“The artist is a receptacle for emotions that come from all over the place; from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape, from a spider’s web.” Pablo Picasso was quite right, but mine came from a mailbox.

Monday, October 30th 1:18pm

There is a time in everyone’s life when they realize it is just too hard to fight the urge to draw on yourself or doodle on a canvas of your choice. I know you have all been down this road whether it was giving yourself a pretend tattoo or doodling on your sibling years ago. If you have not participated in the aforementioned creative experiences, you my friend, have missed out on a very important part of your childhood. Let me help you try to understand this phenomena through various pictures and odd but equally thrilling situations.
Back when I was attending Tucson High School, I drove my 1974 Super Beetle to school everyday. Down Aviation I would fly only to arrive at a place not worth flying to. High school was not the greatest place. It was full of ignorance and restrictions for a creative mind. Not that I had a creative mind, but I was sure if someone had one, it would never be allowed to grow here. I was quickly proven wrong. Mrs. O’Malley taught English. It was my senior year and I was more then happy to attend my English class. It was the one class I was actually good at, unlike my Biology class. I hated science and eventually ended up spending most of my time at Brooklyn’s Pizza learning the basic elements of tomato sauce, cheese and bread. English though, involved writing and I loved to write.

The first day I walked into Mrs. O’Malley’s classroom, I sat down in a seat near the front and watched as all the other kids filed in to seats they decided for themselves. Our teacher wasted no time to inform us not to get comfortable. A seating chart had been drawn up and would be enforced. I was moved from the front of the class to the last row, next to a chalkboard. My eyes were wide as a deer caught in headlights. A chalkboard, a vertical sidewalk, a blank canvas. This was my chalkboard. Well technically it wasn’t mine but hell if I wasn’t going to act like it anyhow. Ignoring the teacher’s instructions to take out a notebook, I scanned the room for chalk instead.

A friend of mine, Clarissa, was seated behind me. “What are you looking for,” she asked me. I told her I had to find a piece of chalk, white chalk, yellow chalk, I didn’t care what color. I just wanted my paintbrush, my gateway to this large green paradise. Clarissa raised her hand and asked teacher for a piece of chalk. I went into instant shock. Did she just do what I think she did?! Here I was trying to look for chalk discreetly and now I was surely going to get in trouble for not writing in my notebook. I glanced around the room. Everyone was busy scribbling away and Clarissa and I were not. My eyes fell back upon our teacher. Mrs. O’Malley gave us a long hard stare but without saying a word, she pointed to a filing cabinet near the door. Clarissa shoved me out of my desk and pointed along with Mrs. O’Malley. I carefully positioned myself in front of the cabinet drawer and retrieved a box of chalk from inside the first drawer. I walked back to my seat grinning from ear to ear. I knew that this was the beginning of the end.

I cleared my mind and pushed the chalk up against the board. I closed my eyes and began to draw. When I had finished, I opened my eyes and stared at my first masterpiece, something that would speak to me, something exciting. I had drawn a mailbox. A mailbox!? With shame and disappointment I looked at it, wondering why of all things did I have to draw a stupid mailbox. However, I did not let this get me down for long. As I sat and stared, I realized the mailbox deserved to at least have a house to keep it company.
Every house needs a driveway so I continued to draw but then quickly noticed the emptiness of the garage I had drawn. What better place to park my Super Beetle! So on I went, drawing my bug and then a road that led to my school. Then it hit me…A jungle. I needed a jungle. A jungle with ninjas roasting a pig and getting prepared to fight their arch nemesis, Pirates. Well as you can see, it quickly got out of hand and my drawing eventually took up the entire chalkboard. I filled it with an ocean full of pirates, mermaids and surfers. I filled it with a mountain covered with snowboarders and skiers. There was even a volcano next to the snowy mountain and war planes hovering above it all.

Never had anything gotten so out of control. I rushed through assignments in other classes hoping this would somehow force time to move faster only to get me closer to my creation again. This was my freak story of a modern day Frankenstein but without the dreary castle or lightening. But even without those things I had created something spectacular, something with a life of its own. Not only that, but it soon became something that other people wanted to be part of. As I drew through the days of English, classmates would ask me to add them into the scene somehow. I always agreed and quickly found a spot for everyone. Jennifer was a ninja attacking a pirate and Kyle was a snowboarder trying to outrun a giant snowball. Sometimes I would make them the pilots of war planes or put them walking across the bridge of the volcano. Even before class, I would think of other places to put friends of mine who had requested a spot because they had seen the drawing but weren’t in my class. The whole time the drawing was up there, no one had ever added themselves. I was always asked to draw them in. From then on, I walked the halls of Tucson High with anticipation of getting back to English class and nothing else. Writing had been tossed aside for the something else that consumed me….the chalkboard.

Winter vacation came and I was more then anxious to get back to school. When time had finally blessed me, I ran to Room 323 and found my seat. Placing my backpack in my chair, I sat on top of my desk crossing one leg over the other, facing the world I was about to get very lost in. Except there was one problem. My world was gone. Mrs. O’Malley, who had never even acted as if I started the drawing on the chalkboard in the first place, came over to my desk. She said that the janitors had to clean all the rooms during the break and a custodian had probably erased it. I heard her voice but the words seemed jumbled and sticky. Nothing made sense. My world was here when I left it and yet all that remained now was a light feathered trace of chalk. I could still see the faint outline of the mailbox, the stupid mailbox that had started this whole thing. As more and more kids filtered in, everyone began getting upset almost outraged that the drawing was gone. The chalk world wasn’t just about me but it was about everyone. I looked around the room and saw that everyone had felt tied to it. I wiped my eyes and through the sniffling, began to dig in my backpack. And as Mrs. O’Malley walked back to her desk I found what I had been looking for. A small piece of yellow chalk. I let the chalk roll around in my hands, watching as yellow dust covered them. I showed Clarissa the chalk and she nodded her head, egging me on. I laughed, put the chalk to the outline of the
mailbox and slowly began to trace. One by one my classmates began looking over as they wrote down the assignment for the day. I heard the whispers behind me but Jennifer was the one who shouted it out first. “Don’t forget, I was a ninja!” And the rest followed right behind her. “I was a skier!” “I was a surfer!” “I was fighting a pirate!” As I continued to draw each person in their respective places, I felt proud that I had started something that had brought us all together in some small way everyday at 2:20pm, when the students of Mrs. O’Malley’s fourth period English class walked through that classroom door.

-Cassie

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 2nd, 2006 at 8:28 am and is filed under Misc. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.