I love these pieces of paper. If my house were to burn down, and I had to save one thing (pets and humans not counting), it might be these sheets of notes and sketches, of calculations and measurements and bits of cream trace covered with sketches, cut from the roll with the edge of my ruler. It used to be a scale, but nobody uses those anymore. Not even me. I suppose they would be second, after the photos of my son growing up. Beyond the obvious sentimenal reasons, he keeps sending me text messages asking for photos of him aged 5 to 8 for work. They like attaching the people who work for them to who they were young. One was for each person's coat hook in a long line of them in the hallway. Like kindergarten.
I can't even begin to name every reason I think this is just plain brilliant, except that it comes down to the very straight line between who we are when we are very young and who we are grown-up. We ask kids, "What do you want to do when you grow up?", but all we have to do is look at what they do and talk about the most, and not argue when they answer and say, for example, that they want to be, say, a fashion designer, or an architect. I'll grant that I'll warn anyone about doing the latter for a million very good reasons, the first being that if they think it's glamorous and that they will be famous and have Rizzoli calling to prepare the coffee table edition featuring their work, and be able to have a Porsche and a house they design for themselves, when a car payment and an apartment might be a bit of a stretch already, they are sadly mistaken. Do it if you are driven, if you are passionate, and if you cannot imagine doing anything else, no matter what, no matter the cost to you.
I don't think anyone goes into fashion with such pretentions, and they are much nicer people, I'm sure.
It's a reminder to remember that child and keep him near. I use the male because my only child is cis-male, and he is even more cherished to me than I and the little cis-girl in me are. To let him be and make sure he has enough crayons and blocks.
Actually, I thought he was going to become an architect, when at some crazy precocious age -- like under two -- he sat down at his little desk next to mine and started drawing perfectly straight lines down the sheet of paper with a pencil, all the way across it. They were closely spaced, and he did it easily, methodically. It was actually his OCD tendency that he was expressing. But hey, I was disqualified at the age of four for cheating on the corner grocery store's coloring context. They said no child my age could possibly color so perfectly within the lines, complete with color coordination and shading. They were mistaken and a great injustice was committed, but I felt rather fluffed up by that, until I encountered modern art and felt -- conventional and lacking in exuberance.
Maybe that's why I love these pieces of paper. They are like showing the inside of my brain. The mess of the process that produces the other thing I love, the result, the neat print-outs of carefully coordinated drawings, with excellence of line weight.
It's like when you look at something, and you see immediately that it's not right, even though it took an unspeakable number of hours to create. My mind does an automatic calculation of the additional hours it will take to fix. It's tempting to cheat, except that it's wrong. Wrong now is disastrous later. It's like when I set out to make a carnival mask for my 5 week-old son his first Halloween and started cutting, hoping that he'd be able to see out of it, and breathe. The proportions mattered, if I didn't want him screaming. He sat in his little seat on my desk at work, where he came with me, and I put it over his tiny face, the face that I had spent 5 weeks gazing at, and it was perfect. Proof that there is a connection between the eyes and the brain that goes straight to the hand. It matters what you look at because it will inform your brain.
And we're back to childhood again, and what the child, the little person is looking at and does, and that it matters.
When my son was not quite two, I took him to Rotterdam and to Paris. We took a train from Brussels to Rotterdam, and he sat on my lap and looked at the countryside sliding past the train. The houses and the barns, the cows, and he pointed, and said, "Buildings different here." His English was good, but not quite fluent.
"Yes!" I told him, delighted with his observation, the fact that he was looking, and seeing, and that he was mentally comparing it to what he knew. Also that he was not falling over from jet-lag.
In Paris, he made me take photos of all the equestrian statues and scultures. Outside the Grand Palais, he pointed up towards the sky, and told me to take a picture. I didn't even bother to question him. Of course there was a horse sculture up there. I scrutinized the freeze at about that level, and there it was.
A year later, I wanted to see Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke in "Before Sunrise". Being an architect, and an unemployed one (one of the most common sorts of architects), on top of being a single mother, a babysitter was a luxury we didn't know. I didn't to drive up I95 to take him to my parents' house. He was little. If I went to a matinee, he'd nap through it, right? No. He watched the movie, and his little hand went up and pointed to the gigantic image of beautiful 19th century palaces in Vienna.
"Paris!" he announced to the entire darkened movie theater.
I stopped breathing. Not only did he remember the name of the city, but the buildings did look just exactly like the Grand and Petit Palais on either side of avenue Winston Churchill.
More reason to worry that he was heading to a future in my profession. Imagine my relief 14 years later, when he decided to go to law school. That lasted not quite a full year before he tried something called "applied foreign langauges". I mean, do you do anything with languages other than apply them? That lasted almost two years before scary psychological symptoms were triggered by any mention of the future. When you have to go lie down and take deep breaths just thinking about your future, you're maybe not on the right track.
So, how do these parents who kind of program their kids do it, exactly? Having been the kind of kid who colored inside the lines in shaded tones of Crayola, who dutifully did all her work, granted, with a naughty independent streak that exasperated my kindergarten teacher, who told me we learn to read after we learn to tie our shoes (wrong thing to say to me), and who did not appreciate my delight at sending hundreds of little pieces of colored construction paper into the air with a gleeful laugh, when she was mentally praising what she had been taking for an totally unacticipated effort to help clean up, I knew what that gets you, and what it does not. At least in my case, all my self-direction usually went along with my teachers' expectations. Not so in my son's case, but I didn't want him growing up to please people and harboring romantic expectations. I certrainly didn't want him lying in the dark, using deep breathing to cope.
"Stop. You have to do what you love. Choose. Fashion photography or fashion design. Pick one and do what you love."
"Fashion design."
I breathed a sigh of relief. Short-lived, for and, so began another messy process, the inside of the brain spilling all over the place, the indomptable self resolutely refusing to accept mediocrity and others' exigencies, when they do not match one's own, to arrive at what looks like a tidy, straight line to the result. The job. The job. That first one that matters so much and makes you in other minds what you are in your own. That's why resumes exist. Padding and lying are inadmissable. Tidying up, however, inside the lines is a very good idea. I breathed a deep sigh of satisfaction, and I looked back over the signs that pointed to this future. They were there in abundance.
I realized that fashion isn't a slave maker or something dreamt up to inflict shameon those who have a knack for getting it wrong, or being a little too short, or shapely. It's not only what you see in the pages of Vogue. It's design. It requires as much of the wearer as it does of the designer. It takes courage, and creativity. It's the twin sibling of architecture, involving an identical process to arrive at a product that shares the same tension between art and functionality, both requiring significant means to produce, and to acquire. He borrowed and read my architecture books alongside BOF and profiles on fashion designers, and he quit fashion school when it insisted he betray purity of line and architecture of clothing, or be considered lazy for not complicating things. While I sewed my own clothes, that was not his thing, which is fine. I don't, after all, build my own buildings.
When I finaly get through this renovation, I will tidy up all those boxes and folders of photos and sketches, calucations and notes, and maybe make the perfect scrapbook story of who we are, past, present, future.
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