When my mother was dying, over a decade ago, my brothers and I came to her house on Whidbey Island in Puget Sound. She had survived many years since first being diagnosed with cancer; we had had ample warning that this trip would include: our saying goodbye to her at a time when she was barely able to recognize us, her funeral, and the reading of her will. We also found out what things, in addition to a share of her cash, she had left us.
I found that over the thirty or more years before then, through several moves, my mother had saved my art projects from elementary school. Now I would be able to bring them home.
It was unexpected. The possessions that I regretted losing from my youth were my old MAD Magazines, my National Lampoons, the art I had done in college when taking a class from Betty Edwards (who wrote the wonderful art instruction book Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain), and a shoebox entirely full of baseball cards from the 1950s that my cousin was bamboozled into trading away while I was off at college. I hadn't thought much about my schoolboy art. But when I saw it, it dredged up a memory -- of the nicest thing that I think anyone has ever done to me.
When I say "the nicest thing," I'm adjusting my rating for what I should have been able to expect. This "nicest thing" was from someone I barely knew, a young girl, who had had no reason to be so nice except a spark of generosity and empathy far beyond her years. But her story will wait for the end of my tale, not yet.
My mother was a gifted craftswoman; she threw herself into sewing and art projects and clever written wordplay. She had a "sewing room" -- a "room of her own," as Virginia Woolf would put it -- where we knew we could find her and knew we were better off not disturbing her if she was deep into one or another project. In the fullness of time, she would teach herself enough about architecture and the building trade to design her own magnificent house, the house in which she would eventually die, up in the Northwest. For someone so adept with her hands, her firstborn's lopsided attempts at artwork must have made her suffer intensively. That -- or they made her crack up. I suspect the latter; if so, she hid it well from me.
Here's my menagerie of clay figurines from my Los Angeles elementary school, minus the ugliest model of a malformed turtle in the world. That turtle is somewhere within my house, but could not be located in time to join the picture; this is perhaps for the best:
From front to back, that's an owl, an odd-looking small bird, a no-less-odd looking turkey, an ashtray, a small curled leaf to use as a soap-holder, a palm print, a god-knows-what (some sort of large animal), and a large fish.
I expect that former Senator Frist (among other doctors) probably could determine from these clay figures what sort of sensorimotor deficiency I had as a young kid; I was not a mere run-of-the-mill bad artist. Our school had art projects seemingly every month or so, about two per year involving modeling clay. In those days, the elementary schools evidently had access not only to a kiln, but to unlimited amounts of clay and a wide variety of glazes. It saddens me to see how my youngest daughter's elementary education -- still quite good in most ways, despite the state's struggles -- has been largely bereft of art. The only lesson I recall her having at school was when my wife came in to do a presentation as the closest thing they had to a parent who was an artist. My wife gooses along our daughter's interest at home, but it's not the same as its having the imprimatur of being a school activity. My wife will not be able to save my daughter's art from school; it is so scant and so thin.
I seem to be dithering before inviting you to enjoy my close-ups of these pieces. OK, here they are.
The owl is among the least embarrassing; even I could learn how to use a tongue depressor to model clay. I suspect, nevertheless, that I had help with it. This help did not include work on the ears.
The absurdity of this little chick isn't fully captured in two dimensions. The quizzical cock of the head to one side may strike you as a legitimate artistic decision; unfortunately, as I recall, I was not trying to do so; I wanted the bird to be looking straight ahead, and also not to be lopsided in other ways, and I just couldn't manage it.
I think I was already nine when I tackled the task of constructing this turkey. It is mystifyingly bad. Again, two dimensions can't quite capture the awfulness, the non-turkeyness of it.
The ashtray -- what can I say here? It was supposed to be round. It it not nearly round, so far from round as to make it unlikely that the young artist was even intending it to be round. Somehow, the glaze gooped into a pool at the bottom of the ashtray. But that's OK; no one here smokes anyway. Anyway, truly horrible.
The leaf -- not so bad. Mold clay into a curled lead, glaze it, and go. Simple enough even for me.
The hand-print -- again, not so bad. How does one screw up a hand-print?
The ... the ... this -- this was the coup de grace. I think that if my mother ever showed this to anyone in the film industry, it may have inspired the end of the Jeff Goldblum remake of The Fly. Pig, horse, dog, hippo, elephant, rhino -- I have no idea what it was even supposed to be.
