This morning, I knew Ron was finished.
I wish I could tell you it was because I finally got the sky right, or because the values settled into place, or because I stepped back and made some careful painterly assessment.
It wasn’t any of that.
I was working around the sky and the space surrounding the soldiers, massaging things, making those last little adjustments that can either finish a painting or keep you messing with it for another three days.
Music was playing in the Shed.
Paul McCartney was singing Another Day.
And suddenly I got choked up.
I missed Ron.
That was it.
My thermometer. Time to take the thing out of the oven.
I always knew these two photographs would become paintings together.
Mike’s photograph—the one that became Elsewhere—was pregnant with something from the beginning.
He was twenty-five, sitting shirtless on a pier in Vietnam, looking as though part of him had gone somewhere the photograph couldn’t follow.
Ron’s photograph made me laugh.
There he is in Vietnam, holding a small mirror while another soldier shaves. Eyes closed. Chin slightly raised. That pose. That expression.
All of it happening against the backdrop of a war.
There was something almost M*A*S*H-like about it—not because the circumstances were funny, but because somehow people continue being people even in circumstances that make no sense at all.
And that was Ron.
He was funny, yes. But he was also smart and articulate. He could sing. He had a big heart.
I knew that Ron.
Decades after this photograph was taken, I knew the man inside it.
Ron was also, as I sometimes joked, Velcro to Mike.
When we visited Ron and Gayle, there would inevitably come a point when Ron wanted Mike to himself. I would find myself politely—and sometimes not so subtly—displaced.
I laughed about it.
Usually I went off with Gayle.
Because I understood.
Those two men had something that belonged to them.
I knew that long before I understood much about how it had begun.
Mike arrived in Vietnam about a month before Ron. Both were with the 101st Airborne, and eventually both were working at headquarters at Landing Zone Betty.
Mike has always said that knowing how to type may have helped save his life. Their work involved reports and documentation, sometimes recording the deaths of other soldiers.
And somewhere amid all that paperwork, all those names, all that loss, a friendship took hold.
It never really let go.
I knew how close they were. I had watched it for years.
But painting Ron made me understand it differently.
Not intellectually.
I already knew the stories.
It became something more felt.
Painting does that to me sometimes. It makes me stay with something long enough that what I thought I understood begins to deepen.
What it records is an ordinary morning ritual.
The painting began to hold something less tangible.
The place itself seemed to have one rhythm—the tents, the sky, the heat, the strange landscape of Vietnam.
The soldiers had another.
Get up. Shave. Dress. Do the work in front of you.
It’s just another day.
And somewhere inside those ordinary days, Mike and Ron found each other.
There were plenty of moments while painting this one when I thought I had lost it. Awkward stages. Colors that weren’t behaving. Passages that felt hopeless.
Nothing unusual about that.
Then this morning, while I was working around those two young soldiers and Paul McCartney was playing, something came together that had very little to do with paint.
Ron was there.
Or at least enough of him was there that I could feel his absence.
I hope when Mike looks at this painting, he sees Ron.
Not simply what Ron looked like at that age.
I hope somehow he sees who Ron was to him.
For now, that’s enough.
More than enough.
I love the art and wonderful stories. 💕💕Always a great start to my day when these messages show up.