When I was in my adolescent years, my father — an ambitious man in the midst of reluctantly inheriting management of the successful national accounting firm founded by his immigrant father — started dabbling, as a hobby, in art.
Seeking an outlet from what he considered a boring life of numbers as a CPA and fascinated by mechanics and movement, he began making a great mess in the basement cutting sheet metal into geometric shapes, painting them in vivid primary colors and using wire to hang and balance them in the style made famous by the American artist Alexander Calder, who was credited with inventing mobiles in the 1930s.
Dad was, by nature, an athlete, not an artist; he quarterbacked his high school football team to a championship; founded a community ski hill near our western Michigan home and loved nothing more than to trounce his children on a tennis court…