Parents Are Hard

Parents are very hard people to buy gifts for. By the time you are old enough that you can afford a gift that doesn’t require a painted stick with an “I LOVE YOU MOMMY” printed on it, your parents don’t need anything you can get. They have lived a number of decades and probably have all the things they want and need. What they really want is for you to be happy and self supporting.

I am no different of course, and for that I apologize to the kids. The things I like really can’t be bought by someone else unless they can see inside my mind and draw the same connection that I did. Really, anything is nice and as long as the kids are happy and self supporting, I am happy. When I was in that position, I tried to give things that had an emotional component but I was not always successful. We lived too far away and I just didn’t know them anymore. It’s entirely possible that I never knew them.

When my mom passed away and we were cleaning out the house, I found a cup that I had given dad many years ago. It said “To Dad…MERRY CHRISTMAS…My First Santa”. He had kept it for all of those years and then mom had kept it after he had passed, it brought a tear to my eye and it is one of the things that I treasure in life. Some years ago, something happened and that cup fell and smashed on the floor. I was devastated!

I picked up the pieces and kept them for a month or two before I attempted to glue them back together. I did a passable job, better than all of the kings horses and all of the kings men, but it would never hold liquid again. Now I keep it well back on the window sill in my work room where other hands can’t get to it and I can look up and see it whenever I choose. Perhaps that is for the best.

I mention this not for the sentimental aspect, but for the repair component of the story. I have always marvelled at how archaeologists can find broken pottery shards thousands of years old and make them whole again. Hell, they reconstruct entire towns and all of the artifacts that belong in the town. Amazing!

 

I was watching a show tonight and in it there was a painting that had been damaged which an art restorer was repairing. It was just a movie and they can do anything in movies, but I doubted that a real oil painting could be brought back to pristine condition. I did a little research, and of course they can restore the painting. Hell, I could start to restore a painting, just start though.

It seems that the first thing you have to do is to remove the canvas from the frame and stretcher. You then glue a properly sized piece of canvas on the back of the painting. I could do that part I think. Next, you turn the painting over and with a pin and glue; you build up the individual threads to match the threads on the canvas. Once that is dry, you of course have to do a touch up which would involve matching the exact colour the artist used all of those centuries ago. Sure….

 

I hope that those art restorers are paid a lot of money for the magic they perform saving those scraps of history for us.

That’s it, just thought I’d pass on something I found interesting today.