The End: Part 1

Sitting at the Ulupalakua Ranch Store with Mitch's (the late Reems Mitchell) statues; feeling fat; feeling old; and feeling it's time to let go.

My niece India had taken care of Mitch at the end of his life after he had a stroke and couldn't work anymore. Mitch had wonderful stories about all his character. There was one about the guy on my right in the photo ... "holding the cock that was holding his cock."

The last piece that Mitch was working on before he died was sitting on a bench in the barn on the property were I stayed. The unfinished wax sculpture of a head had, for years, sat with Mitch's credit card embedded in the dark wax of the his last piece of art. I guess he would use the card as a tool to sculpt the wonderful caricatures he did.



There was something about the smiling face of Mitch's last face that saddened me to the core. Thinking about the end, thinking about my end?

I thought about the paintings by San Francisco artist Jack O’leary that grace the walls of my home. I got them at a flea market in Albuquerque after he died. His sister came to settle his affairs and told the landlady where he lived and died … “Get rid of them, I don’t want them.”

So it that is with all things, including this blog, approaching 300 posts and three years in the making ... how does it end and then what?