Goodbye Decade

I always thought it was my misfortune to be attracted to artists as well as to have one for a brother.

As misfortune would have it, not only were many of my acquaintances artists, but so too was my long-time closest friend. I never did see the point to paintings and the like which was a damned nuisance because the creators of the latter were always so easy to relate to. My friend and I often argued about this small point of contention and one day I shouted finally, “Your art is an inability to face up to life!” I was most gleeful at having made what I thought was a pretty good summation of my friend’s artistic bent. However, he immediately retorted, “Your life is an inability to face up to art!” This comment led to a follow-up dig. “Come on Anne, how long is it going to be the Silvia Plath up one end of the bookcase and the Melways up the other?”

That was it. How disgusting, me being likened to a Melways. I decided then that I would throw out the Melways and go the whole hog and join my “artistes”. Thanks be to my pride.

Thanks are due to Frank Ritchie who taught me at school, for he placed in me a seed of confidence in myself when he peered at me one day when I was bothered about my simple writing style and said quite simply, “Refreshing change your stuff. Keep it simple, it’s good.” Then he wandered away and looked vaguely out the window like he always would when something concrete had been said, and I knew I could definitely keep my stuff simple, for Frank was always pretty right.

Thanks to Lexie Seeary for help in typing and re-typing my work and thanks to my unfortunate liking for artists in helping me to get this work underway.

E. Anne Hofmaier, 10/Dec/1979.