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The Duality Between Realism and Idealism
I was raised by a mother who was an idealist. She turned away from her Midwestern upbringing and moved to California with my father the day after they were married in a traditional wedding at the Francis & First Street Methodist Church near downtown St. Joseph, Missouri.
California was a culture shock for both of them, but in different ways. My father was appalled at the aberrant behavior of the people he encountered. My mother was enchanted by the freedom for women to smoke cigarettes in public and wear pants instead of dresses and the insouciant attitude of the people she was now befriending.
By the time I was born in 1955 it was obvious the marriage wouldn’t survive. My mother painted with oils and watercolors and took art classes part-time at Pasadena City College, just a few miles from where we lived in Burbank. My father was an aerospace engineer at Lockheed Martin by day and worked on his degree in accounting at UCLA at night. He moved out the day after he graduated in 1958 and their divorce was final a year later.
They had chosen not to live together any longer and to dissolve their marriage due to creative differences; she was, he wasn’t. But of course it went much deeper than that.
This would be my first introduction to duality; an instance of opposition or contrast between two concepts…
