The time came after my father’s death a few months ago to go through his things, to sort through the belongings that made up the remnants of his life, to decide what to do with it all.

I set out to identify things that I cared to keep, and also to find things of my father’s that could be preserved and used for a posthumous and greater purpose—to give my father continuity, which my father did not believe could be obtained by the simple act of procreation.

I spent a week in Oregon going through boxes, a meandering voyage that quickly ceased being about a division of goods or a daughter’s search for the nostalgic memento and turned rather into an appreciation and a minding of the life of my father, the man David Fix.

It was not a simple, narrow, or easily quantified path: His life had periods, like the life of a painter, and, within them, phases and side streets, too. During the course of my very early childhood, my father had been an architect, in Chicago, where I was born, working for Mies van der Rohe. Then, after we moved to Italy, he had become a violinmaker, the profession he performed and breathed during the course of the rest of my childhood and my adolescence, up to my mid-twenties. It was what my dad did for most of the years I spent in his company, a calling he embarked on in his late thirties and whose learning and challenges and joys had colored most of my own life.

Then, after my college and grad school, my father and mother parted and my father went on to have a second family and also a second career, that as a university professor in architecture, at the University of Miami, back in the States. He was lucky to be able to move from one life to another so fruitfully, but of course I lived much of it from a distance. I visited my father and his new family many times in Miami, and I attended some classes that Dad taught at UM, where, I learned, he became a beloved professor.

Wrapping up such a life is no small thing. It entails going through dozens and dozens of boxes, each a chapter of a lifetime, a prolific output of a complex, talented, creative, and fertile mind. The process broke me and took me in a million directions, sad and heavy and grievous.

Yet, it also granted me a singular awakening, taking me from David the father to David the man and gifting me an experience and a light I would not have otherwise had.

In my perusing of my father’s things from the Cremona period, I found boxes of his violinmaking tools, pialle and sgorbie and all sorts of things large and small whose names I do not know in English or Italian but whose images color my memories, lined up orderly as they were on the thick slab of his banco in his lab. I found his early violin schematics and the binders in which he took meticulous notes when he was a student learning his new craft, detailing the construction of an instrument in every detail from start to finish.

I found parts of a violin in the making—the fondo, or bottom, and the top, and the fascie, those fine sinuous strips that make up the sides of a violin. The neck is missing, and the scroll, too. My father carried or shipped that violin from Italy to the States when he left and he kept it under wraps so tightly for twenty-five years that it had holes from termites. That illustrates how much he cared about and still cherished the work he had done, and perhaps he harbored a dream of returning to it once again someday. Surely that period of his life represented something worth carrying around for a very long time, and for that reason I have asked a violinmaking colleague of Dad’s back from their time together in Cremona—also named David—to put it together for me, for us, as a keepsake.

From Dad’s early architectural career I found many of his drawings, from many projects dating years back, and his architectural templates, the little plastic templates architects used—when they still drew by hand—to draw a standard shower or a kitchen counter, or, most importantly, the tiny bathtub in which in every new building Dad always placed me in the form of a little stick figure.

I found and sent home to myself a set of my father’s compasses, some rulers, an X-Acto knife, some ink pens, a drafting brush, a ruler and a measuring stick that sat on his work bench in Cetona for twenty years. I found the original drawings of the restoration of our house in Cetona, and drawings of work he had done for others—of fireplaces (it was a pet-peeve of Dad’s that few seemed able to draw and build a fireplace that draws properly), and drawings of chairs he had done in the 1960s on Mies van der Rohe stationery in Chicago.

I found an envelope of the things he used to draw for me sitting at the kitchen table after lunch—sketches of random things that occupied our daily conversations, such as trees or landscape or geometry—and also things he hung on the walls of his studio, including clips of beautiful women placed in the context of design: a breast with a geometrical meaning, a model with Dad’s Golden Ratio lines juxtaposed, and then even sketches of a vulva with pictorial analysis, something related comically to geometry.

Of course, my father would have objected to me touching any of this. I can imagine his stern look under arched eyebrows, dark eyes disapproving of my invasion and disruption of his order. He hated his things being touched or moved.

But then, Dad, I would have nothing of this to tell, and so many holes unfilled.

In Dad’s boxes I found also his famous violin varnish studies, a side street he took at some point in his violinmaking career. Everyone in my family groans at the mere sound of the words “violin varnish” because this particular enterprise—the study of the relationship between varnish and sound, one of those unsolvable mental meanderings that drives one to insanity—took my father far afield from his making of instruments and ultimately contributed to driving our family to ruin, financially and emotionally. It was a moat my dad could not drag himself from.

But, of course, after it was all said and done, after leaving Cetona my father rebounded mentally and emotionally and at the age of sixty or better he went on to have a productive and successful life as an architecture professor. He was a natural teacher, my father, and this chapter in his life was rewarding and well deserved. Over twenty years his courses encompassed things his mind was naturally lent to and that he had contemplated deeply throughout his life in different settings: wind and ventilation, and windows and doors, light, the structure of walls, the sustainability of building and of course, arches, by which my father was entranced as the marvel of design and mathematical principle that they are. I remember my father drawing arches for me as a little girl, on little scraps of paper, with his ink pens, detailing the chiave di volta that holds them together just so.

After a few years at UM Dad became part of the Rome program, taking graduate architecture students to study ancient Rome. Over the years he became the professor of the program, though he insisted humbly that he would never be able to master the understanding of this city whose layers peeled magically like the skins of onions. He, as usual, delved into this with the full passion of his mind and heart: He developed maps of the historical layers as they moved through the different parts of the ancient city and researched and wrote a chronology of Rome that is staple to the Rome program at UM today. I reviewed and looked at his every syllabus and notes, and everything is well beyond anything that I can take in. Every year he took students to Rome, sometimes twice a year, and he never stopped inquiring and wondering what was below and beneath the story of Rome that he had not yet understood or mastered, right up to the point where he could barely walk anymore. And that was the beginning of his end. He retired from UM in 2015 at 83.

