My father and “The Big Lebowski”
My father, Robert Lee Blust, died just before Christmas 1995. In a few days, I will be the same age he was when he died. And not too long from now, I will have lived more of my life without…
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A quietly extraordinary life
When the stock market crashed in October 1929, my grandmother Jane Kidston Bunker was on a plane in Europe. She was flying from Paris, where she was taking her junior year of study at Smith College, to London to visit…
My mother and zombies
My mother wasn’t exactly sure what a zombie was. “So they’re dead, but they’re not dead?” “That’s why they are called ‘undead,’ Mom.” “Undead? Like vampires?” “No, not like vampires. Well, I guess sort of.” It turned out that even…
My father was Banksy
No, this isn’t a shocking tell-all. Robert Lee Blust was not literally the most famous (or infamous?) anonymous artist of the modern era. But he was a talented artist who turned pretty much anything and everything into art, in unconventional…
Chaotic good
Growing up, I thought my father’s full-time vocation was embarrassing me. This was a self-centered view, of course. But I was a hemmed-in, quiet kid, while my father was an expansive, boisterous soul who gave out hugs like candy at…
Christmas trees and unwrapped cheese
My father had a lot of plans. You might even call them schemes. Like how he lashed together a bunch of old tires to construct a makeshift reef to make it easier to fish on oceanfront property he did not…