younger at heart

This may shock some of you, but when I was a kid I wasn't exactly the active, sporty type. No, no, it's true! While my compatriots were out playing tee-ball and soccer and tag, I was inside drawing pictures and imagining to myself what it would be like to be a piano phenom. Don't get me wrong -- my imagination also supplied me with visions of being the world's first great female catcher or a tennis superstar, but mostly it supplied me with cartoons and music.

I loved to color on construction paper, which is why this edition of MS Paint drawings are done on yellow backgrounds. Yellow was the closest you could get to white when you'd already colored on all your white pages.

I didn't know this until sometime in early elementary school, but it was while Peg Oman was doing daycare for me that it was brought to my attention that I liked to draw people. And that I liked to draw people whose proportions were all wrong. Their heads were ENORMOUS and they had these teeny, tiny bodies. The MS Paint up there I'm pretty sure doesn't even do it justice... I'm sure the bodies were really more like half that size. But I remember loving to draw hair and mouths, so I'm pretty sure this is why I paid all the attention to their heads and just drew on little bodies really quickly so I could move on to the next face.

"Why bother drawing bodies at all?" you may ask.

Excellent question. Apparently I am hard-wired to be... sick in the head. People HAVE bodies, we can't just go around drawing people WITHOUT bodies because it wouldn't be RIGHT!

But my imagination was always there, right alongside my obsessive side. When I was very young, I remember "inventing" a new symbol. I was so proud of it, and I would fill dozens of pages of construction paper with this symbol... over and over and over again. (This is an example of where imagination and obsessive go hand-in-hand, kind of like Jane Seymour being unable to stop painting what is clearly the female form over and over and over again.)

Imagine my disappointment in third grade when we began to learn cursive and I discovered -- after all that time -- that I'd only managed to invent the capital letter "L."