“The Young Artist”

The apartment in Bayside.  Perhaps I am three or four.  I am sitting, crouching, squatting, whatever posture I need to be in, on the kitchen floor.  I am drawing with crayons on paper.  The only light is in the kitchen, where Dad is fixing his breakfast.  It is dark everywhere else.  Quiet, too, as Mom and Owen, and John if he has been born yet, are asleep.  Dad and I do not speak.

Am I drawing what I remember to be my first images?  Attempts to depict what it was like to be in the car and drive under the big towers of what I now know to be either the Whitestone or the Throgs Neck Bridge.  I remember trying to show, in a static drawing, what motion felt like — approaching the first tower, being under it, turning around to look up through the back window to see it recede, then turning forward to approach the next tower and repeat the experience.  Perhaps I should have been making a motion picture, not a drawing.  As if!

I wish I had those images.  Where did they go?  Crumpled up in the day’s trash, when Dad had finished his breakfast and gone to work, and Mom was up and starting her day with two or three of us?  Or filed away somewhere in a manila envelope that eventually got lost?  Or maybe still in the house in Connecticut?