had asked for of the original site when it was a service station. He gave me an old print out that someone had brought him of the photo, and I finished it the summer of 2019.
I have a lot of fond memories of the place. I learned to work, use tools, make stuff. I learned to sit around and be bored and find things to do whether it was smashing nickels in the vice or making keys. The back office was one of my first studios where I’d devour comics, build worlds for Dungeons and Dragons, or write and draw inspired by the muses in Playboys that I would sneak down from the upper shelves.
Early on he sold ducks and chicks until that operation got shut down, my step-sister sold lemonade out the front, and somehow my step-brother and I ran a burger and Coke stand during the Iris Festival- and were not shut down by the local food inspector. We helped haul and unload pumpkins, concrete, and loads and loads of flowers to his enormous green house. A forest of banana trees grew up behind the green house out of the plant clippings he composted that kids from local elementary schools would visit.
I helped him make signs to put out front, carving out a gigantic goose and a rabbit out of plywood as well as a nine-foot tall five-headed pink flamingo that I made at art school. He always supported my weird art even if he didn’t always get it.
One of my happiest moments after I had moved out and gone to the University of Tennessee was when I came back to the store and found a plywood board that he had painted completely abstractly- a technicolor Jackson Pollock drip painting. I had myself been slinging paint in a pretty abstract phase of art making, and he told me my latest paintings had inspired him to throw some around after he had finished painting some of the concrete rabbits and other critters he had put out that season.
I still haven’t even begun to really unpack the loss of my step-dad, but I was pretty glad to have gotten to go back to the Corner (that’s what we always called it) after his passing. While it had been a kind of albatross for him once he had closed shop and had difficulty selling the property, the store somehow avoided demolition and became a taproom. It opened right around his 75th birthday about when he was dying and I had came back to help. Though he wasn’t able to make it, my step-siblings were able to have a few drinks in the bays that we spent so much of our childhoods.
Since his passing I’ve been pretty busy managing things for my mom, my family, and, of course, teaching. While it’s caused a back log in creative output, it’s also been a good time for me to future-think and decide what it is I’m wanting to do in the near and far.
