Three AM
By John Grantner
It’s 3:00 am and I’m lying in bed, not asleep. Just now I recall being maybe four, at most five years old, and my dad coming home from work in a winter’s early evening—at around 5:00. It was dark, nearing dinner time, and my brothers, sisters and I were in the living room, crowded around the television, watching cartoons. As he entered through the rear door that opened to the kitchen (he routinely entered through the rear door) my mom called out from the kitchen, “Dad’s home!” and all of us kids ran, squealing, to greet him. I recall clutching and hugging his leg and that the cloth was cold and smelled of night air.
He dutifully hugged and kissed us all, and then he walked over to my mom, who was standing at the stove stirring something, and he kissed her and patted her ass.
That memory has remained with me ever since. One of the few that I don’t wish I could forget. I revisit it often.
John Grantner is a lifelong visual artist and designer who has been crafting narratives and character studies his entire life. He has been a painter in oil and acrylic since his early teens. He’s also a fine art photographer and an abstract digital artist with a penchant for manipulating imagery to tell a story. Grantner is an observer of human behavior with a love of literature. When he escaped the workaday corporate treadmill, these traits came together to help him explore the written word as a creative medium.