In the boxes covering his most recent years, up to right before he died, were hundreds of pages of notes about architecture and its greater meaning: About what makes a good architect, and a good building, and what he considered the ethical code of an architect. In his notes, much to be explored still, I find, I think, an explanation of why my father never really wanted to practice architecture, in spite—and specifically because of—his ethics and integrity as an architect. There is no such thing as “practicing architecture,” he wrote on one piece of paper. He was deeply cognizant of the impact of buildings on the earth and on public life, and he could not shake that importance. He could not indulge the idea of the individual ego shaping so drastically the life and future of others.

When he died he was writing an article (a book?) about Mies, having to do with something my father had understood about the essence of his mentor, something that, regretfully, I will never be able to convey. It was something new even to him, that had titillated and opened some new understanding of something, but I cannot presume to know what. His notes are unintelligible to me, and it leaves me powerless because he had spent the last year or more of his life figuring this out and it may now be lost.

Among David’s notes, boxes and boxes of them, was a study of Tuscan vernacular architecture—case coloniche, as they are called in Italian. Dad considered this form of architecture one of the most sensical and respectable building codes and modes every invented, and he set out to document it and explain it as a viable building mode. I knew he had worked on this because he went on a voyage through the Tuscan countryside after leaving my wedding, in Cetona, in 1998. I knew he had drawn several poderi, farm houses that were eloquent examples of vernacular architecture, because he returned to the States and made Christmas cards out of them and sent hem to people through the years. What I did not know was how many more there were, and how much more there was to his work on the subject—boxes of notes and observations which I hope to organize and publish for my father posthumously. His drawings of the poderi alone are, in Dad’s good fashion, spectacular, so I think he would appreciate it. After all it seems that the Tuscan podere ties together so much of Dad’s life and interests.

Of course, going through my father’s things includes remembering that my father, David, had had a childhood, too, and that childhood encompassed a great deal of learning about music and art—things I had heard about and learned about as a daughter of my father, but never as the adult who is now looking back on my father.

Going through Dad’s boxes I found his wonder spread in the arts of all kinds, beginning with his drawing and painting in his tweens, with Spanish painter Pierre Daura as mentor, and even earlier. He sketched animals, buildings, cabins, faces and trees with heart and skill. He was interested in light and structure and what made them work. By the time he was fourteen he had drawn the whole of my grandparents’ house and deconstructed it competently. By then Dad has also experimented with portraits and geometric constructions in painting, mostly under the guidance of Daura, for whom he also soon thereafter designed a cabin at Rockbridge Baths in Virginia, his first building, I believe.

Beyond the early love of drawing and understanding structure in building, Dad had loved and studied music. It was his first inspiration, music, reaching to the very core of his being. I have told in these pages what inspired him to play the violin from a very tender age—Smetana’s Die Moldau—and that led him to Eastman in spite of having lost hearing in one ear to a mastoid infection in childhood. I found boxes of his violin music, from Bach to Mozart, Handel, Brahms, Mendelssohn, Paganini, Beethoven, Hrimali, Schubert, and the Kreutzer Sonata, which, in his teenage years, he absconded to a faraway place to practice. Bob Garbee, a teenage friend of my father’s, told me of his devotion to music—how he could not be stolen away from it. He also told me that Dad offered to teach Bob how to sight-read music, a lesson he began with Brahms 4^th Symphony, setting him up for immediate failure. My father had a clear cruel streak. As Bob Garbee told me, “Your father from an early age had little tolerance for human imperfection.”

Including his own. When he understood, at Eastman, that he would never be a good-enough violinist to be a concert performer, he left, without a kernel of self-pity. My mother told me, he knew that he could excel at something else, and he would never want to be lesser.

And I found among my father’s thing forty-something years of personal diaries, budget ledgers and journals written in tiny meticulous writing detailing the notable events of the day, factually and without sentiment, including such things as Sybil gets a lecture to I drank too much vino. Thing is, everything I looked at of my father’s, box after box of everything that was his life, was meticulous, careful, specific, precise, and thoughtful. His free-hand drawings are something that no so-called architect I know could remotely imitate.

During the course of the exploration of my father’s things it was hard for me to make sense of so much abundance and work and effort and care. My father wrote notes about everything—copious notations about the curvature of a cello back and the relationship to sound and color. The relationship between materials and harmony and structure. He was endlessly absorbed by Fibonacci and everything in nature that reflected on what he cared about—buildings, music, art. Everything to him had a larger connection and he looked at the world conscientiously absorbed by the inextricable connections between past and future, which included responsibility in building as well as teaching.

Since his death, I have come to learn that David—Professor Fix to others—was an excellent professor. He was kind, indulgent, compassionate, a good listener, concerned, inspirational, and rigorous (all of which I experienced as his daughter). He had a kind and generous disposition, colleagues say, and he was thoughtful and receptive to the needs of others and their views. He changed the lives of his students and made their minds better, as he did for me. One student told me that Dad often brought classical music to his classes so students could listen while drawing—and with him they had to draw by hand. Many commented on the richness of the conversations they had with Dad, insightful and humorous, too, encouraging them to look out of the box. One student recounted a drawing studio in which, regardless of the kind of project a student wished to entertain, the building had to contain a dumbwaiter so the residents or guests on the upper floors could receive their wine undisturbed.

It was that spirit, a mix of rigor and creative lightheartedness that I think led a student to feel comfortable enough to draw a caricature of him in class and present it to him. Dad cherished it, as do I.

My father characterized himself throughout his life as someone who could never finish anything. In self-deprecation he used to say that his life was littered by projects unfinished and imperfect, and that became part of his persona. I found a note that he titled ‘David’s epitaph’ chiding himself for having been born gifted and having done so little with it.

