Spring cleaning is how I have spent at least a portion of my lonely invalid’s Spring Break. I get to walk the dog and clean the house while my family is enjoying the somewhat chilly beaches of Florida’s panhandle. Well, it isn’t all misery. As I was cleaning in the library upstairs, I came across a set of drawings from the 1980’s that I had been looking everywhere for. You have no idea what kind of treasure exists under stuff until you start putting stuff in other places. I picked stuff up, and low and behold… treasure. How long since I last moved that stuff? I have no idea. Stuff moves around in the library constantly. Some of the books fly off the shelves in the middle of the night, I swear it. But this stuff wasn’t books, so it was becoming a permanent accretion of stuff. Not yet icky stuff, but it was painter stuff, brushes and oil paints and mixing bowls and acrylic paints and linseed oil and all kinds of stuff that can become very icky in an upstairs room in Texas with no air conditioning.
So, let me give you a look at what I found before I start trying to turn it into writer’s stuff and Paffooney posts.
This first picture is called Bobby, because Bobby Zeffer sat for the portrait of the boy. (You are aware that I don’t use people’s real names in my work. So, Bobby, if you read this post and see this picture, you will have to remember that it is really you.) (No chance of that, though. Bobby is not illiterate, but I know he hates to read.) I could also call it Horatio T. Dogg, because that is the name of the talking dog detective who smokes a pipe and wears a hat and was the main character of a mystery novel that became too silly to finish. It turned out to be one of those stories where I reached the point of having a Tyrannosaurus leap out of a wormhole and eat all the main characters. I gave up on that story rather abruptly.
The second picture is rather obviously Robert Newton playing the part of Long John Silver in the Disney version of Treasure Island. I was still in my twenties when I drew this. I was inspired to try my hand at further portraiture because the picture of Bobby turned out to actually look like him.
The third picture is the reason I was desperate to find these old drawings. It is one of my prescient pictures. I drew it in the 1980’s from an image that haunted my dreams as a young teacher. I later realized how remarkable it was while I was teaching in Cotulla in about 2000. The girl was in my seventh grade fifth period English class. I can’t tell you how many times I had to dig this picture out and stare at her face. Almost twenty years before, six or seven years before she was even born, I drew this girl, and it looks exactly like her. I became even more mystified by this portrait when the boy walked into my classroom last year. He was from Africa. Eritrea to be precise. He was a wonderful, soft-spoken, highly-intelligent boy with a deep Christian faith in God. I almost went crazy searching for this picture so I could compare what I had drawn to the real boy. It turns out he has a bit less hair in real life and a small scar above his left eye. How did I not see that in my dream?
The last picture was designed as a cover for my graphic novel Hidden Kingdom. I have recently revisited that project and I am thinking now more strongly than ever of trying to finish it. I can do a lot of drawing with my arthritic hands as long as I only do a little bit at a time. And this whole drawing thing, this raging addiction, has finally become fun again now that I am retired and have the time to do stuff. Not icky stuff… Treasure!
Catch a Falling Star 