Little Boy Blues Read Online Free PDF

If you don’t count matchbook covers that bore ads from art correspondence schools asking you to copy a sketch of a German shepherd or Robert E. Lee, Jon Gnagy was my introduction to art.

    I had never been much good with a coloring book. I envied girls their ability to stay so easily inside the lines (I never knew a boy who knew how to color). This was different. I was still copying, carefully aping each phase in the step-by-step instruction manual: the blocking with shapes, the gradual refinement of shape to physical object (box to house, cylinder to pine tree), and then the final details (shingles on the roof, shadows down one side of the tree). But that copying allowed for a certain latitude. Even an eight-year-old understood that it wasn’t about making an exact replica; it was more about the picture as a whole, something that could be approximated, something you could play a variation on, mess with. The best part was being ready with my supplies when the show came on, and then, propped on my elbows in front of the television, following along when Gnagy made three swift strokes with the side of a charcoal stick to put shadows on a mountain range, or feathered in shadows under theeaves on an old mill. I envied his assured strokes and spent hours practicing those easygoing slashes on the paper. Most of my efforts looked nothing like the examples on television or in the instructions, but I persevered until my fingers shone black with charcoal and chalk.
    I never took what I learned from those lessons and applied it to pictures of my own creation. I was happy just to be able to recreate what Gnagy drew, since to me, copying something well was as good as anything you might come up with on your own. I wasn’t after art, I had no intention of expressing myself—what did I have to express? I was after craft, everything that went into knowing what to include and how much you could leave out and still have a good picture. Mastering those techniques was like learning secret handshakes or becoming part of a guild. It gave me a handle on wrangling the world around me, and it was the most fun I ever had with anything on television.
    Mostly, though, I just remember how quiet it was out there in the country. We lived in a brick ranch house in a broad lot as treeless as the churchyard next door. There were dark woods at the back of the property, but I never explored very far. My aunt and uncle’s backyard in Winston-Salem had been surrounded by a privet hedge. There was an old apple tree that still produced a crop every year, and a swing in the tree for me. The yard sloped away from the house, and at the bottom of the yard my aunt always put in a small garden. Beyond that was the alley, lined with clinkers from the coal furnace that crunched under the tires of the garbage truck when it rumbled by. Everything there was measured, bounded, safe. There were no deep woods.
    The house in Winston-Salem faced a busy street, but in Lexington, we lived beside an even busier highway. On Saturday andSunday the road in front of the house and the church was clogged with cars pulling outboard motor boats on their way to and from High Rock Lake ten miles farther south. Then it was even more lonesome, watching all those people passing, on their way somewhere else. Monday through Friday we had the place to ourselves.
    I had the back string free and was working to untangle the two crossed strings that controlled Red Riding Hood’s hands when I became aware that my mother was talking to me. Or maybe it was the sun and not her voice that got my attention. I had been sitting in her shadow where she lay on the folding chair in the yard behind my aunt and uncle’s house and, in the time it had taken me to free just one string from the clotted mess that hung midway between the marionette and the control sticks, the sun had moved and stolen my shade.
    “—a box of oranges and a doll, that’s what I got for Christmas every year. That’s all Blanche got,