I chide you now, Dad, for having thought that.

My father was not an easy person to have as a father, or a spouse. He was demanding, acerbically critical, and sometimes cruel, and at times that narrow, plaintive familial narrative has obscured other light that was part of the man who was my father. It’s natural human error to view others through our narrative.

Now, through the passage of his death and the exploration of what he left behind—his things—I am coming to see and embrace who my father was outside of my perspective, separate from me, his daughter.

I am coming to a place where, finally, I can release the challenging story of living with Dad and embrace the story of coming from David. And that interests me, now, finally.

I am learning through this analysis of David Fix the man to let go of David the Dad, and though I will always cherish the moments my father gave me in holding my hand, or reading to me, or caring for my earaches, or teaching me how to ride a bike or how to make clay Christmas ornaments, his greatest gift was a mind and an inspirational, bottomless trove of wonder in all that surrounded him.

The vastity of David’s mind and its pursuits leaves me humbled and awed and inspired and heartbroken, too: the greater the pursuits and the gifts, and the greater the loss and sense of powerlessness. But it’s right just so, Dad: You sure never stopped traveling this thing that is life, taking your side trips along the way and casting about your insightful eye, and leaving me, along the way, many, many souvenirs to remember and understand you by.

I regret only that I didn’t spend more time with David the man rather than David the Dad. If only I had not been so caught in the trappings of daughterly expectations, of emotional disappointments—the things that father don’t do or don’t do right—I would have spent more time asking David about Fibonacci, and curves, and air through buildings, and so on, and about color and my paintings, and the violin concerto of Paganini, and the music of Brahms, who he so loved, and the story of how he accumulated dozens of signed concert programs from Carnegie Hall, and how, as a young man, he engaged in years of correspondence with famous musicians.

I would have spent more time asking why he thought what he thought about anything at all, because it would have been worth listening to, and that is a rare thing.

Now, in the man who was David I find my father, not the other way around.

Cheers, David, and thank you, Dad. I was lucky to be born of you.

My book, The Girl from Borgo, is finally out in Italian, too — La Ragazza di Borgo, available on Amazon! This labor of love is the story of my upbringing in Tuscany and my life at the intersection of two places, cultures, and identities, and how it all came to pass. Equally important, it is the tale of my love for my hometown, Cetona.

Please join me on this voyage of discovery of home and place, roots, life, love, and the spaces in between. Thank you.

It burns my eyes to see it. It’s not that I didn’t expect it, and, in fact, I was even looking for it. I typed it myself and sent it in. I was wondering when it would run—when my father would be officially recorded among the dead, for all to see.

And yet, seeing it there in blue and white, his name on the list, the W. and all, it makes me flinch. It burns my eyes, that word, David, and that W. and the F, and the final x, which in his signature had a particular specific architectural proportion and flair and personality, distinct like his name and his life and he himself, deliberate and exacting and exact, never random or sloppy or careless, both in acts of beauty and of cruelty.

It burns my eyes to see it there like that, lifeless, like a name on a list is all that’s left, unmitigable and crushing, finite and final and finished and cut and dry, ungiving and unbending and ungenerous. Utterly non-negotiable is the W and the period, silent and still, now, no longer flowing from the glistening black ink of the fountain pen that he held between the fingers of his nice-looking hands, not large but not small, not fussy or manicured but elegant and clean and neat, strong but not overpowering. Hands of precision and meticulousness that drew beautiful and distinguished drawings with that same ink pen, and that carved violins that left shavings on the terracotta floor of his lab in our house with the French doors opening to the view of Monte Cetona and the land sprawling to Città della Pieve to the horizon. The hands that I remember at the source of that W. that stood for the maiden name of the woman from whom he sprung on this earth where he is suddenly no longer, with his hands and his ink pens and his violins and drawings.

All that is left is that name, the D, small and elegant with a tail, and the W with the perfectly positioned period. To look at his name in print makes me cover my eyes like a child seeing something bad and ugly, as if I could wish it away or run from it, his death, but there it is and it must be true, because it says so there, in black and white, with no space for the pinks and purples and greens that rest and dance in between: the whole world that my father was and is to me in both the poetic and the ugly and the singularly sublime that I will carry forever in me.

When I was a kid I often suffered from earaches. I was a strong child, and, later, an athletic, healthy kid, but I inherited the penchant for ear afflictions that, in his case, as a child in the early 1940s, left him, my father, deaf in one ear and almost dead. It was the loss of that hearing that prevented my father from becoming a concert violinist, the dream he had nurtured since he first heard the notes of Smetana’s Die Moldau as a child, at a concert with my grandmother. It was the loss of that hearing that crushed his dream and that eventually sent him, together with other things, into becoming an architect and a luthier. Anyway, that suffering, that excruciating physical pain that he had lived and that had left him scarred and defeated—and in fact I now realize that that pain had somehow defined his entire childhood and life in a way that I had never previously considered—had given him a particular empathy for the ravaging, maddening pain and life-altering danger that ear infections can inflict, and, so, when as a kid I had an earache, I experienced and saw the most tender, the most attentive and empathetic side of the man who was my father, and, in fact, an empathy that I never saw in him on any other occasion.

Even into my teens, at the onset of one of my earaches my father would lay me down on the couch in our living room with a blanket over me, and he would go into our little kitchen with the stove in the corner, with the glass door by the olive tree, and he’d put a shallow pan of water to heat, and he’d put the little dark-brown glass bottle of ear drops in the hot water to warm. Every few minutes he’d draw a drop to test on his hand like a mother tests the warmth of a bottle for a baby, and when they were just right—and with my father there was a ‘just right’ in everything, and particularly in this case because the stakes were so high—while tears of pain ran down my cheeks he would put the warm drops in my ears, one by one, tenderly massaging my ears to make sure the drops were properly absorbed to do their work and heal me. Then, with concern shadowing his tight brown eyes, he would retreat quietly to his lab and to his work carving and building, leaving me on the couch to fall asleep like a child swaddled in a blanket of safety, feeling protected and reassured as I never again felt at any point later in my life.

