Sleeping With The Past 2: Grandpa Lowell Painted

[Ancestry. Inheritance. Legacy. How important is it to us what our forebears have done? A few little things lately have me thinking about this stuff.]

[Leona Helmsley leaves millions to her dog, and ensures that her and her husband's tomb will be meticulously cared for, while leaving her grandkids nothing. Her business, of course.]

[The Angry Young Man has traced, with what I grudgingly admit to be a pretty high degree of credibility, his ancestry back to the Middle Ages. Me, I can only go back to 1600s England so far, but I have hopes that my own additions to One Great Family will piggyback and I can see my undoubted connections to those few historical figures whose genealogies were tracked before it started becoming commonplace in the early modern period.]

[I'm not sure why I care, except that it's sorta neat. I mean, does it matter that my great-grandfather was a somewhat prominent author whom almost no one reads nowadays? (Although...) Does it matter that his son and daughter-in-law are commemorated at Yad Vashem? Or even that the rumor persists that I'm Buffalo Bill Cody's great-great-grandson via a clandestine affair during a visit of the Wild West Show to Oregon in the late 1889? I never knew any of them.]

[One almost-ancestor with something of a claim to fame I did know and remember fondly was my mother's step-grandfather, Lowell Davenport. Grandpa Lowell painted, mostly California Impressionist landscapes (mostly of his home near Santa Cruz), but he also did some portraiture, including one of my mother at about age ten that hangs in my parents' bedroom. My folks have about five of his landscapes as well, and my sister and I each got one when my grandmother died in 2002. (They both have a distinct patina of nicotine which we'd love to get cleaned off one day. I have no idea what that costs.) The pictures Lowell didn't sell when he was alive are similarly distributed among my mother's family.]

[Anyway, Mom's first cousin is a professional wildlife photographer who knows a thing or two about the art world, and he's compiling a photo portfolio of Lowell's work. He seems to think they're worth some money, something we'd always suspected. I doubt I'd ever sell my creekside landscape: not only does it depict something of what I love about my home state, it's also a sentimental reminder of someone I remember as a gentle, somewhat vague old man with a slim build and milky blue eyes who loved the outdoors, his upright piano, and my outspoken great-grandmother.]

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