Joe ~ May 3

 

What Are You Gonna’ do When You Grow Up

 

The dreams of youth are sometimes highfalutin and so pie-in-the-sky that they harbor both hope and that inexorable feeling that says, “Who Knows?” Kids in my neighborhood wanted to grow up to be Mickey Mantle, of Yankee fame or John Wayne and star in westerns. Others, would choose Sandy Koufax, Rocky Marciano or go to seminary and be a priest like their Uncle Biff. But I didn’t aspire to become any of these legends of sports or divine vocation. When asked what I was going to do when I grew up, I would proudly say, “ I’m going to move to New York City and become a famous painter”. Houses? you might ask. No…a real artist!! The kind of artist that paints pictures of those biplanes in Life Magazine that are soaring through the sky in a fierce battle with the enemy. Shooting their machine guns and doing loop-d-loops to gain advantage so they could score another Maltese kill marker on the side of their fuselage. In the background there would be planes trailing smoke and debris as they did a death spiral into a farm field in the Alsace-Loraine. I also had a hankering to paint large crew ships that were foundering in the ocean after being struck by the deadly torpedo from a German U-boat. The Lusitania comes to mind. Very colorful and full of detail. Yes, I know…I was a foolish little kid that learned to keep my secret buried deep inside where others couldn’t use it to pummel me with.  And I wonder to this day why the kids in my school thought that I was ten cents short of a dollar. But, then again, I was deftly scared poopless to field a ground ball and I had the coordination and skill of a kid wearing a deep sea diver’s suit shooting a basketball. Like an orange in a hardware store I did my best to conform…and what a lovely scenario that put forth. Like a boxer in the ring with both hands tied behind his back I soldiered on and the play went on and my dream persisted. A combination of anger, frustration and revenge caused me to go on myriad tangents that only reassured me that my dream was becoming harder to believe in and I had to fend for myself in the real world and put away the things of my youth. I was so driven that I became the what I hated most of my childhood. Big and Strong…athlete…not necessarily a good athlete…but one who showed everyone in his life…LOOK AT ME NOW!!! Me? The little kid that wants to paint pictures?…or the Offensive tackle who can whack that guy harder than he can whack me….What a legacy….In the name of survival I’ve taken a roundabout trip, that brought me to a career doing something creative, using those artistic gifts that I stowed away for so long. And now, seventy years in the making I have fulfilled my goal of making it to New York City and retired from a career that has been a means to an end. 

I now sit before three large canvass that will hopefully turn into a triptych that will wow and amaze those who stand before it. I entered it in an Alumni art show at my alma mater. I had sent in a digital rendering of the finished work, not thinking they would accept it. I didn’t hear from the curators and the deadline had passed so I put it to rest and moved on. Out of the blue, I get an email that the piece had been selected to be hung in the show and it’s due May 6th…OH SHITE!!! … Besides writing these daily missives I’ve been doing nothing but painting. This seemingly insurmountable fifteen by five monstrosity will be delivered on Monday as if my life depends on it. 

And maybe, just maybe it will fulfill on some level, the other half of that dream that has resurfaced and is surrounding me with paint and brushes and color and hope. To borrow a quote from the movie SARGENT YORK, “The Lord sure do move in mysterious ways”.