People say, I understand how you feel, and they want to share my mourning, the mourning of my father. And yet no one can. Death is entirely individual both in its claim of the life of the deceased and the claim of the living who stay behind to live on with their memories. My living of my father and with my father are mine alone, and entirely mine. For sure, no one felt the intense sense of love that I felt, singularly, in that tender gesture of care, and, to this day, when I revisit that memory I feel his love reaching into me.

Over the past several weeks since his death I have gone through a few of the famous passages or phases of mourning. On and off I navigate seas of anger—I have some beefs to pick and pick through—and regret, tons of regret, which, strangely, is not on the list and yet is my strongest feeling now. And then, too, enormous waves of tenderness and memory. Most recently, in the past two weeks, I have come to a pool of bottomless melancholy and sense of emptiness that I fear will never really entirely go away.

But, now that I think about it, staring at that W. as I am, and that D, and imagining my dad’s hand signing his name, maybe I am still grappling with denial, and refusal, too. And that may be why those letters and that name on that list in white and blue make my eyes burn so bad.

 

To be truthful, over the past decade or so my Dad and I spoke only a few times a year. The obvious ones, of course, Christmas and birthdays, and the New Year. For those, he liked to line the family up together so that everyone could take a turn of a few seconds to speak and say whatever was necessary or required or opportune. This habit dated back to the days when telephone calls were expensive and should be kept short. He wanted it to be speedy and unproblematic.

By then my father had another family, and I had taken some kind of second seat in the theater of affections, and of course, the fact that I was in my forties, and then my fifties, by then meant my life was supposed to be well on its way without him. At home he had a son in his twenties who needed much more guidance than I did, and with him and his wife my father shared a daily life of intimacy and dinners and lunches and conversations that I no longer shared.

With me, on the other hand, the calls had in some way come to feel more like obligations than spontaneous expressions of love, and the expressions of real concern or real conversations had become more and more threadbare. I could not call and cry with him about the loss of love and so much more, and, in fact, the more my life became difficult, which in recent years it had become, the more threadbare the conversations became because my father had never been good at making things better that he could not make better. I could not ask of him, even silently, what he could not give, perfectly.

Hence, he turned away from me and my life, and, through time, living apart and compartmentalizing Sybil’s problems had caused us to lose intimacy. I no longer knew how to trust my feelings to him; I was not sure that I was not bothering him, or boring him. I felt that I had lost my Dad.

But one thing we could talk about — along with other intellectual things — and that, in fact, had become our happy place of exchange, was art. I knew I could ask about art without threatening him, without demanding anything of him that he was not willing to give, and, in fact, in asking I ennobled him. And he felt ennobled and competent and in his space. Safe, away from emotion.

Of the mind.

My father had painted as a young man, and studied art intensely, and of course, art was the first love of his life and, as it happened with my father, he knew a great deal about it, so he followed my evolution as a painter with – well, I am not sure with what.

The first couple of years after I started painting he did not come to Charleston – I went to Miami to visit – and so he did not see my work. Then, he came a few years into my painting, and my pieces were all over my house, and I was so nervous that he would come in and dismiss it or not like it or think it was all stupid. He had always been so critical, and I was enormously agitated and concerned.

Instead, after sitting for a while in the living room talking about this or that, he got up and made the rounds of the house and looked at my paintings — and I can see him now looking and evaluating as the professor and discerning person he was — walking around the room, looking, gathering some sense of what I was doing … And I knew from his countenance that I was doing something worth evaluating, though my paintings were all of birds, birds, birds — chickens and roosters. Nothing that he could particularly relate to, or care about. I held my breath, and his response was a surprise, considering that he was a hyper-critical Mies van der Rohe architect and former disciple.

But I understand now that I underestimated my father as a mind, his spirit, and his appreciation for art and what art means.

Or perhaps I underestimated him as a father. I had lost confidence in him as a father, and perhaps in myself as a person in his light.

Thereafter he started giving my work serious weight, and at some point he began to take true interest in what I was doing. He asked for pictures, and he started saying that I was growing and that my sense of the animals I was painting struck something deep and meaningful and moving, and that — that exact thing — mattered a great deal in art. It was about the feeling. The technique you can learn, he said, and you will learn if you have the passion and the discipline.

And I worked at it, every day, with his voice in the background.

And slowly through time art—my work—became the territory that we shared. It was the place where I turned to see if my Dad was paying attention to me anymore. If I had not been forgotten.

And, in fact, art opened the gates for other places, and on occasion of discussing a painting of mine we would veer off into territory that made me think that I could share my Dad again. That I could have a piece of my Dad again. We talked about books, and articles, and artists, and architecture.

Of course, it did not compensate for everything else. I missed my father deeply, the way I had known him before my parents’ divorce. A second family makes everything different—that and distance. Through time I felt like I had become a shadow of what I had been as a child in his life, and over time it compounded itself layer over layer. At some point there was nothing even to say. Another child had replaced me and inherited a father built on my skin, tempered by the learning he had done on my bones, entirely unrecognized.

I resented my father in many ways because he could not acknowledge the hurt he had done to me and my brother in leaving. And in the face of that inability to recognize our grief and to atone for it I perceived that he denied me. He listened no more, he called almost never, and I became no one, or so it felt.

But then I started painting. I actually painted more than he had ever painted in his lifetime, and I had the courage to believe in my art. And it was in that space where he actually saw my competence and valued my growth. I sent him pics on his iPhone of my birds and he asked for more so he could see the light and the texture. He encouraged me to look at things differently, to see color subtly, and we exchanged funny comments about the birds I painted. He loved my work, actually, I think, and finally, he gave me the advice I asked for.

