PROLOGUE
These recollections and stories are from memory mostly, and hopefully they retain the flavor and the substance of the events depicted.
I was born in the Bronx, in the early morning hours of January 9th 1947, in a snowstorm. In the middle of the night my mother Hilda Landfield was rushed to the Bronx Hospital, -- she was very ill, and hemorrhaging blood. My father Nathan Landfield drove us at top speed through the cold and the howling wind and the snow to the hospital. No one could predict the outcome on that dark and scary night. Hilda was a very strong willed young woman and she was determined to have a successful pregnancy (sadly she had a miscarriage in 1940). Thankfully my mother had a successful delivery, and I arrived in the world kicking and screaming in the wee hours of that freezing January morning. To this day I never liked the cold winter weather. If my memory serves me well I would have been content to have just stayed where I was – in the oven -- so to speak -- for at least a few more months
Although she was weakened by the experience and she needed rest and time to recuperate with a lot of help from her three sisters eventually my mother had a full recovery. Her recovery took a considerable amount of time and Hilda told me that for a brief time she wasn’t sure that she was gonna make it through – but she did, and she didn’t have any more kids after me. Hilda always told me these stories about my birth and how difficult those times were whenever I was getting out of line.
The day I arrived was on my brother Barry’s fifth birthday. My brother was born in 1942 and Hilda wanted to have another healthy child to raise and so I completed our family of four. I came with all of my fingers and all of my toes and all of my marbles and a pentient for drawing, a passion for art, jazz, folk music, poetry, pretty girls, an independent streak and especially a loathing of crowds, authority and hypocrisy in general.
We lived in apartment B9 on the second floor of 780 Pelham Parkway South. My parents slept in the living room, on the folding couch. I slept in my crib in the bedroom that I shared with my brother
My parents met in New York City during the early1930’s. They married on October 24th 1937 Hilda’s 23rd birthday. Hilda’s sister Sarah (Sadie) was married to Nate’s brother Bill and Hilda and Nate met as a consequence of Bill’s dating Sadie. “Nate” (as my father was usually called) came to New York City from Ohio in 1930 when he was still just seventeen years old. He hitchhiked from the family home near Cleveland determined to find and stay with his oldest brother Bill who had come to New York City a few years earlier and who Nate had heard was living in a place called Brooklyn.
It seems that each week brings new complications, and new demands on my time and on my career. At a certain point I am going to begin writing about my life now, as a painter in the twenty first century.
As I write this I’m thinking about jumping around from idea to idea or rather from past to present to past as my memory kicks in with certain recollections.
