Something To Be Proud Of

After a couple years of writing, selecting, editing, re-editing, re-re-editing, and all the many other details of producing the final product, my book is finally here. My primary objective with this project has always been to produce something I am proud of. To me, it is art. I can’t take sole credit. Cathy, my wife of 51 years is my excellent critic and editor. Ryan, the book designer, always does a fantastic job. Larry Underkoffler always makes great drawings. All the folks at Beaver’s Pond Press helped to make this a good product. After all, it carries our names. We better have pride in it. But perhaps even more special to me, is that the cover of the book was painted by my mother, in the late 1930s, about 8 years before I was born. Yes, she was a professional artist, but that came decades later. The painting that became the book’s cover was done when she had just graduated from high school. In the late 1930s, in southeast Texas, existence for many was poor and bleak. She wanted, more than anything else, to add color to that existence. More than two decades after she passed, she is still adding color, this time to the ending of a bleak year. When all else fails, art persists.