1. I am five or six years old. I have spent the entire day with my grandmother (as I have most days) and we are now at her ceramic painting club/class. The room smells of turpentine and old ladies, despite the fact that my grandmother is not quite fifty. I wish we were at her house where there is a color television with a VCR and I can watch Muppet movies. There are four or five other ladies in the room and each has her own carrying-case full of God only knows what. I'm told they only have paints in them, but they're big and make strange clinking sounds such that I want to dig through them to find out what's in them. One lady has a carpet bag, another has a leather briefcase, and my own grandmother has a large wicker picnic basket. I sit as still as my fidgety body will allow, answering as many of the ladies' questions as I can while trying to take in all the smells and colors of the room. I try not to ask when we'll be going home too much and am rewarded for my reasonably-good behavior by being allowed to paint a dinosaur on a ceramic tile. I think my mother still has it somewhere.
2. I am in my early teens. I am taken to a Monet exhibit in Ft. Worth with my grandmother and some of her friends. One of them is the wife of my grandfather's friend whose ranch we go hunting at. She seems more interested in what I think about everything than the exhibit itself. I am astonished by a painting that is largely unfinished, in which the underside of a bridge is only suggested by a single zig-zagged mark, leaving large, blank canvas patches exposed. I was under the impression that this was supposed to be a masterpiece collection and hope one day to be skilled/important/famous enough for my unfinished work to still be treated as fine art.
3.I am eight or nine years old. I have been signed up for art lessons from a woman who might be the local ag teacher and I wonder if we'll get to help her feed the cattle. Her entire house smells like a horse blanket and I am deathly allergic to everything within it, given that it is all covered in a fine layer of animal dander. I am fortunate that the "lessons" are in a tool shed away from the house, but it is hot and makes me not want to be here anymore. One of the other children has found a cattle prod and is hitting people with it. Then he figures out how to use it. Now I definitely don't want to be here anymore. One of the children is crying. Profusely. I think it might be me. We are taught to make pottery and I want to make a coffee mug like I saw somebody do on the local PBS station one time. I am politely informed that there is no pottery wheel available, but I am welcome to make anything I like with my insufficient lump of clay. Unperturbed, I shoot for the coffee mug anyway. The handle falls off and it leaks. I believe it was used as a pen holder, but I haven't seen it in years so I can't remember.
4. It is the first day of kindergarten. I go to church with half the children in this room and am, therefore, nonplussed at being left here by my mother. We are arranged at tables and classified into groups designated by an animal that has been die-cut from construction paper and has our names on them. Each table/group has six children at it, except for the turtle group, which consists of myself and another child named Teddy. Teddy is part of the half I don't go to church with and is distressed at the perception of his parents' abandonment. Whereas I am still riding the wave of owning a new Superman backpack and dinosaur Converse sneakers (with fancy Muppet bow biters), he cries non-stop for the entirety of the day, a trend he will continue for the remainder of the week and the first fifteen minutes of each day subsequent to that. After a month or so of this, I am punished by missing recess for shoving Teddy and telling him to stop crying. Only later would I think about it long enough to regret this decision, as I am certain he has most likely gone on to be one of the most dangerous serial killers on the face of the planet.
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