The Triptych

Toward the end of my father’s 18-year battle with cancer, he asked me to stretch a canvas. Not a simple 18x24”– a six-frame, three-panel, 4x9’ screen, tall and wide enough for a Japanese forest. He talked it out and I penciled it in. But he was too weak to stand, too weak to hold a paintbrush. Friends came to see him. Would you mind, he’d say, filling in the tree? Adding some gold leaf? Ripening a pumpkin? In all, a dozen or more artists added enough paint and love that, by the time he died, the forest was all there.   (100)