Robert Wood and Big Brothers

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As I sprawled on the couch watching Championship Wrestling from Florida one Saturday morning, I looked at the painting that hung in the family room during a commercial. It had always intrigued me.

It was an untitled mid-century Robert Wood oil painting depicting a wild storm-tossed rocky beach. Mom and Pop had gotten it for a wedding present. To my 12 year-old mind, it could have been anywhere.

Mom came into the adjacent kitchen and saw me looking at it. She put some water into the kettle and put it on the stove.

“Isn’t it beautiful?” she asked. “After the war, your Dad was stationed in California. It always reminds me of that coast.” I could see her drifting off to those long-ago years, a perspective it took me half a lifetime to develop.

The kettle began to whistle. Before she turned, she looked at me. It was a moment. “I’d like you to have it someday,” she said.

Someday. That was too much for me to grasp. I turned back in time to see Dusty Rhodes applying his signature move…the Bionic Elbow…to his hapless opponent.

Ten years later on another Saturday morning, I was at a flea market at the University of Florida. I thumbed through castoffs by graduating seniors: textbooks, albums, tapestries. I noticed a framed painting.

Another Robert Wood, this one a landscape. It looked to me like something reminiscent of a homecoming; a weary traveler returning to a place of a childhood bliss after years of struggle and a well-stamped passport.

It hung in my dorm room; then for the next 5-6 years in a variety of apartments; and finally, our first house.

When IBM closed the Boca plant in 1995, my brother Doug and I had to take transfers…him to Austin, me to Raleigh. Mom and Pop tearfully waved goodbye twice within the space of a month as their kids and grandkids moved far away. Goodbye to cookouts, swimming and coloring…just the two of them rolling around our old house.

To keep them in the loop, I’d send batches of photos with comments written on the back. Shortly before Mom’s birthday in 2010, such a batch arrived along with a card. Doug and I also went halves on some flowers. My mom…according to my dad…looked at each picture, read the back, and commented…she was never in a rush for such things. She read her cards and got a little tearful. They watched some TV, then turned out the light. Just another night.

Only it wasn’t. The next morning, my dad couldn’t wake her. He called 911 and she was rushed to Boca Hospital. Massive stroke, nothing we can do, so sorry.

Pop said don’t come yet; let’s wait to see what happens. Five days later, they held the phone up to her ear in her hospital bed as she lay comatose. Didn’t know if she could hear me—they say that hearing is the last sense to go—but I told her I loved her, she’d been an awesome mom, if she had to go, I understood.

Twenty minutes later, I got a call….she had stepped into eternity, into the loving arms of Jesus.

In the days following, Pop, Doug and I began the dreary business of going through her stuff. By this time, Doug had moved back to Boca and Mom and Pop were living in a retirement place with much less room. We found the Robert Wood seascape painting in their storage locker.

Doug and I began arguing over it. I told him about the long-ago conversation between Mom and I and he scoffed. 

“She told me she wanted me to have it,” he said. Pop was too distraught to referee.

“Look,” I said. “What do you need it for? You can walk to the beach.”

But it was more than just the painting. Both of us wanted to keep a little piece of Mom alive. The arguing became bitter, angry. I decided to let it drop; it wasn’t worth losing my only brother over.

Back home in North Carolina, the other Robert Wood hung at the top of the stairs. It always seemed lost; without its sister painting, it was a bookend without a mate.

I didn’t dwell on it, but it bugged me from time to time. Oh well.

In mid December 2012, a large package arrived from Florida. It came with a Christmas card and it said don’t open the box until Christmas.

That Christmas, after all the presents had been opened, the kids were playing with their new toys and It’s a Wonderful Life was playing, I thought it was time.

I went out to the garage and opened the box. I pulled out something big, but not heavy. I unwrapped it: The Robert Wood seascape. I turned it over and things got a little blurry as I read what my brother had written on the back.

Both Mom and Pop are long gone now but the Robert Wood seascape hangs in my family room. On cold winter nights, I look at it and my mind drifts back to a better era; my boyhood and days and nights of the four of us in the Boca house.

And of a brother who wanted me to have a homecoming.

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