Seeing Red

SEEING RED

 

I am at my happiest when my art and writing come together.  The painting (49”x72”) is titled “Seeing Red.”  The text in the background is as follows:

My shyness evaporated in the wake of unrestrained giggles as the dome of the winter sky made itself visible and invisible.  The flakes were tasteless yet as cool as mints as the sky threw a party for me complete with January confetti raining down all around me like sparkles of promise.  Traffic sifted the icy bits to the sides of the road where it drifted into mounds and would have turned to gray-brown slush without the constant renewal of clean falling snow.  A snow day away from school has magical, even, some would say, curative powers. 

  Silhouetted against an unexpectedly bright backdrop, Bubba and I skipped all the way home from Birdwell Elementary School, kicking up tufts of white, singing again and again the jingling refrain, “Everybody doesn’t like something, but nobody doesn’t like Sara Lee,” ending each refrain on a screeching drawn out high note.  Today was my fifth birthday and since no one at home had mentioned it, I just knew they were planning to surprise me.  But not all surprises are good.  Sometimes not knowing the truth can be a blessing.  Bless you, bless you, bless you--seems like when I sneeze I always sneeze three times, and if you say the automatic phrase real fast, blessyou, bleshyou, bleshooo, it begins to sound like a sneeze itself, or like a two-syllable foreign word without meaning, wi thout me ning, wi thout mee neen… 

  Unable to focus on anything real, I sprawled all afternoon on the burnt orange shag in the den, drawn hypnotically to the flicker of the TV screen. 

  “What are you doing, Lee Baby?” housekeeper Evelyn asked.  “Why aren’t you outside playing?” 

“I don’t know.  I don’t have anyone to play with.” 

  Bubba was off with his friends and lately he got mad when I followed him around.  Even when I pretended to be invisible, he still told me to get lost.  He said it with such force, I worried that some day it might really work, like a horrible incantation, and I would disappear forever. 

  Even though the snow continued to fall, all around me the wonder of the day began dissolving.  The sky had grown darker and I could no longer pretend I was in a globe gently shaken by a friendly giant.  I had started wondering where the party people were.  Maybe no one wanted to come.  I considered melting into the carpet, puddling up on the hardwood floor beneath, and bleeding shamefully to the corners of the room where on Monday, Wednesday, or Friday, I would be mopped away by Evelyn, as though Bubba had screamed in his most fluent Pig Latin,  “Et-gay ost-lay!” merely one time too many and I was gone forever.

  The TV welcomed me back from a commercial break but I had lost interest in frantic plots and manic laughter.  Warmed by anger over having been forgotten, and all but unobserved by the dozing Evelyn, I spent the rest of the evening cutting pictures from magazines.  Red hats, red shoes, red berries…  And I glued them into my scrapbook.  Red hearts, red lips, red words that I couldn’t yet read.  And one convincing rendering of a red 1964 Chrysler 300, polished to a high sheen and set to zoom away from today into the future…