One day when I was about fourteen, I meandered aimlessly
into a new little art gallery in the Old Market called Chezar 11. Inside,
wrapped in a bandana and a caftan, a woman in her forties started telling me
about art, religion, and life. Eventually she handed me two dollars and said,
“Go across the street to Julio’s Mexican Café and get some guacamole and
chips.” She squeezed lemon wedges over the guac in the Styrofoam and proceeded
to stir the concoction with one of the corn chips for all the world like a
witch with a cauldron. In that moment, this unique lady created a lifelong
friend.
My name is Kenton Bruce Anderson, also called “Butch” by
DeLoris and those who have known me since my youth. Let me share what I knew of
my best friend of the last nearly forty years, DeLoris Bedrosky, this richly
creative mother, businesswoman, and spiritual thinker.
A mother creates, loves and teaches. DeLoris was first and
foremost a mother. Her initial creations
were four kind, good-natured, gentle children. Imagine yourself as a child or
young adult. How do you think you would feel if your happily married,
40-something-year-old mother dragged home a 14 year-old troubled boy and
started calling him her best friend? Most of us would be aghast. But Rene,
Nannette, David, Gary and even her husband Dick just smiled shyly and said, “Hello”
and “Welcome” to me. What kind of a person must it take to create that kind of
family? She knew she was behaving out of the box, but as a teacher, contexts
weren’t so important to her as people were. So she just unapologetically spent
her time loving kids, grandkids and adult kids and giving her last to every
stranger. And she would chuckle under her breath and say, “I have a weird sense
of humor.”
Instinctively, DeLoris knew she had something to teach
everyone who came to her. And people responded to that urge. I remember at the
Kansas City Psychic Fair where she told me we were going to do readings. I sat
on one side of the room with a respectable 2-3 people in line for me; the line to
see her wrapped around from me all the way to the other side of the great
auditorium.
When she transitioned into the property management and
jewelry business, DeLoris took me along for the ride. We rented out her “house
in the holler” to drug dealers by mistake, but learned that you can get them
out pretty quickly when you stand in the middle of the street taking pictures
of each car and passenger that comes to visit. That may not get ‘em runnin’ but
it gets ‘em mad enough to call the city and ask for the house to be condemned.
Of course the city obliges and they’re out the next day!
She and Dick and I spent the next big chunk of our lives
dealing Jewelry and traveling the country buying and selling our wares. When
the opportunity came for me to open a shop in Omaha’s Old Market, she took her
complete inventory from her Ozark shop walls and hung it on mine. Sure, I paid
her back in six months, but what kind of a person DOES that for another?!?
This afternoon, her son Gary asked me to remind you all something
very important. When a great artist dies, the value of her work depends on how
well the next generation understands what she revealed of her inner soul--in
her art, her public persona, and her private life. I will give you that context
now of DeLoris’s contributions as a spiritual folk artist. Once you understand
how she personified a unique pop-art aspect of Omaha spiritual folk artistry,
Gary advises, you should buy all her works you can find and watch them go up in
value!
Art and religion were inseparable in DeLoris’s life and in
that way she was a true product of her spiritual times. Just as early artists
decorated cathedrals during the heyday of organized religion, artists now
decorate the homes people sit in to watch their new church of pop culture, the
TV. DeLoris’s inner journey was an expression of the great American artistic
and religious movement away from organized religion to New Age beliefs, so I
will not shy away from telling you what she believed she accomplished: She
became a 12th-level adept, left her astral footprint on
the moon, meditated in a plastic pyramid, explored all religions, beliefs,
prophecies and wisdom, new and old, and was the “best artist” she knew. She had
a mind that was always firing and a heart that was always ready to open and
welcome a new soul into her orbit.
She was never ashamed of anything she thought or believed. She
read extensively and had an in-depth understanding of any of her interests,
including UFOs, psychic realms, planetary confluences and pole shifts,
survivalism, pyramid power, Christianity, Buddhism, meditation, romance novels,
and scandal sheets like the Enquirer and Globe.
She looked for the hidden meanings in everything she did or that
occurred around her. After the fire that destroyed her shop, she told me, “I
finally figured out why I had been led to save all those magazines (she had
huge black garbage bags full of them); I was savin’ ‘em for KINDLING!”
She always believed in a God-force, but she didn’t conceive it
the way most religious cultures confine it to human qualities. Her God didn’t
look like some human body, but was instead part of every living thing and was
the very energy that each was composed of. It was the force that pushes the
smallest of impulses together to form particles and squeezes those particled
bundles of nothings together to form molecules.
This is what DeLoris left me with and what I think she would
want me to leave with you: Our lives are part of a huge canvas covered by the
multicolored energy adventures we create, coalescing into a beautiful painting
for us to enjoy while we are here and share with those who are here after we
are gone. Are you living your life for others and feeling the beauty and joy
that creates? Are you remembering that there is a bigger plan than just yours,
but you are a special, loving, giving piece of that cosmic puzzle? Are you
brave enough to live your life as best you can, allowing your starlight to
explode in all its glittering finery, arcing across the great expanse of our
little earth sky, yet graceful enough to watch it wane without regret, anger,
bitterness, or jealousy? Are you grateful; are you loving; are you brave, gentle
and kind? If so, you have lived a “DeLoris” life and you may be at peace with
your time.
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