Second Chance Ranch

When I was very young, I watched over my mother. At five or six, I began to learn the responsibility of care-taking. That was also about the time when I began to lock myself in the bathroom to play. I always played there then. I talked and sang in quiet echoes so I couldn’t hear anything. And they couldn’t hear me. I lay down in the empty bathtub with all of my toys and I sang to my dolls. I reflected in the mirror.

     I recall my ‘fifties’ mother in her early thirties through the telescoped eye of a child, which naturally distorts the intentions of parents and enlarges them to giants. Of course she was larger than life. Clear-skinned, she had large brown eyes that often seemed fixed on some point far beyond the kitchen sink and our cyclone-fenced backyard. And even allowing for the child’s telescoped eye, my mother was a tall woman who thought of herself as oversized, and for some reason she never quite fit in. She was bigger than her husband, especially in her high heels. Or maybe they were the same height when they danced, but she was clearly wider.

     Our beautiful mother was the mysterious kernel, the contagion seed in our family’s doomed whole. Even then, I knew that she wasn’t doing it alone. The monster helped her. Empowered by deep fears and a dark yearning to hurt something, it wished to squeeze knowledge into a smaller thing than its own ignorance and to mash the life out of compassion. This thing had scooped us up in its great shovel and given us to her like playthings. It extended to each of us; she fed us, and in turn, we nourished and invigorated its taproot.

     There were so many of us, we were disposable. These were the things I knew without knowing why, things I learned as a child listening with half an ear to all that was said, and most intently to all that was not said. I remember the silence most of all.

     I had designed a whole world when I was a child, in silence. I made a book of drawings. Pages and pages, it told a story, a story of my life. A life, oddly, not yet lived. My book was where I went to be heard, the world I called Fantasia after one of those experiences that collides with you like a drunken driver on a Saturday afternoon, the matinee, and changes your life forever. Pink tulle and mouse sorcery, classical music and giant ears in black silhouette.

     Only now do I understand that we continue along like water flowing down a hill, going more or less in one direction until we splash into something or someone, and a spurt of some kind forces us to find a new course.

     For me this was a magical time. I got eyes and I got happy feets, and with them I marveled at the lights and the colors, the way you can mix two primary colors and get a third, and you can throw in texture, visual and tactile, and then, with Fantasia, was the whole world of music, and another small thing, lest we forget, was the minx, not a mouse, but surprise!

     I blocked shapes on white construction paper, drawing with No. 2 pencils and 64 Crayola crayons. I was much happier when I began touching the waxy tubes of color. What could be more stimulating than color and texture and drawing outside the lines? Like Chagall. Like Picasso. Given over to color, you’re back in a time before words. Pictures are the stories that have spilled forth long before we acquired the arsenal of words and compound sentences. Pictures do not need interpretation and clarification, justification or retraction.