Betrayal of the Limb

I've already fallen behind on the weekly art journal that I'd resolved to do this year, for various reasons, all tied to defects in my personality and the outrageous tyranny of full time work, but it doesn't matter, because I've already drawn the major opus of my later life, like the French guys water lilies. What a load of free time he must have had.  

You educated people know who I'm talking about!  Please tell me, I can't remember his name, and I want to toss it to the philistines like emotionally hurtful bread crumbs. 

I took considerably less time to draw my major opus, and it shows, but I believe it encapsulates these final years of my earthly existence fairly well. 

Unlike the lazy surrealist doodles that have in the past and will continue in the future to waste the time of any stray viewers of this blog, this drawing actually depicts a real life event that has haunted my suburban existence: I broke my neighbors tree, on accident. I was attempting to bond with the little kids that wait for the school bus along with my kid, and one of them asked me to pull on the snow covered branch of this aspen tree, in order that the snow would fall on them in a freezing shower and they would be amused thereby.  I demurred, as the tree was on the front yard property and right by the front window of someone's house. The kids are always playing around in the yard while they wait for the bus, but as I am a grownup it doesn't seem right to me to walk onto their yard from the sidewalk. The kid insisted that the owners of the house have told them that it's okay to play in the yard, and as her will is implacably strong and mine is barely perceptible at all I pulled on the branch and it broke off the tree and fell to the ground before me.  "Oh they're gonna be mad," the kid said, and they all ran to the bus which had conveniently pulled up at that moment, leaving me alone by the broken limb, gazing furtively at the front Windows of the house. The picture depicts my headlong rush up the street, conveying the huge piece of evidence to my own back yard where it could be hidden. I had resolved to approach the neighbor at a more reasonable time of day to apologize for the branch, but I have never done so.  It seems aggressively intrusive to me to knock on someone's door for anything but a medical emergency. Better to just wait for an opportune time, when both of us happen to be outside and walking near, and have no urgent business to attend to, to mention the tree and take the opportunity to say how sorry I was...and if all parties happen to grow old and pass away before that meeting ever happens so the better.  And if there's an afterlife wherein social interaction is some kind of requirement and past wrongs are expected to be righted then I will be happy under those circumstances, where time would expected to be in extremely plentiful supply, to bring the matter up.