Throwback Thursday: An Early Formative Experience

“Sometimes when I consider what tremendous consequences come from little things… I am tempted to think there are no little things.” ~Bruce Barton 

I read once that Francis Ford Coppola had an illness when he was a teen that kept him in his bedroom for a year. To keep himself from going crazy at what he couldn’t do, he used to create puppets or characters and stage plays in his room. No doubt this staging and directing on a small scale contributed to his achievements in Hollywood, which included hits like The Godfather and Apocalypse Now.

On a smaller scale I had a bout with pneumonia in seventh grade which contributed in no small way to making me who I am. There were five weeks left in seventh grade when I learned that I had pneumonia and that I would have to stay home and rest. Frankly, I did not feel ill. It was a form of walking pneumonia, so I didn't have a strong incentive to stay housebound. When my mother came home from work she'd find me continually in the woods behind our house or doing things in the yard when I was supposed to be "at rest." The doctor explained that it appeared the only way to keep me inactive, short of shackles, was to hospitalize me. 

After five days in the Somerset Hospital I was released back to the custody of my parents, whereupon I was constantly reminded that if I did not rest and stay in the house I would be back in the hospital. 

 

Evidently my parents recognized that I needed something to keep me busy, and they bought me a paint-by-numbers set. The set had two paintings of a pair of Springer spaniels, along with all the appropriate paraphernalia to make them. A card table was set up in the family room and I allowed myself to become mesmerized by what was involved in creating these paintings, which ultimately hung on the wall of that room for several years. 

You may scoff at paint-by-numbers art, but the whole procedure is quite instructive. First off, you come to understand that what you see up close and from a suitable distance is different. You learn attention to detail, and you learn patience. If nothing else, you learn how to control a brush, how paint adheres to a surface, how appearances are deceiving, and maybe how long it takes to get bored with an activity that is tedious and time consuming. Some people may not have the patience, though frankly, the process of putting paint on a surface still fascinates me to this day and I can’t imagine ever getting bored with it. 

After my bout with pneumonia I did not immediately become an artist. Baseball was my passion at that time. Later in high school, while feeling introspective and somewhat alienated, I returned to my art, inspired by album covers and the works of Hieronymus Bosch. 

In college I continued my pursuit of an art major and this, combined with my habit of writing about anything and everything I was associated with, led to a career in advertising. It only follows that my blog would be representative of these same twin passions, writing and art. The B&W image at the top is that first paint by numbers picture from the weeks I rested and recovered from my pneumonia. The face below is an early drawing from high school.

Can you recall an early formative experience that contributed, in unexpected ways, to who you are today?

Formative Experiences

Life, in its fundamental essence, is a series of experiences. Fingertips pushing keys on a keyboard. Driving a car to work in the morning. Organizing photos on one's laptop. Talking to a friend on the telephone. Paying bills. Walking out to the mailbox to get the morning paper. Our days are filled with such ordinary things most of the time.

Then, there are the extraordinary moments, those unforgettable experiences outside the norm.

I was talking with my brother Don about my grandparents this morning. We were sharing memories, and it somehow came up how I used to talk with my grandmother for hours about mystical things like whether the Egyptians had been in contact with alien life (as evidenced by their remarkable understanding in the design of the Great pyramid) or whether psychokinesis is really possible. That is, can people bend metal simply by the power of their minds? Or levitate objects? The Russians were purportedly researching these things during the Cold War.

Don was a bit surprised by this side of my grandmother, and it became apparent that much of what I knew about my grandmother was not common knowledge. My grandmother had always been a highly intuitive person and read extensively along a wide range of interests that far exceeded what you might expect from a rural West Virginia housewife. This was all before the formative experience that gave birth to the following poem.

I'm not sure of the year but it was sometime in the early Sixties, an out of body experience. Without hallucinogenics. Rather, she'd had a stroke and while undergoing surgery left her body. For what she believes was a period of twenty minutes she hovered over the operating table, watching as doctors and nurses labored over her semi-lifeless body.

The Greek-Armenian mystic Gurdjieff once stated that our life experiences are like food. Some foods take more time than others to digest. My grandmother's long talks with me were an effort to process this experience she'd undergone.

So it is that some powerful experiences move us in deep places. The loss of a loved one. The unexpected death of a friend. A profound mountaintop experience. It is not only grief that takes many moons to process. Sometimes other kinds of experiences make such impact that people spend years seeking to better understand what happened to them.

The following is a poem which originally appeared in my grandmother's chapbook of poems titled Helping The Sun Grow. No mention here of the mystical, but a remarkably luminous and upbeat snapshot of that moment in time...

Aftermath Of A Stroke

Here I lie, tight packed as in my Mother's womb
I laid with restlessness a full lifetime ago.
But still entirely I, altho I have no room
To move about and at my will to come and go.
But now -- I wander, freely in my mind
The long road thru the crowding mists of time,
And pause in my journeying now and then
To live the happy times again
Made bright indeed by sunset's glow!

by Elizabeth Sandy