This is a painting my father’s roommate made of him in art school in the late 1960s in his early-20s. It hung in our house growing up and I’d completely forgotten about it until I went to visit my dad two summers ago in the #berkshires when we at
@massmoca during the
@solidsoundfest Wilco curates every other year. Timothy James Gabel, or TJ as he was known to his friends & family, had lived in the Berkshires for the last 30-odd years with his longtime partner Cindy. The second picture my cousin Kate posted recently; Id never seen it & I hadn’t been born yet… it features young Kate, her mother Barbara, my grandmother Elizabeth, my mother, also named Barbara, and my Uncle George. The last picture is my dad and I with my boys in June 2024. Tim passed away just before Thanksgiving last year after a heart attack landed him (via helicopter) in a hospital outside Boston. He went down fighting to live. I was estranged from my father for most of my adult life after my parents split up, mid-80s, but in the last few years we’d been talking more. Id only seem him twice in person in the last 35 years, but I wanted him to meet my wife Sybil when we were married, and we wanted him to meet his grandchildren. They’d talked on the phone and he’d send them presents on their birthdays, etc. My sister Allison and I were just happy to have a rapport at all in the last decade. Today would have been his 79th birthday. Ive realized, since his passing, how my endless curiosity about art comes from him. He was an artist at heart and art teacher after college for a stretch in Chicago, but like a lot of boomers, he had to go into other lines of work to thrive in the 70s & 80s to support his family. My love of books, too, comes from growing up a house with no books: Tim was dyslexic and didn’t learn to read properly till he went to live with my great Uncle architect & finished HS at some Holden Caulfield-like North Shore prep school. He didn’t learn to enjoy reading books until his 70s; in fact, neither of my parents learned to love reading till they were retirement age. Tim will always be, to me, a fraternal twin farm boy from Illinois who never looked back. And my dad ❤️🥁
