, L L E W W A DR . L L E BE W jenny & joseph gordon 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
e an
my daughter jenny grew up falling down.
...falling down, under the fierce weight of a disabling genetic condition...
...with a cut chin here, and a black eye there.
it’s a good thing she had her pencils, pens & markers to help draw herself back up to a steadier state of mind.
when she turned 16 she fell sleep deprived from her REM cycle and crash landed in sad, pictureless limbo. from late summer through december, she couldn’t sing or draw to save her life. All her pens & pencils had rolled into that hard to recover place where irretrievable sleep falls. she was deprived of her past joys and a picture of her future time. finally a night came when she saw the bright light of a dancing red ribbon as it fell softly from the top of the book of reminders. it instantly relit her cold, wobbly drawing hand: and she drew herself up once again.
jenny's unsteady pictures were the first bold reminders she drew for herself as a way to remember where she became severed from time. and they were our first clear signs -- unavailable through her EEG -- that she was finally drawing her way back up from her sleep deprived, painfully broken state of mind.
i call these pictures my daughter’s reminders because she drew them in a furious sprint up, down and across the weekly meridian of reminders in my outdated date book of 2003... and also because they remind me of things about her that i once tried to forget. that’s why i hid this book from my sight for nearly ten years.
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My Daughter’s Book
of
Reminders
then as a new year approached, she spotted the ancient red line of drawing reaching out to her on the glow of a red ribbon placemarker. she recognized its crimson spark, and quickly found her pens again. I am reminded how she drew in a furious sprint to speed her recovery as she had done many times before over the thin ice of her young life.
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she was drawn into the grey pinstriped pages by its dancing red ribbon.
the pictures she made after her long fall remind me that wobbly pictures are sometimes worth at least a thousand pictures each. especially when they carry the power to remind a daughter with a fragile brain and tippy body of the many worldly things that can draw up joy against the fiercest kind of gravity.
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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. yet in a way, she can draw just about everything- in the way she draws anything she likes.
I have no paper fright,� she boasted. indeed she’s never erased a single line. as there is nothing to correct in any picture she makes. they all have their place for at least a few moments, before they hit the recycle bin.
R em i n d e rs
ah yussel
the wobbly pictures my daughter made in a furious sprint a decade ago remind me that she 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.
someone once asked her why she likes to make pictures for hours on end
with her centrally disordered nervous system, jenny’s fall from sleep at sleep away camp severely deprived her. after she fell and shattered, she suffered through a long, discordant stretch of
simple, she said. you can move anything everywhere you want.
time. she could niether see clearly who she was, or where she
wherever you want. i can’t do that anywhere. but i can with a
wanted to go. these pictures she made in a furious sprint helped
pick-up stick. sometimes i can’t if a no 2 falls to the floor. so
her to speed up her slow recovery. and ten years later, they also
just be patient.
serve to help me recover my hard to hold memories of a daughter whose life was hard from the get-go. yes, they remind how utterly lost she was. it took a full year for her to fully recover what had scattered from her fragile brain. but when she finally restored her lost habit of drawing for hours, her grey days and
the movable pigments that a friction stick releases can walk,
nights began to rouge up. and with drawing came her
run and fly beyond the hum-drum lines of a non-walking
reconnection to the people and animals who populated her shaky
person’s predictable routines. what a gift it is that my daughter
world.
has found sheer joy in that unerasable feeling of physical freedom that all starts from the dull point of a no. 2 pencil
drawing has given my daughter & me a connecting line on which to find our steadiest, most carefree links of time. jenny’s reminders came quickly, flying from her grapho-impaired hand, leading her back home again following her painful months of deprivation following her long, shattering fall from sleep. here they are, aged ten years, reminding me again and again how fortunate we are to be alive and well -- and still drawing.