I was a good reader and writer. I won the award for Best Artist at my middle school graduation. I played guitar from the age of seven—first classical, then blues and rock, and later jazz. But I always tried to fit in as an athlete. I tried swimming, cross country, and track and field. I even did karate at the YMCA for one lesson. I did summer baseball camp for two years. But I was just not a good athlete. In high school I completely abandoned art and music, and joined the football team. Just about anyone could make the football team if you stuck it out, because they needed a large squad for practice. My team had fifty players on the varsity squad, and another thirty on the freshmen team. But I was terrible, and I never played, except in blowouts. I guess I was just trying to fit into jock culture.
When I went to college, I got involved in martial arts, and did enjoy them for several years as a club or extracurricular activity, but even that I was only moderately successful in. I don’t know why I never embraced the arts. I did, of course, go on to major in English. And I wrote for the school newspaper for three semesters, and even resumed jazz guitar lessons on and off throughout my undergraduate years. But I never pursued creative writing classes, and never resumed drawing, painting, or sculpting. The closest I came to the plastic arts was working as an model for the art department. They paid well and always needed males, and I had no modesty, so it was a good fit. But no actual art for me. I really didn’t even write creatively again till I participated in the Summer Institute in 1999.
If I wanted to oversimplify things, I could blame my father for pushing me into sports. He and his brothers were the consummate jocks, and my dad did put a lot of value on athletic prowess. But truth be told, my dad wasn’t that influential in my decisions, and in actuality he was a damn good artist, too. He had studied architecture and then later majored in biology and became a high school biology teacher. I used to love to look at his sketches in his architecture notebooks, as well as in his anatomy and physiology notebooks.
I guess I was just more interested in trying to fit in than in trying to pursue my interests and talents. I still regret not honing my skills in art. To this day I have a lot of raw talent, and I dream of having the time to take classes some day.
But what made me think about this was my son, who participated in his first poetry reading yesterday. He’s six, and one of his poems was selected for the Creative Writing Program’s Poetic Journeys program. It was called “Snow, Rain, Snow, Rain, Snow, Rain.†He wrote it last year in kindergarten. He read it aloud from a podium in the Benton Museum in front of a small crowd of adults and students. He’s a nervous kid, and I didn’t think he’d follow through and do it, but before the reading began he actually asked me if I had a copy of his poem on hand, and when I gave it to him he went and sat in a corner and read it to himself over and over again to practice. I was really proud of him.
He’s had a lot of success in the arts these last few years. There’s no art or music at his school. They were cut or drastically reduced. (I believe he gets thirty minutes of music once a month, no exaggeration, and no art whatsoever). So we have enrolled him in drawing classes, pottery classes, and guitar classes at the Community School of the Arts, which is at UConn’s Depot campus (you know, the creepy one with all the unoccupied old buildings). He’s loved the classes, and has really thrived. He took drawing last summer and enjoyed it immensely, but when we tried to enroll him in drawing classes for the school year, there were none that worked with our schedules, and so we put him in the pottery class, which he’s loved. He’s even won two awards, one in each semester’s art show.
We did try to get Cormac involved in sports. He took swimming lessons, and did all right. He has played sports at camp each of the last two summers, but spent most of his time in the art or nature rooms. He even won the Golden Cockroach award for correctly answering the most nature questions in his age group. We also signed him up for T-ball last year, and Amy coached. He didn’t hate it, but he spent most of his time looking for bugs in the outfield, and when asked this year if he wanted to do T-ball again, said no, and asked if we could put him in an art or science class.
The other day, Cormac was reading a biography of John James Audubon, and since then he’s been telling everyone that he thinks he wants to be a Naturalist when he grows up. That way he can study nature and also draw what he sees, like Audubon did in his notebooks.
I’m proud of my artsy kid, and I hope he never makes the mistake I made of making a false pursuit of sports at the expense of something he really loves and is good at.
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