It's hard to believe it's been five years this evening since my lovely, loving friend Carolyn Kelly left this sphere of existence. The last few months of battling cancer were gruesome, sad, maddening…I could go on and on listing synonyms. Her doctors knew it was a lost cause, I knew it and she pretty much knew it, certainly by the last month or so. Still, she still battled until she lapsed into a long sleep from which she never awoke. One of the fine hospice nurses who sat with her in the final weeks said to me, "People keep fighting because they don't know what else to do." I absolutely understand that.
Carolyn was in my life for about twenty years. We broke up. We got back together. We broke up. We got back together. That happened several times. It was hard, as they say, to quit her. She was so delightful and so sparkling when she was happy. Moments when I thought we could never be together again were followed shortly by moments when I felt we could never be apart. Then fate settled that conundrum.
Her famous father loomed large in our relationship. A lot of people would rank Walt Kelly as among the greatest cartoonists of the previous century. Woody Allen, no matter what else you may think of him, knew great humorists and he once named the ones he most admired as Groucho Marx, W.C. Fields, Elaine May and S.J. Perelman. He then added, "Oh, and don't forget Pogo. Walt Kelly's comic strip was touched by genius." A pretty good endorsement, I'd say.
Carolyn was also a cartoonist and if people hadn't kept comparing what she did to her father's work, I think she'd have done more of it. Once when our friend Stan Freberg was talking about his friend, Frank Sinatra Jr. and his struggles, she said, "I know what he feels like." But I thought her drawings were wonderful and I wish she'd done more of them. Here's a little one she did as a birthday gift for a friend. I think it's charming…
I inherited from her the job (make that "honor") of co-editing the reprint volumes of the Pogo strip now being issued by Fantagraphics. Volume 8 has been delayed, like everything else in the world, by COVID — extremely bad in all the countries where we can print stuff like this. But the set will be finished as Carolyn had wished. Amazon for some reason gives the Reading Level as Age 9-12 and the Grade Level as "4 and up." I think you need to be a lot older and wiser to understand 90% of it.
I don't want to turn this into a commercial because it's about Carolyn. I want you to know how terrific she was, how much I loved her and how much I miss her. In a sense, she is still with me because I also inherited crates and crates of drawings, writings and documents from the life of both her and her father. I'm still going through them all and every week or two, I come across another wonderful "message," be it a letter or drawing, that was either done by her or very meaningful to her.
She wanted me to share her father's work with the world and I want to share hers. A few weeks ago here, I shared a wonderful article she wrote. This time, I'm sharing a beloved drawing that her father did for her.
Her childhood nickname was "Tony Bug" and she said she wasn't sure why. You will occasionally find "Tony" or "Tony Bug" turning up in a Pogo strip and that's a reference to Carolyn. One day — I don't know if it was a birthday or Christmas or if there even had to be a reason but her father offered to do a drawing for her to fit a sadly-empty space on her bedroom wall. He asked, "What would you like?" and she said, "Two dogs and a mouse." Her father was good at drawing everything but he particularly excelled at dogs and mice.
It must have been wonderful to have a father who could do that. If my father had tried to fill an empty space on my wall, the only thing he could have put up there was an income tax form.
I'm about to give you a link to view this drawing but I want you all to promise me not to post it on Facebook or Twitter or anywhere else and do not give others the direct link. Instead, give any Walt Kelly admirers this link so they have to come to this site and read what I wrote about Carolyn. And if you came here for that reason, also please read this piece that I published here five years ago about Carolyn.
Do I have your word you won't post it anywhere else on the Internet? Good. I knew I could count on you. Here's the link to see the drawing. Isn't it beautiful? His daughter was too…in every way. If I could draw like that, I'd have sent her one every day when we were together…and maybe even when we were apart.
