Keeping On

One of the best days of my whole life happened when I was eight. Saturday has historically been my favorite day of the week, since I got to sleep in and my dad didn’t have to work, and when I was playing baseball, it was game-day. But after a few years of tee-ball, I got a little tired of it and realized that sports weren’t really my thing.

That was fine, according to my dad, even though I was a little worried that he’d tell me to stick with it anyway. He said he hoped I at least had fun, and I did – I just wasn’t all that into it anymore.

Instead, I realized something else: I was pretty good at drawing the cartoon characters I always watched on TV. Tegan was, too, and eventually when we hung out at each other’s houses, we would always end up doodling in sketchbooks.

I was always shy at first, hesitant to show my dad what I was drawing, but he always acted like every drawing I did was the best one ever. He’d hang them up on the fridge until all sides were absolutely plastered in my scribbles, bragging to our family members that I was his “little artist.”

And okay, in retrospect, the doodles weren’t that great compared to how I ended up growing as a scribbler, but I guess for my age I was pretty good at being a copycat. My Bugs Bunny drawings were spot-on way back when.

One cool Saturday in the summertime before third grade, Dad took me downtown into Chicago. We didn’t go into the city a whole lot, since we lived in the suburbs, but every time we went, it was always exciting for me. Mom used to take me to the park and let me see everything from my stroller.

I was a little too old to be wheeled around, though, and so Dad just parked us on a side-street so we could roam down a road filled with shops. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky, though the sun wasn’t beating on us; it was the perfect weather to go along with a perfect day.

We weaved in and out of some shops, some that sold toys that I only got to look at, some that sold clothes. “We will come back when schools starts so we can get you new clothes,” Dad had said. “But let’s not worry about that today.”

At around two in the afternoon, we dipped into an ice cream shop, and I got a huge vanilla cone that got all over my face. But Dad wiped my mouth off with a napkin and a stern-but-amused smirk, and that was that – it was on to the next adventure, which happened to be a used bookstore that I would end up going to a lot as a teenager.

It was so much bigger on the inside, and as we weaved through mazes of bookshelves, I could hardly focus on what kinds of books I was gawking at. I just saw little price tags that said .50 and .75, and my dad kept mentioning how I could pick a few books when I saw some that I liked. He even held a few in his arms, a brightness to his smile.

I wasn’t sure exactly what section I ended up in when I came face-to-face with a wall of drawing books. Of course, now I know, but c’mon, I was eight.

There were ones that could teach me how to draw human faces and ones that could tell me how to draw cats and dogs and birds. There were books about buildings and perspective, books that had naked people in them, but they weren’t the kind of naked that would make my dad shield my eyes if we were watching it in a movie together, just a “normal” naked that made the people look like ordinary humans. Books on trees, grass, cars, hands, feet, bones, muscles, water, all sorts of textures, and any other thing I could possibly think about.

Dad saw me flip through a few of them, and he asked, “You want a drawing book?”

Staring at a guide on how to draw a seagull’s wings, I absently said, “Uh huh.”

“That is great,” he beamed. I felt his hand on the top of my head, mussing my hair. “And these are cheap, so you can get a few, if you would like.”

My God, it was like a choir of angels opened up in my head at that moment. “Really?” I gasped.

I must’ve looked pretty shocked, because he laughed. “Yes, really! Pick some books today and we can come back when we go clothes shopping in a few weeks. I am glad you want to learn more about something.”

And man, did I want to learn! I already thought that art was something I could be kind of decent at, since the kids at school seemed to think I was alright, and when I drew with Tegan over at her house, we’d have contests to see who could be better (and most of the time, we just conceded in a tie).

That day, right when we got home, I dove straight into the books. I started off with a book about animals, learning the shapes that make up dogs and cats, how to draw realistic wings for birds and scales on fish. I had paper sprawled out all around me in the living room as I lay on my stomach. Dad was watching TV and kept quiet, knowing that I couldn’t be disturbed from that peacefulness.

I went right on into the night doing that. I practiced each guide until I was positive that I had gotten it right, and sometimes I asked my dad if my drawings looked okay. You should’ve seen the look on his face when I held up some of them, I swear. He wasn’t always the best at expressing his thoughts, but when his eyes doubled in size and his jaw dropped, I could tell that something good was going on.

And in a way, that sort of thing continued on while I grew up. Dad got a manila folder to keep all of my old drawings in, the ones that he had to take off the fridge just to make room for the incoming “masterpieces” he seemed to be so proud of. I didn’t get it at first. They were just sketches to me, evidence of learning and brain activity – they didn’t feel like “art” to me, just simple studies. I was only a novice and I knew I could get a little better.

That never stopped him from taking photos of my drawings (with my consent) and sending them to our distant family members, bragging about the things I took for granted. He truly seemed amazed.

Even years later, while I slaved over my portfolio in high school and tried to develop a distinct drawing style that showed the fact that I knew what a skeleton looked like, he was always proud. I didn’t always want to draw realistically, and he was okay with that. I didn’t want to be a painter like Da Vinci or Kahlo – I wanted to make art that could make it into movies or on a television screen, stuff that could make somebody smile.

Even when I was eight, I think I already made one person smile, at least – the person who gave me the freedom to choose to be an artist in the first place.