Today (10/31/25) I visited the Norton Simon Museum to see the Little Dancer and to collect some thoughts and dive deep into nostalgia, and retrieve the words I had written the night dad had passed 10/27/2025:
Dad has passed. He left an open book, a slew of pages unwritten though he was not young and he had truly lived—had the wisdom of an old wise guy and the love of a young intrepid man, a father.
He passed tonight as I slept in Pasadena a few blocks from the Norton Simon Museum, a mile from the Rose Bowl, and down the hill from all his hiking trails.
Dad, we are in your stomping grounds. You drove our little kid feet into this earth the moment we could distinguish tree from flower and you could drag our feet up a little dirt trail where you promised us the largest, loomingest of valley oaks, the tracks of wild chaparral animals, and the perfect boulders to sit on as we devoured your pb&js, carrots and apples browned and softened in their ziploc bags.
Dad, you passed with us here in your stomping grounds that you taught us could be ours. If we paused to smell the jasmine and if we let our baby hands pat the soil around the nasturstumtiums, and if we climbed the hilliest , curviest street to let Cherry Canyon become the beginning of our secret magical world of never ending natural mystery, the divine.
Dad, you passed in our stomping ground. Minutes away from “the Little Dancer”—the iron bronze girl that came to life in a book that you promised us would come to life. Little did we know, that day you took us to the Norton Simon, that there she would stand, yellow ribbon in her hair, exactly right, exactly as the book said, and that there we would meet our story book in the flesh, our stories always brought to life.
Dad, the story breather, the magic that turns story books into our reality. Where we forgot to distinguish between our world and those stories you insisted as not just mere escapes , but as true parts of our realities.
Dad, we are here in our stomping grounds. Minutes from 4384 Beulah drive. A house you gave us but then taught us the true home is in the backyard where fantasy meets reality as our forts became more elaborate and the acorn pancakes needed a frying pan from the kitchen, and the dirt and leaf coverage of our living room floor needed a broom, and where you could only come in if we gave you some good kid permission to open our imagined door that you knocked at, knowing you were part of our world making and that you had forever bound us to the true passionate project of worldmaking.
Thank you, dad, for giving us a sturdy belief in a project of building futures and worlds that are better than the next.
We love you. Descansa en paz.
Brooke Kipling
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