Portraits by the Artist as a Young Man

When I was in first grade ('85 - '86), we had a weekly assignment to create four sentences with our week's vocabulary words, and then illustrate them with four pictures. Being first graders who could barely tie our own shoes, we didn't understand the concept of quarters; we were merely told to take our piece of grey unprocessed-straight-from-the-tree paper and fold it in half, then fold it in half again. This left us with four equal sized quandrants in which we could bring to life our literary masterworks of doom.

We had to move. Our house was resold to another family.

I guess even at this tender age my social studies book had taught me about foreclosure. How else could our house have been sold right out from underneath us? Did your childhood home have lofty Doric pillars and Gothic chandeliers of gargoyles that seemed to defy the laws of gravity? Ours did. We were fancy.

Mom made fudge for our party.

Generally speaking, moms have hourglass figures and wear slinky black cocktail dresses when they're in the kitchen making fudge. I must have gotten my home economics education from the Flintsones.

Jill and I are running a race.

See how the lines on the track get closer together as you get farther from the viewpoint of the picture? That, my friend, is called perspective. Such advanced techniques in the artwork of the young can only be explained by the fact that we had Pole Position for the Atari 2600, which I didn't know how to play, but attempt to play every day regardless. It took me awhile to figure out why there was an Easter Island head watching the race from the stands -- then I realized that it was my first place trophy!

The cat can dig.

I'm pretty sure this was "dig" in the purely literal sense, not the 70s disco sense. I'm also nearly postive that there was a back story to this picture. You see, the kittens were caught smoking up the catnip and tossed in a holding cell. Momma Cat, being your typical Italian-American gangster cat mom rolled up to the jail and dug a tunnel so her offspring could escape the sentence. One of the kittens dressed up like a mouse to fool any police cats that might be tailing them.

The cow loudly said, "Moo!"

I really don't know why "moo" was a vocabulary word, but it can be partially explained by the fact that I went to public school. The other three words for the week were too, zoo, and boo!. This particular cow lived in a wooden barn, and it looks like I was being OCD about putting nails on all the boards. You can tell that this is one of my more mature works from the end of the year, and will probably be worth a little more when I become famous. Keep that in mind should I ever die and have an estate sale.