Eric Wiegardt

     We argued (well, more like ‘discussed’) all the way to the party at Eric Wiegardt’s gallery yesterday.  Was it twenty-five years ago that he opened the gallery or did he and Ann come back to the peninsula twenty-five years ago and then open the gallery at a later time?  I remember buying a painting of our family house in Oysterville from him but the purchase was made at his mom and dad’s house, not at the gallery.  Nyel remembered differently… but not conclusively.
     Twenty-five years is a long time to remember.  I was living at my little house on the bay – a house Ossie Steiner and the Mack brothers had built for me nearly a decade before.  Dobby and Lila Wiegardt were my next door neighbors.  Nyel and I were an ‘item’ but not yet a couple.  The purchase occurred shortly before Christmas and was to be that year’s gift to my son.  Those things Nyel and I agreed on – the broad brush strokes, you might say.  But the specific circumstances under which I purchased my first Wiegardt painting were fuzzy at best.
     As we walked from the parking area into the gallery garden the artist, himself, came out to greet us, so I posed the question to him.  “They both happened at once,” he said. “We moved back and opened the gallery at the same time.”
     “But why did your dad call me and ask me to come next door and look at the painting at his house?”  Eric conceded that it was a good question.  We both remembered that he and Ann were living downstairs at his dad’s and that he had brought several paintings up to the dining room to show me.  But why there, if he had the gallery?
     At that point, Ann joined us and we all turned to her for the answer.  And, of course, she knew.  “We moved back in the summer but we didn’t open the gallery until just after Nate was born,” she said, “so it must have been in January of 1986.  In the meantime, we were living with Eric’s folks and Eric was working there.”  Mystery solved.  Leave it to the distaff side to keep track of the important events and their sequence!
     By the way … the party was one to remember for the next twenty-five years!