Recently, when I sent him the picture of a new painting of a wild turkey, he responded, “Birdkins, she is lovely. She looks like one of those ladies from the Upper East Side on her way to a charity ball!”

I cracked up, and renamed my painting ‘Upper East Side.’

Perhaps he had come to respect me as an adult in some way, or to see me as the person that I am. Or perhaps it won me some confidence with him that I had not previously had. Art bridged a distance of emotion that I did not know how to bridge otherwise, and in recent years I got the opportunity to give him two paintings of mine, which he cherished and loved.

In the days when he finally grew sick of his cancer, and it became clear that he would be dying, the opportunity arose for me to show my work, here in Charleston. I had never had the opportunity, for many reasons, and I was weighing a decision to go say goodbye to my Dad, again, a final goodbye, and the opportunity to organize a showing of my work. It was not really even a show, but rather an imperfect “putting out” my work. Of course, I wanted to go see my father one last time.

Dad was too weak to talk on the phone because he had not been eating, but my stepmom, Susan, had told him about this and he had said that the most important thing to him was that I do this — that I show my work, no matter what. He sent me a message: That he had great faith in me and my work, and that I should never stop painting. Keep going, he said. Keep painting. Show yourself. Show your work.

And so I did. I never got to talk with him again. He died, just before I set up my work to be shown.

Tears rolled down my cheeks as I set up my enormous canvases of birds and people strolled in front of my work and made cock jokes, and I smiled at them, chagrined inside that while I could post on Instagram or Facebook, my father, my most important person, was no longer there to see. He had fallen off his perch, as he liked to say.

While I was there in these storefronts with my work, and my father was dead, incredibly to me, I liked to think that Dad helped and watched. The truth, though, is that I missed his encouragement, the laughs we could have had about humanity, the wisdom and advice he would have given me, and the consolation he would have offered in the face of so much baseness.

Dad, I thought to myself, did the vapid woman really just crack up in front of my painting and say, ‘Would you like a cock in your house?’

For sure, I missed my biggest fan at my first ‘show.’

When I brought all my paintings back home, I sat on the floor and cried for all the love given and had, all the love I have inside, for my father and for the birds I paint, and also for all the love lost.

I did, however, Dad, have confirmation deep in my heart that I should continue painting, as you had said. And I will. I certainly will. Maybe you escorted me here, to this place …

Thank you, Dad, for your inspiration and your support, and the great courage that you taught me, through everything you did in your life — even the things I did not like.

I miss you, and always will, every painting I start, and every painting I finish, forever more.

Yesterday I went to the funeral of a young man named Nick who died because he chose to take his life. He was just 41, and he shot himself.

The funeral service struck me for its earnestness, but also for the priest’s attempts to make everyone feel better about the fact that we could have done nothing to prevent this. God forgives us.

I squirmed and wrestled in my seat about all that, and I am still wrestling.

I saw Nick just a few days earlier in front of EarthFare, and we waved at each other and he smiled at me, his ironic Irish smile not much different from any other time I had seen him, really. Dark-haired and handsome, a bit smartass and smirking, Nick was smooth and cool and below the waves. But yes, yes, something, when I got in my car, something crossed my mind, a small thread of a thought, an instinctual feeling that Nick was not feeling great and that he looked sad and resigned.

I should have turned back and asked him something — asked him how he was doing — but I didn’t. I didn’t stop, and I did not ask. I had stuff to do, places to go, and so I tended no hand into Nick’s life, no sense of my presence. I am not sure that it could have made a difference — I don’t know what was happening in Nick’s life — but I like to think that it would have because at times I wished that someone had done the same for me.

Three years ago I came back from spending a year away, in Italy, where I grew up, and upon my return I found a place entirely changed: I had lost my lover of ten years, my cat – an animal I loved like a child – and a home. I traveled the streets of Charleston like a ghost, and no one, with rare exceptions, tended me a hand or a smile, or an invitation to dinner, or a hug, and at night I cried myself to sleep night after night for months on end, with no one but my resilience to hold me. My loneliness was deep live a cave.

It reminded me of the end of my marriage, ten years earlier, when everyone in Charleston seemed poised to throw some stone at me and leave me dead in a ditch. Even people who I had been friends with for many years and who ate at my dinner table and who I cared about failed to show up, to be there for me. Judgment was all that mattered — not my truth. And at night I went home and choked on my tears because I had lost so much and there was no one to make it better. I felt like I was entirely alone in negotiating what appeared to be an insurmountable situation.

I, contrary to Nick, I was able to pull through it—not without Nick’s very same thoughts—and I still live. And, of course, every life is different, lived uniquely and with one soul. We cannot walk in the steps of one single other human being.

But, it is also true that life is hard, and that we are fragile. And it is also true that we fail, often, to shine light in the path of other people’s lives. We fail to ask, we fail to listen, we fail to hug, to hold, to give. We fail to offer compassion and kindness and understanding. We fail to show up. And as a result people are alone. We are alone.

Suicides happen because people want to die. They really do not want to live anymore. I like to believe that someone could change that, that someone could offer someone a reason to live, and of course I think it is true. It is possible. As the guy who, while planning his jump from the Golden Gate Bridge, wrote in his suicide note, if just one person smiles at me while I cross the bridge, I will not jump.

Let us all be that smile.

Love to Nick and to his family.

David W. Fix, violinmaker, architect, and professor, irreverent thinker and lover of ideas, and handsome man, died January 22, of cancer, in Eugene, Oregon. He was 85.

My father did not want a funeral or a memorial service, or even an obituary. A nonconformist and a non-belonger, he did not believe he had done anything worth commemorating. He was an atheist and a rationalist who believed that what we live and give and accomplish on this planet is all there is, and, mostly, little of it is of notice. He died saying that he had made the choices he wanted to make and that he had lived a good and full life.

