Full Bloom
My dad is 78 and, by some measures, slowing down. He has a bad hip and a bad heel, a surgically repaired shoulder and balky eyesight, and despite kicking a lifelong Marlboro addiction, lungs that rumble and groan. I worry about him behind the wheel (he locked himself out of the car, with the engine running, not long ago) and wherever the digital world demands compliance (he refuses to use an ATM card or a cellphone or anything else that requires a password or charger). He favorite expression: “Save me from the twenty-first century.”
Dad may be a dinosaur, but the older he gets—the closer extinction looms—the more I have come to recognize that creakiness is not the same as stagnation. His work requires him to be inquisitive and inventive, audacious even, qualities that a son can only hope to emulate.
Although he is retired from the art department at Portland State University, Mel Katz is still an artist, a job that comes with no expiration date. Next month he is having a show of new sculptures, his 120th or so exhibition. He scored the first one, at the Brooklyn Museum Biennial, six years before I was born. The stuff he makes has never been confused for decoration, nothing prettified or representational. These are contemporary pieces, abstract, industrial, provocative, cumbersome, the kind that invite criticism, that tempt rejection. At an age when other dads might be content to putter around the golf course, mine is taking monumental chances. Given the choice, he will die in his studio—and on Father’s Day, that is the first place I will try to reach him.
