I remember my art teacher, never married. I attended a Sacred Heart school then, off of Maynada and the Alhambra Circle, the one that spun every car around a pair of huge brass shoes. We shared these with our sister city, somewhere in Bolivia.

This woman would have us make sculptures using toothpicks and fingerprints and leftover packaging materials and paper plates. She hung them on the walls.

This teacher, childless, would have us make objects she subconsciously longed for, the way psychologists give themselves away in their questions. Here, in Popsicle sticks, a swing set, here, in play-dough, the lumps of a family, here, in clay and buttons and Crayola paint, baby shoes.

These days I wonder if our tiny, brazen attempts at art were her children more than anything else. How she had raised them and directed them, how they would grow with us until we had filled them with brass, until she could form them gigantic, and define cities.

06/27/2006

Author's Note: The expanded version of Hemingway's famous six-word novel.

Posted on 03/07/2007
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