Eric Oates, He Loves Her Madly
Written by Virginia Eaton —
Glenn Raggio designed the look of wellness center Class, the Body Pastiche, from the color on the walls to the flooring, and the art throughout the space.
He is a retired police officer from the Bay Area and it came as a surprise, to Glenn as much as anyone else, that he has an exquisite sense of style and color.
Growing up in San Francisco in the 1960s, Glenn has lots of story-worthy memories of the city on the bay. One that has remained vivid is his recollection of watching the 1968 movie Bullit being filmed.
For those who don’t know, the Oscar-winning Bullit stars Steve McQueen and Jacqueline Bisset in a crime/police drama with a quintessential chase scene that Glenn was lucky enough to witness.
Glenn Raggio
While that scene set the car-chase standard for many years, there is another scene in Bullit that burned its way into Glenn’s brain forever. It’s when McQueen and Bisset are arguing over the nature of his job (very ugly) and Bisset asks McQueen, “What will become of us in time?” and he replies, ”Time starts now.”
The summer before we opened Class, Glenn was watching one of those remodeling shows on television and saw, hanging on the wall of the newly furnished apartment, a painting of that scene where McQueen tells Bisset that Time Starts Now.
Glenn called me brimming with excitement and said that we had to find that painting to hang at Class. I emailed the producer, who passed me to someone else who passed me to someone else again who gave me the name of the artist along with his phone number: Eric Oates.
We called Eric; Glenn explained his connection to the movie and what we were in the process of doing with Class by creating something entirely new. We asked if it would be possible, and how much it would cost, to get a copy of Time Starts Now.
Time starts now
He informed us that the name of the painting is actually He Loves Her Madly, which made perfect sense when you see Bisset and McQueen together. He also very graciously said that he would love to give us a copy of his work to hang in Class. Glenn and I were blown away by his generosity and enormously grateful!
As I developed my core philosophy around health and wellness at Class, this quote, Time Starts Now, became a mantra for getting this business off the ground and is the driving force behind my conversations with my health-coaching clients.
Yesterdays don’t matter; tomorrow doesn’t matter. The only space that counts is the moment in which you find yourself right now.
He Loves Her Madly hangs in a prominent spot on a wall in Class and reminds us that what happened is behind you, what will happen is in the fog of the future. Right now is all you have and, when you can live where Time Starts Now, life has enormous meaning.
I challenge you, as we move into the fall with its trademark holiday madness, and then winter’s solitude, to find those moments where you can live fully in the present.
Virginia Eaton is the owner of Oakhurst wellness center Class: The Body Pastiche
Read more of Virginia Eaton’s blog posts here.
More on artist Eric Oates at AmericanOates.com
