a fox
In the category of first-world complaints, I have a nagging one. I am grateful that I was born a woman in a decade in a country where I did not have to fight to go to school. I am grateful that my parents valued education above almost anything else and that they made it possible for me to go straight from my high school desk to a leafy college campus before my feet even hit the ground. I am grateful that I live in a city where it’s not even that weird to be a poet and a lawyer and a PTA mom. And I am damn grateful I live in a nation where nobody’s getting arrested for their poems or essays or novels, even if the NSA is listening in on their cellphones.
But, amidst all that gratitude, I am seriously annoyed by the fact that I just can’t draw. Every year for about the last five years, my new year’s resolution is: Learn to draw. And it’s not just like my other resolution to go to the gym that usually lasts through the middle of January. I try. Or I try to try. My google history is filled with searches like “how to draw a fox” and my bedside table is overflowing with books like Drawing from the Right Side of Your Brain. Last year, I even took a sketchbook class with a very sweet twenty-something who kept encouraging me to “let loose.” But the problem isn’t that I am tight or stiff or whatever the opposite of loose is. The problem is that I suck.
A good part of it is that I am spatially challenged. I cannot imagine what the couch would look like on the other side of the room unless I actually put it there. High school geometry was a torture chamber of trying to see in multiple planes before I actually put pencil to paper.
But the problem is, that I also have other imaginings. Drawings and paintings and wood-block prints. Some of them simple, some elaborate. At work, I know exactly what I want our logo to look like or how I want our website to feel. The problem is, I can’t execute on those imaginings. I have no ability to get what is in my mind into the material world, even in the most rudimentary way.
I also know—or I wish—that drawing would help with the poems. I have tremendous and fantastical illustrations in my mind that I want to serve as sketchwork, as a kind of note-taking for my poems. I love those artist notebooks full of doodles and line drawings of scenes and characters and even words themselves. Again, no dice. My sketches come out as childish and stilted and completely uninterpretable. No one wants to see the inside of my pen-scratched notebook. Believe me. No one.
In kindergarten, I won the coloring contest for my splendid “within the lines” rendition of a revolutionary minuteman. It was a proud moment, even though I knew—even at the time—I was lucky the assignment had not been to actually draw a minuteman. I can still remember the big cut-out blue ribbon that was attached to my paper when I got it back. It had “1st place” written in the teacher’s even block printing and a ruffled edge around circle at the top. It had two long streamers that perfectly matched my minuteman’s jacket hanging down below the bottom edge of the paper. I can remember it like it was yesterday. Just don’t ask me to draw it.
