I really began this blog over thirty years ago, in 1976. That was the year that Mrs. Vera Johnson instructed her first grade students to tell her a story. We weren’t really adept at writing prose back then, so she copied down what we said. However, the illustration, a Crayola rendition of a scene from our masterpiece, was to be our own creation.
I told Mrs. Johnson about the time that our family’s pony, Smokey, bit my little brother on the hand. The plot of my story is rudimentary at best; however, my illustration is a sight to behold. Cyd, a mere stick figure, has golf ball-sized teardrops streaming from his eyes, and poor Smokey looks more like a man-eating armadillo than a pony. It was not only my first venture into the world of publishing but my first hard lesson on artistic integrity as well. Being unable to read my seven-year-old mind, Mrs. Johnson mistakenly titled my piece Smokey, when it was obviously a written tribute to Cyd.
I’m not going to pretend to remember everything that I was thinking that day. In fact, telling Mrs. Johnson my story is just one of a hundred vague memories from that period of my life. However, I can only imagine how much I missed my little brother, and how scary it must have felt to be thrust into such a foreign environment without the one person that understood me the most.
Cyd and I were born less than two years apart, and it was not unusual for people to mistake us for fraternal twins. After all, as siblings we shared everything: a bedroom, toys, clothes, friends, books, and relations. Before I started to school, our days were one long swashbuckling adventure after another, and to our parent’s constant dismay, we would often talk for hours after lights out, creating elaborate fantasy worlds and plotting the next day’s agenda.
For that one year, my afternoons were spent teaching Cydnee everything that I had learned in school, and being the obsessive-compulsive that he was (and still is), the questions would not stop until the minutest detail had been properly verified and catalogued to memory. Then, Cyd would bring me up to speed on everything that had taken place in my absence, and it was my turn to ask questions. We had no idea that our after school rants would one day be considered an art form, or that something called “the internet” would eventually replace our fat pencils and glossy Spiderman notebooks.
Writing an introduction for this blog has proven to be a far more
difficult task that I ever imagined, with each new draft communicating even less of what I originally intended to say. In all honesty, I have no idea how to discuss a blog that’s been 30 years in the making, or how to comment on an artistic collaboration that predates my earliest memories. I suppose the best that I can hope for is to choose a random starting point and write, filling in the blanks as we go along. And what better place to start than at the very beginning, with a story that a seven-year-old boy once told his first grade teacher?
Enjoy.
Robert
