The Storytelling Beauty of Found Things

How the discovery of a portrait of my mother sparked my writing

This is my mother. A portrait painted by my father sometime, I believe, in the mid-1960s. My mother would have been in her 30s at the time. My father was an amateur artist, charcoal drawing dogs, pheasants, trout on a fly line, and occasionally portraits—there was one of Jackie Gleason and another of the Pittsburgh boxer, Billy Conn. But until recently, I had never known that my father had painted this watercolor of my mother. I never knew it existed.

When I showed the portrait to anyone who knew my mother, there was no doubt who they were looking at. “Beautiful,” they said. “He truly captured her,” they said. Dad’s talent was not surprising to me. What was, however, was that this portrait was uncovered by mistake, a complete surprise, found tucked inside a small stack of Life magazines (including the edition after the JFK assassination) without anyone now alive knowing it was there. When I saw it, it took my breath away.

Found things. They can ignite buried emotions, new depths of sentimentality and memory. Finding an old photograph of you and your sister, smiling around the candles on a frosted cake at a kids’ birthday party. Finding the key to your boyhood home in a drawer full of what you thought was junk. Finding the baseball you caught after it sailed into the field box seats along the third baseline at a Pirates’ game sometime in the late 1960s. Finding the wooden-shafted putter that your uncle, your father’s brother, used to keep in his Sunday bag. Discovery uncovers chambers in the heart, and found items tug on the tender tissue.

When I write, I look for those discoveries in story. What will surprise me? What revelation unearths something unforgettable? What discovery opens up the box where all the remarkable things are kept? Found things are what we are looking for in our writing, little gems that reveal a bigger truth, an emotion that had been cloaked or forgotten. As writers we are always trying to take something old and give it newness, attempting to uncover the meaning it once had and deliver it with a fresh perspective.

This portrait of my mother may never become the subject of a new story, or the centerpiece of a personal essay, or the motivation for a poem, but it has reignited something deeper, something partially lost in time—a memory forgotten and then found. This portrait is a symbol of the unwavering love my father had for my mother, of the heart that beat for her for more than fifty years. And that rediscovery for a writer lies at the center of everything. Love is what drives all art, and by reminding ourselves of this truth, the act of finding lost things we will always give us stories to tell.

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