All right, obviously I didn't post all this simply to slag my own youthful hand-eye coordination, woeful as it was. I think that by this point -- at least, this has been my hope -- that I have established my lack of aptitude as an artist in those days. (I did become a decent amateur artist later, but not with 3-dimensional art.) This was, by and large, art that only a mother could love. And my mother apparently did love them, despite probably being extremely amused by their atrociousness. I don't, in any event, think that she saved my art to be mean, to strike at me from beyond the grave by making me contemplate once again that long-forgotten turkey by posting it on a internationally prominent website. My general artistic atrociousness raises one mystery, though, and perhaps it did to her as well: this fish is pretty good.
So now I get to tell you the sad, embarrassing, yet somewhat wonderful story of the fish.
What I lacked in skill as an artist I made up for in daring and creativity. We were invited to use one color of glaze for our fish, but with permission one could use more than one color. I received permission and I went to town on it, glazing away. I don't remember how I applied the glaze; I think that I had the sense that I was experimenting with method, without having a clear idea on what my method was. After all, I wanted it to be interesting, and how bad could it be?
When, days later, the clay fish came back from the kiln, my teacher gave them out by color. Red fish went out to my classmates, then orange fish, then yellow, then blue, etc. Finally, at the end, came the multicolored fish. There were two of us who had used multiple colors -- me and a little girl who lived around the corner from me, whose name was Kay.
Kay was a real budding artist. She knew what she was doing, thought it through, accomplished it well. She would have been, I think, nine or ten at this time, so of course there's a limit to how perfectionist and accomplished she could have been, but I remember her as the class standout in art, the way that I was in math. She and I didn't socialize much, although I think I had been to her family's doorstep a few times selling scented candles and candy bars for my Cub Scout pack, back when children of that age were allowed (even encouraged, even required) to go up to strangers' houses and try to sell them things.
So, my teacher brought out the two multicolored fish. One of them was the one you see here. The other was actually perhaps more realistic, given that its colors had melded into a muddy brown, with splotches of color placed randomly on its body. Fish exposed to toxic chemicals may well look like that. It was, as I recall -- and you can review those pictures above to see how low my standards for clay work had become -- the ugliest thing I had ever seen. I wish that I could see it again just to relive the ugly, to see if it truly was as bad as I recall.
We were supposed to have scratched our names into the bottom of the clay. My teacher, I believe, knew that this was a delicate situation -- the most beautiful fish in the class coming out next to the ugliest one. I believe that I gaped, aghast, lips curled, posture frozen, at the muddy brown fish with the apparent scale disease and lesions. I hadn't remembered how I had painted the fish, but surely I could not have done anything to make it this bad. The teacher, as I recall, asked us quietly if we knew whose fish was whose.
And Kay, without turning it over to check for her name or mine, said "that's my fish" and took the monstrosity, walking with her head held high back to her seat. I am not ashamed of any of the awful pieces you see pictured above, but I am ashamed to say that I took the beautiful fish you see above, claimed it as mine (no name was clearly discernible on the bottom) and took it home to my mom. My only defense is: I was only nine and I was maladroit and I was humiliated. It was my first good art project. What must my mother have thought?
How, I have wondered since, especially since receiving the fish back from my mother's estate, is how does a young girl of none or ten -- especially one proud of her artistic ability -- even imagine doing something so kind to a classmate who was also largely a stranger? I can imagine that my facial expression might have been a cue that I was distressed, but still: kids that age tend to be cruel, rarely are they so noble. Who knew that we have such goodness in us?
Kay would have taken that fish home, of course -- perhaps she had already spoken of the art project -- and shown it to her own mother. Did she accept her mother's shudder and confusion? Did she explain to her mother what she had done to allay someone else's emotional pain? I don't know; so far as I can recall, we never discussed it. I'm sure that Kay's mother kept her own art, her more beautiful art, for many years. I would like to think that she saved that horrible fish as well -- to remind both her and her daughter, on many future occasions, of how kind her daughter could impulsively be. That ugly fish reflected inner beauty.
By demographic statistics, Kay is probably a mother herself now, possibly even a grandmother, in her early 50s. If she became a mother, I'll bet that she became a good one. So as I wish my mother a happy day in Atheist Heaven, I wish Kay a happy Mother's Day as well. I wish the same to her mother, if she is alive -- especially if she saved her daughter's art.
And if by bizarre coincidence Kay happens to be reading this, then I can make an offer. Kay, I would be honored to return your lovely fish to its rightful home. My mother saved it for you.