What is certainly true to me, though, is that my father is a man worth remembering, and I am taking the liberty to defy him here on my blog.

David Fix was born October 4, 1932, in Erie, Pennsylvania, where my grandmother traveled to birth him in the department of obstetrics of which her father, a revered doctor who had chaperoned thousands of children into life, was chief. My grandparents lived in Lynchburg, Virginia, where my grandfather was a self-made and successful contractor, and that is where my father spent his childhood.

But, four fortuitous early and inspiring encounters with art and music chartered the path—primordial, for my father, I think—that he took as quickly as possible away from Lynchburg and the southern United States and its cultural and racial legacy:

The first happened when my grandmother woke him one morning and announced that that night they were going to the symphony. My father put forth his most persuasive arguments as to why he should not have to participate in this expedition, but ultimately my grandmother prevailed and off they went to hear Hans Kindler conduct the National Symphony Orchestra performing Smetana’s Die Moldau.

That night that music, otherworldly, swept him into an unknown and fantastical world, and in his childlike imagination he determined one day to be like those cats up there playing their violins, their bows breezily tracing arches through the air and making this heavenly music. He never forgot that night.

The second happened at the house of his friend Joe Cunningham, whose father was a successful and well-traveled geologist. When they played there—a house full of wonderful treasures—Dad, six or seven then, took books off the shelves and splayed them on the ground to look at the pictures. One of his favorite books was about the art and architecture of Rome, and one of Greece, and while he turned the pages he thought they were the most beautiful pictures he had ever seen.

—Mrs. Cunningham, are these places real?—he asked Joe’s mom one day when she came upstairs to check on them. —Do these places really exist?—

—Yes, David, they do, and one day, I am sure, you will see them.—

The third event that chartered Dad’s course happened when he took music lessons with Mrs. Graves. While waiting for the student ahead of him to finish, he sat looking at a wall full of art that entranced him. Among the small paintings and prints on the wall he saw an etching of a dancing character that he particularly liked. When Mrs. Graves came out of her lesson Dad asked her about it.

—Mrs. Graves, this is the most beautiful drawing I have ever seen. What is it?—

—It is a drawing by a man named Albrecht Dürer. Do you like it?—

—I love it, Mrs. Graves,—Dad said. —Can I have it?—

Mrs. Graves, moved by his precocious fondness for the drawing, promised he could have it when he finished his piano lesson book, and so it was. In spring she gave it to him, and he took it home like a most precious treasure.

The fourth came on the bus to school. My father, by then twelve or thirteen, was riding in the back when Pierre Daura got on. Pierre was a Spanish painter who had reached America during the Spanish Civil War and taught art at Randolph Macon College. Everyone in little Lynchburg knew who Daura was, and they talked about him. He was a man so interesting that all wanted to meet him, yet he was so foreign to the landscape, my father said, that even a child like himself noticed and knew.

Dad was immediately attracted to him and on the bus he approached him, introducing himself.

—Mr. Daura,—he said—my name is David and I have a Dürer drawing. My teacher gave it to me. Would you like to see it?—

—Do you, now?—Daura asked him, screwing up his eyes in disbelief.

Yes, my father said proudly. Daura gave him an appointment at his studio. Dad put his little Dürer in his knapsack, exactly as he had wanted to, and took it to him, and from there a lifelong friendship began. Daura taught my father to paint, the art that was my father’s greatest love.

Ultimately, during the course of his young life Dad studied music, played the violin, studied art and painted, and eventually, by a series of forces some beyond his control, he decided to become an architect—architecture being a practical art my grandfather endorsed.

Dad studied violin at the Eastman School of Music from 1952 to 1955. He served in the Army from 1955 to 1958, in Washington, DC, and eventually transferred to the University of Virginia to study architecture and graduated in 1959. He entered Yale Architecture School Class of 1962. The class had already been selected and sealed, but the dean and famous architect Paul Rudolph made an exception for my father on the basis of his drawings alone. He received his master’s, and his architecture licensing card was signed by no other than Paul Rudolph and Mies van der Rohe, by whom he was hired in Chicago 1962.

He worked for Mies until the icon died, then he started a small architectural firm with colleague and friend Phyllis Lambert. But ultimately  my father became frustrated by an art—and a business—that perhaps never fit him entirely, though his sense of building and architecture itself, and the relationship between people and buildings, was instinctual and deeply felt, anthropologically rooted, deeply aesthetic, and denoting a keen appreciation for the supreme responsibility of building on this earth. Perhaps that was the crux—the responsibility of building on this earth.

All that became evident when my father decided to leave architecture to return to the source of his love—music—and to make violins, and we moved to Italy, when I was a little girl. Our home in Cetona was the reflection—simple, even primitively respectful—of a deep and diligent understanding of place and history. My father adored Cetona and his life there. It was idyllic and steeped in his greatest passions and interests, matured from those childhood days. And of course, in moving there my parents gave me what will always be my home, for which I am eternally grateful.

Dad attended the violin making school in Cremona and apprenticed under Master Luthier Francesco Bissolotti. He made instruments—violins, violas, and cellos—for nearly two decades and also embarked on a study, unfortunately never finished, of the properties of varnish and its impact on the quality of instruments.

He returned to the States in 1991, when the marriage of my parents ended, and he began teaching at the University of Miami School of Architecture, a position he held for nearly twenty years. He came to teaching late in his life, but he loved it and was devoted both to his students and the calling of teaching. Nearly every year, he taught in the Rome Program, on the architecture of that ancient city, of which he became a scholar. He treasured his times in Rome, soaking in and sharing with his students the love of architecture and art he so relished. He retired from UM in 2015, at the age of 83, and most recently lived in Eugene, Oregon.

