Mom's White Dresser

by Donald Hoxter

You probably don't remember, but at the house in NE Portland, the one we were in when Mom died, she got you girls a plain white dresser and then she painted very nice art nouveau trim designs around the outside of each drawer and if I recall correctly, she painted the knobs each a different solid color. It looked so good she and I discussed the possibility of her doing a few of these to generate income from her artwork.

It was always a great failure of mine that I couldn't figure out how to propel her deep abiding talent as an artist into an income funnel. All those years we were together, fourteen to be exact, we tried art galleries, artistic co-op affairs, a booth in a store in downtown Portland, three or four of our own studio-galleries, county fairs, the country faire, Saturday market, a one-woman show at the Umpqua Valley Art Association, ( which was in retrospect, the highlight of her long overdue and much deserved recognition as a world class artist, creating in fact a new genre in the fine art world. That of course being the elevation at last, of her 'soft-art' to the exalted status of a fine art and not just a craft. We made money at it here and there but never the amounts it deserved.

I think now looking backwards at it all, that my status as a bonafide self-chosen outlaw/outsider was a major factor in the established art communities shunning of mom's work. Although, at the Country Faire, every public venue really that we participated in, it was recognized without question that this lady was in a class all her own, and that no one, not even a smidgen of someone else who was a participant with their own creations, was even remotely near mom's level of creativity and talent.

But you see we already knew this fact. So it may have stroked hers/mines ego to a degree, but it did little to dispel the overwhelming feeling and knowledge that here we were, one of the very few who could be classified in the league of 'The Masters', going through this journey of life, with fame, fortune and recognition passing her/us by.

It passed Van Gogh by also. Hell he never sold even one of his paintings during his entirely too short lifespan that wasn't bought by his brother. Most of the time secretly as his brother was his agent.

I told Mom numerous times that I didn't care, (because at the time I was smuggling probably ten tons of marijuana a year and we had more than enough money) and I truly believed "fuck the world" if they won't or can't or what-the-fuck ever, (don't want to pay huge sums for her work or at least something relative) then we would keep them. Which I preferred anyway to decorate the interior of our mindscape.

I told her that almost anyone could do what I did. Which in retrospect I see wasn't true at all. Very few (in fact less than a handful I see now) could do what I was doing. Cause it wasn't just smuggling pot, it was taking a small group of totally dysfunctional beings (on their own)and pulling from them that which they didn't even know they possessed and creating a theatrical production. The smuggle itself.

Bound to a radical sense of ethics,foundationed firmly in the hippy/revolutionary/let's get up one more rung on the evolutionary ladder pathos, and making this group like a finely tuned Porsche engine. Able to outrun the strongest, most militaristic, fanatically overwrought with supposedly christian morals, government.

Who had hundreds if not thousands of dedicated fanatics, armed to the teeth, with the latest and the best technology could offer.

Individuals working 24/7 to stop me and my ragtag bunch of robin hood based outlaws. But they were spiritually bankrupt and they never did stop us.

Fate somehow threw the most bizarre obstacles in our direct path, so many times. But the key was to not resign yourself to the objectives inherent in Fate. To never say quit, no matter how dire the landscape looked to you at the moment. To plod onward, conscious of the karmic consequences of being dishonest, greedy, a liar, a thief, or an individual whose intent was to cause harm. As long as we could and would honestly access the spirituality bestowed upon our every breathing moment we just might make this one through.

And so mom adapted that same set of ethics I constantly was drilling into my compatriots, her, you kids, and as I look back on a life lived, I think there is a strong sense of achieving sucess actually. I know that every single time I am with you, or Belle or Emmy, I kind of glow inside with a pride of knowing that the goals mom and I discussed while all three of you were nuturing in her tummy or at her tit, these same goals we somehow were able to accomplish.

They were the goals of producing a new stunning product in the field of female children/women/artists/outlaws/gnostic free thinkers who would carry on that overbiding sense of right and wrong I referred to earlier as ethics.