DRAW WELL, BE WELL: My Daughter's Book of Reminders

, L L E W W A DR .

L L E BE W joseph gordon

My Daughter’s Book

of

Reminders

ain tt b ac k ag ok abou e o f b li e s ’ r e u t n o a pic drawing

Book of Reminders

my daughter jenny grew up falling down.

...falling down, with the cut chin here and a black eye there.

it’s a good thing she had her pencils, pens & markers

these friction sticks helped her draw herself back up ... towards a steadier state of mind.

the wobbly pictures she made in a furious sprint a decade ago remind me that jenny was born with a rare chromosomal disorder. it’s called I.P. and it was I.P. that brought her into the world with a whole stuck tray of disabling challenges.

on account of I.P. she lacks the balance to stand or walk. and that’s just the tip of her iceberg. her condition starts at the top of her fragile brain and ends at her toe nails.

when she’s wished like hell that she could wipe her own behind or after she fell ill following a fall is when she often felt most drawn to picture making. those movable pigments that a friction stick releases can fly beyond the humdrum lines of predictable routines. which is why she’s found sheer joy and that unerasable feeling of physical freedom from the point of a no. 2 pencil

“I have no paper fright,� she says. indeed she’s never erased a single line. the pictures she made in a furious sprint to recover her missing self ten years ago remind me of the trying year she suffered after falling from her fragile sleep at a sleep away camp.

So shattering was her fall that she was deprived of entire sheets of her memory. she lost her will to draw entirely. she fell picture-less and songless for four months into that hard to locate place where unrecoverable sleep falls. she left us for a while.

then, on a cobalt blue night in late december 2005, she discovered a bright red ribbon place mark bancing from my outdated book of weekly reminders. that bright crimson line re-lit her scattered mind. and sparked her return to her wobbly yet certain place on the ancient red line of drawing.

My Daughter’s Book

of

Reminders

①

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

7

her hands and her eyes -- two of the main keys to drawing -- are compromised. it is her fate to make her pictures with such manual imprecision. and yet, she knows exactly how to draw her way towards what she sees and feels. true, she can’t reach her artist mother’s verisimilitude nor come close to her grandfather’s spitting images of boats sailng off the maine coast. but she can draw everything in a way -- in the way she draws anything she likes. and she loves to draw what she likes -- which includes her freefalling orange peanut shell. “it flies so high it can kiss god,” she said. “it’s too orange -- like the sun -- to crack.”

stuck words may thaw very quickly from up in the icy racks at the top shelf of her brain’s language freezer. the pictures may help remind her that she is not a passive creature, but a thinking one. because the act and action of drawing allows her to make and feel her own marks. this adds up to a very steady pleasure, even after gravity has knocked her down. a long, breath-halting facial pain is very familiar to her as that odd kind of seizure that can make her pencil drop. she’s felt hose sharp needles shooting off in her nose, eyes and mouth at least a thousand times. but the pleasure that’s drawn from a single picture can actually place one of those frightful pains far back onto a distant horizon line. and from there, she’s composed hours of boundless play. picture-making takes the cake, especially when she’s taking her pick-up sticks straight through the straits of a fatiguing weariness. Like when jenny is sketchily heading towards a bellylaughing red island, one with nice eastern eyes. it’s a comforting sort of place drawn out in the middle of somewhere. the kind of place chocked full of mangos, cherry pineapple longboats, and exotic birds with bright paper kite feathers. it has a sweeter than here kind of form that can be pictured strong enough to re-shape a very poorstarting day. today was like that. and yet the moment she starts playing with all her colors, she’s got a good chance of finding some fresh balance and real peace from her head pains down on the table top, that holds up the infinite rectangles of a boundless paper universe.

ah yussel