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2001
Barnard/CBS Essay Contest -- Second Prize Winner
Allajah Young
Fashion Industries High School
A
Woman I Admire
When
my day is over and I lie somewhere between sleepiness
and sleep, my memories act as a pillow to keep
me from falling. I seem young to be reminiscing,
but I often remember the time in my life when
I was nine years old and living in Chino Hills,
California. My family had moved there from One
Hundredth Street and Broadway. It was a gated
community, built on a rolling hill in the middle
of nowhere. It wasn't exactly a feeling of entrapment
I experienced, even though the only time I would
leave was to go to school or the supermarket with
my mother. It was more a feeling of being surrounded
by a sameness. The community had four different
sizes of cookie cutter houses: two, three, four,
or six bedroom units, all the same insipid shades
of pink and blue. We lived in a pink four-bedroom
with the front door on the left side.
In my newfound land of pink and blue houses there
wasn't much to do. In the park at the bottom of
the hill, the kids were mixed up in games that
were boring to me. My favorite thing was to take
my bike up to the very top of the hill and ride
it all the way down with no brakes, but I even
grew tired of that. I began to spend my afternoons
and nights in front of the television, watching
cartoons and old TV shows on Nick at Night. My
mother was afraid I was becoming a couch potato,
brain and body turning to mush. One day she told
me to take a box of cookies to the house across
the street. I can't remember the ploy she used.
I thought it would be a quick task I could finish
before the commercials were over.
The
house was the same as ours except it had the door
on the right side. I didn't even know who lived
there; I never really saw many of my neighbors,
just the occasional garage door opening and closing.
When I knocked on the door, a woman answered and
greeted me with a genial smile. She was my height,
which was average for a woman but awkward for
me. She had long chemically straightened hair
and big almond-shaped black eyes with skin the
shade of an avocado seed.
Her
name was Cathleen, and she was a retired art teacher.
That first day at her house she asked me, "What
do you do to keep yourself occupied?" I didn't
know what to tell her, so I just said the first
thing entering my mushy mind, "I like to watch
old TV shows." She had a way of not having an
expression on her face. When I gave her my answer,
she didn't look puzzled, or mad or happy, she
didn't look like anything. This perplexed me.
I knew what I said didn't sound good. She moved
from across the room to the seat beside me on
the couch and said, "Well I like to draw to keep
myself busy. Do you draw?" Once again I was lost
for an answer. The only drawing I would do was
in school, a turkey made from construction paper
at Thanksgiving, or a bunny at Easter. I said,
"No." She looked away for a minute as if to find
an answer in her head that would keep me comfortable.
"Well I'm going to teach you."
Every
day after that I would come home, eat, and go
to the house across the street. The first few
weeks she would sit me in front of the living
room window that faced my house. She gave me a
box of colored pencils and told me "to draw what
I see, however I want." I would make things the
color they were: the water blue, the grass green.
The first picture I finished was of the landscape
from Cathleen's living room window. The view was
the same every day. Bright blue sky and piercing
hot California sun, on the clean street--no rain,
no clouds, just bright hot sky every day. I was
excited to show her what I had done when I finished.
I called her into the living room and she stood
next to the easel. She looked at the picture,
and then at me with that same nothing look that
I had seen the first day we met. She said, " Why
does the sky have to be blue?"
"Because it is."
"Does it have to be?"
"But doesn't it have to look like what it is?"
She
went upstairs for a minute; she brought back a
large black spiral sketchbook and turned it to
the last page. It was a drawing done out the same
window. The sky was swirling with colors and the
clean street was a shiny light blue, my house
black and gray. She looked down at me and said,
"See? It can be any color. It's still the sky."
We started with pastels, deep reds and blues for
a sunset, or a bright pink for a sun. People's
faces didn't have to be beige or brown. I made
them orange or purple. When it came time to make
something exactly the color it was, like a flower
or a bowl of fruit, she would help me mix in the
right yellow or the right pink to make the orange
its authentic self. Later we moved on to watercolors.
They were the thick kind that came in a tube,
not the Crayola ones I was accustomed to. When
she brought out a box of paintbrushes, I instinctively
reached for the big burly one. She took it from
my hand and said, "A small point is made for every
detail."
The
painstaking but beneficial process of using a
small brush for an entire project taught me to
have patience with my artwork and not to lose
that patience at the first sign my picture might
be good. She taught me there is a time for everything,
a time to be neat, or sloppy, and that the two
extremes couldn't exist without each other.
Not many nine year olds have portfolios, but by
the end of the summer I did. These visits with
Cathleen became the highlight of my days. Besides
drawing, she would talk to me about her life and
her mysterious husband who only existed in oil
portraits to me since I never saw him. We would
talk about how bleak Chino Hills was. Cathleen
would tell me how to do things, how to carry myself,
when it was best to speak and when it was best
to whisper. And when she moved away, I told myself
I wouldn't forget the things she taught me about
art and life.
I
had many art teachers after Cathleen, so when
it came time for me to put together a portfolio
for high school, I had a lot of works to choose
from. But I kept going back to two sketches I
did that summer when I was nine. I thought, "I
can't put them in my portfolio." I did anyway.
I realized then that every line, every brush stroke
I used, that I made my own, came from something
Cathleen taught me. Even now I find myself reaching
for a pink color pencil to highlight grass or
adding a red hue to skin. And today I find that
an expressionless face and no words can make a
strong and captivating impression. Conceivably,
if I had never gone across the street my mind
might have turned to mush.
In
a lackluster place like Chino Hills where colors
and minds can halfheartedly fade away, Cathleen
changed the world to color for me and I admire
her for that.
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