Witch Sisters III

I'm heading down Chicago's Longwood Drive, looking past the wet leaves sticking to my windshield and watching the last bits of bright gold desperately cling to the windblown Maple branches.  The sky is low and heavy and grey.  My mind sees it purple.  The atmosphere is a book, a fantasy, a painting.

The only thing missing are the witches. As I pass the Irish Castle, I look up over the hill and through the branches and I pretend they're there, just over the turrets; circling the old limestone battlements on top of the hill.

I know they've been in the Broom Room all summer, spinning and flying and cackling. And waiting for this time of year. A Beetlejucian production worthy of Tim Burton showing up and directing it himself. But we don't need him, because we have my father.

In some ways, the three sisters aren't archetypal witches.  Yeah, they have pointy hats and broomsticks.  Cauldrons and warts, yes. But they're not scraggly and smelly shopping-cart ladies like you might see on Western avenue or the L-platform.

Our witches are an eclectic mixture of different themes, like the ones written by the Brothers Grimm and found in family favorites like Magical Beasts and Bed-knobs and Broomsticks. Strangely more Nancy Drew than Creature Features.

My father sketched the witches on scrap mat-board left over from framing projects he did himself in his first gallery - the one next to the railroad station and across the street from Monterey Pharmacy, Kreteck's and Kaden's.

It was probably fun for him too.  He was so busy painting local houses and drawing historical landmarks that any child-like diversion was almost certainly welcome. And thus, they came drifting into our childhoods like bluish wisps of Bond Street smoke from his pipe.

We knew, as the leaves piled up on the driveway and it would get dark just before dinner, that it was witch time.  My father already had a love for storms and clouds and folklore.  All he needed were his pencils and mat-boards and us, and the sisters and their world readily came to life.  Vincent Price had his pipe organ and my father had his art supplies.    

And we were an attentive audience - we'd rather hear about their magical and mischievous antics then listen to an opera or hear about some old building on Prairie Avenue. Give us the girls.

At bedtime, in the days when everyone could fit into the same bed, we'd listen to the witch stories, and my father would draw them as he told them.  I oddly remember his hairy fingers gripping his Turquoise Pencil or his felt-tip pen. The pictures were never really the same, but we didn't care - or probably even notice at the time.

I wish I still had some of the illustrations, just to see them once more. But sometimes memories are even better than the real thing. And when the good ones are happening, you never really know it at the time.

Crumpled pictures find their way into the trash - but memories find their way into blogs.

And when it feels like the fall - a purple-grey sky, a leaf-rustling wind - I think about the Witch Sisters.  I picture my father, in 1966, picking up scraps of mat board from the floor of his gallery to bring home.  And I see him putting that felt-tip marker and Turquoise Pencil in his pocket.

Thanks dad.