— 15 —

ELWOOD H. SMITH (FORMER STUDENT) AND NANCY BOYER FEINDT

Lunch at the Martindale Chief Diner By Elwood H. Smith

I was sitting alone in a classic diner shortly after noon on Route 23, just off the Taconic Parkway, waiting for my spinach, tomato, and cheese omelet. I was studying the clots of cream in my coffee when she appeared. I looked up, and there she was, Mrs. Feindt, sitting across from me, fidgeting with the torn edge of the menu’s yellowed plastic sleeve.

She smiled at me and looked back down at her menu. I was restless all night long, in anticipation of our luncheon rendezvous. I finally fell asleep and when I awakened, I rolled out of bed and stumbled toward the bathroom door and crossed directly into the Martindale Chief Diner.

Nancy died in 2003. I visited her at her home in Toledo, Ohio, two weeks before cancer took her life. I sat on an ottoman at her side, holding her hand.

She was lying in an old leather recliner, puffy from the effects of chemo and heavy drugs, but she was aware of everything: her two fat, lazy cats, the dishes being scrubbed in the kitchen by an old friend. I was thanking her for the umpteenth time for being my mentor, my saving grace, my link to the outside world, when she squeezed my hand and told me I was the most stubborn student she’d ever had.

I remembered being a model student, eager to learn, a hungry sponge. I soaked up the Skira prints she gave me, works by Daumier, Van Gogh, and Chagall. Eventually, she slipped Picasso and Francis Bacon into the mix. Mrs. Feindt was an endless font of magic. I was enthralled and overwhelmed.

“I could see great potential,” Nancy said, “but your focused, inquisitive nature constantly wrestled with your mile-wide streak of skepticism and stubbornness.”

Mrs. Feindt, Alpena High’s new teacher, was as tenacious as I was cautious. In two years, she managed to breach my sturdy wall of resistance, bringing with her riches from worldly experience.

Throughout my childhood, I studied the great cartoon strips of the forties and fifties.

I absorbed the characters in Barney Google, Pogo, and Popeye. I studied Norman Rockwell’s Saturday Evening Post covers. Nancy found ways to honor my keen interests, while steadily steering me into unexplored waters.

Nancy Feindt, my mentor, my old friend, had changed. She was no longer the solid, sturdy woman I’d known over the years. She was, this day, vaporous, almost not there.

“Just coffee,” she said to the waitress. “Black, please.” Then she looked at me and said, “I can’t stay too long, I shouldn’t be visiting you.”

“I am so happy to see you, Nancy,” I said, but I was too chipper.

“If you are expecting tales from the other side,” she said, “stories of horrific landscapes from Hieronymus Bosch or a schmaltzy heavenly street paved with gold by Thomas Kinkade, you’re at the wrong diner on the wrong day.”

I reached across the table and placed my hand gently on hers. “I’m not expecting anything, Nancy,” I said. “I’m not even sure this is happening.”

She smiled and said, “I always knew you’d make it, you know. I think about those days in Alpena with great fondness. My Michigan memories, and those of my happy times in Europe have enriched my life, my afterlife.”

“Why are you here?” I asked.

“Why are you here? That is the better question,” she said.

Nancy didn’t wait for an answer.

“You are here,” she said, “because you need help. I am here because you think you don’t. You do. You are not following your compass. You are near your destination, but you are off course.”

Nancy was right about my unreliable sense of direction, in my life and in my art. Her voice has always been, I realize at that moment at the diner, an internal guiding light throughout my entire adult life. And now, here she was, ready once again to barrel through my stubbornness, my unwillingness to listen.

“You think you came up with your latest idea to abandon your trusty pen for a simple graphite pencil in an attempt to reinvigorate your art?” she asked. I looked down and picked at the soggy spinach leaf peering out of my cold, rubbery omelet.

“Remember the necklace, the one I wore at my seventieth birthday party?” she asked. “You know, the colorful pencil stub necklace Helen Eustis mailed to you after my death?”

I did remember it. It’s in a drawer somewhere.

“You didn’t hear it speak to you, but it did!” she said. “You don’t always listen, but you somehow manage to hear important messages when you are ready. The necklace spoke to you just before you began your ‘Death at the Circus’ drawings. You listened then. Open your ears; messages are being sent to you each day like thunderstorms. Open your windows, my stubborn boy, and let in the light, let in the rain.

I laughed aloud. Here I was, a seventy-seven-year-old man being scolded by his deceased high school teacher. Nancy smiled and said, “Okay, I think we are finally getting somewhere.”

Nancy was a feisty apparition, I’ll give her that. She reminded me that she had to get back before she was found out. She swallowed the last of her burnt coffee and stood.

“Find that necklace and hang it close to your drawing table,” she said. “It will speak to you, so open up your stubborn ears and listen. It will guide you back to the true path. In fact, my friend, you have been more or less off-track since you were that small child soaking up the Sunday comics.”

“You were genuine then. Listen to the necklace, it will lead you back to the truth. Yeah, I know I’m sounding like a new age spiritual guru, here, but trust me, that cheap colored pencil stub necklace is a talisman. Follow it back to the truth.”

I promised I’d pay close attention to the talisman. BLINK! Nancy Boyer Feindt was gone. I paid the check and drove back home. I could feel the rain on my face.

Elwood Smith, an internationally acclaimed advertising and editorial illustrator, has also written and illustrated numerous children’s books, two recently for the Creative Company, I’m Not a Pig in Underpants and How to Draw with Your Funny Bone. Elwood currently lives in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, with his companion, Janice Kittner, and his three unruly cats.