Dr. Peter Colman

The squat, red-brick, factory-like building, adjacent to the high school campus, was where Dad had taken up ‘wood-working,’ or ‘shop,’ as they use to call it. I still have the small table and shoe-shine box that he made as a freshman student there.

“That’s the Technical Building,” Dad gestured, as we passed the immortal Central High School campus. “That’s where I took shop. Built my first table there. A lot of the young guys used to study and work there. Many of them went off to the war, like me. Most of them never came back home.”

Ironically, during my own ‘shop’ experience in the eighth grade at the Wilson School, I had made a small sign with the words ‘Colman’ painted in red. I later gave that sign to my father. Nearly five decades later, I happened to notice the same wooden sign, its red paint still bright, nailed to the door of his back-alley brick apartment. It was the last item I took from that hidden, lonely ground-floor apartment, just off the back alley across the street from my Mom, after Dad’s death. No one, I suspect, even knew what it was, or where it had come from. I suppose that someone would have noticed it sooner or later, and eventually just discarded it, along with the memory of a small boy and his disenfranchised father, both of whom were suspended in time, separated forever.

As I exited that apartment, a little over a year ago, I tossed the wooden sign in the cardboard box with Dad’s effects, and headed to Mom’s place across the street. It reminded me of the green and white New Hampshire license plate bearing the COLMAN name (I salvaged that metallic memory from Dad’s garage some years ago). All I ever managed to salvage from our relationship, it seemed, were priceless, but equally useless mementoes: cheap canvas military belts, a Limited Edition 200th Anniversary United States Commemorative belt buckle, a bonafide ‘Bear Creek Tool Stone,’ with a small handmade wooden case, and a realistic replica of a ‘rare’ silver dollar, which I first believed to be an original; it was not. I did manage to salvage a few of Dad’s paintings. My father had a passion for Native American themes and artifacts, as did his second wife, Dorothy, who, throughout her entire, sheltered life, enjoyed anything ‘Indian’ (almost as an obsession). I, too, have shared that passion from the time I was just a small boy. Most of Dad’s paintings displayed early American pioneers and log cabins, or peaceful pastoral scenes. But his favorites featured the sea. One large oil-painting, which he entitled “The Rising Storm,” actually won a pink ribbon.







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