As Far As I Can Tell

Meredith and I decided to check out the Around the Coyote art festival in Wicker Park tonight. It’s an all weekend affair where lots of businesses and galleries host art shows and performances.

There were a few great artworks, but you had to find it amongst some pretty bad work. There was one building in particular that had three artists I liked: Pamela Callahan’s paintings, Bert Menco’s prints, and Mary King’s drawings.

The odd part came when we started to talk to Mary King. Meredith started the conversation because she bought a drawing, and asked her where she was from. It turns out that she used to live and teach in Kalamazoo. As conversation continued she mentioned that she is originally from a “small town in Michigan near the Indiana border”. You guessed it: Sturgis.

She asked what my parent�s names are, and they didn’t ring a bell. So I brought up that my Dad has a farm operation in Burr Oak, and she remembered the size of the grain bins and farm setup. Then she mentioned that her brothers had sold a farm once to “the King brothers” — my Dad and my Uncle, King Farms.

It turns out that this woman’s Grandfather built the house that I grew up in. Her mother bought the house and the land it was on from her Grandmother, where it eventually passed into her two brother�s ownership. Not only that, but her brothers, whose last name was Fro, started the Fro nursing home down the street that my Dad worked at during the war instead of going into service.

It was amazing that out of nowhere this coincidence spiraled forward. She knew the layout of the house, and asked what room was mine when I lived there. It used to be her Grandmother�s room after her husband died. She had kept up with the house too, noting that there was an addition built on to it, which my Mom had built a few years before we moved to town.

I signed her mailing list, so maybe next time she has a show I’ll go and talk to her more. It was a really sort of strange and magical moment — randomly meeting the woman whose Grandfather built the house that all your childhood memories live in. She actually used the phrase reminisce to describe our conversation. That�s oddly what it was, two strangers reminiscing over a house they both knew as children.