Tom Maderos: Paintings and Prose

Encounters with a Few of my Several Identities

On my morning rounds, the tall, fit athlete with the lipstick-red hair jogs past me, not even breathing hard. After she’s gone, I wonder if I am ever that memorable anymore. Farther along, two small dogs attached to their owner by elasticated leashes seem wary of one of their larger, hairier brethren, free roaming across a lush vacant lot. The small dog’s person sports an army-green t-shirt with white lettering that reads: “Anti-human, Pro Dog.” Some people I know are more pro-cat, pro-plant, or pro-bird. Lately, I find myself being essentially pro word. Then there’s the giant pinkish-orange pumpkin I’ve seen before. It’s lying in state in the driveway, months after the holiday that celebrated it. A few blocks up, a man with brown lace-up work boots has cast aside a nearby blanket but is still sleeping on the sidewalk in the sun. Seeing these people and things, I feel, wrongly, that I am all of them. Then I think, equally mistakenly, that I am none of them. I continue to walk, going on with my day and theirs.

The Avocado Leaf

I watched my mother walking away. She was lying still on her deathbed, occasionally shifting from side to side, trying to get comfortable, and her expression showed something maybe only she understood. But it was probably a mystery to her as well. In my cold and distant position maybe three feet away, I was already outdoors again, traveling through time. Neither forwards nor backwards but off to the side, noncommittal as always.

The rust-colored avocado leaf slides down the shingled roof. It’s like the lyrics of a song without a melody. Small black-headed birds come and go in the garden. With their improvised departures, they are just like me and the avocado leaf.

Current Employment

Walking past the empty storefront, all I see through the picture window is red and black cracked linoleum. Long-running businesses keep collapsing, but can we still get hope to telescope out?

Chance doesn’t simply reside in dice or playing cards. The observant driver has seen my shadow cross the cement driveway and lets me cross before pulling out.

In this neighborhood residents appear to have a shared interest in yard sculpture. There is a rusting owl whose slow flapping wings are counterbalanced by a bulbous weighted tail. Down a few blocks there is a waist-high metal shark on a post and then a plaster sea-nymph figure whose extended hand ends in a Nautilus shell.

These walks are now my current employment. Thinking this, I come upon two House Painters who have finished early and are folding up their canvas tarps like newlyweds doing the laundry.

Midday, Mid-year

The white moths enjoy the cool basil plants, but the honeybees and bumbles seem to prefer the nasturtiums and poppies, even though these last have lost nearly all their colored glories.

The returning mockingbird pair sends the solitary hooded oriole packing, its bright yellow plumage like the ghost of Van Gogh. All the blonde and ginger suicides console each other. The summer sun bleaches the joy from the lavender echinacea, but the sunlight hours have passed their peak, regrettably. Too soon winter rains will displace summer’s love. What we’re attracted to nourishes, then disappoints.

A Wordless Melody

The calm of other lives mocks my aimless anxiety. The red-headed house finch rests on the apple branch. The yellow dandelions and golden poppies widen sidewalk cracks silently. Remnant rags of clouds are dispersed by the sun.

On my morning walk I encountered a man all in black walking two small black dogs. Instead of tugging hard on their leashes to force their direction, he was singing to them. It was a wordless melody as they went along, with unaccountable sweetness.

Tom Maderos has answered fan mail for the Monkees, taught kindergarten, worked on Wall Street, and won awards for home-brewed beer. He graduated from the University of California, Santa Cruz, with a degree in Fine Arts/Letterpress Printing, and continued his study of book arts as an apprentice to Clifford Burke and William Everson. His formal education  included work in printmaking, graphic design and plein-air painting.  He lives in Santa Cruz, California.