We are all drawn toward home even if it may take a while for some of us to realize it.

There's something wrong with the young if they don't want to break out of their secure cocoon, their stifling family and school and little town and all their oh-so-dull surroundings, and strike out for the glamorous world just waiting to take them in - and how. Think of the prodigal son.

There's something wrong with the old if they don't ache for the old home place, and yearn to see those familiar faces once again. The lucky ones make it back someday, at least in spirit, and find themselves welcomed - again like the prodigal. Like wandering Jacob, they realize that this place was holy though they knew it not. Homo viator, Man the Voyager, is also man the homecomer.

Al Allen, artist and teacher, was not only one of the lucky ones but one of the talented ones. He was called home, as they say in these parts, at the age of 82; his memorial service was held at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, where he'd taught and painted for more than two decades.

He began his life's journey November 29, 1925, at Steele, Mo., at the noisy dawn of the automotive age. Indeed, his father was an automobile dealer in nearby Caruthersville. Back then, the Missouri boot heel was still a seemingly empty horizon bordering the Father of Waters, a silent expanse that might be broken only by an occasional gray shack.

But the scene was empty only to the unseeing eye. Inside some of those shacks, women would be quilting, following the geometric patterns passed down from generation to generation. But the urbanization - indeed, globalization - of Al Allen's world was unavoidable. The outside world kept impinging: The Allens would move soon enough to beckoning Memphis on the other side of The River, where he would be reared and his mother would work as a seamstress at the old Goldsmith's department store.

On his graduation from high school in 1944, he would enter the Navy and employ his talent as part of its Terrain Model Workshop. Some of his earliest works of art would be three-dimensional, pre-invasion models of Pacific islands like Iwo Jima. Continued...