Ronnie Randon did not learn healthy ways to deal with hard things in his youth. After serving in the Army, he says he turned to alcohol, then to drugs. Over a 33-year prison sentence for murdering his romantic partner, he eventually learned a new way to process emotions when he taught himself to paint starting in 2012.
Now 66, Randon has gotten his life together. He has been living at the Veterans Transition Center in Marina for a little over a year and now also works for VTC as a driver, giving rides to newer program participants to take them to appointments, in addition to doing handyman jobs for neighbors.
He’s earned enough to buy a vehicle and has some money in the bank. And he focuses on volunteering – as a mentor to new arrivals at VTC, and as an artist.
He recently donated a painting project to Coastal Kids Home Care, a nonprofit that installed four “wind phones” in painted boxes that invite members of the public to say whatever is left unsaid to the dead.
His purple, butterfly-themed wind phone is installed at VTC. “It’s my responsibility to give back as much as I can,” Randon says.
Weekly: How did you get into making art?
Randon: It was therapeutic and it was a healing process. There was a thing in the military, you weren’t supposed to talk about your emotions. Then the same in prison – I had to cut off everything in order to survive. It got to a point where I said, I need to stop doing that, or you become callous. That’s why I picked up art. I was painting a mural in the gym in prison and I would call that my fishing trip, to go away for four or five hours.
You recently completed a wind phone project at VTC. Did you use it to talk to anyone?
My mom and Diane.
Tell me a little bit about what you told your mom, who died while you were incarcerated.
I blamed my mom for a lot of things in how my life turned out. When she passed away in 2008, I never had a chance to reconcile a lot of things with her. I had a lot of guilt. I never got to tell her to her face that I was sorry and it wasn’t her fault for the decisions I made in my life.
It’s weird how you think you have time. I tell people, don’t put off what you can do today until tomorrow. Nobody is ever promised tomorrow.
What did you say to Diane through the wind phone?
She didn’t deserve what happened to her. The pain I was feeling, I projected that onto her. It should’ve never happened.
If you break a vase, you can go buy another one. When you take someone’s life, you can never give that back. Not only that, I robbed Kathleen of an ability to meet her mother.
You met Diane’s daughter, Kathleen, for the first time in prison through a restorative justice process. You didn’t even previously know that Diane had a daughter.
It was life-changing.
I had to leave the room at first, because she looked just like her mom and had mannerisms her mom had. We had moments of laughter and being serious, moments of just silence and tears.
I carry those things with me, I don’t push them away. It is part of my life now, and it’s something I have to embrace.
You are very forthcoming with yourself, and with me, about your inner life.
I ran groups in prison. I realized: I am going to be truthful about who I was back then. Even though I got an honorable discharge from the military, I was not living an honorable life.
I was told by the restorative justice group that 90 percent of people who are asked to meet family members refuse to. I didn’t want to fall into that statistic.
I am not trying to change the past or what people think about me. But I wanted to do one thing in my life right.
Tell me about your experience with VTC.
They have shown me so much grace. My first night here, I cried. For the first time, I was able to hear myself think.
When I came back from the military, a lot of the things I was dealing with, I didn’t know how to deal with. Had this program been available to me then, I believe I would never have gone to prison. Now my whole thing is trying to find a way to give back, not take away.