Dad was always an idea traveler. Drawings and ideas occupied prominent places at our lunch and dinner table where Dad’s fantasies rolled out like little sparkling toys for me to follow, be it a portrait of a friend of mine or a drawing of a tree or a dome or an animal or a hemorrhoid, which often made for very funny times. We talked about everything—books, art, buildings, landscape, sex, man, mankind and its achievements and failures. He had no limits to his curiosity, intellectually. He pursued a study of case coloniche of Tuscany, for which he drew a series of exquisite live sketches, a study of a new design for a violin, and was in the process of writing an article on Mies van der Rohe when he left us, or, as he would have said, when he fell off his perch. He was a fascinating man.

Unsurprisingly, my father was not an easy man to live with. He could be temperamental, critical, and cutting as a Japanese sushi knife. He relished life and suffered it in a constant chafing struggle between ideals and limitations, the potential and beauty infinite and sublime and the limitations—for himself and projected on others—agonizing and crushing. Being in the world as a man was a difficult compromise in which children and wives and friends were often caught up. His universe offered a range of experiences from the stirring and the wondrous to the scalding and scarring, and sometimes the passage between the two unfolded in the blink of an eye.

Besides, my father was not a man of steely discipline, he did not serve the same employer for a lifetime, he was not involved in charities nor was he a man of the church. Really, he was not even a family man, and indeed, he was not cooperative, or often even nice, although he was very funny, very charming, and very nice, too. He was unapologetically his own person, iconoclastic, independent, and untraditional. He fails in all the revered obituary categories—and without remorse.

But my father was brilliant and exceptional in the depth of reflection and sensibility that churned inside him and that he took in from the world. He remembered minute details of people’s lives, and intricate details of conversations he had with people and the important things they had to say, even decades after the fact. Art, music, landscape, and human stories touched him deeply, and he shared that sensibility with me and everyone he thought would appreciate it. He loved food, and cooking, and dinner parties, and friends, and stories shared. I picture him tonight at a dinner table … or anywhere that was a source of beauty for him. Certainly one cannot say that he drove through life without looking: He looked and looked and looked, everywhere he went. He could spend weeks in a cathedral or a building he admired, or observing the rolls of the hills he loved, or a painting, and often when I was growing up I found him in the living room sitting alone listening to a Bach cello suite or a Brahms violin concerto, or a Dvořák concerto. In college the gifts he sent me were cassettes of that music he loved, carefully labeled in his unmistakable calligraphy, and drawings, too.

My father enveloped my world with a sense of independence and possibility  in which I could do anything, a world where what mattered were ability, talents, and greater concerns. He cared nothing about appearances, false pretenses, status or money. He lived on his own terms, mostly unwaveringly. Often all that sorely lacked practicality, or sense of the common, but it made me who I am, a person enamored and engrossed with being part of a larger world of wondrous things that endure. And also living on her own terms.

All that I learned from the man who was my father, the man whose mind never ceased wondering and seeking and learning, up to the day of his death.

I will feel your absence, Dad, and miss you, for the rest of my life. I have no one to show my paintings to for feedback; no one who can as easily weave a fascinating conversation and know so much about so much; and no one to cheer me on when I embark on another idea that may not bear fruit but that comes from the deepest of my intuition. Though you starved my emotions sometimes and understood nothing of me in some ways, you appreciated and championed some things about me better than anyone else on the planet. In some ways you were my biggest fan, and for that I thank you.

Conversely, I am sure there is much I did not know about you, and, in fact, I regret if your life is not represented here to your liking. I am sorry for that. But I was most definitely your fan, too, and this is the best I know to do with what I do understand of you.

David was preceded in death by his brother, Bill. He is survived by his oldest son, my brother Paul, who lives in Italy; his youngest son, my brother Alex, in Eugene, Oregon; his second wife, Susan Fix, also in Eugene; my mom, Irene Fix, in Pennsylvania; and myself, in Charleston, SC.

With love forever.

We used to talk at the fountain and in the piazza, arm in arm, day in and day out. That is how I grew up with people, talking, sharing, spending hours together. Then, later, we wrote many, many letters, long, detailed and frequent, and so, so welcome. I still find such joy in revisiting these irreplaceable and rich epistolary relationships, many of which lasted years and years and were of enormous importance to my life. Then the phone came along, and we phoned occasionally, though it was still so expensive that we still wrote. I have boxes of letters that my parents wrote me in college and years after, on that featherweight paper that was nearly transparent. Then calling became cheaper and we slowly stopped writing, and phone calls replaced letters. Then email and texting came along, and those slowly replaced calls, and then even emails. Now emojis have replaced words, and Facebook posts are the way we expect to know about others and for others to know about us. Slowly, over two decades we — and I am not talking about my friends in Cetona but about humanity in general — have gone from saying 2000 words of full descriptive emotion and expression of ourselves to saying 20 words and expecting the result to be the same. Or even worse, to let caricatures tell our story, or pictures. Surely we cannot expect human relations to stay the same — whether long-distance or not. For friendships to not wither. For loves to not dry up. For knowledge of one another to not evaporate. For ourselves to not become islands awash in seas of disconnect. We become lazy in expression and unsure about anyone caring about any of our truths. Have any of you counted the phone calls you have exchanged in the past year versus those you exchanged seven years ago, or ten? I feel this deeply, and my life is definitely the lesser for it.

When I returned from my year in Italy some time ago — longer ago than I care to measure now — and I came to live in this temporary home loaned to me by a friend, in walking about the neighborhood and searching for some kind of tethers I made friends with a dog who was always alone in front of a red brick house nearby.

She was black and short-haired and sinewy, like a young elegant horse, with a clean, lean face and deep chocolate eyes. She reminded me of a lover’s dog I once knew, named Pansy. Mostly, she was really sweet, and lonely, and wanting for play and love. Her peeps, I came to learn, were doctors, and between both of their busy schedules rarely were they both home, and, most often, neither of them.

