(Unedited/WIP)

My father told me the story of chimera many different times over his life: it seemed from a different perspective with different meaning each time. I had known early on that it was a beast of ancient origin.

But it wasn’t until several months before his passing that I realized all the parts of the story. As Homer’s fire-breathing she-monster left the pages of his story to take on many shapes and meanings over history, so did my father’s Chimera. Partly by nature, partly through history, and partly through imagination, his Chimera bore mine.

My father’s stories of Chimera began in the Bronze Age. It was then he said that the Etruscan people of Italy used bronze for cast and beaten work. “The most famous example of Etruscan art is a small sculpture of the beast with a lion’s head, a goat’s body and a serpent’s tail—the Chimera of Arezzo,” he would recite proudly as my small fingers traversed the glossy pages of the art textbook he pointed to. (I may have been the only one who actually listened to these type stories.)

My father also worked with bronze. And it was in the black and white photo of this small statue from the 5th Century BC that he found definition for his own artistic vision. He agreed with its beauty and its hardness.

At age 42, my father left his job as a Xerox salesman to start Chimera Designs. Chimera was firstly the proud and mythical symbol of his realized dream of handcraft furniture and other objects in bronze. With a grandfather jeweler, father metallurgic engineer, and mother who was a Cooper Union educated illustrator, he felt metal working and the arts were in his blood. Chimera had another significance to his business, he would explain to people. His secondary concept for Chimera Designs was to create pieces that united three materials: brass, glass, and marble. From these parts, he conceived each design and breathed life into them with hammers and bevels.

At this point in history, men were supposed to be primary earners. So in 1984 when a man up and quits his job, a lot of eyebrows were raised. So it wasn’t surprising that my mother was initially rather outspoken about her disapproval of my father’s artistic pursuit. As some mothers are, she was as stubborn as a goat. A bit prone to nagging, as some mothers can be. The subject of my father’s work ethic was a subject frequently pulled at “Dilettante,” she often said under her fiery breath.

My mother had the fortune (or misfortune depending on who you ask) of German-Scotch disciple and Social Register privilege. By the time she was in her 30s, her career was well established and remarkable for a women of her age during the time period. At age 10, I rarely understood her big vocabulary. I guess for some time, I thought she meant artist. My father had another reason for leaving his sales job to work as an artist at home, “someone needed to raise three children.” And that was true. Contempt over Chimera, reared its head as if it was an intrinsic part of the hobby animal farm I grew up on. But the fierce conviction in both my parents bellies–as all fires do–both fueled and burned them, expelling and exhausting through multiple channels.

Consumed with her scientific research, my mother was passionate and resolute about her calling and its meaning. She was also the first person I had ever heard defined, as such, and thus became the definition in my head of ‘workaholic.’ As if in perfect macrocosmic irony, a molecular biologist, she spent hours in her laboratory, tirelessly imagining and creating genetic chimeras. Authorities say that only 10% of all experiments actual yield positive, desired outcomes. At the end of her cut-short by cancer career, her research yielded 103 scientific journal articles, 5+ textbooks chapters, and 3 patents under license by major corporations.

My father remained fairly optimistic despite certain odds and criticism. And he created some beautiful pieces that my brothers and I hold onto dearly. He would tell me over and over that “the secret to life is enjoying what you do.” He never connected with the copiers or the people he was selling them to. He connected to metal; as his energy left his hands, some secret meaning, the mystical pictures in his mind where he found them, materialized.

The same way my mother found meaning in the cellular sculptures created by a double helix: the paired coding of three letters A-G A-U U-G. In infinite sequences shaped the world and its ever breathing creatures. My father realized later in life, he distinctly and definitively interpreted creating form from metal as his unique calling.

While he was my primary caretaker, I watched the genesis of his chimera. I watched as he hammered, bent, and polished. Learning the skills and craft in an apprentice with an older Eastern European, he often said that he was learning from one of the last traditional Arts and Craft school. He was proud of the tradition of his method, just as he was proud of his metallurgic legacy, descendant of jewelers and metallurgic engineers. I remember an enthusiasm during those early years. Each vase stamped at the bottom, hand wrought by Gene E. Montenecourt. A chandelier designed from leaves, all of them equaling the beauty of the Etruscan chimera, regale tables of marble and brass. I watched him sketch his idea. I heard him hammer on metal for hours and smooth the finish to a parlor shine. In my picture of him then he was more hopeful then in the years after and seemed even younger than the years before. Maybe it was just the time I was beginning to find out what Chimera and everything it entailed meant to him. Or just before the years that I started to loose track of my mother and then ultimately our relationship.

Shiny bronze pitchers and vases, some smooth, some with wrought finish, coffee tables with rose and white and emerald colored marble all became fixtures in our creaking, rural, colonial farmhouse. Why was he told all his life that art was of no really use to anyone? But even so, one could really use his. What was more useful than inspiration to fuel him and move others? Even so, Chimera became still. And my father took a job selling real estate. As the years went on, I heard and saw less and less of his designs. And I saw less and less of him.

The stories of his last designs, which I heard in parts, as there were gaps in our relationship and gaps in his designing, reached mythical proportions. It was a bronze chair and a matching bench. The design sketches seemed to evolve over years until they were finally cast in Moscow. Minimalist neo-classic thrones done for outdoor park seating, they were utterly unique and elegant in design, yet seemingly impossible to sit in for any extended time. As I got older, he watched things evolve in me, too. I could tell by the patterns that our relationship developed that he saw a lot of himself, but more that he would never be able to understand. And even more of my mother and generations before her.

Years went by when stubborn in our perceptions, proudly holding ancient history like coats of armor, flaring temperaments, and burning words defensive and offensive in the interpretation history.

Through my schooling, I became an artist and a scientist myself, when of the proper head, all the sudden I could see his thinking. Across the black Italian marble countertop in his modernly designed kitchen, we often spoke of our shared interest: cooking, travel, philosophy, and the arts. The last time I heard talk of Chimera was one of these discussions not too long before his death. He told me something I never realized: the name chimera had come from my mother.

“That was her contribution,” he said. Sharing this with a look that was part disappointment, part gratitude, and part amusement. Envision the expression of someone both satisfied at getting an inside joke and a little angry at realizing the joke may or may not have been on him. Yet, ultimately appreciating that however it was meant, no matter which way you looked at, Chimera was still the right word for it. While Chimera’s third and literary mean: something that will never happen, was yes probably part of the meaning, it was only part.

He told me many times the stories of his youthful ambitions to be an artist that were inhibited. By military school, by corporate America, by the pressure and costs of raising a family. But he realized parts; he realized it enough to make me see it. And he was a great father: ceaselessly encouraged my brothers and I to find careers that we love.

Now searching for meaning in my parents’ examples, I realize that what I have to do to make a good living and what I have to do to make me happy may be two entirely different animals or three or more. Or that having one, two, or three of them predatory and prey co-existing on the host body, together on the same animal, often further confused and driven by wants and desires. Two side hustles and day job, it’s the new chimera professional.

Shedding light on the nature, the history, and the imagination that defines these perceptions, I come to realize my many interpretations of chimera from being to end. I type my story, splicing together Iliad to Italy to fire-breathing bronze sculpting genetic glitches to the new school beast that is my career today, to realize the Chimera, be it vain or merit-worthy, in my imagination. To realize that it has all existed.

Dorsey Warfield Montenecourt http://www.dorseywm.com

Visualize. Realize. Actualize. Evolve. This is our new reality. Evolving at lightening speed. Like an RNA chimera on an algorithmic superhighway.