Lavender

Part 3

   Time dragged on and Phil Marden's flyers failed to elicit a single response.  Life for the man was becoming a blurred monotony of meaningless days without end.  He felt like he was always sleepwalking, and in an attempt to cope with the pain of having to live without Peggy, his body and mind were becoming numb to everything.  One day he was sitting in the study, staring blankly at the wall and wondering why he had come into this room, when his gaze fell upon the digital camera still sitting on the shelf where he always kept it.  "One of the nicest presents Peg has ever given me," he mused.  Of course, the mention of his missing wife brought a stab of pain to his heart, and his mind started to induce forgetfulness to shield him from the ache.

   Somehow he realized what he was doing, and through the fog of numbness he began to fight back.  Shaking his head furiously, he shouted, "No, I want the pain!  I want to remember Peggy.  I have to remember her!"

   He reached for the camera and clicked it on.  Once more he reviewed the parade of flawed photos it contained, and as he compared the blurred pictures to what he knew reality to be, he was suddenly horror-struck.  The smudged faces in the photographs were almost an exact match for what he could recall his wife looked like.  No, the photos had not magically improved in quality; rather it was that his memory had started to fade.

   "This...this can't be happening!" he gasped.  "I can't just sit here and let Peggy slip away from me like this!"  Dropping the camera to the floor, he rushed to his desk and grabbed a ream of copying paper from one of the drawers.  He pulled out a sheet and stared at the blank page, trying to imagine his wife's face smiling back at him.  Seizing up a pencil, he began scribbling almost demonically, as if he couldn't get the lines on the paper fast enough.  In a few seconds he was through, but he was deeply dissatisfied with his efforts.  "Christ, she doesn't look anything like that.  C'mon, Phil, you can do better than this!"

   Discarding the sheet, he grabbed another and tried again.  And again.  And again...he was halfway through the ream before he concluded that he wasn't making any headway and forced himself to stop.  He almost started to panic; the features of his wife's pretty face were slipping away from him and he didn't possess the artistic talent to preserve her in a decent portrait.

   Closing his eyes, he took several deep breaths and pushed the panic back down.  He began concentrating as hard as he could, muttering to himself, "Philip Marden, you can do this...you have to!"

   Slowly the vision in his mind cleared and as his wife's image unblurred, a smile came to his face and he sighed in relief.  She was still with him.

   Realizing what a fragile thing a memory can be, and having no way to safeguard it other than with pencil and paper, the man began a new quest.  By God, he would learn how to draw, and once he had properly captured her on paper, he wouldn't have to worry about Peggy ever fading away from him again.

   He began stopping in at a local art gallery every day after work, and he would intently study the various portraits he found there.  The different techniques the artists used for shading especially intrigued him,  and he started experimenting with them at home.  Still dissatisfied with his results, he determined that he needed to speak to someone trained in the art of fine portraiture, and he sought out the counsel of Twin Cities' high school art teacher.  She explained how features on a face couldn't be properly drawn using hard lines and demonstrated for him some techniques he could employ to subtly bring small details to life...the shape of a nose, the tint on pursed lips, the smattering of freckles across a blushing cheek.

   After several sessions of conferring with the gracious art teacher, Phil began seeing marked improvement in his endeavors.  While he was still not completely happy with the drawings of his wife, he was no longer wadding the pages up and throwing them away upon completion.  Instead we would study them, sometimes for hours, in an attempt to determine what needed to be tweaked on his next try.