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TAKING FLIGHT

48" x 36"
OIL ON CANVAS

The final painting of the twenty seven is "Taking Flight", 48x36 inches, oil on canvas. It is for and about Carol Dawn Haykin, my mother. My father died a decade before covid arrived. My mother is a life-long practicing registered nurse now living her quiet life when covid arrives. She understands virology and epidemiology very well. She gracefully accepts the concepts of quarantine and isolation completely and is utterly compliant. She spends her next year solitarily, seeing not a friend, nor a single member of her close-knit family, she takes all of her meals alone. Still she contracts the virus and is immediately hospitalized and once again in isolation. It is new year's eve of 2021. I finally locate her by telephone. Here is our conversation... "Hi Mom!" "Oh, hello sweetheart, I was just thinking of you." "Well I was just thinking of you too, and want to wish you a happy new year. I'm so sorry that you're having to spend it in the hospital." "Oh, I'm not in the hospital", she says. "Where are you? She tells me this. ... "I'm home. Your father has worked so hard on this place and it is beautiful." My mother died a few days later, compliant and isolated. This is now the story we all know, the story we all share. This is how we are all changed.