Come With Me

 One of the most disheartening things I've faced is grueling, laborious work when there is so much more that was expected of me from teachers, friends, pastors, my wife, and myself for that matter. 

I was raised with two sisters by a single mother in the 1970's when it was much grimmer as a single mom than today. Money being scarce for us at the time, there were periods when we couldn't afford a television. It really wouldn't have mattered much, even with a TV because, back then, there were only 3 channels from which to choose so the distractions were fewer. And when our TV went on the fritz, which was more common in those days, it was a while before Mom could afford a new set. 

Not having a TV as a kid and having lots of alone time while Mom worked to support us, I had occasions to read more for entertainment than the average kid and certainly more than my friends. As grade school boy I was reading H.G. Wells, Edgar Rice Burroughs and non-fiction books on astronomy and the American space program. By the time I was in junior high school I was reading novels by Leon Uris and Margaret Mitchell. 

Needless to say, I loved drawing and I emulated humorous artists from Mad Magazine, Peanuts, Cracked, Plop, the Sunday paper and others. The way the artists created stories from their characters was of interest to me and I even created my own strip called Salt Shaker. 

Because of my talent for drawing and my interest in reading, I would always try my hand at both, and I was in high school when a writing teacher complimented me on a report I wrote about Bartholomew Dias. I would often accompany some papers and reports with illustrations of my own for that extra touch. 

Most of my family knew of my interest in the creative arts but were never really engaged in it. Mom was too busy just trying to help us survive and my father was too immersed in his own activities to even know what I liked to do. Regardless, most of the adults in my life, with good intentions, felt art was a good diversion but it was no way to earn a living. The best way to do that, they said, was to get a job, pay my bills and make my boss happy.

During my school years I often practiced writing, unwittingly so, by keeping journals or even spontaneously writing things down on a single sheet of notebook paper or scrap paper. Sketchbooks were common for me also, even if it was a simple spiral notebook, and to this day I often keep a combination sketch-journal with drawings combined with my written thoughts. In my youth, I wasn't even aware there were books made for the sole purpose of drawing in them. When I finally  discovered sketchbooks, I presumed they were for real artists, not me. This is the sort of thing that happens when a youngster has no real guidance or mentoring.

I loved getting my hands on drawing instruction books and in some of the comic books of which I was a fan, had drawing lessons between stories.

In college, which I wasn't expected to attend, my creative writing instructor called me out of class and spoke to me in the hallway to tell me how particularly skilled I was at writing and that I should have considered it as a profession. 

I did nothing with the counsel, which was a frequent behavioral pattern of mine, as "life" got in the way. The distractions of so many things and people unrelated to the betterment of myself or of the hunt for a career in which I would have excelled seemed to greedily pull me away from a life of promise. Also, I don’t think I really believed I was good enough or smart enough to make a good go at it. My destiny in life, I felt, was to be of service to my obligations by sacrificing my own happiness for the sake of others. That was a cruel, sadistic lie.

My adult working life has been an unwelcome, working-class existence which has produced nothing more than an unhappy exertion and has procured only a hand-to-mouth, paycheck to paycheck existence at best. Here at this stage, I crave nothing more than to finally end a life of servitude, by once and for all silencing all the ghostly voices of the past who said “it’s no way to earn a living”, and finally pursue with all my abilities, a career in the creative arts.