I went to dinner the other night with my mother and daughter. As most of these occasions turn out, I was the babysitter. Telling them both to keep their voices down. Not to color on the table. Asking if they had gone to the bathroom since lunch, or if they needed to wash their hands. Generally playing the peacemaker.
“Mom, I’ve told you, do not argue with a 5-year-old … especially when you’re wrong.”
Over diner pancakes and bacon, they drew cats in a notepad and then asked me to contribute my own to the collection. I did — licking my lips and concentrating intently as I scrawled and scratched my way across the page.
I finished up and showed them my masterpiece.
It looked more like a steak. Or something a cat had coughed up.
“What is that?” my mother asked, repulsed. “Someone’s spleen!”
My daughter was more supportive. “No, Gradmom Evie,” she said. “See? There’s the head. And there are the feet. And that’s the tail.”
“Thank you for sticking up for me,” I told her. “Never mind the head is actually over there, and those aren’t his feet.”
No, my art skills aren’t terrific. My mother is a trained artist, and my brother, too. He does sculpture. She is a painter. I ruin pages in a notepad.
That’s always the way it’s been with me and drawing. My daughter returned from my mother’s house one day and said to me in the most awe-struck voice, “Dad, you never said you did art!”
I asked her what she meant, and she explained how my mother showed her the pictures on the wall my brother and I had done when we were kids. She had us create a book from etchings we made on plates and then ran through a press. My mother still has those prints hanging in her house. They look like primitive cave drawings. By cavemen who couldn’t see what they were doing because they hadn’t invented fire yet. “Could be a moose … could be a river.”
But how cool to be recognized by my daughter as an artist … until she said: “Those were very nice mountains you drew.”
“Mountains!?!” I blurted out … maybe a little too offended. It startled the poor girl. “Those aren’t mountains. Those were space ships attacking the Death Star.”
And it hurt. I’ve always wanted to be good at art — don’t we all? But three-legged gerbils can sketch an Eiffel Tower in their cedar shavings better than me. I struggle to sign my name. It’s been one of my only disappointments in life.
Then the other day I read it. My saving grace. A news story about a woman who is going to — AS ART! — give birth to a baby in a Brooklyn art gallery.
Childbirth as performance art! No longer confined to being a way to bring life into the world, this wonderful, magical, awe-inspiring experience is now going to be artistic expression.
At first in disbelief, the horrible cat scratcher soon came around to the idea. If giving birth could be art, well, maybe there is hope for me yet. Maybe I could overcome my shortcomings in the field by going the performance route myself. That everything about my daily life might actually be an artistic expression worthy of praise.
How I burn my hand every morning trying to get a bagel out of the toaster. The strange, contorted, awful faces I make at the dinner table as I use my tongue trying to dislodge a piece of meat from my teeth. (Including my wife yelling: “What are you a hyena? Go get some floss!”)
How I can tap “Green Acres” on the underside of my knee. Or how I can get soup stains on my shirt even when I’m not eating soup.
Art! Art! ART!
And it occurred to me: maybe it isn’t that I’m a bad artist — maybe I just hadn’t found my muse. My medium.
So I’m done with cats and Star Wars drawings, and I’m on to bigger things. To find myself as a true artiste — one who my artistic family will actually be proud of. So if you see me out on a street corner pensively eating a can of beanie weenies or holding a conversation with a lamp post, just gather round and take in a little of my artistic expression. And hopefully it won’t look like something a cat coughed up.