I have never been a dog person, taken mostly by cats. But every day, the longer she came to watch me walk by on her street, this sweet dog, well-cared for and enclosed in a generous yard shaded by lovely oaks and delineated by an electric dog fence, she came to beckon me, seemingly looking out for me, alert as I came into her view. As she saw me coming, she’d get up and come to her boundary, wagging her tail enthusiastically.

Reluctant at first, I came to near her electric fence, and she came to greet me. Slowly, she invited me in, further and further, and bit by bit I came onto the grass and into her driveway to pet her, and I learned from her tags that her name was Girley.

Over the course of many months, in this neighborhood new and foreign to me, Girley and I made friends, she looking out for me on the horizon, brown eyes pointed as I approached on my daily walks, and I calling for her as she came to her electric limit and rolled down onto the ground to be petted, knowing I would come to her, and surely I would.

She was so sweet and giving, and there—something stable and nice. In time, she waited for me, even when I drove by in my car, the old green Volvo whose rumbling she came to recognize, and in this daily routine Girley came to fill the void of other things — people, animals, places lost and gone, too many to mention. Every day I looked forward to the playfulness of her bark and the pleasure of rubbing her belly, her eyes closed in bliss in what became a shared moment of trust and companionship.

I came to love Girley more than I knew.

Last month, I noticed a For Sale sign in the yard of Girley’s home, and I learned that Girley’s peeps were moving to Tennessee. My eyes stung at the sight of the sign and I stopped to gather myself, feeling a bit bottomless. I was not surprised to feel the looming loss of Girley full of grief for me, but I felt regret mostly for not being able to communicate to this unknowing dog — not mine to own, not mine to love—how much I would miss her.

One dawn last week, Girley’s family moved and took her with, to Tennessee. They left. That morning when I went for my walk I paused with heaviness to note the absence of her water and food bowls gone from the porch. Nothing but silence, the void of people having moved. There is nothing else like it, specifically.

I imagined her in the back of the car looking out onto the countryside, traveling through the states, and it made me smile, yet cry.

And now, every day when I come to Girley’s house I continue to look for her, against my own knowledge that she is gone. I picture her there, nose in the air, tail wagging low to the ground, like a cartoon happy dog. I miss her, for sure — and the great joy she gave me.

Farewell, Girley girl.

I made $18 today.

It’s raining now, and listening to the rain and looking out onto the drops hitting the street outside this borrowed home I think of most mornings in Cetona when I was in my teens, when I would get up at 6 and make my bed and tiptoe downstairs with my clothes and books down the spiral staircase through my parents’ bedroom, still asleep, to the first floor. I would wash and dress in the bathroom with the yellow-and blue-flowered tile, tiptoeing between rooms, and close the wooden door to the little kitchen and make myself breakfast.

When it was cold and rainy, which in Cetona it most often was in winter, I would warm my bread in the oven and leave the oven door open for heat. Sitting there in the warmth and the dim light I would have my caffelatte and biscotti while reviewing Dante or Latin or math or history or whatever it was that called for our attention that day — something that surely I had fallen asleep with the previous night, for I was the dutiful daughter, and a bright one, too.

Sitting there in the silence with my books I listened to the raindrops falling on the terracotta terrace outside and the dimness of the countryside enveloped in sleep and wetness. There was a certain sound to it; nothing carried — not the call of a rooster or the bare moan of a car somewhere out there in the countryside, and it enveloped me like a cocoon. I never dreaded venturing out in the rain to go to school, though, strangely. There was comfort in the walk to the bus, the habit of it, in retrospect, or the surety of me having done what I was supposed to and feeling prepared for whatever came. I knew it would yield reward in my small world and, perhaps, someday, in the larger one, too.

After having my small breakfast I ducked out the door under my umbrella in the silence of our street on the edge of town. The thud of the heaviness of the brown wood door and the latch catching still ring exactly in my ear, though I would pull the door shut quietly as to not wake my parents or our sleeping neighbors next door, Pio and Bianca, tired and old. I walked up our winding unpaved road, skirting the puddles in the dark gray light, the sunlight still budding unclear, walking methodically to reach the piazza, up and up the hill, where I would catch the 7 am bus to Montepulciano. In the rain the countryside was quiet except for the rush of water in a small stream below where as a child I looked for frogs and flowers, and I would see no one on the street, not even the farmers that every day passed me on the road to school, not Genoveffa going to feed her chickens or Silvia’s grandmother, who otherwise I crossed every day going down to her campo carrying buckets and food for her rabbits. The montagna of Cetona stood to my left quietly, tall and embracing, enveloped by fog and rain, and the sweet smell of the earth drenched in rain filled everything.

I waited for the bus in the piazza in front of the Bar Cavour with its dim lights and the smell of coffee and cigarettes and a handful of kids who went to the liceo with me or caught buses here and there to other towns for other schools. In the rain the bus came and took us through the countryside from Sarteano and Chianciano to the Piazza della Stazione in Montepulciano. From there we walked up to the fortezza and to class. Every town was enveloped like Cetona was in the rain, from Chiusi to Montepulciano and beyond, a reign of gray and water, and outside the fortezza the landscape sat gray and indistinct as we listened to our lessons and passed – or didn’t – our tests.

At 2 we walked in the rain through Montepulciano’s steep streets back down to the bus that took us an hour back through the countryside by then enmeshed in fog that made everything a mystery, back to Cetona, with Monte Cetona still blanketed in rain and the top hidden in clouds. There was the piazza again, deserted and dreary, the rain pounding the pavement, and back down the silent road home, to lunch and home and homework and, later in the afternoon, friends in the piazza, if any could be found. So much of everything was a mystery then, so much to unfold; an entire future to discover, in retrospect. This little town in the middle of nowhere — where would we go from there? Where would I go? I don’t think I ever wondered that. Looking back, everything seemed so much surer then, and so much more reassuring. Everything was right there, and everything sufficed, even in the mystery of the rain.